The show was popular with its Victorian audiences, and soon imitators began to profit from similar shows. Barnum marketed Johnson’s show under the title “What Is It?” claiming that Johnson was a missing link between man and ape, not yet classified as a species, and asking the audience members to judge for themselves what this exotic creature was. William Henry Johnson, the original “What Is It?,” was a petite, African-American man who was born with the condition now known as microcephaly and who began performing at Barnum’s American Museum in Manhattan in 1860, the same year Charles Darwin published Origin of Species. As an illustration, let us examine two of Barnum’s freak show performances with particular resemblance to Jackson: the “What is it?” exhibit and the “Leopard Child.” One might wonder, is this relationship purely coincidental, or did Jackson plan his entire career as a response to Barnum’s? As we will see, Jackson did, in fact, consciously emulate both Barnum and his performers.

One of Barnum’s most popular freak show exhibits, performed by William Henry Johnson, was titled “What is it?” Jackson’s final performance, including both the planned concerts and the posthumous film, was titled “This is it.” The “This is it” concerts were supposed to take place at London’s O2 Arena in July of 2009, but were interrupted by his untimely death less than two weeks prior to the opening date. Jackson’s final performance as a self-made freak seems to answer a question posed by Barnum. It will be presented in roughly a reverse chronology, beginning with his bizarre image as a fifty year old “What is it?” and the medical mystery surrounding his death, then working backwards to the roots of this persona within his early work, including his music videos and tabloid hoaxes. For this reason, breadth will be favored over depth in many of the descriptions.

This analysis is intended as an introductory survey on a topic which deserves further study. Yuan have written on these topics, but what has not been considered is a holistic visually-based approach to analyzing his music videos, media image, and shifting appearance as a single art concept with his transformation into a self-made freak at its center. Recognition of Barnum’s influence on Jackson is not an original idea, nor is recognition of the theme of metamorphosis in his music videos. This paper will explore these themes through visual analysis of Jackson’s music videos, tabloid hoaxes, and physical transformation to show his relevance as a video and performance artist whose life and work are inseparable aspects of a single body of work, a body of work which used performance, surgery, media manipulation, video, and reference to Barnum’s nineteenth century freak show to embody a hybrid culture.

Medical mysteries, spectacular performance, and magical transformation all play into the logic of the freak show. If all of these “humbugs,” performances, and transformations are viewed together, one begins to see that Jackson has, in fact, based his career around the nineteenth-century showman’s philosophies, namely, those of the freak show. Between the height of his career and his death in 2009, he had attempted to buy the elephant man’s deformed skeleton, convinced journalists that he slept in a hyperbaric chamber to prevent aging, built an amusement park for himself to live in with his pet circus animals, and magically transformed from a Black man into a white-skinned person of unidentifiable race and gender. Around the same time, he was inducted into the Guinness Book of World Records for the enormous success of his album, Thriller. “This is my Bible and I want it to be yours… I want my whole career to be the greatest show on earth,” Michael Jackson told his manager, Frank Dileo, and attorney, John Branca, as he handed them copies of a book on Phineas Taylor Barnum’s theories and philosophies. SPRING 2012: V.08 N.01: CAA Conference Edition 2012

Michael jackson transformation