There’s a scene near the beginning of the new Janet Jackson documentary where members of her team fuss over the itinerary of the rising superstar’s European publicity tour as she tries to get a word in. Jackson is 23 years old, has just released her smash album Control, and is seated in a car next to her then-husband and creative partner, René Elizondo Jr, who’s behind the camera, filming. Unable to break through the noise, Jackson pauses and listens. When she finally does speak, she calmly and definitively has the last word. Jackson is the one who knows exactly where the entourage is headed and where they’ll end up—in this case, London. The snippet is quietly telling—Janet Jackson is a pop icon who always knew that saying less was a way to stay one step ahead.
Lifetime’s four-part series Janet Jackson—which has sparked a resurgence of appreciation posts and analysis on the legend’s social and cultural impact—is a masterclass on the singer’s balancing act between restraint and disclosure. What is the etiquette of sharing your hardships when wealth insulates you from the worst of the world’s social ills, yet your problems are truly just like everyone else’s? It’s a catch-22 that Jackson, having been in the public eye since age 7, knows intimately. Public visibility is the only reality she’s ever lived, and it’s apparent from the memories she can and can’t recall throughout the series, like the fact that she slept in the living room with her sisters, while her brothers had a triple bunk bed with three of them sharing the middle bed.
The Jackson family’s early years spent in Gary, Indiana are a complete revelation not only to the audience but to Jackson herself, who we watch learn about parts of her past from her older brother and documentary co-producer, Randy Jackson. Her closest sibling (along with the late Michael Jackson), Randy leads her through their hometown, where a building-sized mural of her five brothers brings her to tears. For many people, childhood homes are the first places we recognize the limits of our control, our place in our family units, and what freedoms our parents might allow us. Where do we hide our diaries, our secrets? In reflecting on her childhood, despite a shared experience with her brothers, Janet sees herself as an outsider amongst stars.
We learn that Jackson’s earliest memories start after the meteoric success of the Jackson 5, when the family moved to Los Angeles and became one of the first Black families in the predominantly white, upper-class suburb of Encino. Incidentally, it’s also when she joined the family in show business, making her childhood memories a viewmaster of legends: Berry Gordy and the entire Motown roster, Vegas showgirls, and David Bowie. While other parents took their children to summer camps, the Jackson clan snuck playtime during rehearsals in their home studio and toured across the country, including a long-run in Las Vegas. They performed as a variety act, complete with musical routines and skits playing off their family dynamic, with Janet serving as the precocious and witty trickster. “We were the youngest people in Vegas,” she says in a voiceover. “There were no other children performing there. It was just us.”
A constant thread throughout the documentary is the Jackson parents’ unrelenting determination to ensure their children’s success: their mother Katherine sewed all of their colorful costumes, and Joe instilled a punishing work ethic. “I didn’t get to experience my father the way I saw other children experience their fathers,” Jackson says, and for a minute, it seems as if she’ll dive deeper into this lost relationship. But the star holds back. Even as the documentary shows that Jackson wants to write truth into decades-long falsehoods, there is an impenetrable boundary that still conceals the inner-workings of her family. In the moments where we hope for more insight, she retreats, giving only highlight reels without deeper context or reflection. We get the headline without the story, and while viewers may want more, Jackson understands she deserves privacy and wields that expectation skillfully. She will tell us a little of what caused her pain but also never wants us to forget that along with this pain, her life has been a tremendous gift made possible by her parents. “My mother saw the talent, but it was my father that was smart enough to say that they gotta show this to the world,” she says, a point that’s later echoed by her brother Tito.
We also learn that, if Jackson had it her way, the world of showbiz would’ve been left strictly to her brothers; as a teenager, she wanted to attend Pepperdine and study business, a dream her father immediately dismissed. “What parent doesn’t want you to go to college?” she asks, laughing. Would the Pepperdine route have kept Jackson from the choices that led to Control, Rhythm Nation 1814, All For You, acclaimed greatest hits albums, and sold-out stadium concerts over three decades? Is that a choice she regrets? Is it one the audience regrets on her behalf? Listening to her speak about the road not taken, you can feel the earnestness and nostalgia, and almost imagine how crushing it must have been to shelve a dream. Her music has motivated her fans as they lived out their own ambitions, but what has followed her? The documentary offers no resolutions on this road untraveled, except for an old television clip where a 18-year-old Jackson tells Dick Clark that she would find a way to both perform and study.
As the documentary progresses from one era to another, Jackson grants as little time as possible to the most well-known controversies in her life, including the Super Bowl wardrobe malfunction and Michael Jackson’s legal battles. The decisions feel both pointed and delicate, laying to bed an old humiliation and balancing the memory of a beloved brother. While Jackson has lived long enough to have her past exonerated, the culture shift has landed with the finesse of an apology forced from a petulant child. Janet doesn’t need our contrition. Janet Jackson is not about the men in her circle, but the ways she moved around and past them in her own unrelenting mission to be fulfilled.
Watching the series, I thought back to last year’s Tina Turner documentary, which similarly placed the rock-and-roll icon at the center of her musical and personal journey. Turner and Jackson are performers separated by decades, but their artistic lineage is one of cutting edge innovation and courage, and their private lives hard fought and fiercely guarded. Black women artists like these are easily cast aside, only to be reclaimed when the culture at large seeks rehabilitation. To show themselves to us after enduring years of mistreatment showcases that those like Jackson, whose continued work and legacy molds and remolds convention, tend to receive a transactional amount of grace.
