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ZERO STARS/**** starring Jaafar Jackson, Nia Long, Miles Teller, Colman Domingo written by John Logan directed by Antoine Fuqua
by Walter Chaw I didn’t want to review Michael because talking about this film recognizes this film. I wonder, though, if not talking about it also validates it, in the way you’re trained to be quiet about uncomfortable things when you’re a minority. It’s a tough position to be put in, particularly because the people putting others in this position are the ones who should be called to the carpet for their lazy ignorance and/or malicious bad faith. Shitty, broken people have a habit of scrambling the basic morality of everyone in their orbit. I’m speaking not of whether Michael Jackson was a serial predator who targeted young boys–a charge that dogged him for the last decades of his life, leading to a string of settlements and a highly publicized and scatalogically intimate trial–but rather of the dishonesty involved in creating a hagiography for one of the most galvanizing, indeed polarizing, figures in pop-cultural history by pretending none of that happened. That he was a transformative figure is undeniable, a transcendent talent who spent much of his social capital on songs that yearned to heal rifts between the races. He was one of one. That his legacy is tainted is similarly undeniable. If director Antoine Fuqua’s focus were Bill Cosby, this film would be about his success as the “I Spy” hero, kid-show icon, and pudding salesman and end right when the curtain rises on that first episode of “The Cosby Show”. If it were about Polanski, it’d stop at the premiere of Rosemary’s Baby.
What’s wrong with a hagiography of someone who was for many years the most famous person in the world? A Chaplin biopic that doesn’t mention the pedophilia? A Woody Allen one that fails to reckon with his predilections? I don’t mind “death of the artist” as critical theory, but only to the extent that it does not require a willful ignorance of biographical details that inform the artist’s work and legacy. Michael Jackson was a genius. And he was widely and credibly accused of rape/pederasty/child molestation, to whatever degree a single term fails to capture the atrocity of the acts. You hold these distinct truths in your hand uneasily; it’s a clouded mirror that causes you to reflect on your own irreconcilable repulsiveness. When I was a youngster, Michael Jackson was my favourite celebrity. I had this in common with my friends. We sang along to every track on “Thriller” on our way to and from soccer practice. We knew the “rap” but said “bleep” instead of “Hell.” We stayed up to watch his music videos drop on “Friday Night Videos”. I loved the movie version of The Wiz, his only non-concert feature film. I wore out my VHS of the “Thriller” video (which included a behind-the-scenes making-of) learning how to do that dance. It was the first tape I remember buying from a grocery store. Is there an extreme irony in me mentioning, even obliquely, child murderer John Landis, who directed “Thriller,” in a review of a Michael Jackson biopic? Well, maybe not “extreme,” but it’s certainly dark as fuck. The presence of Landis in Michael almost feels like a nihilistic joke–and sometimes that’s the only kind of humour that keeps us from scratching our faces off, amiright? Consider how the film shows Michael compulsively visiting terminally ill kids in hospitals at regular intervals; it doesn’t exactly make us think of him loving children in a charitable sense. Why not show Cosby dropping off donations at battered women’s shelters? I don’t think it means what you think it means, hoss. I know you know what I’m talking about, because although Landis appears on screen in your film, it’s in shadowy glimpses, and he doesn’t have any lines.
As the allegations started coming out about Michael–the mugshot, the tearful public pleas, the constant coverage–I was destroyed. I doubt there was a larger cultural force in my childhood than Michael Jackson. I was such a mark that I believed him when he said he’d never had plastic surgery. How could someone like Michael want to look like not-Michael, after all? Of course he had a skin condition. Of course he married Elvis’s kid out of love. In sixth grade, I read Mark Bego’s Michael!, an early biography cranked out as a mass-market paperback to capitalize on MJ’s immense post-“Thriller” superstardom. It dropped a week after Michael’s hair caught fire while filming a Pepsi commercial–a mishap that made him a martyr for the cause of American capitalism. The book sold over three million copies. It didn’t mention paterfamilias Joe Jackson’s penchant for beating the shit out of his kids (Michael, in particular), though it does recount Michael’s older brothers nailing Jackson 5 groupies in the same room as baby Michael, the women asking in excited whispers if the terrified shape beneath the covers was him. I didn’t know what to make of this charming anecdote at the age of 11, but I haven’t stopped thinking about it in 42 years. I wonder what Michael would be like had it been motivated by anything other than the avarice of people already grotesquely engorged from feasting upon the corpse of their dead benefactor. How do you suppress empathy? How do you arrest development? Where does self-loathing begin? Is being a predator of children chemical? Is it a disease that turns deadly when left untreated? The best person to write a bildungsroman of a serial abuser is obviously Mr. Beast, who has enriched himself by putting his success-starved fanbase through a modern Stanford Prison Experiment. Mr. Beast is our accidental John B. Calhoun.
Is the sociopathy that allows people to prey on other human beings, especially young human beings, the same kind that enables them to find unimaginable material success as Mr. Beast-type influencers, CEOs, epoch-defining entertainers, and career politicians? If audiences are prey, what sort of base, animal charisma and cunning are required to enthrall them? What’s the wattage of those deadlights, anyway? What can reduce millions, tens of millions, to deer pinioned in ecstasy in their last moments on a mountain pass? At one point in Michael, to show how developmentally misshapen Michael (Jaafar Jackson) is, he brings home the board game “Twister” to play with his brothers. “Twister.” Here, Michael is in his early twenties, and his brothers, playing basketball in the driveway, are all older. (Oops, hold on a second, Michael is at the children’s hospital again.) Anyway, he brings home “Twister,” and his brothers tease him for wanting to play it. Let’s sit with this ostensibly light, funny gag for a second. Just marinate in it. While you’re letting that sink in, consider how Michael talks to a sick kid about the genius of Charlie Chaplin. Is this meant to be a joke, like the conspicuous game of “Probe” in the teenage boy’s closet in A Nightmare on Elm Street, Part 2? Is it a Freudian Slip of a prank the subconscious is playing on the guilty consciences of this movie’s creators? I often complain about films not having subtext. Michael is a film that only has subtext. Why does Michael build a mansion he calls “Neverland” and cram it full of zoo animals and CGI research chimps? Is it because of the illustrated Peter Pan he reads as a kid? What about that story so appeals to him? He also reads an illustrated The Wizard of Oz; is that why–wait, that’s the origin of his Scarecrow in The Wiz, isn’t it? Okay. Got it.
Failing the honesty test, Michael fails the “portrait of the artist” test as well. There’s a brief sequence where he watches James Brown on a black-and-white TV and starts mimicking the Godfather of Soul’s moves–but what of Fred Astaire and the Nicholas Brothers and Gene Kelly and Bill Robinson and… What does the Spike Lee historical-montage-within-a-biopic version of this movie look like? Was he asked to direct it, and who declined? Him, or the estate? Would Spike’s joint have had, like Fuqua’s film does, a scene where Michael unites the Bloods and the Crips–a bit that feels both dangerously reductive and super racist? Was there a better way to demonstrate how the themes of peaceful coexistence in Michael’s music and performance resonated with just about everybody? Without caricaturing harmful stereotypes in a cartoon devoted to not noticing the herd of elephants trampling, Roar-like, through every single garishly decorated room? There had to be. I was troubled, too, by how Michael essentially posits a gang truce and late-night monster movies as equivalent influences on Michael’s budding artistic voice. Are those really the same thing? Doesn’t this trivialize legacies of violence? “Thriller” famously opened with a disclaimer: “Due to my strong personal convictions, I wish to stress that this film in no way endorses a belief in the occult.” Michael felt it was imperative to add this, given his Jehovah’s Witness upbringing, but there’s no reckoning in Michael with how beliefs this ingrained in his morality jibed with the hedonistic rush of rock stardom. There’s no reckoning with Michael’s sexuality at all, in fact, which ultimately Streisand Effects it, though I’ve made that point enough, haven’t I? Can you make that point enough? There’s a scene where the head of CBS Records, Walter Yetnikoff (Mike Myers, now doing the Ray Foster bullshit full-time), threatens that he’ll shove his company’s roster of artists up MTV’s collective ass if they don’t start playing Michael’s “Billie Jean” video immediately. Given that this is a Michael Jackson biopic, it’s probably not great to threaten violent, non-consensual sodomy. Okay, now I’m done.
Did I mention that Miles Teller is in this? He plays Michael’s lawyer beneath prosthetics that make him look like the benighted, misbegotten offspring of Alan Autry and John Cusack’s Brian Wilson. (It immobilizes his face à la Myers’s own Fat Bastard.) During Michael‘s inevitable “Motown 25” TV special necromancy, where Michael introduces the world to the Moonwalk, Fuqua cuts to a child’s screeching, ecstatic reaction, and, wow, that’s not a choice I would’ve made. Anyway, what I know of this performance is that Michael was terrified his schtick didn’t come off, that he’d blown it in front of the nation when, in fact, he’d just made television–and dance–history. What Michael portrays instead is fey, unattractive false modesty in Michael and drunken, rampaging evil patriarch Joe (Colman Domingo going the full Larry Fishburne in What’s Love Got to Do with It? mode) crashing the afterparty as Snidely Whiplash. Another problem with a film this dishonest is that one of history’s most well-known and unrepentant child abusers–whose crimes are so well-documented that this homogenized mess doesn’t bother eliding them–is absolutely validated for his child-rearing methods. Indeed, the takeaway is that Joe did nothing less than mold Michael Jackson into a pure vision of benevolent holiness. Michael Jackson, the incorruptible philanthropist and secret, silent benefactor to a nation of anime-eyed urchins, who are preferably terminally ill in the Patch Adams fashion. Michael Jackson, who isn’t perfect only because Jesus cornered the market on perfection. Michael Jackson, whose tribulations mainly stem from producers and directors not understanding his VISION, obliging him to raise his voice a tiny bit. One of his signature poses was standing with arms outstretched in a cruciform position. The King of Pop, besmirched for our sins. Well, damn, if a good beating did all that, Joe should’ve taken the belt to everybody. Save a couple of straps for me!
I’m reminded of Eddie Murphy’s lacerating impersonation of MJ in a stand-up routine that ends with him squeaking, “Tito, bring me a tissue,” lampooning for an audience not ready to hear it the affected voice and manner–the odd, disordered solipsism–of the planet’s greatest hero. A man so broken that Warren Zevon wrote a song about him. That Michael is a thirty-year-old Peter Pan who regularly rented out Disneyland to enjoy it in private. The Michael in Michael is the Michael nobody allowed to be mentally ill. When you’re that gifted, that powerful, you’re not sick–you’re quirky. That Michael retreated into a fantasy land where his playmates were physically his emotional age. Whether or not he was a pedophile, someone should have loved him enough to force him to get some real help. After Michael died, I thought a lot about how Peter Pan didn’t make little boys lost. He protected them, didn’t he? It’s a bad reading of the text by Michael or by us, I don’t know which. Maybe Michael was the lost boy. Maybe that’s where we all got it wrong.
