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Liking or disliking Michael Jackson and his music has little to do with the public spectacle that is Leaving Neverland. In the overcrowded genre of media about Jackson's pedophilia, director Dan Reed goes for the home run with a slap in the face for those in danger of becoming inured to the subject. Jockeying for center stage is the opposing attack movement firing at Leaving Neverland and its participants. Their discreditation platform wins hands down when it comes to obfuscations since none of their "policy points" stands up to scrutiny: legalism isn't truth being told.
Torrents of celebrity marketing across decades only ever reinforced my hope that Jackson would just go away. And then he did, sort of. What's always interesting is the business of celebrity branding, and how 'artists' wield their powers of litigation to prevail in life, and in Jackson's case, to curate a lucrative legacy in death. Trawling through the extensive documentations of litigation and more, it's notable that the names of Wade Robson and James Safechuck aren't Johnny-come-latelys by any means, and they're on board the good ship Leaving Neverland with enough unredacted testimony to elevate the sordid Jackson saga up to something else.
It's taken a few weeks for a suspect media to partially recover from the shock of Leaving Neverland, and they're now predictably scrambling for The Story which best dodges two male victims mentioning the unmentionable: "We were two little boys who enjoyed sex with a man." It might not be a great credibility defense but, given some thought, it's one hell of an offense. Expert forensic psychologists aren't rushing at Leaving Neverland in droves - no doubt unsure which horses to back and which to hobble. Wade Robson and James Safechuck admit past lies, but director Dan Reed gives them close to four hours to tell their rebranded and lurid but consistent tales.
The non-appearing "Jackson's Camp" predictably dismiss it all as "They're in it for the money", as if to pre-establish the moral high ground of the moneyed. The director is on very shaky ground in claiming that Robson and Safechuck are not...and utilizing that questionable claim as backup evidence of their credibility. Safechuck actually passed on the potentially lucrative opportunity to testify on behalf of Jackson - citing his repugnance of Jackson's character. Perhaps they just are owed money (and lots of it), under a breached implicit contract which dare not speak its name.
How Do You Clean Up A Dirty Story?
It's unreasonable to make judgment calls exclusively around who's lying, but it's quite reasonable to theorize that pedophilia is as much
clustered manipulative lying as it is sex. As spectacle, Leaving Neverland strikes many as harrowing and disturbing and so it should. As a vehicle to fuel our tendencies to personal and collective rushes to judgment it's quite frustrating. The undeniable complexity of
Robson and Safechuck's victimhood as viewed through a prism of "feel
pity for us" isn't an easy sell when their past deceits get in the way, and they're not obviously appealing for sympathy anyhow.
The most glaringly phenomenal aspect of their new stories is that they
are applying pederast values to their part in pedophilia ("We were in love," "We
enjoyed the sex", "He didn't do right by us."). It's hard to dispute the reality that pedophiles do shape their victim's sexuality to their own purposes from a very young age, while simultaneously acknowledging that maybe Robson and Safechuck are on to something in terms of approaches to remedy and healing.
"What's the difference between pedophilia and pederasty?" you might ask.
"What side of (around) fourteen are we talking about?" is the most viable answer.
While arbitrary ages aren't the last word, they're all we have as a society to begin determining consent issues. And since consent should remain key, if very young men want the right to consent to sex with older men then they need to take to the streets to demand ages of consent be lowered.
But
puberty as the onset of manhood isn't a bad place to define the point at which the worst type of
pedophile might dump young male prey. While there are pedophiles who
exploit post- and pubescent males, the dynamics of attraction,
power and negotiation usually differ. That exploitation may be of
teenage male sex fantasies and experimentation, without any relationship to defined pederasty. And from the perspective of a precociously sexually active gay boy, movie director Joel Schumacher's frank recollections of his young self are most informative, in a dispassionate way.
"Around fourteen" seems to be the age of cutoff for Jackson, but we're left to wonder why puberty doesn't rate a mention. How exactly does being dumped and shamed for physically becoming a man impact on a boy in the long- and short-term? It's undeniable that Robson and Safechuck, with the assistance of Leaving Neverland , are sailing to ports unknown in asking us to look at victimhood, pedophilia-plus and perhaps child sex trafficking in both older and newer ways.
Reed could have plugged the many holes in Leaving Neverland's hull with a clear understanding of what a modern pedophile is, as opposed to
what a defined pederast was. As a frame of reference it goes a long way to individualizing and humanizing the stories
Jackson's victims tell. Their stories are punctuated by Jackson's failures to honor the
central responsibilities of a pederast in terms of setting the younger
man up for life (with education, especially) and finding him more sexually attractive after pubescence. In many ways it's progressive and courageous to air Wade
Robson and James Safechuck's anguish around those exact issues: selling them as the consequences of "being in love" while going
hard with graphic genitalia recollections misses the mark.
Who's To Bless And Who's To Blame?
The director responds to questions around broad and long-term coverups with "The answer has something to do of course with the dazzling glare of celebrity and our instinctive deference to talent and wealth. But it also has a lot to do with collective ignorance." If Leaving Neverland doesn't stand as an indictment of celebrity worship then we've completely lost our way. "How could she?" is the knee-jerk reaction to Robson's ruthless stage mother. "Very easily" is the answer if we're honest enough about our real motives behind issues like 'wanting the best for our kids and ourselves'.
"Jimmy" Safechuck claims to be "still working on it" when it comes to forgiving his own mother. For the sake of his own healing he probably needs to work a bit harder on it since she knows and admits she fucked up as a mother. It's just a log-jam situation: she's gone as far as she can go, and drawn-out penance doesn't serve anybody or anything, mother or son. Sadly, there's no mention at all of interventions in terms of his mental health. He presents as a beautiful soul in need of it.
But back to what Leaving Neverland has been positing on Robson and Safechuck's behalf: that they're not in it for the money. With that consideration not necessarily under a cloud, their claims are certainly tied to the shocking: "We were two little boys who enjoyed gay sex and wanted to get paid." Dan Reed does a fine job of avoiding the implications by bringing in his big guns at the exact point pesky questions about sexuality might get asked: wives and kids. That's about the time that Leaving Neverland starts to take on water. And despite some very slick editing, it all lurches towards the tabloidish, in an "it is what it is" kind of way.
The moral of the subliminal story of course is that heterosexuality just might save the day, albeit with some mental trauma along the way. Just one pesky but reasonable question which needs asking is "Would Robson and Safechuck be more or less sympathetic and credible if they were gay or bisexual?" There's actually way, way too much wives and (especially Robson's) family in the second half of Leaving Neverland, to the point that it appears Wade Robson might be in the director's chair. With a brief nod to therapy which isn't revisited, the show immediately invokes the paranormal instead of credible professionals explaining the fine points of how pedophilia does cause sexual dysfunction but heterosexuality doesn't heal it or cure anything. Or that the questionable goal of some treating therapists (to restore men's "true" sexuality) is binary thinking and often presents all homosexuality as a dysfunctional sexuality default. Instead, in an idea torn from the pages of Weekly World News, 'breakthroughs' for dysfunctional and deluded families happen when a relative has a dream that somebody got molested.
For a couple of weeks The Story was fan backlash and bans on radio play for Michael Jackson, in the absence of that elusive something which might pass for both balance and objectivity. The fact that people who were in no position to know anything were excluded from Leaving Neverland goes a long way towards scuttling hack media notions about the necessity for "balance". With that pretense out of the way, a lack of prior convictions for Michael Jackson is being pressed into service as objectivity. That he was acquitted / never found guilty of pedophilia isn't objective truth. He wasn't found innocent either, thanks to liars and the expert legal help which only power can buy. Decades of clever serial sandbagging have created a "Michael Is Innocent" myth, and if a pair like Robson and Safechuck who were there force us to confront that myth then we might be on the way to apprehending some truth.
