The HBO documentary about the alleged abuses perpetrated by Michael Jackson tries to get viewers to reconsider the pop star’s canonization. But is it too tall an order?
“Can we continue to celebrate the genius in the face of the monster?” asked the writer Pearl Cleage in the title essay from her 1990 collection, Mad at Miles. Cleage was attempting to contend with both the cultural legacy of the jazz legend Miles Davis and the man himself, who had a history of domestic violence against women. Her question and palpable feelings of outrage at Davis are not unlike those of this current moment, in which fans and critics are reckoning with Michael Jackson’s legacy and the long-standing allegations of child sexual abuse against him. For many, though, Jackson—arguably the world’s greatest entertainer—remains pristinely frozen in amber.
Leaving Neverland, the two-part HBO documentary that debuted on March 3, details the accusations levied by Wade Robson and James Safechuck—two men who say they were molested by Jackson when they were children. The film is aesthetically deliberative in its tight camera shots and long pauses, which allow Robson and Safechuck to fill the space themselves, thereby minimizing Jackson. There are no experts present in the film to contextualize what the effects of long-term child molestation are. In the four hours of Leaving Neverland, audiences are granted a front-row seat to the alleged abuse, as it is explained in painstaking and alarming detail. On-screen, Robson and Safechuck, now 36 and 41, respectively, are visibly navigating how to confront and heal from their trauma. As a viewer, I was heartbroken for them. (Jackson denied the accusations throughout his life, and his family maintains his innocence. The Jackson estate is suing HBO for violating a non-disparagement agreement.)
The work of the postmortem exposé is often corrective in nature. It challenges prevailing assumptions about a person and asks viewers to reconsider their own memories of events. Nostalgia’s grip, though, can blur patterns of alleged predatory abuse in plain sight. It seems difficult to translate, in 2019, the magnitude of Jackson’s popularity in the 1980s and 1990s. For many, the entertainer’s death in 2009 marked an end to the era of the mega pop star, whose global celebrity garnered unparalleled, fevered fandom. Media back then were smaller and more limited, far from the fractured universes of today, in which each fan’s relationship with her celebrity of choice is siloed, intimate, cultish.
