Reviewing ‘Leaving Neverland’

When Pitchfork approached me last week about reviewing Leaving Neverland, I worried about accuracy. Fortunately for accusers Wade Robson and James Safechuck, so much of what they share is already in the public record. Dan Reed’s four-hour documentary offers detail, forensic in its specificity, about what these men said Michael Jackson did to them as elementary school-aged boys. Jackson’s most fevered supporters use Robson and Safechuck’s testimony under oath that Jackson never touched them. However, there’s no way the most fair-minded watcher can endure Leaving Neverland without concluding that the men told the truth now.

Then the essay-review went live. Expecting Jackson’s formidable social media army’s attack, I didn’t flinch when I read a couple of attacks on Twitter. Less expected were dismissals from readers who thought I let Jackson off the hook or implied I didn’t support the victims; one person on Twitter was particularly offended by my alluding to the documentary’s racial and sexual politics. They don’t interest Reed. And it produces a weak film. Pointing this out doesn’t undercut Robson and Safechuck’s accounts. A documentary is not congressional testimony; nor is it a deposition. A documentary has responsibilities as art. To ask, for example, Robson or if he can’t or won’t a music critic about working with noted Michael Jackson enthusiast Justin Timberlake, whose solo debut consisted of Neptunes-written Jackson rejects, would have strengthened Robson’s case; readers would have seen how Stockholm Syndrome exerts a powerful, lasting spell.

Below is the original first third of the piece, excised for reasons of space and impact. I agreed. An essay like this needed a less otiose introduction, or, better, no introduction at all. I doubt these paragraphs would have assuaged readers looking for clarity. I had intended to show how Jackson was offering audiences the most generous glimpse yet into his megalomania and addled state while the rest of us were laughing and laughing off the accusations.

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Only the most fervent fans know “Morphine,” the most violent entry in the Michael Jackson catalog. Buried on 1997’s remix album Blood on the Dance Floor, it offers almost seven minutes of clattering funk, with whirring machines and industrial grinds that made contemporary acts like Prodigy sound like Hanson. Jackson sings in a high, tight, breathless rasp—how listeners might have imagined Gollum sounded before Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings series. And the lyrics—well. “You make me sick, baby/So unrelying” go the verses. So far, so predictable. Since “Beat It” at least Jackson’s paranoia has hidden in plain sight, a paranoia and a brandishing of his contempt for non-acolytes from an artist who was wealthier and weirder fifteen years later.

Then Jackson the producer stops the track so that Jackson the songwriter can coo in his sweetest voice:

Relax
This won’t hurt you
Before I put it in
Close your eyes and count to ten

Creepy in 1997, so ghoulish in July 2005 that friends and I on a road trip to a Sleater-Kinney show in Atlanta couldn’t help collapsing into hysterics, especially when he yelped “Demerol/Oh my god, he’s taking Demerol” as if he were Method acting the cry in “She’s Out of My Life” for the six thousandth time. For millions of people who’d grown up with Jackson, mockery was easier than sympathy, yet consider: even then the mockery served as a Russian doll from which the grotesqueries peeked out and legitimated him as an artist too. America no longer listened to Michael Jackson; we did because we laughed and sung along to a performance buried on an album that peaked at #24 before plummeting.

For heterosexual men, fear of homosexuality lies in their response to penetration—to what the English, with their usual self-mocking panache, once called buggery. In Leaving Neverland, Dan Reed’s HBO documentary, Michael Jackson comes off like a hunter baiting a trap, waiting for the moment when boys Wade Robson and James Safechuck, the two men who have accused him of sexual abuse, are first awed, then relaxed, and finally comfortable enough for him to lay a hand on their thighs and invite them into bed to perform acts familiar to consenting adults.

Relax
This won’t hurt you