Information reaching Kossyderrickent has it that One of Michael Jackson’s eyelashes is now up for auction on eBay for $18.
The Sky Arts production, an installment in a series called Urban Legends, was to follow Michael Jackson — as portrayed by white actor Joseph Fiennes — on a fabled road trip with screen legends Elizabeth Taylor and Marlon Brando.
It was a face that reminded me of Nijinsky; of the eccentric socialite the Marchesa Casati, she of the anorexic torso, lipstick-slashed lips and jet-black eyelashes; of Alla Nazimova, Rudolph Valentino’s mistress, in her grotesque silent screen adaptation of Wilde’s Salome; of Valentino himself; of the tragic, elegant Beast played by Jean Marais in La Belle et la Bête; of Barbette, the transvestite acrobat celebrated by that film’s director, Jean Cocteau; of virtually any of Fellini’s characters; of one of those androgynous ephebes who haunt the unreadable and now unread contes cruels of Jean Lorrain and James Branch Cabell; of Dorian Gray, not as painted by Wilde’s fictitious portraitist, Basil Hallward, but as photographed by, let’s say, Cecil Beaton; of, finally, the Mona Lisa, not at all as painted by ÂLeonardo but rather as rhapsodised by Walter Pater in a celebrated purple Âpassage. (“She is older than the rocks among which she sits … like the Âvampire, she has been dead many times, and learned the secrets of the grave … and all this has been to her but as the sound of lyres and flutes, and lives only in the delicacy with which it has moulded the changing lineaments, and tinged the eyelids and the hands.”) It was, to put it whimsically, the face, livid and divine, of an angel with jet lag.
Its power, moreover, as an object of contemplation was intensified by its apparent disconnection from its owner’s body. The only thing one knew of ÂJackson’s body was the flamboyantly Ruritanian outfits that camouflaged it. It was almost as though there were nothing to know under those gaudy uniforms: his nakedness was literally Âunthinkable, unconjurable, Âunconjecturable. What was the tincture of his body skin? Had he had a “body job” to match the nose job, pigment job, etc? These were Âmeaningless questions.
After the show’s trailer hit the web last week, Paris Jackson joined fans in expressing disgust for Fiennes’ casting. “I’m so incredibly offended by it, as I’m sure plenty of people are as well, and it honestly makes me want to vomit,” she tweeted at the time.
It seems Paris’ reaction had an impact. Sky Arts announced on Saturday that the Urban Legends installment will not be airing after all.
“We have taken the decision not to broadcast Elizabeth, Michael and Marlon, a half-hour episode from the Sky Arts Urban Myths series, in light of the concerns expressed by Michael Jackson’s immediate family,” the company explained in its statement. “We set out to take a light-hearted look at reportedly true events and never intended to cause any offense. Joseph Fiennes fully supports our decision.”
Jackson’s face fascinated me. It was the face of an adolescent Âmasturbator, dishevelled, drained and ashy-white; of a silent film star, its unnerving Âghoulishness presenting itself less as the negation than, in the Âphotographic sense of the word, the negative of its original Âblackness. A made-to-measure face, it was its own caricature, its own Aubrey Beardsley pen-and-ink portrait.
