A Tell-Tale Thriller: An Intertextual and Structural Insight into Poe’s Pop

Marta Miquel-Baldellou

Universitat de Lleida

The year 2009 will be remembered for commemorating the bicentenary of Edgar Allan Poe’s birth as well as the premature decease of the King of Pop, Michael Jackson. Despite some initial hesitance, more scholars have increasingly established links between Poe and contemporary musicians like Lou Reed, Allan Parsons Project, as well as Bob Dylan (Rollason 2009), which implies the increasing blurring among different artistic manifestations and the gradual dismantling of high and popular culture. More recently, some scholars have added Michael Jackson to the list, especially with regard to the pop singer’s choice of Vincent Price, the actor who appeared in most of Roger Corman’s films based on Poe’s tales, to participate in his Thriller. Likewise, academics often acknowledge that, ten years ago, an article published in The Hollywood Reporter announced Jackson would play the role of Edgar Allan Poe in a big-budget biopic entitled The Nightmares of Edgar Allan Poe, a project which was never released (Neimeyer 2002; Peeples 2004). Actually, both Poe and Jackson share important biographical details such as the pervasive influence of a tragic childhood, a tempestuous relationship with their respective fathers, their ludicrous depiction by the press, their assumed eccentricity and popularity as American icons, their misunderstood marriages, their financial debts, and even their untimely death. As far as their reception is concerned, even though they both were American, Poe was ultimately rediscovered by Charles Baudelaire, who prompted Poe’s popularity in Europe, and similarly, Michael Jackson had planned to end his career through a series of concerts to be held exclusively in London.

Nonetheless, it is precisely a narratological approach into Michael Jackson’s lyrics and videoclips that gives evidence of closely intertwined links with some of Poe’s tales as far as characters, settings, themes, and motives are concerned. Settings such as dark backstreets, menacing passages, dilapidated houses, graves, and mental journeys through time and outer space pervade many of Poe’s tales and Jackson’s videoclips. Moreover, characters such as strong-willed women, smooth criminals, doppelgangers, men in the crowd, and jokers are commonly found in both their songs and tales. They also share themes such as the role of the individual in society, the inner struggle between two separate factions, their antipathy for the press, the role of the artist and his art, capitalism, crime, illegitimate relations, and even race (Kennedy and Weissberg 2001). Motives such as physical transformations, cats, ravens, pavements resembling games of chess, mourning bands, hoaxes, as well as Egyptian tokens also pervade their works. In particular, close-readings of Poe’s tales and Jackson’s songs show the parallelism that can be established between “Murders in the Rue Morgue” and “Smooth Criminal”, “The Imp of the Perverse” and “Bad”, “William Wilson” and “Man in the Mirror”, “The Man in the Crowd” and “Stranger in Moscow”, “The Assignation” and “Billie Jean”, “The Man That Was Used Up” and “Don’t Stop ‘Till You Have Enough”, “The Masque of the Red Death” and “Thriller”, “The Fall of the House of Usher” and “Another Part of Me”, as well as “Ligeia” and “Dirty Diana”.

Edgar Allan Poe’s contemporary popularity remains unquestioned as last year’s celebrations and commemorations of his bicentenary corroborate. Likewise, even though many assume Michael Jackson’s fame had lately declined, he has been heralded as the unquestionable king of pop and entertainment. It is the aim of this paper to present an intertextual analysis between Edgar Allan Poe’s tales and Michael Jackson’s songs and videoclips with a view to underlining the narratological structures shared between both authors’ works as representatives of contemporary popular culture. This approach may aid in teaching narratological tools and structural analysis as well as encouraging students to develop comparative and intertextual analyses among authors and works pertaining to different disciplines.

Bibliographical references

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http://www.popmatters.com/pm/feature/107644-thriller-nevermore/

Biographical details:

Member of the research group DEDAL-LIT, focused on the conceptualisations of ageing in the literatures of the English-speaking countries, and assistant instructor at the Department of English and Linguistics of the University of Lleida. Her field of research focuses on the cultural conceptualisations of ageing in Victorian literature and nineteenth-century American literature. She is currently completing her PhD dissertation entitled “Transatlantic Modalities of Victorian Ageing in the Works of Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton and Edgar Allan Poe”. She has presented papers and published articles on the topics of transatlanticism, ageing, gender and Victorian literature in national and international conferences and academic journals. In 2008, she was granted a government scholarship for a research stay at the Victorian Studies Centre, Department of English, of the University of Leicester, United Kingdom.