Welcome back to The Work, a column about resistance in fiction. This month: Antoine Fuqua's MICHAEL and how resistance cuts both ways.
Sometimes, a fictional history can get to the truth of a thing more than any documentary ever could. Consider the ending of 2010's The Social Network, a fictionalized account of Mark Zuckerberg's founding of Facebook, which ends on the image of Zuckerberg sending a friend request on his hot new social network to the ex who dumped him at the start of the film — a pathetic image meant to evoke the ultimate petty smallness at the heart of a guy who changed the world to make it equally petty and small. Other times, a fictional history can do the opposite, contorting real events into a narrative uninterested in truth but invested in warping it, like D.W. Griffth's 1915 film Birth of a Nation, long revered for its technical innovation but openly racist in its aims, valorizing the first Ku Klux Klan and inspiring the birth of the second one after its release.
Somewhere between these two poles lies Michael, Antoine Fuqua's film about the stratospheric rise of Michael Jackson that conspicuously ends in 1988, well before a number of allegations and lawsuits over child sexual abuse would begin to tarnish Jackson’s fame and presage his early-aughts fall from grace. A month after the film’s release, it is an astonishing success, currently the fourth highest-grossing movie of the year. It’s also a source of considerable controversy; a primary cause of this was a near-collapse that came about well into production when the film, which was initially framed by a 1993 lawsuit alleging that Jackson had sexually abused a 13 year-old, Jordan Chandler. The lawsuit was settled one year later, but Michael's producers overlooked a provision in the settlement that prohibited any depiction of Chandler or his case, leading to lengthy and expensive reshoots that were paid for by Jackson's estate.
Much of the controversy over Michael stems from this context: the very public knowledge of Jackson's alleged misdeeds in 1993, a 2005 criminal trial over similar child sexual abuse allegations (in which Jackson was acquitted), and later claims made posthumously in Dan Reed's 2019 documentary Leaving Neverland. (The film is no longer available due to a settlement with the Michael Jackson estate. Reed, for his part, has recently offered his thoughts on all this, asserting, convincingly, that "people just don't care" about the children Jackson allegedly abused.)
All of this history makes Michael a minefield to evaluate with any clarity. As a work of historical fiction It possesses neither the insight of The Social Network nor the extreme goals of Birth of a Nation. As a film it is mundane and sterile and would occupy the same space as most other tepid musical biographies were it not for Michael's unique priorities. A lawyer breaks those down best:
“Expecting a sanctioned biopic to deliver unvarnished truth misunderstands the dynamics: The estate is the gatekeeper, and the film is a catalog activation strategy — a two-hour advertisement engineered to send audiences straight to streaming platforms to rediscover the back catalog,” attorney James Sammataro told The Hollywood Reporter in a story about the current culture war over the film carrying forward into an almost certain sequel.
Sammataro works for the law firm that represents Sony Music, a major stakeholder in the Jackson catalog, and seems to be chiding critics who appear to want Michael to be something it's not. The film, he argues, is very plainly a commercial product, with commercial goals – and only one of them is selling movie tickets. This more or less gives away the ballgame: Michael is a fairy tale. Reality is the boogeyman.
Having someone involved in the project of making Michael be so openly mercenary about the film's material priorities in turn makes its narrative priorities all the more clarifying. Because beyond Jackson's music, Michael only has two real interests as a story: Jackson's innocence – that is, his childlike naivety and purity of intent – and Jackson's power.
There’s a scene roughly halfway through Michael that lays its ideological project bare, a fictionalized version of how Jackson finally got airplay on MTV in spite of the channel’s early and pronounced racial bias against Black artists. (David Bowie famously pressed on-air personality Mark Goodman about this in a 1983 interview.) In the movie's telling, Jackson and his manager John Branca meet with CBS Records president Walter Yetnikoff with a demand that Yetnikoff call MTV and get them to start playing the "Billie Jean" music video.
The scene plays like a shakedown: Jackson, who is consistently demure in the film, only speaks to assert that he is a proud Black artist who makes music for all people, including people who watch MTV. Branca coolly asserts that Yetnikoff's claim that MTV is a nonstarter is nonsense; he can get it done. Yetnikoff, played by Mike Myers for some reason, bumbles through the meeting, desperate in his efforts to appease his most popular new star, and makes a show of having his assistant get MTV on the phone for him, sweatily demanding his counterpart at the network put "Billie Jean" on the air immediately or MTV will no longer be in business with CBS Records. The call lasts less than a minute, and history is changed.
That is not how any of this happened (no previous account puts Branca in the room, most entirely credit Yetnikoff for getting it done), but it is what Michael is about. It's about how cool it is to have a single man, or anyone speaking on his behalf, moving corporate heaven and earth at will. About a massive fandom validating fame as pure, unquestioned power. And while the movie's version of Michael Jackson is there, speaking about his music, it's John Branca – who in real life is co-executor of Michael Jackson's estate and a producer of this film – leveraging that power, putting the screws to Yetnikoff.
Taken in tandem with the movie's continued overtures to innocence – the young Jackson is repeatedly depicted tenderly with the menagerie of animals he accrues as his wealth increases, reading storybooks like Peter Pan and The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, signing autographs for children and comforting them in hospitals – and Michael is offering the viewer a bargain. Let its stakeholders – Jackson's estate, the lawyers who run it, those who own his catalog rights, the movie studio interested in stretching this out into a whole franchise – have some of that power back, after years of infamy diminished it, and you'll get something out of it. An excuse to look away, to remember the good times as bad ones come your way, another movie to look forward to, an excuse to publicly bop to some really fucking good tunes that maybe felt bad to play a little too loudly for a few years. It's the capstone of a long, slow effort – multiple posthumous albums, a 2009 concert documentary, a Cirque du Soleil production that's been running since 2013, a hit Broadway show, and most importantly, the scrubbing of Leaving Neverland — to file a person down to content.
This is not an argument for censoriousness, for a world where Michael Jackson's beginning is only evoked with a disclaimer about his end. It is an argument against what is happening, which is more than simple hagiography. It is a concerted effort from stakeholders to rewrite history, predicated in our culture's continuing and alarming disinterest in protecting children as long as there is something to gain from it.
Progress can be resisted, and it's not terribly difficult. Fiction that is situated in resistance to a negative status quo also implies the same can be done to a positive one. Michael isn't a regression on its own, but combined with the erasure of Leaving Neverland and claims that the allegations are irrelevant from luminaries like Spike Lee, Michael becomes a work leveraged for the express purpose of erasure. There is a lot of money to be made in maintaining a status quo, or returning it to a less equitable one.
In her oft-quoted essay collection The Language of the Night, Ursula K. Le Guin ruminates at length on the purpose of fiction, noting that "We read books to find out who we are. What other people, real or imaginary, do and think and feel – or have done and thought and felt; or might do and think and feel – is an essential guide to our understanding of what we ourselves are and may become."
Returning to our initial continuum: The Social Network is a pleasurable film about a terrible person who started a digital revolution that we know to be a net negative for the world. But like Le Guin asserts, the film is interested in understanding what we are and may become, grappling with the awful truth of what drives us to do things – even incredible and lucrative things. Michael, like Birth of a Nation, resists this potential for synthesis, instead choosing to limit our understanding of ourselves and what we may become to something much meaner: raw material meant to fuel a fame machine, unquestioning worshippers of the Moonwalk. It's a trap. This is the simple truth of a film like Michael: it doesn't matter how good the music is, some stories are told just to put you in your place.
