It is now six years since the release of Dan Reed’s documentary Leaving Neverland, a film that cast the late megastar Michael Jackson as a serial paedophile. Over four hours, Reed profiled two men, Wade Robson and James Safechuck, who allege Jackson abused them when they were young children. The details were harrowing – the lavishness of their seduction, the closed doors and elaborate warning systems, the spare telling of the acts that took place.
The response, among critics and film festival audiences, was commendatory, and the film seemed then part of the wider groundswell that led to the toppling of a number of monolithic men – among them R Kelly, Harvey Weinstein and Bill Cosby. Their work has duly been tarnished as a result. The fact that the same has not happened to Jackson is intriguing, and certainly attributable to more than the absence of a conviction.
But in some fierce quarters, Leaving Neverland was denounced; Jackson’s estate called it lurid, outrageous, pathetic. Furious fans rallied outside screenings. Even the less fervent wondered whether perhaps the allegations were rooted in some great misunderstanding. Others accused Robson and Safechuck of being little more than opportunists, in search of fame and fortune. Reed received death threats.
That the three would be prepared to re-enter the fray for Leaving Neverland 2 might seem surprising, but this sister documentary, broadcast on Tuesday night, is an important work, one that follows both the men’s 10-year legal journey, and the fallout of the original film. It explores how speaking publicly can lead to an almost excavatory trauma, and forces us to question, once again, why we remain so in thrall to Michael Jackson. In the immediate aftermath of the original Leaving Neverland broadcast, data analysts Nielsen Music reported a dip in both streaming and airplay for Jackson’s catalogue. But by the end of that year, the singer saw growth again, with 2.1 billion streams compared to 2018’s 1.8 billion. He ended 2019 at the top of Forbes’ highest-earning dead celebrity list. Again. In the years since, Jackson’s streaming has continued to grow – last year, Thriller became his first album to surpass five billion streams.
It is worth saying that Jackson has not, to date, ever been convicted of any charge. In 2005, he was acquitted of molestation charges. Lawsuits filed by both Safechuck and Robson were dismissed for technical reasons. The closest admission of anything came in 1993, when the singer reached a financial settlement with an underage boy he was accused of molesting.
Still, for the last 15 years of his life, the accusations hovered. They were even addressed, vaguely, in Martin Bashir’s famed documentary, Living with Michael Jackson. Jackson shrugged the suggestions off with an innocent question: “What’s wrong with love?” The darkness lay in our minds, he suggested; the impure thoughts were our own.
There was an attempt to understand or account for the strangeness of a grown man sharing his time and his bed with young boys: Jackson was such an oddity, a Peter Pan, a preserved child, a product of his own abusive upbringing. He was also a global superstar who had never lived in the normal world. Perhaps the usual rules did not quite apply?
Somewhere along the line, we began the intricate process of untangling the art from the artist; of creating a world where we could watch a documentary like Leaving Neverland, but still admire “Billie Jean”. He was not the only artist who prompted this conundrum and contortion – fans were already attempting similar tricks for Woody Allen and Roman Polanski.
But this urge to forget seemed somehow more pronounced in the case of Jackson. A 2016 documentary by Spike Lee explored the artistry of Jackson, but lacked the filmmaker’s trademark interrogation, seen in films such as 4 Little Girls or When the Levees Broke, choosing instead to simply bask in a celebration of Jackson’s back catalogue.
And, of course, in purely technical terms, the music remained immaculate, undimmed, irresistible. As the actor Andy Serkis, discussing cancellation culture in this newspaper, summed it up: “When Michael Jackson’s music starts to come on, I defy anyone not to tap their foot to it… And if your body won’t let you cancel it…” In this way, we made it the music’s fault; ascribed to ourselves a kind of powerlessness in its presence. When MJ the Musical opened in London’s West End in 2022, the world stood unruffled.
There is a John Jeremiah Sullivan essay about Jackson that I often revisit. Written in the wake of the singer’s death, it is an exceptional and iIlluminating piece of writing; one that attempts to make this global megastar, this cartoon figure, human.
Sullivan traces Jackson’s lineage back to an Alabama cotton plantation slave named Prince Screws (and so, Prince, the name he gave his oldest son, which we took for a flourish of egotism, becomes understandable). He documents the childhood menageries, the relentless racism that made the singer speak so much more candidly to the black music press. He is victim, genius, “the greatest work of postmodern American sculpture”, and of course, a complicated figure to love.
Time, and repeated reading, has made the piece more complicated, too. But at its heart are truths I believe – that hurt people hurt others, that good people do bad things, and bad people make good music. That, above all else, few people are wholly good or wholly bad. We contain multitudes.
Sullivan is most tender in his discussion of Jackson’s approach to music, detailing how the singer was interested in the “anatomy” of a song, how he studied the work of his peers, how he recorded in the dark, illuminated only when he drew close to the microphone. It’s an image that has long stuck in my head: Jackson, sublime in the act of musical creation, doing who-knows-what in the darkness beyond.
I think often of another detail in Sullivan’s piece. How, in the early demo for “Don’t Stop ’til You Get Enough”, Jackson worked his way into that famed voice, from a relaxed, high-pitched man’s voice, through something softer, quieter, and on until he finds “a full-on girlish peal”.
It is conscious artistry, of course; an illustration of his gift. But it is also the reason I find it so hard to listen to his music these days. This is the act of a man who knew how a line, a vocal tone must land for maximum impact. This is a man who, through his music, succeeded in seducing us all.
