Real Sorrow and Fake Friends

It was the largest public display of mourning since Princess Diana’s car accident. Nearly all of the major broadcasting stations deployed reporters after the death of Michael Jackson and they didn’t just bring pictures of crying crowds of people into the living rooms. Soon the nonsense analyses of people who supposedly knew intimate details about Michael Jackson’s life began pouring into living rooms across Germany.

Soccer goalkeeper Oliver Kahn was not necessarily known for tenderly working his way into the private lives of others but that was before Friday evening. In a special broadcast about Jackson’s death by “Exclusive” magazine, the soccer player shared an emotional moment with RTL: “So much glamour on the outside, yet so much sadness on the inside.” With that, Kahn set the mood for that night’s television; an entire nation gathered on their couches and descended into the true (or imaginary) emotional abyss of Michael Jackson.

And because both the public and the private grandiosely superficial artistry of the King of Pop seemed to be identical, it was not too difficult for celebrities like Kahn to summarize all of the artist’s fame and suffering in one or two phrases.

So Friday evening became a night of inspired half sentences about the late, great pop star, accompanied by some inspired milling about on the part of reporters; every station that still had a half-decent correspondent network sent people out to all the pertinent locations to collect what little information there was about the super-star’s death and to capture the fans’ grief.

RTL, ARD, ZDF–all of them sent their delegates to Michael Jackson’s birthplace, to his star on the Walk of Fame in Los Angeles or to the gigantic forensic institute where his body was being held to await details of his death in a constantly postponed press conference.

Amidst all of this, coverage of both the private and the public aspects of the Jackson case barely differed from one another; numerous stations tried to develop some type of comprehensive account of Jackson’s death while balancing sorrow and professional explanations as events unfolded, but to no avail.

Stations like ARD and ZDF had a problem harmonizing the available information with the melodrama the followed Jackson’s death. One of the more unique reports came from Klaus-Peter Siegloch, who stood in front of the Apollo Theater in New York for a ZDF special early in the evening. Siegloch was looking to give an account of the grieving fans that had gathered outside the theater but in the end there was little grief to be had. Instead, passersby shouted scurrilous comments over the journalist’s shoulder- the old hand quick-wittedly commented, “People are apparently trying to process the pain with wild partying.”

It was the end of the ARD special broadcast that proved to be the most embarrassing. The news station accompanied a hectic helicopter ride transporting Jackson’s body from his home in Westwood, L.A. to the Californian medical examiner. The sacred words “here the star sets forth on his last journey” commemorated the moment and an endless series of “journey impressions” of Jackson’s life accompanied by the not-so-classic ballad “You’re Not Alone” closed the program for the night. Pure emotional terror.

The brutality with which the account of Jackson’s death hit German television astonished even the media professionals themselves. However, the collective state of excitement was less reminiscent of the death of Elvis Presley in 1977 than it was of Princess Diana in 1997, despite the references made over and over again to the “King”. In a display eerily similar to Lady Di’s death, television broadcasters placed tearful pop-stars and authoritative psychoanalysts side-by side in the same programs, trying to make sense of yet another super-celebrity death.

Local celebrities contributed to the melee. All too often, the tragic entanglements that led to the beloved star’s death were reflected upon in rapid-fire interviews of supposedly grieving stars. Nearly every German celebrity who had the camera held up to their face posed as if they knew and were fans of the deceased. With so much vainly displayed expertise on the subject, one was almost thankful that Helge Schneider was later heard on an NDR talk show exclaiming, “Michael Jackson? Didn’t he sing ‘My Girl Lollipop’”? One could call his commentary ignorant or inappropriate but compared to most people on television lately, Schneider’s performance appeared downright respectful. After all, whether it was real or simulated stupidity, he left room for his colleagues to step away from the subject with some dignity.

In all honesty, does one really want Veronica Ferres commemorating Jackson as both a “genius” and a “perpetual child”? Does one truly enjoy the on-screen bully, Detlev D. Soost, weeping for the late, great performer as if he were a “member of the family”? And do we really need a statement of moral righteousness (“Everyone judged him, yet no one was there”) from the eternal après-ski party man, DJ Ötzi? But that’s what happened on the “Exclusive” special broadcast with Frauke Ludowig on primetime German television.

It was the largest public display of mourning since the death of Princess Diana but it is an event remarkably different from that fatal day in 1997. An important aspect of the tragic descent of Michael Jackson has become painfully obvious over the past few days: someone with friends like Jackson does not need enemies. The man wasn’t even on the medical examiner’s autopsy table and people supposedly close to him were already mercilessly psychoanalyzing him in front of RTL cameras.

Leading the pack was Uri Geller, the rough and tumble mystic who spoke to several German news stations about the Oedipal suffering of his late ‘friend’. Why did Jackson have almost 50 operations? The spoon-bending Geller solemnly repeated to RTL what he was supposedly told in an intimate discussion with Jackson: the performer didn’t want to look like his father. In a later interview with ARD news, the apparently stricken magician laid it on thick, offering additional details about Jackson’s private life.

Even this barely sugar-coated battle for attention reminds us of the death of Lady Di, whose title, the “princess of hearts”, has earned merchants millions of dollars since, as they sell devotional objects to the bereft and the curious. One did not have to love Michael Jackson to go to bed sad after the evening news: the King is dead and the groupies are selling what they know.