Dani and I watched Donnie Darko last night. Couldn’t really tell you what it’s about, aside from the standard creepy guy in a satanic bunny suit and large house-crushing jet engine (it’s kinda formulaic, I know). The satanic bunny, a.k.a. Frank, pales in comparison to this real life freakshow.

OK, I feel bad for the guy in the sense that all of his plastic surgery has finally taken a serious toll on him. At the same time, this is the price you pay for using artificial means for some superficial sense of beauty. It’s a sucky way for the lesson to manifest, though.

In the grand scheme of things, I feel Michael Jackson may be one of the most tragicomic figures in the 20th century. As a child, he was adored for being the youngest member of the Jackson Five and the lead singer. He was most likely robbed of his childhood in favor of making the family money and garnering fame for himself. As an adult, when he began to get acclaim on his own, he seemed to want to buy back his childhood, converting parts of his Neverland ranch into his own personal Disneyland, buying a monkey (haven’t you always wanted a mon-KEY?) and, generally, trying to live the life of a 12-year-old. I doubt the whole child sexual abuse deal and wonder whether or not that was just some sleep-over prank or something gone awry. Certainly, there’s nothing normal about a 30-year-old man having sleep-overs with children, but, again, it looks like he’s still stuck in life as a 12-year-old. He’s almost totally asexual and, while he has had, I believe, two children and been married to Lisa-Marie Presley (certified hottie), I’m positive that’s just a front. I don’t think he’s gay necessarily, nor do I think he’s a pedophile. I think he’s just a young boy trapped in a grown man’s body. Literally.

Kind of reminds me of an article I read on Salon the other day about psychologist Harry Harlow. In the 1950s, Harlow performed rather shocking yet interesting experiments using monkeys about the nature of love and nurturing. This is the thing of Psych 101 classes in colleges across the US. Amongst his findings was the fact that young monkeys who were isolated from monkey society and re-introduced as adults still exhibited infantilistic traits. In addition, monkeys who weren’t nurtured by their parents when they were babies grew into maladjusted – in some cases downright psychotic – adults. With all of our pop-psych hoodoo, we all take this as read. But, in the 50′s, the idea that children actually need to be loved and nurtured to promote good development was a bit off kilter. In fact, B.F. Skinner had said just a couple of decades before that the ideal environment for raising a infant would be a box, where the child had no potentially infectious contact with anything or anyone.

Jackson, having been forced to be a full-time entertainer at such an early age, may be that monkey in the box. All of his plastic surgery and megalomaniacal marketing tactics may just be his attempt to justify his existence in a world that he was never fully prepared to deal with. And all of his weird tendencies toward childish pursuits may simply be due to the fact that he was never really allowed to mature past that point. We all want to remember Jackson as that cute kid on Ed Sullivan belting out “ABC. Easy as 123.” Which makes it all the more sad to see his crumbling nose revealed in a court room.