Now, this is 90 minutes into a four-hour movie, which HBO is showing in two parts starting Sunday, and I’ve learned how Jackson has ingratiated himself into two families, starting around 1987 or ’88, after the release of his album “Bad,” during his world tour. ![]() The movie devotes itself to two men, Wade Robson and James Safechuck, who claim, in separate accounts, that Jackson sexually abused them for years, from boyhood into adolescence.Īnd of all the allegations, the moment that really got me is the ring. There’s a moment in “ Leaving Neverland,” Dan Reed’s documentary about Jackson’s alleged pedophilia, where I simply ran out of hooks. You also need to do a lot of looking the other way.īut, eventually, all the suspension reaches a logical end. You need to do a lot of looking at him to feel this way. For so long, so much about Michael Jackson won our awe, our pity, our bewilderment, our identification, our belief that he was a metaphor, an allegory, a beacon, a caveat - for, of, about America. Just the odyssey of his nose from bulb to nub seemed somehow like a people’s journey. He lived in defiance of physics and race and gender, and we just kind of lived with that. If the average cultural experience demands the suspension of disbelief, if we oughtn’t think too much about this movie we’re watching, this novel we’re reading, this magic trick being performed right before our eyes, if being entertained means setting aside skepticism, logic and possibly a sense of morality, then what a magic trick we had in Michael Jackson.
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