Monday, February 1, 2010

The Stage...

There are only two movies on the hard drive of my computer.

One is Marjoe, the 1972 Academy Award winner for Best Documentary. It follows the last traveling revival of Pentecostal evangelist Marjoe Gortner. Marjoe had been preaching since the age of four. As a child his parents took him all over the country where he preached at old time gospel tent meetings and other ceremonies. He was touted as the youngest ordained minister in the history of the world.

There was only one catch. Marjoe was a fraud. When he was an infant his parents noticed his talent for mimicry. With dollar signs in their eyes they began to train him in the tools of the preaching trade. In meetings his mother would signal Marjoe to say a certain line or the take his sermon in a different place by crying out phrases common in these pentecostal meetings. "Yes, Lord Jesus," "Praise his Name," "Hallelujah," all guided Marjoe in his performance.

Marjoe continued the act well into adulthood, until a crisis of conscience drove him to expose his deception. So he assembled a team of filmmakers to follow him around on his last tour. Behind the scenes he shared with them all his secrets, how he gets people to speak in tongues, to give their lives to Jesus, and to open up their wallets. He told them what certain religious phrases meant and how to get proselytizers to leave them alone by saying "Brother, I'm washed in the same blood as you!"

In the end, I was left fascinated by what an amazing con artist Marjoe was. (And shocked that this movie came out years before the evangelical scandals of the 80's and 90's, but these incidents still took the culture by surprised.

But more than this, I was left with a feeling that the fake preacher was not the only fraud under the big tent. Marjoe not only exposed himself, he exposed the gullibility and naivete of religious people who crave a human idol to look up to. (In some circles the impetus for this idol worship is "Leadership," but that is neither her nor there.) We can sometimes be discovered as hollow people.

The second movie on my hard drive is also a documentary that covers an adult performer who had been on stage since he was a child. It also follows this revered figure in the lead-up to what was to be his final set of performances. You guessed it. This is It.

Does it even need to be acknowledged any more that the Michael Jackson on stage was an entirely different person than the one off stage? We do ourselves a grave disservice when we attribute this fact to him as if it is odd when a public persona diverges from a private life. The disservice comes in the assumption that our lives are once of absolute integrity themselves.

I was struck by a couple of things in This is It. The first was the amount of work that went into being Michael Jackson. The lore of MJ was always that of an extra-human figure that fell from the sky with perfect dance moves and a groove to match. But the documentary tells a different story. One of the comments uttered by Jackson throughout the film was "This is why we rehearse." This was said after mistakes were made both by his dancers and himself.

The second was the amount of awe expressed by his young dancers. Michael actually meant something to these kids that was more than just the source of their paychecks. They saw their proximity to him as something of deep significance in their lives. Early on one guy expressed it clearly, through tears and a strained voice.

"Life is hard, right? And I've kind of been searching for something to shake me up a bit, and kind of give me a meaning to believe in something. And this is it."


Is Michael Jackson someone worthy of giving another person meaning? I suppose that is up to you to decide. But the question misses the point, doesn't it? Regardless of how we have litigated the life of Michael Jackson in our minds, it is hard to deny that his music and his moves did something that may be considered holy, which was to shock us into movement.

Whether these two performers were con artists on stage or off, they both spoke and lived vital truths about the human condition. Marjoe Gortner revealed just how small we can all be. Michael Jackson showed us that regardless of how small we are, there can always be found a reason to dance.

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