These conflicting imperatives, played out to their human limit, produced a life that seemed to derange everyone who crisscrossed it, starting, of course, with the man in the mirror.Īnd what on earth did we think we were watching as the astounding young performer altered his features, the structure of his face and the color of his skin? We peered at his military costumes, his sunglasses, the Kabuki makeup and curls cascading down the front of his face, and winced at the disappearing nose, itself covered at times by surgical masks. But, in him, the performer’s primal need to be witnessed collided in a quite spectacular way with the criminal’s compulsion to stay hidden. He was hardly the first star to do so, nor was he the only one to wrestle with conflicting desires for attention and concealment. Within the fortress of his talent and fame, Jackson lived exactly as he liked.
At the same time, and this is its great strength, Leaving Neverland says to one and all - are you fucking kidding me with this? Who in God’s name could look at the mountains of evidence pouring out of every crevice and angle of this story, and not see what was happening? Robson remembers watching her son dance on that stage, her voice trembles and almost breaks with her joy it’s a memory of overwhelming appreciation. Robsons of the world, Leaving Neverland reminds us that we too, if we examine our lives honestly, have undoubtedly found it convenient to overlook all manner of things in our efforts to court enchantment. “Out of all the kids in the world,” he says in the film, “he chose me to be his friend.”įor those of us, myself included, who so harshly judged the Mrs. “I was him for a moment, almost,” says Robson, who describes the event as “dreamlike,” and “sensory overload, emotional overload.” The first time Jackson put his hand on Robson’s thigh, it felt great. Imagine the elation of seven-year-old Robson, a ferocious tiny dancer who rewound and repeated “The Making of ‘Thriller’” video until he had Jackson’s moves down perfectly, being brought onstage by his idol to dance for 65,000 screaming fans. Reed is not judgmental he acknowledges that once your life is invaded by magic - a substance more addictive than money or love (for which you will mistake it) - you will not willingly let it go. Conveying this is a singular accomplishment.
Ironically (or fittingly?), the slow reveal of Jackson’s actions over the years (thanks to many journalists, documentarians, and online researchers) contributed to that cultural shift, and Leaving Neverland will take its place as a milestone in continued understanding of the phenomenon.īefore they became tales of abuse, heartbreak, and cruel abandonment, Robson’s and Safechuck’s stories were love stories. Americans undertook this late-breaking examination in the 1980s, around the same time that these two men say the abuse began. Robson and Safechuck speak about their experiences with a frankness and lack of shame made possible by three decades of confrontation with the human propensity for pedophilia, a compulsion from which no country, social class, or profession is immune. We are hardwired to feel happy for people in love. The stories of James Safechuck and Wade Robson are textbook cases of child seduction, illustrated by miles of video and still footage in which pheromones bounce off of Jackson and his boy friends, whose exuberance in each other’s company is disturbingly infectious. NOT HAVING PAID strict attention to Michael Jackson’s lyrics before his death, I spent three decades singing, “The chair is not my son” whenever anyone played “Billie Jean.” That changed after I saw Leaving Neverland, the Dan Reed–directed HBO documentary in which two men speak about childhoods spent as Jackson’s special friends.