TheTwinAndreBen
3 stacks
Wesley Morris is probably the best film writer around today. In The Times today he previews the 4 hour Michael Jackson Documentary, of which the first of two parts will air this Sunday night on HBO.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/28/arts/television/michael-jackson-leaving-neverland.html?
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.
He lived in defiance of physics and race and gender, and we just kind of lived with that. We ate it up. Just the odyssey of his nose from bulb to nub seemed somehow like a people’s journey. 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. You need to do a lot of looking at him to feel this way. You also need to do a lot of looking the other way.
But, eventually, all the suspension reaches a logical end. You run out of hooks to hang things on. There’s a moment in “Leaving Neverland,” Dan Reed’s documentary about Jackson’s alleged pedophilia, where I simply ran out of hooks. 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.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/28/arts/television/michael-jackson-leaving-neverland.html?
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.
He lived in defiance of physics and race and gender, and we just kind of lived with that. We ate it up. Just the odyssey of his nose from bulb to nub seemed somehow like a people’s journey. 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. You need to do a lot of looking at him to feel this way. You also need to do a lot of looking the other way.
But, eventually, all the suspension reaches a logical end. You run out of hooks to hang things on. There’s a moment in “Leaving Neverland,” Dan Reed’s documentary about Jackson’s alleged pedophilia, where I simply ran out of hooks. 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.