The main event: This Is It

Published on Friday 23 October 2009 16:49

SOME people still think Elvis Presley is alive, so it's hardly surprising that lots believe Michael Jackson faked his own death.

You can read the various conspiracy theories at www.michaeljacksonhoaxdeath.com, but here's the abridged version: Jackson never had any intention of playing his live shows at London's O2. It was all an ingenious, mindbogglingly elaborate plan to pay off his huge debts. He'd pretend to die, and the inevitable surge in music and merchandise sales would make him enough to start over.

This Is It, the movie of his final rehearsals, was part of the plan too. Kenny Ortega, the film's director, wasn't filming "rehearsals" at all – from the start he was making a movie Jackson intended to release after his "death".

One version of the conspiracy theory has it that Jackson will make a surprise appearance in This Is It, pulling back the curtain on the greatest hoax of all time – this being the reason for the intense secrecy surrounding the film, which is not being shown to anyone, anywhere, until its release on Wednesday.

"So will he come back in the movie? Before it? After? At all?" the hoax website excitedly speculates. "Well, I mean, they say This Is It, right? So if he's not coming back soon then that can only mean This Is NOT It. So which is it… Is This It, or Isn't It?" Quite.

If this really is The Greatest Hoax Of All Time, it's going fantastically well so far. Jackson's career is flourishing once again. The song This Is It – considered not quite good enough to be included on Jackson's Dangerous album 18 years ago – has had a huge amount of airplay. An album accompanying the film – essentially yet another greatest hits package, plus the new song and, heaven help us, Jackson reading a poem called Planet Earth – is in shops from tomorrow.

The film itself is, arguably, the cinema event of the year. It will be released on around 18,000 screens worldwide, unprecedented for a movie of this kind. Some forecasters have suggested – far too excitedly perhaps, but based on box office pre-sales – that it could make up to $250million in its opening week, becoming one of the biggest hits of all time. And it is only screening for two weeks.

Meanwhile, for the first time in years, Jackson is being talked about mostly as a pop star, a musical genius, rather than a tragic, deformed middle-aged megalomaniac with questionable sexual appetites who hadn't made a good record in almost 20 years. It is almost like being back at the start of the 1990s, before the child abuse allegations began to bite, before the Brit Awards when Jarvis Cocker famously did what millions of people across the world secretly wanted to do – waggle a disrespectful bottom at Jackson's strange messianic behaviour.

Few things summed up this behaviour better than Jackson's decision in 1995 to float a giant statue of himself down the Thames to promote his comeback album HIStory. Rather than remind the world that he was still, truly, the King of Pop – as was presumably the intention – the statue seemed more like the creation of a mad deposed dictator, unable to accept that he wasn't in charge any more.

And yet, if Jackson's record label was to float that same statue down the Thames now, you can't help suspecting that most people – rather than wonder how deluded and isolated you would have to be to build something like that – would doff a respectful cap in memory of the departed.

Indeed, it is astonishing what nonsense people are now, once again, saying about Michael Jackson. "This song only defines what the world already knows – that Michael is one of God's greatest gifts," John McLain, co-producer of the This Is It album, has said of its title track. Kenny Ortega has described the film as "sacred documentation". This dubious elevation of Jackson to the status of demigod is exactly what Jarvis Cocker punctured so effectively back in 1996. As Cocker put it recently: "Rock stars have big enough egos without pretending to be Jesus." Exactly.

Jackson was a hugely gifted and influential performer and songwriter, as the film will surely illustrate. Hopefully it will have the sense not to make any greater claims than that. With people like McLain and Ortega in charge, though, that's doubtful. Then again, if Jackson wants to be like Jesus, all he has to do is prove the conspiracy theorists right and come back from the dead, on screen, all around the world. Now that would be quite a movie.

This Is It is in cinemas from Wednesday