By analyzing Michael Jackson’s « Thriller » video, we offer a discussion of adolescent metamorphosis. Through an extraordinary self-fiction linking cinematic reference to myth and science fiction, Jackson shows, with a radical and transgressive postmodern gesture, the ridiculousness of such oppositions as man-woman, angel-demon, human-animal, living-dead, reality-fiction – mere pairings whose structuring power he shatters. What can one say about a body primary function seems to be go from one transformation to another, to keep metamorphosizing into harrowing new extremes, in order to replay the metamorphosis of adolescence, which is here marked by a tragic negativity?

Adolescence, 2013, T. 31, n°4, pp. 965-977.