A couple of days before I saw Michael, Antoine Fuqua’s biopic about Michael Jackson, I found the movie’s “Final Trailer” on YouTube. I was moderately interested in this trailer, but what I really wanted to see were the comments, how many people were expressing simple adulation of Jackson as a musical artist and how many were bringing up the creepier stuff, the accusations of sexual abuse of young boys that shadowed the last decade-and-a-half of his life.
I did this out of genuine curiosity. I’d never gained a reliable sense of where we’d landed on this matter, as consumers and judges of pop culture. On one hand, there’s been little sustained effort to render Michael Jackson anathema, to cancel him, even though the accusations against him are numerous, and they concern offenses on which the judging public is disinclined toward mercy. Yes, he was acquitted in the one trial he faced, but he’s also accused of assaulting several other boys, as recounted in Leaving Neverland, the troubling documentary series from 2019. And the things he indisputably did, like having young boys spend the night at his house and sleep with him in his bed, would mean permanent infamy for a normal celebrity. Instead, in 2022, people made a Broadway musical about Jackson — a “jukebox musical” that focused on the songs and ignored the creepy stuff altogether.
On the other hand, the name and memory of Michael Jackson are noticeably tainted. His famous songs get played in various places, but the people who play them seem to rush past the tainted name in mentioning the great music. No one’s doing lengthy digressions on the beloved genius who sang “Beat It” and “Billy Jean”. Jackson’s memory, it seems, is veiled not so much in outrage or open disgust as in careful and rigorous discretion. It’s as if the case of Michael Jackson has returned us to an earlier, less lurid era, in which — unlike our own sex-mongering, scandal-happy time — a respectable person didn’t openly discuss the seedier types of crime and folly.
Or that, anyway, is how it’s felt to me in the 17 years since Jackson died of a drug overdose administered by his personal physician. So when I started reading the comments under the trailer, wondering who would bring up the bad stuff, I figured lots of people would. But instead they made me think that I was just imagining a broader culture seized in the queasy ambivalence I felt myself. Because there was nothing about the bad stuff. I scrolled and scrolled but found no comments in which Jackson was treated like an Epstein or a Weinstein. All I saw were things like “Boy is he missed” and “There will never be another Michael Jackson!!!!!” I had to scroll through hundreds of comments before I found one that even mentioned his troubles, and that comment was entirely sympathetic, and the troubles it mentioned were totally different from the ones I was thinking of: “[W]hen he was alive they were killing his soul with rumors and talking about him being broke and bad money habits.”