As the critic Jason King recently wrote on Slate, “Whether or not the allegations presented in the film are true, and whether or not it ever intended to do so, Leaving Neverland dangerously reinforces the gay-folks-are-predators stereotype-if only because it never acknowledges that such a stereotype exists in the first place.” By dangling the possibility of male-on-male rape, Leaving Neverland reinforces stereotypes that go unrefuted. Worse, the film’s absence of context-artistic, psychoanalytical, legal-leaves exposed the fact that two white men accused a black man of grotesque violations. For one, this summer will mark a decade since Jackson’s death only his most vehement Twitter claque can defend him now. In a review of Jackson’s 1991 album Dangerous, writer Chuck Eddy compared him to the Sex Pistols’ Johnny Rotten: “incomparably feral performers grossed out by their own animal desires.” In Leaving Neverland, Safechuck and Robson’s accusations cohere into a feral man surrendering-without conscience-to his animal desires. If Safechuck and Robson’s accounts are true, they need no reckoning with Jackson’s aesthetic legacy the reckoning is for the audience. Even Jackson defenders who haven’t read Gustave Flaubert’s axiom about artists remaining above their handiwork, paring their fingernails, have accepted a glib paraphrase: “Separate the artist from the art.”ĭocumentaries can honor the gravity of their subjects’ accusations without playing like an attenuated “Dateline” episode. The atomization accelerated by social media has made taking sides an easier conscience-free existence.
Screenwriter Evan Chandler’s accusations of sexual abuse against Jackson on behalf of his son, 13-year-old Jordan in 1993, happened at the same time when “Billie Jean” still got listeners on the dancefloor and the Free Willy theme became a surprise smash.
Leaving neverland documentary free online license#
Although the Jackson estate wouldn’t have dared to license the music-it has already sued HBO for $100 million over the documentary-surely a great film would have ensnared the audience in its complicity. Jackson does get one defense, in the form of snippets from his concerts, the rhythmic oomph of which will remind segments of the audience of what they will ignore for the sake of a good time. Both James Safechuck and Wade Robson refer to Jackson as “larger than life,” and so he remains, a Charles Foster Kane denied in this film even the chance to defend himself through exculpatory witnesses. Leaving Neverland does not posit intersections between Jackson’s art-among the 20th century’s most euphoric and despairing pop music-and his alleged misdeeds. Upon learning about Wade’s secret life and the extent to which he was still sifting through the wrack of his ruined childhood as a man in his 30s, Joy confesses: “He told me that he felt no emotion for me.”
And their good cheer gets wearisome, if not chilling, as Leaving Neverland runs on Joy Robson in particular can’t stop punctuating her self-effacing cracks with smiles. Yet they are also presented as willing victims, if not accessories. Mothers Stephanie Safechuck and Joy Robson project the sincerity of parents who might otherwise worry about leaving their kids alone at the park jungle gym for fear of guys like Michael Jackson. In the film, the confidence with which the Robsons and Safechucks evade the conflation of stoking their kids’ ambition and reveling in their access to privilege is striking. (Safechuck’s mother recalls letting her son spend time alone with Jackson after the singer’s stylist described him as “like a 9-year-old little boy.”) Safechuck claims that Jackson began abusing him in the late ’80s after Jackson met the 10-year-old Safechuck.Īlong with its central pair of stories, Leaving Neverland contains material for another documentary about the credulity of parents. Jackson could justify these heinous acts of which he is accused, Leaving Neverland suggests, because he also regarded himself as a child. The Michael Jackson of director Dan Reed’s two-part, four-hour HBO documentary, which airs this weekend, is a child-man for whom luxe hotel suites, the infamous Neverland Ranch estate in Santa Barbara, California, and first-class plane tickets weren’t enjoyable in themselves they served as enticements to lure in children and their parents, while Jackson schemed to bed his favorite boys. According to alleged victims Wade Robson and James Safechuck, the pop icon would at first awe his young victims, relax them, and finally make them comfortable enough for him to lay a hand on their thighs and invite them into bed to perform sexual acts. In Leaving Neverland, Michael Jackson comes off like a grinning hunter baiting a trap.