"Beat It"
“Beat It”, directed by Bob Giraldi, engages more directly with race relations. The video, shot in South Central Los Angeles and featuring actual Bloods and Crips as extras, follows a narrative pattern similar to a number of other socially conscious videos from that year. Both Lionel Richie’s “All Night Long”, directed by Bob Rafelson, and Donna Summer’s “She Works Hard for the Money”, directed by Brian Grant, spread the disco message that the psychological effects of social ills like class exploitation, racism, and sexism can be sublimated by boogieing down and feature large crowds of choreographed dancers. Jackson, who wrote the music video for the Jacksons’ track “Can You Feel It”, is no stranger to this message. “Beat It” was originally planned to be a more overtly political video once again directed by Steve Barron but, as his sister, Siobhan Barron explains, “[CBS] didn’t like our concept. It was more political. It had something to do with a slave ship. All the Americans were flipping out” (Tannenbaum and Marks 149). Giraldi’s version was political in different ways. In “Beat It” Michael fully embodies the racial mediation that his star image is constantly engaged in. The video begins in a night owl diner where a couple of gang members have gathered before a fight. They exit the diner, cueing a Warriors-esque sequence where gang members jump out of the shadows of post-industrial South Los Angeles. The video’s set piece is a choreographed knife fight between a black man and a white man, the video’s choreographer, Michael Peters, and his boyfriend, Vince Patterson. As the two men try to cut each other, Michael Jackson appears to break up the fight and initiate a choreographed dance. The video’s tone, though gritty, is one of conciliation as Jackson got both the Bloods and the Crips to appear together. Bob Giraldi describes the experience as “the most glorious moment of my directing life, as the macho, killer Crips and Bloods watched their brothers, most of them gay, dance in a way they never could” (Tannenbaum and Marks 151). Both of these videos, as well as the epic “Can You Feel It”, are based on Jackson’s own designs and display a considerable interest on his part in filmmaking, an interest that would continue to develop and eventually result in his Francis Ford Coppola-directed Disneyland apotheosis, Captain EO. Kobena Mercer describes the importance of Jackson’s engagement with the visual medium, writing, “These videos, executed from designs by Jackson himself, and others in which he appears such as ‘Say, Say, Say’ by Paul McCartney and ‘Can You Feel It’ by The Jacksons, are important aspects of the commercial success of Thriller because they breached the boundaries of race on which the music industry has been based” (303). These efforts cemented Jackson’s status as the biggest star of 1983 and paved the way for his collaboration with director John Landis on “Thriller”.
