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Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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A warning, this episode contains discussion of sexual abuse. In early 2019, an audience sat in the Times Center Auditorium in Manhattan for a preview screening of Leaving Neverland. That's Dan Reed's controversial HBO documentary about Michael Jackson.
The film's approximately four hours of testimony from James Safechuck and Wade Robson, who allege in great detail that the pop star groomed and abused them when they were children.
Secrets will eat you up. You feel so alone. I want to be able to speak the truth as loud as I had to speak the lie for so long.
Many of the audience members at that screening were sexual abuse survivors. And once the final credits had rolled, the house lights came up and Oprah Winfrey took the stage, joined by Safechuck, Robson, and a psychological trauma consultant for a Q&A. The filmed conversation was meant to help everyone in that room process what they'd just witnessed, and it aired later on HBO as the special
after Neverland.
For me, this moment transcends Michael Jackson. It is much bigger than any one person. This is a moment in time that allows us to see this societal corruption.
It's like a scourge on humanity. So I was at that taping as a member of the press. I was a TV editor at The New York Times. And this was a huge story we were covering from multiple angles. But like so many people, I'd also been a lifelong Michael Jackson fan.
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Chapter 2: What are the controversies surrounding Michael Jackson's legacy?
He was my first and most intense pop cultural obsession. I'd devoured all the music and video choreography and archival footage I could. I'd bawled when he died in 2009. And I'd always doubted the allegations of child abuse.
Chapter 3: How did the documentary 'Leaving Neverland' impact public perception of Jackson?
Watching Leaving Neverland and being in the room for that Oprah conversation removed pretty much all of my doubt. And for that brief moment around the documentary's release, it seemed, to me at least, as if the general public might finally reckon with Jackson's complicated legacy, that in the midst of the Me Too movement, one of entertainment's biggest stars could fade a bit. Maybe.
Ready whenever you are, Michael.
Or maybe I was wrong. Michael, a glossy, estate-approved biopic directed by Antoine Fuqua, is headed for theaters this month. Big stars are involved. Coman Domingo and Nia Long are playing Joe and Katherine Jackson. And Michael's own nephew, Jafar Jackson, Jermaine's kid, has been cast to channel his uncle's persona. Spread love, joy, and peace. That is what I want the world to feel. Magic.
He's big on Broadway, too. The hit Tony-winning show MJ the Musical has been filling seats since 2021. It focuses on Jackson's artistry and less on his biggest controversies, which makes it even harder to feel leaving Neverland's impact, if there was any at all.
Artist biopics, especially ones that come authorized by their subjects or their subjects' estates, are usually meant to function as a legacy reset. Obviously, there's the financial incentive. Send those old songs back up the charts, sell more merch, etc. But there's also an intent to cement a narrative about creative genius and individual triumph.
Ultimately, the point is to make you admire them, even if that means sanitizing the truth. Michael Jackson's especially tricky to try to sanitize, and his public persona has always ebbed and flowed. And I have to wonder if it's even possible to start over again with him. What even is his legacy now?
I'm Aisha Harris, and on this special episode of NPR's Pop Culture Happy Hour, we're talking about Michael Jackson, the many stories that have been told about his life, and the mythical spell he still seems to cast today. We'll be right back after the break.
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If you're even moderately curious about the legend around the King of Pop, I highly recommend Margot Jefferson's book on Michael Jackson. Now, this was originally published in 2006, but in 2019, the critic and scholar published a new intro for the book that was a response to Leaving Neverland. One of her observations has really stuck with me. She writes, "'He didn't want us to understand him.
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Chapter 4: What is the significance of the upcoming biopic 'Michael'?
It was becoming clear to me that Michael Jackson had an obsession with children.
The movie concludes just before his criminal trial for child molestation in 2005. which began a few months after the movie originally aired. Now, crucially, this is an unauthorized biopic. The creators did not acquire the music rights to Jackson's catalog. So instead, we get some schlocky, generic music that sounds like it might be lifted from one of those CD compilation commercials from the 90s.
Leave a
That song plays during a montage where Michael and Lisa Marie are early into their courtship, and they frolic outside on the grounds of Neverland Ranch in Santa Barbara County, California. Then there's the wonky dialogue in Bizarre Flourishes with characters who resemble off-brand imitations of real-life figures like Diana Ross.
Michael, it's me, Diana. You're going to be a big star. But there will be hurt and pain, always.
And then there's the makeup. So Michael's played by Flex Alexander, who's dark-skinned, not unlike Michael Jackson was in his earlier years. But as the narrative timeline progresses, he has to undergo the physical transformation to look like Mike post-Bad. But Men in the Mirror cannot moonwalk to the occasion.
The actor looks increasingly ashier and ashier throughout the film until finally it appears as though he's immersed himself in this giant vat of finely ground white flour. Or let me give you a cinematic reference here. You might remember that part of E.T., the extraterrestrial, when E.T. is dying really quickly and he's turning this ghastly shade of white.
That's basically Flex Alexander in this movie. It's much closer to Tommy Wiseau's The Room than it is to the Jacksons in American Dream. But here's my hot take. Man in the Mirror is uniquely fascinating in large part because of its artistic limitations. They allow room for a less sanitized, if extremely muddled, perspective than any estate-approved biopic would ever allow.
Men in the Mirror is deliberately vague about where it stands on Michael's guilt or his innocence. It zooms in on Manny, played by Brendan Prost. He's a character based on the son of Evan Chandler, who filed a lawsuit against Jackson on allegations of abuse in 1993.
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Chapter 5: How do biopics shape the narrative of artists' legacies?
He was upset, but he never... said anything about me or my performance. He never, it was the allegations and the stuff that was going on at the time that he was upset. It's like, why do we have to keep talking about this?
But this goes back to what Margo Jefferson said about Jackson in her book, that he wanted us to love him, not understand him. And honestly, that's the way most artist biopics treat their subjects. The Jacksons in American Dream featured a stacked cast of beloved Black actors, a tight family-approved script, and a lavish budget. It goes down easy as entertainment. And that's why it endures.
Men in the Mirror had none of that. Is it a good movie? Not at all. And yet it comes closer to acknowledging the realities of the frictions of Jackson's life than he himself was ever able to. And that's got to count for something. Up next, a look at how Michael Jackson constantly rewrote his own legacy in real time.
In January 1994, Michael Jackson made a surprise appearance at the NAACP Image Awards. He was presenting the award for Outstanding Choreography to Debbie Allen. But before he got to that, he seized the moment to address the pending lawsuit filed against him the previous year based on allegations of child sex abuse.
I have been strengthened in my fight to prove my innocence by my faith in God and by the knowledge that I am not fighting this battle alone. These weren't his first public remarks on the issue. A couple weeks earlier, he declared his innocence in a satellite video from Neverland Ranch. And there he described being humiliated by the investigation into the claims.
But that was a statement meant for the world. His speech at the NAACP Awards was something way more specific. It was MJ code-switching, preaching directly to the Black Choir, as it were.
Members of the NAACP have been jailed and even killed in the noble pursuit of those ideals upon which our country was founded. None of these goals is more meaningful for me at this time in my life than the notion that everyone is presumed to be innocent.
So at this point, the crowd erupted into huge applause before he could even finish the sentence. And then... Everyone is presumed to be innocent and totally innocent until they are charged with a crime and then convicted by a jury of their peers. He was telling this audience, my struggle is our struggle. Or put another way, I'm still Black.
This moment crystallized what Jackson had been working towards for much of the late 1980s and into the early 90s. It took five years for his follow-up to Thriller, and by the time Bad came out in 1987, the music landscape had shifted. Hip-hop and New Jack Swing were emerging as dominant expressions of Black culture.
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Chapter 6: What themes are explored in 'An American Dream' miniseries?
Now he's been gone for almost 20 years. And I'm wondering, where does he fit in in the culture today? Stay with us. For anyone like me who wasn't around to witness peak Michael Jackson hysteria, the Brace Yourself video is a perfect entry point for understanding just how massive he was.
It's about three and a half minutes of really effective montage set to a version of Oh Fortuna from Carl Orff's cantata Carmina Burana. Most of the clips capture Jackson being mobbed by throngs of fans attempting to break past security as his motorcade passes through cities. all around the world.
Other scenes show concert moments from his historic Bad World tour, performing for manic audience members who scream, sob, or even pass out. Many of them are soaked in sweat from all the excitement and body heat and don't even really seem to care. It all builds up to that familiar O Fortuna climax, when the choir swells while the instrumentals crash and explode underneath like thunderclaps.
And then there's this rapid-fire series of images summarizing Jackson's career, as it syncs up with this musical climax. Album and magazine covers, music videos, TV performances, archival concert footage. Brace Yourself worked on me when I watched it as a kid countless times. It was on my VHS copy of Michael Jackson video greatest hits. It made me think, I'm a believer.
This is the greatest artist of all time. The whole thing is dramatique, a pure adrenaline shot of emotion. There's no real friction there because it's not meant to be deep. It's meant to seduce. This frictionless version of Michael Jackson is the way he wanted to be remembered. To some extent, this is the version that persists on the internet all these years later.
Like a lot of long-dead celebrities, his online presence relies heavily on being reduced to straight-up memedom like TikTok dance challenges and impersonations. There is, though, this flip side to the spliced and diced memes. Some people are trying to connect with Jackson through a distinctly modern lens.
There's this viral image that shows a young adult version of him on a beach wearing only swim trunks. His complexion is mostly dark except for a few parts of his body that are displaying the visible effects of vitiligo. Mm-hmm. The image is pure fantasy, though. This attempt, I guess, to make Jackson seem more relatable.
But this alternate universe sidesteps the more complicated truth that while his autopsy report revealed he did indeed have vitiligo, Jackson still went to extremes to appear less and less like the Black person he was born as. What are we to make of this? And then there's the theory that Jackson was on the spectrum.
When I see people on TikTok talking about Michael, I'm seeing fan cam edits of how people who are in the neurodivergent community can see themselves in some of his responses to some of these interview questions. Again, Corey Antonio Rose.
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Chapter 7: How did Michael Jackson's public persona evolve over the years?
And I think it really bothers people to try to deal with that because it's deeply upsetting. And...
I think compartmentalizing those things and telling ourselves that we can compartmentalize those things is a coping mechanism to avoid confronting this broader atmosphere that we live in and the way that it damages us than figuring out what we're going to do about it to make things different.
Is there room for an ethical examination of MJ through art? Something that sits somewhere between the exaltation of artistry found in the Jacksons in American Dream and the examination of the downfall in Man in the Mirror? A dramatization that can truly complicate his image for a hungry audience in a way Leaving Neverland couldn't? I think so, but it's not going to come out of the Jackson estate.
Take MJ the Musical, which was penned by Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Lynn Nottage. It literally dances around the toughest questions concerning Jackson's life. It's mostly set during rehearsals for his Dangerous World tour in 1992, the year before the first public allegations of sexual abuse. And as for Michael the movie.
So Matt Bellany, co-founder of Puck News, was one of the first to report in 2024 that a version of the Michael screenplay was included the 1993 child sex abuse lawsuit against Jackson. Now, his report said the intention was to paint the Chandler family as money-hungry and Jackson as innocent.
More recently, Bellany and other journalists have published anonymously sourced reports about the movie's production delays. They say the script was given extensive rewrites after the creators learned from the Jackson estate that they were legally prohibited from dramatizing the Chandler family.
NPR has not independently confirmed these reports, though in an interview with Australian TV, producer Graham King acknowledged there were reshoots because of what he termed a legal issue. The movie's final version covers the early beginnings of the Jackson 5 and ends with Jackson's first solo tour, promoting the Bad album at the end of the 80s. There are no real surprises here.
Of course, it hangs a thin narrative arc on Michael's antagonistic relationship with Joe. Curiously, there are several scenes of the star interacting with kids, signing autographs in a toy store, or visiting them in children's hospitals, almost as if the filmmakers were looking for a way to refute the allegations without actually addressing them head on.
As usual, Michael, the movie, gets to suppress the friction of his life. More room to love him instead of understand him, And based on the enthusiastic reactions I heard from the packed audience I saw the movie with, this is something a lot of people want. Still, I think the culture deserves better. I think perhaps the way that you might be able to sort of
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