Work through the following tasks to create a comprehensive case study for Michael Jackson's Billie Jean music video.
Media Magazine reading: Billie Jean, birth of an icon
Go to our Media Magazine archive and read the case study on Billie Jean - birth of an icon (MM62 - page 20). Answer the following questions:
1) What was the budget for Billie Jean? How did this compare with later Michael Jackson videos?
The budget for Billie Jean was $300,000; in comparison to ‘Thriller’ it was $2million.
2) Why was the video rejected by MTV?
MTV they refused to air the video, arguing that it didn’t suit their ‘middle America’ audience.
3) Applying Goodwin's theory of music video, how does Billie Jean reflect the genre characteristics of pop music video?
Andrew Goodwin outlines the conventions of promo videos in his 1992 book Dancing in the Distraction Factory: Music Television and Popular Culture. He provides a useful framework to begin analysing the video.
Genre Characteristics. The video contains many conventions of the pop genre: lip-syncing, performance interwoven with narrative, dance routines, high-fashion costume.
4) How do the visuals reflect the lyrics in Billie Jean?
The song is apparently based on Jackson’s experience of fan-girls claiming he or his brothers were the parents of their babies, mixed in with a missing persons story that Jackson had purportedly read in the news at the time. Key lyrics are amplified through the visuals: the song is about a girl, Billie Jean. Although we never see her as a character in the video, we are presented instead with other images suggestive of females in general with whom he never comes into contact – the billboard/ screen with a woman’s face displayed on it, the figure on one side of the double bed at the end. There are more literal links: when Jackson sings the stand out line, ‘Then showed a photo of a baby crying, his eyes were like mine,’ the screen freezes and a frame appears around the artist’s eyes. Elsewhere he does a spin as he sings ‘in the round.’
5) Why does the video feature fewer close-up shots than in most pop videos?
The video assists the star-construction of the artist, not so much through the close-ups that you might expect in other pop videos, but through the focus on the distinctive dance moves (often shown three-fold in the frame) which had not been seen onscreen before. It was shortly after this video was shot that Jackson did the first moonwalk, stunning the audience with his performance of, ‘Billie Jean’ at the legendary Motown 25 concert later in 1983.
6) What intertextual references can be found in the video?
There’s a visual style that begins here, in ‘Billie Jean’, and develops throughout the other promos for Thriller. By the time ‘Bad’ was released in 1987 the King of Pop’s iconic image was cemented in pop-culture history.
7) How does the video use the notion of looking as a recurring motif?
The notion of looking can be seen through the use of the private detective (also an intertextual reference to Noir film and detective fiction). Jackson is being watched and followed; a polaroid camera attempts to capture his image but he’s elusive, mystical. The audience sees his image multiplied using split-screen editing, he is frozen or isolated in a frame-within-a-frame. Towards the end he is spied through a window by an old woman in hair-rollers as he ascends a fire escape to stand, somewhat creepily, at the bedside of a sleeping figure, where he then becomes the voyeur.
8) What representations can be found in the video?
Like most pop music, the narrative element is mysterious; much is left open to interpretation but what
is interesting here is the way that Jackson is beginning to construct a narrative about himself
and establish his identity. What Steve Barron describes as a Midas-touch narrative could, in retrospect be interpreted as the beginnings of the Messiah-complex that Jackson was criticised for later his career. The ‘everything-he-touches- turns-to-gold’ idea in this video is fairly innocuous and it’s sweetly naïve when, in ‘Beat it’, Jackson pops himself between the ringleaders rival brawling gangs, does a little dance singing, ‘it
doesn’t matter who’s wrong or right,’ causing them to come together as a synchronised dance troupe.
Close-textual analysis of the music video
1) How is mise-en-scene used to create intertextuality - reference to other media products or genres? E.g. colour/black and white; light/lighting.
The beginning of the video started of with black and white which creates intertextuality linking with the film noir genre. We can also detect the beginnings of the ongoing theme of being ‘from the streets’. The setting in ‘Billie Jean’ is urban, it is night time, litter blows down dark alleys and fire-escapes. This is the first in a sequence of videos that explored gangs, crime, danger and the supernatural. Although Jackson’s childhood home in Gary, Indiana was more suburban than urban, there’s no denying he grew up in poverty.
2) How does the video use narrative theory of equilibrium?
His narrative of being from the wrong side of the tracks and being ‘not like other guys’ was an important part of his identity, probably throughout his entire career but especially in his twenties. If you have 18 minutes to spare, the extended narrative in Scorsese’s video for ‘Bad’, which depicts Jackson bidding farewell to his Ivy League school mates to head back to the mean streets of his youth, clearly highlights an ongoing identity crisis for this megastar.
3) How are characters used to create narrative through binary opposition?
Rich vs Poor : Michael Jackson
Good vs Bad : The detective
4) What is the significance of the freeze-frames and split-screen visual effects?
The freeze-frames and split-screen visual effects is extremely significant because it suggests that the detective is collecting evidence against Michael Jackson.
5) What meanings could the recurring motif of 'pictures-within-pictures' create for the audience?
The common theme of pictures-within pictures could be proposing that Michael Jackson dependably feels as though he is being viewed and that his protection is being attacked, this is likewise observed through his verses in the song.
6) Does the video reinforce or subvert theories of race and ethnicity - such as Gilroy's diaspora or Hall's black characterisations in American media?
It can be argued that the video somewhat subverts theories of race and ethnicity.
7) Does this video reflect Steve Neale's genre theory of 'repetition and difference'? Does it reflect other music videos or does it innovate?
I strongly believe that this music video reflects Steve Neale's genre theory of 'repetition and difference'
8) Analyse the video using postmodern theory (e.g. Baudrillard's hyper-reality; Strinati's five definitions of postmodernism). How does the 'picture-in-picture' recurring motif create a postmodern reading?
Postmodernists guarantee that we live in a media-soaked world – submerged in media items every minute of every day. To such an extent, that the qualification between this present reality and the media portrayal of this present reality has turned out to be obscured, Using Baudrillard's hyperreality hypothesis, we can express that the music video has been built to mirror the 1940, additionally there are various types of intertextuality inside Billie Jean for example Pastiche is used as the crime noir genre has a serious emphasis.
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