The doc is suffused with heart-wrenching, graphic storytelling by Safechuck, now 40, and Robson, 36, who detail a system of exploitation, coordinated by Jackson. That was the only pivot I could come up with: responsibility, do-goodery, adulthood.Įscaping into grown-up concerns felt apt, because Leaving Neverland is about the incredible vulnerability of children. Instead, I looked up low-waste living and bought work clothes online. Afterward I couldn’t listen to any music, least of all Jackson’s, or write, or go to sleep, or find a traditional chaser of any kind. But then I had to go back to make sure I’d heard right. The film is so chilling that halfway through it I stopped listening as closely to descriptions of the alleged abuse, so as not to form looping GIFs of the gruesome acts in my head. This documentary might be to Jackson’s legacy what that final shot is to the “Thriller” video. The film gives the gut punch of learning someone you’d believed has been lying all along, the final smirk feeling all the more coy as the years pass and more and more of us age out of ignorance. That last look is what Leaving Neverland feels like: the shock and pang of betrayal, a visceral reveal of insidious behavior.
And throughout its nearly four-hour runtime, Dan Reed’s documentary channels the look Jackson gives the audience over his shoulder at the very end of his most famous music video, revealing yellow eyes and a slick smile: a wolf-cat in Tiger Beat threads, whose jheri-curled head is now freeze-framed into pop culture history. On Sunday night, HBO will begin airing the two-part documentary Leaving Neverland, which details the ways that Jackson allegedly targeted, groomed, and sexually abused two men, James Safechuck and Wade Robson, over several years in the 1980s and ’90s, beginning when they were respectively 10 and 7 years old. We gasped because he’d been misleading us, too. All the 8-year-olds assembled, myself included, gasped at the very end of the video, when Michael Jackson himself turned into a monster, surpassing in creepiness the one he and his girlfriend saw on a movie screen. One of my strongest, most formative musical memories is watching the “Thriller” music video, in its entirety, in an elementary school music class in the ’90s.
0 kommentar(er)
