How hard should we cancel the Michael Jackson biopic?
I was in high school in 1982 when Michael Jackson’s Thriller came out. Those were the days of national monoculture, and that album was the aural equivalent of chewing gum on your shoe. It was in cars, in malls, in the 7-11 while you were getting a Slurpee, just impossible to ignore. People forget that “Michael or Prince?” was a national debate during Reagan’s first term.
The videos for “Beat It,” “Billie Jean” and “Thriller” were credited with breaking the “color barrier” on MTV, which was barely a year old and a new taste-making force in pop music. Seven of the nine tracks on Thriller were top-ten hits and the album was number one on the Billboard charts for 37 weeks. Michael Jackson, 24 years old but nearly two decades into his pop-music career, reached celebrity escape-velocity and became the King of Pop™.
Jackson’s life story is fascinating. Molded into early celebrity by a domineering father, he appeared to spend much of his life in arrested childhood. Neverland Ranch, Bubbles the chimp, his extreme cosmetic surgery and progressive de-blackification, his masked kids. A troubled late-career shadowed by debt, drug abuse, deep eccentricity and several credible allegations of child sexual abuse, most famously covered in the 2019 documentary Leaving Neverland.1 Finally, death at 50 from a drug overdose on the eve of a series of comeback concerts in London. Fertile territory for a biopic on race, celebrity, sexual pathology and the cost of fame!
Alas, that is not the biopic you’re going to get. The biopic you’re going to get is Michael, and it is reportedly on track to be a monster hit. But the movie elides all that late-career complexity and ends with Jackson’s triumphant concert at Wembley in 1988, when he was still on the rise and before any troubling child sexual abuse allegations.
