Leaving Neverland

[Kurth]

I didn't see a thread on this, but apologies in advance if this is a duplicate. Thought about dropping this in the Harvey Weinstein thread, too, but it didn't quite fit.

Watched "Leaving Neverland" last night and the night before on HBO (it's 4 hours, broken up into 2 parts). I knew it was going to be a tough watch going in, but it was even more of a gut punch than I expected. As a kid growing up in the 80s, I idolized MJ for a while. Posters up all over my walls. Obsessed with "Thriller." I wasn't a diehard - never got the jacket or tried to dress (or dance) like him - but I was definitely a fan. And even after he went nuts, and even after the child sex abuse allegations went public and he was tried (and acquitted), it didn't really erase in my mind how cool I thought he was back as a kid.

But after watching this documentary, I can't imagine ever hearing a Michael Jackson song and not immediately turning it off. I know his issues were widely known, but the way this documentary lays it out in all its terrible detail . . . the guy was just a monster. A sad, tragic monster, but a monster nonetheless.

I've generally held the belief that we should separate the art from the artist. But I don't think I can do that in this instance.

[Holman]

I always knew MJ was a brilliant artist, but I never got deeply fan-struck, so I haven't followed the revelations this century other than to understand that he had been criminally fond of boys.

At the risk of inviting terrible details, could someone summarize the accusations presented in the new documentary? (I'm a father and don't really want to watch it.)

[Moliere]

‘Simpsons’ Episode Featuring Michael Jackson’s Voice to Be Pulled

[Moliere]

Michael Jackson’s music is a gift. What do we do with it now?

“What the hell is wrong with Michael?” Chris Rock asked in Never Scared, which was filmed in 2004, the same year the pop star was indicted on a second child-molestation charge. “Another kid?” he asked, stunned, before summing up the situation perfectly: “We love Michael so much, we let the first kid slide.”
...
Like Hannibal Buress’s bit about Bill Cosby raping women, Leaving Neverland is what finally got many people to admit to themselves what they already believed. The testimony of the two men is so intimate, so drenched with the sorrow of ruined childhoods, that it cannot be denied. They talk about falling in love with Michael Jackson, about childhood sexual pleasure, and all the other aspects of this kind of abuse that we don’t want to understand. During descriptions of the sex acts, the film sometimes cuts away from the speaker to show pictures of the little boys they were at the time of the events. They were beautiful children, so young that a parent might still have read bedtime stories to them.
...
The ancient question: What moral stain awaits us if we cannot abandon the art of a monster? None.

Edmund Wilson taught us in “The Wound and the Bow”—nominally about Sophocles’s Philoctetes, an obscure play about the great archer who was bitten by a snake and suffered from its suppurating wound for years—that “the victim of a malodorous disease which renders him abhorrent to society and periodically degrades him and makes him helpless is also the master of a superhuman art which everybody has to respect and which the normal man finds he needs.” T. S. Eliot wrote in “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” “The more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates.” More to the point, Don Cornelius said, “It is always a pleasure to find something that matters.”

Michael Jackson’s art matters. It matters not because of any sociopolitical significance, although many of his songs bear uplifting messages. It matters not for its implications about race in America. It matters because of the simple fact that it is, in every sense, the gift revealed.

[Drazzil]

I didn't see a thread on this, but apologies in advance if this is a duplicate. Thought about dropping this in the Harvey Weinstein thread, too, but it didn't quite fit.

Watched "Leaving Neverland" last night and the night before on HBO (it's 4 hours, broken up into 2 parts). I knew it was going to be a tough watch going in, but it was even more of a gut punch than I expected. As a kid growing up in the 80s, I idolized MJ for a while. Posters up all over my walls. Obsessed with "Thriller." I wasn't a diehard - never got the jacket or tried to dress (or dance) like him - but I was definitely a fan. And even after he went nuts, and even after the child sex abuse allegations went public and he was tried (and acquitted), it didn't really erase in my mind how cool I thought he was back as a kid.

But after watching this documentary, I can't imagine ever hearing a Michael Jackson song and not immediately turning it off. I know his issues were widely known, but the way this documentary lays it out in all its terrible detail . . . the guy was just a monster. A sad, tragic monster, but a monster nonetheless.

I've generally held the belief that we should separate the art from the artist. But I don't think I can do that in this instance.

I think the best thing MJ did for his legacy was dying when he did. I don't think most will care about what he did in his personal life now that he's dead. People will still be fans of his music a century from now, with nary a footnote to his abhorrent behaviors in the future.

But then again I think there's a small outside chance MJ's family arranged for his death, so wtf do I know.