A psychopath, alone in the desert exhibits no identifiable antisocial traits. Give him a shiv and stick him in a prison cafeteria, and eventually he'll show his true colors. In just the same way, Michael Jackson when he was without money, power, and millions of fans, didn't demonstrate his antisocial behavior. But now -- well, I think the two recent documentaries recently shown on network television speak for themselves.

The first out of the gate, a british production titled, "Living With Michael Jackson" didn't seem to indict the man enough, so NBC's Dateline decided they should reiterate the horror. Focusing mostly on three subjects, (plastic surgery, pedophilia, and financial trouble), Dateline sought to boil their target down to a loose two hours. Instead of addressing each topic with its own segment, they instead covered each of them at least once in between commercial breaks. If they really wanted to drive the point home, they could have highlighted each subject in three separate segments, which would have provided badly needed coherence.

Apparently they decided to throw all of their footage and commentary into the big "freak expose" Cuisenart; each segment bounced around a lot -- first we see someone rebut MJ's claim that he only had two plastic surgeries on his face, then we see the lead investigator of the sex abuse case, then back to plastic surgery again. Then, to commercial.

It would be cynical to think that they were just trying to pad the show out to two hours, but they did repeat some footage, while constantly reiterating the surgery/child abuse themes, mentioning possible financial ruin only in the last ten minutes. Perhaps, a more cynical analysis would lead us to believe that the reason they didn't simply address an issue and be done with it was to keep people tuned in during the commercial breaks. Each teaser leading up to the breaks repeated the topics, promising that more information would be revealed after the commercials. (Never mind that this wasn't the case. All we saw was footage similar to what had come before, and the same people showing either indignation or support for Michael without adding new information.)

I appreciate the fact that this was a hastily thrown together grab for ratings (especially when you consider the fact that it was up against the finale of Joe Millionaire in most markets), but what excuse is that for a major media outlet to allow the program to be an incoherent mess of unsettling, disturbing material? Michael Jackson is creepy enough as it is, why create a program with no narrative, no depth, and only three major points that sprawled to two hours?

As far as the spate of Jackson documentaries, I can only put it this way: Marylin Manson didn't faze me. Eminem? Doesn't scare me at all. But Michael Jackson inspires an unholy dread in the pit of my stomach every time I see his face. With a brain, more horribly twisted than his body, he's become something of a bogeyman for me, representing evil unleashed in the world.

For the record, I developed these feelings while watching "Living With Michael Jackson", before I'd seen the Dateline report. I'm sure that I've been manipulated, but I congratulate the producers of the program for their truly remarkable job. The media works.

-B. C. Silvia