blurring the lines

Excerpts from a thoughtful and useful piece on Michael Jackson by Michael Medved at TownHall.com...

Medved's opening is an interesting historical footnote of which I was not aware:

Oscar Levant, a famous pianist and media star of the 1930s and ’40s, battled for decades against mental illness, surviving several painful hospitalizations. He once declared: “There is a fine line between insanity and genius. I have erased that line.”

And then, to MM's thesis about MJ:

The late Michael Jackson erased the same line—and blurred many other distinctions in the course of his extraordinary career.

In an unprecedented way, he obliterated the dividing line between black and white in terms of personal identity and mass appeal....

He also blurred the distinction between male and female, straight and gay. His public appearances blended macho hip thrusts and crotch-grabbing with a soprano singing voice and mincing, effeminate speech in interviews. His sinuous athleticism struck the whole world as undeniably sexy, but it involved a polymorphous sexuality untethered to any known gender.

Finally, and most poignantly, he shattered distinctions between adult and child, trying desperately to hold onto the image of boyish innocence, of prepubescent playfulness, long after he had entered middle age....the allegations of child molestation represented the dark side of all of MJ’s blurred distinctions...his fixation with children may have connected with the normal childhood he never had...

Then, a provocative parallel from MM-- of MJ to "Citizen Kane"/Randolph Hearst (!)-- followed by a more obvious parallel to Elvis. And then MM's punchline:

...the premature and startling death of The King of Pop will function to turn a mostly pathetic story into a truly tragic one—another distinction that the great performer has posthumously blurred.