The online civil war over “Michael” is a battle over the truth

Is the truth specific? Depending on the size of the audience it reaches?

If so, MichaelA new film about pop singer Michael Jackson is on track to have the biggest opening ever for a music biopic, with a projected $70 million at the US box office, though critics say it sanitizes Jackson’s true identity – and aims to replace the King of Pop as the apotheosis of artistic virtue.

The film’s release sparked a familiar but recently heated online civil war between those eager to reclaim Jackson’s music and legend and those who see any celebration of him as a failure of accountability.

Musically, Jackson was in a class of his own. In the pre-social media days, before AI artists topped the Billboard charts and became a recurring internet meme, Jackson was the epitome of monoculture: 13 hit singles, countless awards, and twice inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. He remains, even in death, one of the best-selling music artists of all time. But his legacy has also been defined by multiple allegations of sexual assault, a sometimes eccentric personal life, and Jackson’s recorded admission of sharing his bed with underage boys. “This guy was worse than Jeffrey Epstein,” said Dan Reed, the film’s director. Leaving Neverlandthe 2019 Emmy Award-winning HBO documentary about Jackson’s alleged sexual misconduct, he recently told The Hollywood Reporter.

Director Antoine Fuqua, who insisted on Jackson’s innocence, never intended to avoid the allegations that surrounded Jackson later in life. According to him, the original pieces of Michael It included a re-enactment of the 1993 police raid on Neverland Ranch, in which Jackson was strip-searched to verify the physical description of his first accused, Jordan Chandler. But the scene was ultimately scrapped along with the entire third act of the film, which totaled $15 million in reshoots, due to a legal clause in a settlement with Chandler that prohibited his experience from being depicted on screen.

The result is a film that abruptly stops in 1988 and erases the two most controversial decades of Jackson’s life, choosing instead to focus on Jackson’s musical legacy over the more controversial aspects of his personal behavior.

The decision to omit these elements is not surprising when you consider that Jackson’s family obtained approval for the use of his music, essentially giving them veto power over the final cut of the film. One argument that keeps popping up on social media is that critics should judge Michael On their own terms and not on what they think it should have been. “People seem to want a movie [that] “It will never exist,” one X user pointed out.

Jackson’s fans say that these allegations should not overshadow his musical and artistic legacy, and separate the artist from the work, while critics assert that the biography should present a complete picture of Jackson, no matter how harsh that picture is. As film critic Sean Burns described it on X, it ended with a “release”. bad It’s like ending an OJ biopic with him winning the Heisman Trophy. Artist Harmony Holiday wrote that a good Michael Jackson movie “would be part tragedy and part farce,” drawing attention to the film’s lack of the real kind of inner character that made Jackson so polarizing.

Vulture critic Allison Wilmore noted that “watching the film feels more like frog-walking through a wax museum than watching a movie, as each landmark is recreated with an uncanny, repulsive resemblance to the canyon and none of the interior detail.”

As many of us seek to seek out and sculpt our truths, perhaps there is also a responsibility to challenge the film’s framework, or at least to question the assumptions it asks the audience to accept.