Despite film critics reacting to it with all the horror of finding a ball of hair in their soup, the Michael Jackson biopic is a hit. And not just financially, though the estimated $150m it’ll make this weekend around the globe will certainly be making investors happy. What’s really significant is that people like it, with audiences polled in recent days at US cinema screenings giving it an overall A- grade. Over on the review-collating site Rotten Tomatoes, the veritable online battleground du jour that plays host to unbothered critics and furious fanboys, Michael currently sits at 40 per cent “rotten” when professional reviews have been totalled, but 96 per cent “fresh” per the Jackson acolytes voting with their clicks. Never has the gulf between the supposed critical elite and the men and women on the ground been quite so stark.
Michael has been framed as a bit of a referendum on Jackson’s public image, a reputation that’s been distorted and dented over the years, if not fatally. It feels a bit unfair: Michael is squeaky clean by design, charting Jackson’s childhood in the suburbs of Gary, Indiana, his difficult relationship with his father and manager Joe, and his ascent to superstardom. We meet Bubbles, Jackson’s primate bestie, and watch as he buys himself boardgames, comforts sick children, makes the “Thriller” video, and wows Wembley. He is practically saintly; a lovely albeit lonely man who blessed us with the gift of his music and did absolutely nothing else, your honour. And because the film ends in 1988, with Jackson on top of the world, all the weirdness of Jackson’s later life – from the child sex abuse allegations first made against him in 1993, to his bizarre marriages to Lisa Marie Presley and Debbie Rowe, to the increasing surreality of his augmented face – is left off-screen. A sequel has been threatened. God knows how that’ll work.
But the cold truth is that it might not matter. Jackson is our most uncancellable artist, living or dead, and proof that as long as you can waggle something shiny and expensive (and ideally brilliant) in the faces of the masses, everything else is met with a shrug.
“People don’t care that he was a child molester,” said documentary filmmaker Dan Reed this week. “Literally, people just don’t care … I think a lot of people just love his music and turn a deaf ear. And short of having actual video evidence of Michael Jackson engaged in sexual intercourse with a seven-year-old child, I don’t know what would be sufficient to change these people’s minds.”
Reed is the director of Leaving Neverland, the 2019 docuseries based around interviews with Wade Robson and James Safechuck, who alleged childhood grooming and rape by Jackson. Leaving Neverland, released a decade after Jackson’s death in 2009, made shockwaves, but not to an extent that his image was permanently wounded overall. The series is also impossible to legally see in the US anymore, with the Jackson estate having taken advantage of a non-disparagement clause in an early-Nineties contract between Jackson and its broadcaster HBO for an unrelated concert film. HBO pulled the series from its streaming platforms as a result, chalking up a win for an estate determined more than ever to keep the Jackson brand as spotless as possible.
Jackson devotees are understandably protective of their idol, but the success of Michael suggests that even those outside the more voracious cult of his fandom are willing to overlook the King of Pop’s darker contours. It’s arguable that Jackson’s music makes him just too good to phase out of public life entirely, that the bombastic genius of “Thriller” and the influential razzle-dazzle of his live performances overpower the ickiness of his private life. Time has also been an asset: younger generations probably won’t remember the headlines about Jackson’s baby-dangling balcony theatrics, or the Nineties and Noughties comedy series that reiterated the idea of Jackson as a creepy boogeyman. Nor Martin Bashir’s once inescapable 2003 sit down with Jackson, which – leaving aside Bashir’s ultimately shady investigative practices, as exemplified by the revelations about his famous Princess Diana interview – saw Jackson admitting to and defending sharing his bed with young boys.
This week, Jackson’s nephew Taj – the son of Jackson’s brother Tito – suggested that all of the above was a malicious media confection, cannily using the Trump playbook that has become the default of modern image-laundering. “Sorry media, u don’t get to control the narrative anymore of who Michael Jackson truly was,” he wrote on X. “The public gets to watch this movie… they will decide for themselves. And you can’t handle that.”
What is frustrating about this is that Jackson shouldn’t really be “cancelled”, or his music exiled from public life. Instead, a smart response to disgraced or at least questionable artists from the past should be to place them in context – celebrate the art, while also acknowledging the horror, alleged or otherwise. Last year, the Ditchling Museum of Art + Craft staged an exhibition of works by the artist Eric Gill, a figure of significant contention since 1989, when a biography revealed that he had sexually abused his daughters. The show was curated by real survivors of sexual abuse, who selected the art to display and determined how it should be presented. “If you don’t show his work, you’re not telling the story of this man,” Vivien Almond, one of the show’s curators, told The Guardian. “My view is it needs to be seen, but included alongside it needs to be the story of what this man did.”
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Michael had an opportunity to reflect the complexity of the Jackson story, and our collective relationship to artists accused of doing very bad things. Instead it has leant into crude absolutes: Jackson as virtuous angel; his accusers as money-grabbing frauds not worthy of consideration. Lost is the potential of a teaching moment about the messy realities of humanity, and the emotional hold that great art has on us. And if you thought a sequel might do just that, think again. Filmed for Michael, but left on the cutting room floor at the behest of lawyers, was an entire segment dramatising the 1993 sex abuse allegations by 13-year-old Jordan Chandler, which led to a raid on Jackson’s home and a lawsuit. (Jackson settled for $23m, and the investigation was closed.) Director Antoine Fuqua told The New Yorker this week that he intended for the scenes to exonerate Jackson, adding: “Sometimes people do some nasty things for some money.”
Oh well.
