“Our culture doesn’t know what to do with independent women, and definitely independent Black women,” says New York Times reporter Jenna Wortham in FX and Hulu’s one-hour report “Malfunction: The Dressing Down of Janet Jackson,” which centers on the now-infamous 2004 Super Bowl half-time show from Jackson and Justin Timberlake.
“And forget about an independent Black woman who makes her own money,” Wortham adds, “who knows who she is and is apparently a completely sexually liberated woman. When there was an opportunity to punish her for it, they did.”
The phrase “wardrobe malfunction” entered the lexicon after Timberlake pulled off a portion of Jackson’s bustier during that now-infamous performance, briefly exposing her bare breast, but even so, the wordplay of title feels misjudged. Two people were on stage in that moment. Only one is named in the title, which opens the door to an interpretation suggesting she is the malfunction, rather than the outsized response to the Super Bowl show itself.
“Malfunction” rides the trend of recent TV projects that also include “Britney vs. Spears” on Netflix to “What Happened, Brittany Murphy?” on HBO Max that set out to reexamine pop culture’s not-so-distant past, but I hesitate to call these works documentaries. They are earnestly made but never deep. The subjects are all worthy — and actually deserve better than this. A predictable mix of archival footage and present day interviews, they boast strong research skills but weaker storytelling and filmmaking instincts, repackaging information that’s already been reported elsewhere.
This approach strikes me as little more than a step up from “Behind the Music,” once a staple on VH1. Like everything else, “Behind the Music” has been rebooted (with new installments on Paramount+) and the series has never pretended to be anything more than what it is — a recounting of old stories for a new generation — but at least it features new interviews with the very people it profiles, something conspicuously missing in the aforementioned specials.
In fact, Jackson has her own documentary — a career retrospective simply called “Janet” — coming in January on Lifetime and A&E. “This is my story told by me, not through someone else’s eyes,” she’s said of the two-hour special, and I’m curious to hear that story because it’s entirely missing from “Malfunction.” When celebrities are the driving force behind their own documentaries, the end result is almost always a carefully managed exercise in image maintenance. Still, it’s a point of view that’s been absent. We don’t know if she’ll address the Super Bowl show in “Janet,” but I hope she does because for too long people have been talking for her, casting aspersions and making assumptions without much consideration for how any of this might have felt for her.
Produced by the New York Times, “Malfunction” is made in a view-from-nowhere style — here’s the information, do with it what you will — when it might have benefited from a stronger voice or first-person point of view. No one is challenged on anything, let alone the very news organization that happens to be tsk-tsking 15-year-old media coverage without much self-awareness. Recontextualizing requires an intellectual rigor not present here. Wortham’s insights, especially about the ways misogynoir came into play, are among the strongest, but the format reduces her thoughts to sound bites.
Other things that are left unspoken: A larger conversation about music artists who have created lucrative personas rooted in not being corporate pawns (whether that’s a fiction or not is another matter), and a sports league and TV network very much obsessed with the appearance that everyone is in fact toeing the line. I say “appearance” because it’s clear that all kinds of inappropriate behaviors occur behind the scenes; we just rarely see it reported publicly. There’s hypocrisy all over the place and that kind of context would tell a more complicated story.
The film ends with a few postscripts, including this one: Jackson and Timberlake share a publicist. What? This feels like something that somebody on camera should have dug into; show business is full of these kinds of strange bedfellows and it’s worth at least trying to untangle how this all works.
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