In Leaving Neverland, Michael Jackson comes off like a grinning hunter baiting a trap. According to alleged victims Wade Robson and James Safechuck, the pop icon would at first awe his young victims, relax them, and finally make them comfortable enough for him to lay a hand on their thighs and invite them into bed to perform sexual acts.
The Michael Jackson of director Dan Reed’s two-part, four-hour HBO documentary, which airs this weekend, is a child-man for whom luxe hotel suites, the infamous Neverland Ranch estate in Santa Barbara, California, and first-class plane tickets weren’t enjoyable in themselves; they served as enticements to lure in children and their parents, while Jackson schemed to bed his favorite boys. Jackson could justify these heinous acts of which he is accused, Leaving Neverland suggests, because he also regarded himself as a child. (Safechuck’s mother recalls letting her son spend time alone with Jackson after the singer’s stylist described him as “like a 9-year-old little boy.”) Safechuck claims that Jackson began abusing him in the late ’80s after Jackson met the 10-year-old Safechuck.
These accusations pile up, context-free. Committed to accretion as an approach impossible to separate from its moral fervor, Leaving Neverland is a humdrum piece of filmmaking. Reed doesn’t employ the forensic concentration of documentarians like Barbara Kopple or Errol Morris. Nor does he play the part of the ruthless inquisitor, like Claude Lanzmann in his punishing 1985 film Shoah, about the survivors of Nazi concentration camps and the villains who brutalized them. Instead, Leaving Neverland alternates between talking-head shots and file footage, with excerpts of phone messages Jackson left on one of the boys’ home answering machines sometimes woven in. For UK-born Reed, whose credits include documentaries on the Charlie Hebdo attacks and a stint on “Frontline,” having these subjects and their testimonies suffices. His appeal is to pathos.
In Safechuck, thickly browed, with a quick, warm smile and faint hesitance of manner that suggests he’s still amazed at what he’s admitting, Reed has found an ideal camera subject. Safechuck’s story, which dominates the first half of the film, is that of a young SoCal Jackson obsessive who caught the singer’s eye after co-starring in a Bad-era Pepsi commercial. After Jackson dispatched a film crew to the Safechuck home (“It was like an audition,” he says in the film), the boy and his family were whisked to Hawaii, where patience and Jackson’s shrewdness about the effect of luxury on average people led to Safechuck spending more time in the singer’s room. Later on, in Paris, Safechuck says Jackson “introduced me to masturbation.” By the time Safechuck got invited to the Neverland Ranch, he alleges that Jackson took him into the attics for sex.
Wade Robson, a 7-year-old dancer of exceptional mobility when he met Jackson, tells a similar story of seduction and betrayal. In some ways, Robson’s account is sadder. While watching the film, it feels like Robson grew out his blond hair in a hopeless attempt to match the Michael’s jheri curls. Joy Robson, in typical showbiz-mom fashion, devoted herself to Wade’s career to the exclusion of her other children and husband, who was suffering from bipolar disorder. In 1990, Jackson gave the family their golden tickets to Neverland. Unlike the Safechucks, the Robsons were granted an RV trailer for a Grand Canyon trip as distraction while, according to Wade, Jackson molested him.
Along with its central pair of stories, Leaving Neverland contains material for another documentary about the credulity of parents. In the film, the confidence with which the Robsons and Safechucks evade the conflation of stoking their kids’ ambition and reveling in their access to privilege is striking. Mothers Stephanie Safechuck and Joy Robson project the sincerity of parents who might otherwise worry about leaving their kids alone at the park jungle gym for fear of guys like Michael Jackson. Yet they are also presented as willing victims, if not accessories. And their good cheer gets wearisome, if not chilling, as Leaving Neverland runs on; Joy Robson in particular can’t stop punctuating her self-effacing cracks with smiles. But they get their comeuppance. Upon learning about Wade’s secret life and the extent to which he was still sifting through the wrack of his ruined childhood as a man in his 30s, Joy confesses: “He told me that he felt no emotion for me.”
Leaving Neverland does not posit intersections between Jackson’s art—among the 20th century’s most euphoric and despairing pop music—and his alleged misdeeds. Both James Safechuck and Wade Robson refer to Jackson as “larger than life,” and so he remains, a Charles Foster Kane denied in this film even the chance to defend himself through exculpatory witnesses. Jackson does get one defense, in the form of snippets from his concerts, the rhythmic oomph of which will remind segments of the audience of what they will ignore for the sake of a good time. But that’s it. Although the Jackson estate wouldn’t have dared to license the music—it has already sued HBO for $100 million over the documentary—surely a great film would have ensnared the audience in its complicity. Screenwriter Evan Chandler’s accusations of sexual abuse against Jackson on behalf of his son, 13-year-old Jordan in 1993, happened at the same time when “Billie Jean” still got listeners on the dancefloor and the Free Willy theme became a surprise smash. The atomization accelerated by social media has made taking sides an easier conscience-free existence. Even Jackson defenders who haven’t read Gustave Flaubert’s axiom about artists remaining above their handiwork, paring their fingernails, have accepted a glib paraphrase: “Separate the artist from the art.”
Documentaries can honor the gravity of their subjects’ accusations without playing like an attenuated “Dateline” episode. If Safechuck and Robson’s accounts are true, they need no reckoning with Jackson’s aesthetic legacy; the reckoning is for the audience. We can handle it. To complicate is not to excuse. In a review of Jackson’s 1991 album Dangerous, writer Chuck Eddy compared him to the Sex Pistols’ Johnny Rotten: “incomparably feral performers grossed out by their own animal desires.” In Leaving Neverland, Safechuck and Robson’s accusations cohere into a feral man surrendering—without conscience—to his animal desires. This is dangerous too. For one, this summer will mark a decade since Jackson’s death; only his most vehement Twitter claque can defend him now. Worse, the film’s absence of context—artistic, psychoanalytical, legal—leaves exposed the fact that two white men accused a black man of grotesque violations. By dangling the possibility of male-on-male rape, Leaving Neverland reinforces stereotypes that go unrefuted. As the critic Jason King recently wrote on Slate, “Whether or not the allegations presented in the film are true, and whether or not it ever intended to do so, Leaving Neverland dangerously reinforces the gay-folks-are-predators stereotype—if only because it never acknowledges that such a stereotype exists in the first place.”
In its scrupulousness about playing fair toward Robson and Safechuck, Leaving Neverland allows gruesome tropes about black men to hover as a mist inhaled and untested by Jackson’s musical descendants. Left unmentioned is that Robson went on to co-write *NSYNC’s “Pop” and “Gone” with Justin Timberlake, who proceeded to try to swallow Jackson’s legacy whole. Last fall, Drake scored another hit interpolating a Jackson-Paul Anka demo from 1983. What must Robson think when he hears these songs? His terrorizer won’t leave him alone. When asked about his family’s guilt near the end of Leaving Neverland, Safechuck says, “Do I blame them? I’m still working on it.” Reed’s cinematic deposition allows for no such ambivalences, to its detriment.
