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Who would believe it? We learn this -- and so much more -- from a fabuloso documentary that blew a hole in Sweeps Week when 27 million enquiring minds tuned in to watch. Naturally, the Custodians of our Public Virtue came out the next day in full cry. Everyone had been sickened and saddened by the sorry spectacle -- so much so that the thing was repeated seven more times.
"What you are about to see is bizarre, unsettling ... and riveting."
All in all, it's a wonder Bashir got past security. In England, Bashir made a career off the misfortunes of tabloid anti-celebrities. He had a gift for getting interviews no one else could touch: the Murdering Nanny of Boston, the Conjoined Twins of Manchester, the Mad Bomber of Soho. His calling card was a sympathetic bon-bon he once produced on Princess Diana during a time when the Royals were vilifying her name. Lately, though, he has become a master of the High Class Freak Show, a purveyor of oily compassion, middle-brow prurience, and through-the-roof ratings. Jackson, on the other hand, was a frequent burn victim of the tabloid expose. He usually kept himself sequestered in his 3,000-acre Santa Barbara kingdom, far from boom mikes, spy-cams, and -- well, adults. Perhaps Jackson imagined that the man who had produced a puff piece on Princess Diana would do the same for him. Certainly he could use some upbeat publicity: His last album had been an embarrassing non-entity. Plus there was that teeny matter of certain hushed-up allegations involving someone's little Johnnie or Jeffrey or Justin (we know him only as J.) that were settled out of court once the outraged parents came into a very healing payday of 15 -- or was it 40? -- million dollars? The only thing that eventually worked in Michael's favor, after 27 million here and 15 million in England had tuned in the show, was Bashir's fatal weakness for on-camera face time. A shlumpy, nut-brown man of Pakistani descent -- all glasses, cheeks and prickly Wisely, the ABC broadcast employed Barbara Walters to bring us Americans in and out of commercial break. As ever, Barbara lends her own comic brand of "tastefulness" to the proceedings. In between episodes of Michael Jackson talking the most incredible nonsense in the most sincere way (which makes everything he says sound true somehow, in some alternate universe), the doleful looks on the venerable Barbara are priceless. As is her notoriously studied speaking voice, with its sing-song patterns, cautious enunciations and maddening pauses. "As I watched...this documentary," she begins, about to negotiate a minefield of wicked sibilants, "I felt first...sympathy, then...shock, and then finally...sadness." I am happy to report that Bashir matches her pandering at every descending level. As the documentary runs on, his voice takes on a rhinal tone of dread. But Michael, the baby on the balcony! But Michael, the boys in the bed. But Michael, your face! Living with Michael Jackson is one of those supposedly "devastating" but actually hilarious documentaries where all the "conclusions" have been worked out before the questions are even asked. It was just a matter of letting the camera run: The Peter Pan statues and merry-go-round in the backyard, the mobbed trip to the zoo, the fans hurtling themselves at the limousine. It would all be judged "deeply troubling." The platitudes of psychoanalysis would apply. And everyone would walk away feeling magnificently self-righteous. With great savvy, Bashir made sparks fly off the third rail of American paranoia every time he confesses that he "fears for the children." And he feared for the children a lot. He fears for the "vulnerable" children, the "disadvantaged" children, the Make a Wish Foundation children, and of course, for those Hansel and Gretel toddlers that are Michael's very own, in their long Fellini veils. Upon seeing these porcelain babes, perhaps for the first time, he asks, ever so daintily, if Michael had actually inseminated their mother. "Oh yes. Of course," comes the shy, girlish reply. Unfortunately, Bashir does not follow up with the logical next question. Do these blond children have vitiligo too then? Full-blown? From birth? Instead Bashir regales us once "So when people say like, you've had implants in your cheeks..." From Mt. Everest to the Valley of the Dolls...continues >
© 2003 Nightcharm, Inc. and John Caiendo.
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short hair -- Bashir follows Michael right into frame, lumbering along at his quick, slender side, resembling nothing so much as a proper English hedgehog that -- as if through the Looking Glass -- has been made to speak, with a nasally London accent.
again -- and much to Michael's gathering horror -- with every Internet rumor about the 