Michael Jackson's shadow of doubt

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Michael Jackson's biopic has pushed his music up the Billboard charts

The real feat isn't that any of this comes 43 years after Thriller's debut. It's that we're still entertained. In time, sins can either be forgiven or forgotten. Rarely both. Unless there's enough distance and emotional disconnection to bury the offense. Having a calculated piece of Hollywood propaganda to break the box office wide open helps, too. Michael must have the holy trinity. Because three decades after he paid an estimated $20 million to settle a child sex abuse civil suit (despite denying culpability), and two decades after a jury had to deliberate for seven days before acquitting him in one of the biggest celebrity trials of the century, and nearly a decade after Leaving Neverland featured two of his alleged victims recounting as adults what they say it was like to "have sex" with Michael when they were minors, the whole world is seemingly ready to forgive. Or forget. Maybe both.

"I don't believe these m************. I do not believe them." — Dave Chappelle, on Michael Jackson's Leaving Neverland accusers (Sticks and Stones, 2019).

Nothing about Michael Jackson's rise has ever been believable on its face.

Not the idea that a Black, struggling-class family from the industrial ghetto of Gary, Indiana, could produce the biggest global pop-star of the 20th century. Not the irony of having a skin-lightening condition (or predilection) while singlehandedly Blackening up the portals of pop music by integrating a music video network that upheld America's racist standard of (in)visibility. And certainly not the fact that this same pop idol, self-consecrated in the image of Peter Pan, would one day be accused of being a villain in deep disguise.

To even entertain a reality that absurd would require a faith in the American Dream blind enough to subdue the nightmare. But when the soundtrack is also unbelievable, anything becomes possible. In a sense, that paradox is what made Michael Jackson a pop god. We always had our doubts about him. We wavered in our belief. Yetwe praised him nonetheless. And like a precocious child, he played in our faces. Had the nerve to tell a bunch of LA gangstas to "Beat It" in a bedazzled red-leather jacket. Had the audacity to proclaim — while cornered by the likes of a young Wesley Snipes in a dark N.Y. subway station — that he was, in effect, "Bad."

Shamone, bruh. You ain't bad. You ain't nothin!

The only thing we ever believed in when it came to Michael was the fantasy. When he was onstage, our suspended disbelief was collective and complete. It had to be for the magic to work, for the hundreds of millions of records to be sold, for the machinery of capitalism to churn the world over. His reality offstage, on the other hand, always seemed questionable. When he moonwalked for the first time at Motown 25, it defied logic. But discerning fans never doubted his marriage to Lisa Marie Presley was anything other than spectacle. Even at the height of his fame, there were dubious aspects of his personal life — often self-seeded to sustain his enigma — that poked hellified holes in his impermeability as an entertainer. The culture questioned his sexuality, side-eyed his ambiguity, mocked his eccentricity, even as we worshiped the ground he glided upon.

Yet, for some of us, it's taken 30 years to entertain the belief that the king of pop didn't stop at achieving the unthinkable. He very well may have committed it, too.

As Michael broke box office records on opening weekend, new details emerged of another family of siblings who've gone public with their allegations of child sexual abuse at the hands of Michael. Jackson and his estate have denied all allegations of child sexual abuse, but the patterns in the claims mirror others: How he ingratiates himself with the family and parents. Glamours them into thinking they're special. Earns enough trust for the kids to be left in his care overnight and sometimes over weeks. And, finally, scares the victims into silence with tales that they would never be able to be together again if the world found out.

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Michael Jackson: A Quarter-Century Of Sexual Abuse Allegations

Of course, none of that is depicted in Michael. The film's timeline ends in 1988 — five years before his first accusers went public — in part because of legal concerns that essentially made it easier to mythologize MJ minus the messiness. It's not the only thing the biopic is missing. The most obvious omissions range from a whole sister named Janet to his musical mentor and producer Quincy Jones' entire personality. But the intangibles are more glaring: No sign of the private man that existed beneath the larger-than-life persona he created. No true sense of what drove him to obsess over being the best. No real recognition of the psychological toll he exacted, on himself or others, in his pursuit of pop perfection.

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Ultimately, the estate-produced biopic has one job: To create empathy for a protagonist long villainized by three decades of looming child sexual abuse allegations. We get lots of CGI Bubbles and concert performances strung together by a Disney-fied plotline. The only detail held to an exacting standard is the choreography, thoroughly executed by his nephew Jaafar Jackson. But the biopic reserves its most pivotal role for Michael's former entertainment lawyer, John Branca, who also happens to be the co-executor of Jackson's estate and a co-producer of the film. The estate was more than $500 million in debt at the time of Jackson's death in 2009, but Branca has since generated billions in revenue through deals that include a Tony Award-winning musical on Broadway, two Cirque du Soleil shows and multiple album releases. With talks of a sequel already underway, the film is on target to become the biggest and most legacy-redefining business transaction of Jackson's afterlife.

The most horrific scene preserved in the biopic, to me, is when Joe Jackson, in a totally convincing portrayal by Colman Domingo, issues a warning to his young sons, the Jackson 5: "In this life," he says, "you're either a winner or a loser." It feels like the benign sort of thing every American-bred father is taught to drill into his sons. We, who watched MJ's transmogrification in real time, know of the damage Michael did to his own body trying to be the best. Those self-inflicted wounds were part of his psychic inheritance. But I can't help feeling we aided in creating a monstrosity of the man, too.

When Michael died in 2009, I stayed home from work to watch his funeral. I probably could've gotten away with watching it on my laptop at work since I was music editor of the local alt-weekly. But I needed to mourn in peace. It was already taboo to love Michael out loud in mixed company. Being the only Black editor on staff, I figured nobody else would share my sympathy. When I told a co-worker a local TV news station had invited me to debate his legacy on-air, she asked if I believed he'd molested those children. "Those children" were faceless and nameless to me. I told her no, I seriously doubted it was true. It didn't surprise me when she told me she believed it.

Michael always meant something different for a generation of Black folk raised in the '80s. We were growing up in the shadow of the Civil Rights Movement. Our parents had known Jim Crow on a first-name basis. The story of Emmett Till wasn't a history lesson for them, it was an ever-present threat. We were the first generation to be unburdened of it. Michael represented new possibility. The kind we could only dream of when we weren't weighed down by the constant distraction that Toni Morrison keenly identified as "the very serious function of racism." For a fleeting moment, he personified that for us. Our hope. Our joy. Our transcendence. Through Michael, we moved freely in and out of space, Black bodies unimpeded by the laws of motion and discrimination. Escapism was our inalienable right.

So, yeah, I wasn't buying it. A white boy and his parents alleging molestation just sounded like a newfangled version of the old antebellum trope. Too many Black men had been lynched for less. Here was America, trying to suffocate our dreams again.

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Before And After

When the two-part documentary Leaving Neverland debuted on HBO in February 2019, I'd just become a new dad. My son was only 3 months old. And even though James Safechuck and Wade Robson were closer to my age than his, I couldn't help but see their stories through paternal eyes. Fatherhood shouldn't be a prerequisite to trigger an empathic response, but if becoming a parent doesn't make you more conscious, you're probably not fit to be one. Next month, my son turns 7 — the same age Robson was when he and Michael allegedly began engaging in oral sex. "This is how to show love," he recalls being told by Michael in the documentary. Safechuck recalls being 10 or 11 when he and Michael exchanged vows and had a mock wedding in his Neverland bedroom. He says Michael even gave him a diamond wedding band.

"He made the boys feel loved. Did he love them?" critic Margo Jefferson asks in the new introduction she penned when her 2006 book, On Michael Jackson, was republished after Leaving Neverland premiered. "Within the confines of his damaged, damaging soul, I imagine he did. We like to think we love with all that's good in us. But we love just as fiercely with all that's bad in us."

The thing about Peter Pan that gets lost in Disney's animated adaptation of Scottish novelist J.M. Barrie's original work is just how reckless and self-serving of a manchild he truly is. The Lost Boys he seduces to Neverland become the expendable lifeblood of the island. Like a vampire who can't see his own shadowy side, Peter promises them youthful immortality but ultimately ends up isolated and alone.

Fairytales are entertaining. But they're also dangerous. This isn't about separating Michael the victim from Michael the villain. Or canceling both outright. It's about being able to reckon with his multiplicity. He may have been the baddest entertainer this world ever knew, but he also went out sad. A symbol of lost innocence accused of stealing it. A smooth criminal. And one helluva mirror. He tapped into the same thing that drives our belief in the most enduring cultural traditions. Like the Tooth Fairy. Or Santa Claus. Or God. Michael created the illusion of magic. The single, glittering glove. The moonwalk. The kick, the spin: Heeeheee! But his most enduring trick was his silence, even in the face of denials and million-dollar settlements and that disturbing interview with Martin Bashir, in which Michael revealed that allowing children to share his bed was "the most loving thing to do." The man once rumored to have purchased the Elephant Man's bones never acknowledged any alleged skeletons hiding in his own closet.

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In the end, Michael the movie sticks with the same script. The one thing no one expects from it, or the renewed fixation on his unresolved legacy, is a solution for how to deal with a problem that dwarfs even the biggest pop star of the last century. Hidden somewhere in the unwritten margins of Jackson's story are the mechanisms that create monsters of men. Whatever we're willing, or unwilling, to accept about the fallen king is an honest, unforgiving reflection of us. Each of us, invested to a fault in competing narratives of Jackson's life, find ourselves forced to choose our own adventure. Or aversion. But facts can never compete with the fairytale.

So much of MJ's oeuvre hinges on danger, whether he's cast himself as the personification of it or a self-anointed protector against it. Only now, the biggest vulnerability to Michael's legacy is his looming shadow. And the most impressionable fans among his multigenerational audience are those too young to be totally engulfed by it. Before I could make the parental choice on when or how to introduce my son to Michael Jackson's music, he was already moonwalking through the kitchen in socks. Cultural indoctrination doesn't ask for permission. It takes our youthful innocence and turns it into ignorance. When a random YouTube commenter reminds us that "Michael Jackson has fans that aren't even born yet," it could be a warning or an ingenious business plan.

But it's also worth remembering that he was once the picture of innocence, too, before the boy genius was groomed for global consumption. Now that Michael Jackson is too big to fail, and no longer a living man with mortal flaws and moral failures weighing him down, selling the aura is inevitable. But it does nothing to vanquish the potential horrors untold. Michael's shadow work consumed him. And us. In every thrilling and haunting way possible. That much is true, whether we choose to believe it or not.