1 week ago
3
Here comes Michael Jackson. Sixteen years dead, thrice disgraced, still too big to fail. MJ the Musical rolls into Melbourne spruiking 5 million jubilant customers across three continents. Another glorious tier to an empire sustained by the machinery of forgetting.
Don’t fret, music fans. This great art vs questionable artist argument has already been won. Riding so high in the coffers of history, cherished memories of Billie Jean and Beat It are not at stake. Weird, though, when the fantastic story of a man is written and rewritten so large it steamrolls our appetite for the truth.
I felt the first queasy rumble of the machine at the Brit Awards in London in 1996. You can watch Jackson’s performance of Earth Song on YouTube. Shame for the whole sick world was on us, as poor children of all colours were herded out to be healed by touching the pop messiah’s outstretched body.
Two years after Jackson settled a civil suit with 13-year-old Jordy Chandler’s family over sexual abuse accusations – the reported $35 million came with no admission of liability – the whole creepy uncle/martyr spectacle was both laughable and alarming. We’d never know whose account to trust, but this King of Pop geezer was beyond belief.
Sanctifying his special relationship with children was a classic example of what we now routinely call doubling down: an American gambling term for deflecting distrust with a crude act of reassertion, a power move brash enough to obliterate dissent. That’s been the MJ strategy ever since.
That year’s comeback plan was spearheaded by giant statues of Jackson dressed for battle, built to tower over Europe. His HIStory package reminded us of his greatness by slipping a disc of old hits in with his new stuff. Invincible continued the creative decline but the gameplan held firm: keep the legend larger than life and let scale blur detail.
Going back to the ’80s, it was Jackson who insisted on the King of Pop branding with MTV and other media that needed him too badly to suggest he wasn’t. And it was his publicity machine, we now know, that fed tabloids outlandish stories about hyperbaric sleep chambers and buying the Elephant Man’s bones.
The point wasn’t credibility but control. Better to be the punchline of a freakish rumour than the subject of a less flattering truth. When Oprah Winfrey invited the persecuted King to rail against those cruel plastic surgery rumours, the tactic of dismissing all “Wacko Jacko” news as equally absurd just about worked – our own eyes be damned.
Oprah Winfrey interviews Jackson in 1993. Credit: nna\riwood
That was until the music stopped a second time. “I am Peter Pan … in my heart,” Jackson told UK journalist Martin Bashir in that train-crash TV interview of 2003. Claiming the starring role in a fanciful personal reality was part of normalising an infantile lifestyle including – inconveniently revealed as the cameras rolled – his habit of sharing beds with other people’s children.
Gavin Arvizo, 13, and his younger brother, Star, duly alleged sexual abuse and this time, after a four-month trial, Jackson was acquitted of all charges. It was cut-and-dried vindication for defenders, but for those who always see smoke as fire, just another suspect twist in a seamy conspiracy.
By that time, with due respect for what appears to have been a life of immense and escalating personal trauma, Jackson’s creativity was on life support. But still the show lumbered on, his persecution narrative swelling to fill gaps between hits reissued again and again, with any accompanying criticism neatly folded into his martyr’s robes.
And then he died.
Fans gather at Jackson’s star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame after his death in June 2009.Credit: Getty Images
Not for long, of course. Hypnotised by the mourning TV packages, my kids were among the millions who fell in love with him afresh. Soon I was dusting off the CDs and DVDs; hauling them off to see the film salvaged from his aborted final concert, This Is It! (it sure wasn’t) and Cirque du Soleil’s Immortal (also anything but).
I took them to Kenny Wizz, “the world’s #1 Michael Jackson impersonator”, who they happily assumed was actually Michael Jackson. From my seat it was vastly more enjoyable than the HIStory tour 15 years earlier, by which time the myth and the staging and those daft statues had dwarfed the man and his work a thousand-fold.
I remember the Wizz interview turning icy when I dared ask how the allegations against Jackson had figured in his obsessively researched characterisation. He’d met the family, he told me. Michael’s mother, Katherine, checked out his show in Las Vegas. “She told me I was doing a good job, keep up the good work.”
It’s testament to how good a job the forgetting machine was doing in 2019 that the documentary Leaving Neverland landed with such a shock. In another seismic TV event, this third round of sexual abuse allegations from Wade Robson and James Safechuck were so vivid, and the #MeToo climate so charged, that MJ stock appeared, at last, terminal.
Jackson waves to supporters during his trial in 2005.Credit: AP
Radio stations in Canada, New Zealand and elsewhere pulled Jackson’s music. The Simpsons shelved an episode. Weird Al Yankovic even dropped Eat It from his set. But only until the heat died down. Over in Vegas, where the big money rolls, the Cirque-us soldiered on.
Loading
Nor did those unresolved allegations trouble a 40th anniversary party for Thriller in 2022, including deluxe reissues, a streaming documentary and “immersive” fan events. Less fanfare greeted the removal of Leaving Neverland from HBO Max last year, after a legal settlement with the estate. Sony has since deepened its stake in the Jackson business with deals that now total well over $3 billion, clearly confident the machine will work its memory magic in perpetuity.
Like the films, the repackages and the circus shows, MJ the Musical is curated by the estate overseen by entertainment attorneys John Branca and John McClain. Recent court skirmishes suggest the family’s sway is smaller, but with posthumous earnings running into the billions of dollars, commercial rigour is probably not an issue.
Narrative rigour? The estate and family have consistently denied all charges against Jackson, and it’s unfair to expect a jukebox musical to address unproven allegations of child abuse. But critics have been compelled to note that the storyline is embedded in his Dangerous tour of 1992 – just before that first “extortion” attempt by Jordy Chandler. That was Jackson’s word back then, read in a globally relayed TV address: a platform usually afforded only politicians, certainly one denied to a 13-year-old boy with no Grammys. That power disparity continues to skew conversation today, as the official musical thrills millions and director Dan Reed’s Leaving Neverland 2: Surviving Michael Jackson quietly streams on Stan to those still interested in Robson and Safechuck’s ongoing litigation.
MJ The Musical during its Sydney run earlier this year. Credit: Rhett Wyman
That fire smoulders towards an ever-receding court date (late 2026 is the latest) against a furious chorus of podcasters and YouTubers polarised, with the vicious energy of all online debates, between fan dogma and suspicions of corporate conspiracy.
Meanwhile, the machine is preparing to double down one more time. Long delayed by casting and script dramas, Michael, the estate-sanctioned biopic starring Jackson’s nephew, Jaafar Jackson, promises at last to “bring audiences a riveting and honest portrayal of the brilliant yet complicated man who became the King of Pop”.
That’s if honesty and complications can be resolved. In January, it was reported that Michael would need reshoots after lawyers discovered a clause in Jackson’s 1994 settlement with Chandler. A new release date of April 2026 means the film’s window of return is now being squeezed between that old minefield and the new one being prepared by Robson and Safechuck.
Can the myth survive another story that fails to think of the children? Can its shine outlast the sensational impact of two grown men allegedly damaged by Neverland confronting the King of Pop’s ghost in court? Despite its outward oblivion to allegations that will not die, the Jackson estate finds itself defined by them.
If the memory machine works it magic just right, Michael will delight the world with a story that can survive any truth. Moonwalking that tightrope may prove Michael Jackson’s most spectacular feat.
MJ the Musical opens at Her Majesty’s Theatre in Melbourne on September 9.
Find out the next TV, streaming series and movies to add to your must-sees. Get The Watchlist delivered every Thursday.
