Michael, more bleached

The success of a film as ridiculously bad as Bohemian Rhapsody has punished us with a stream of musical biopics following the same pattern: idol glorification and tiptoeing around the most scandalous issues in their biographies. Sometimes, they ignore them outright, as if they weren't fundamental facts, even in the idols' artistic work. It's not cinema: it's legacy management.

The magnificent first part of Elvis is saved, to which Baz Luhrmann brought pace, personality, and electrifying aesthetics to reflect how Presley appropriated Black music and popularized it to a delirious extent among white audiences.

Now, the promotion for Michael bombards us to pay for a cinema ticket and watch how, in two hours, they recount the childhood and rise to glory of the most famous of the Jacksons. There's nothing we don't know. Even a miniseries already depicted the patriarch as a violent abuser who squeezed his children to achieve success. Like the members of Queen in Bohemian Rhapsody, the family of the Thriller singer has creative control of the film. And when the family controls the narrative, the shadows disappear.

Only Janet (my musically preferred Jackson) has distanced herself from a portrait that shows no trace of the eccentricities of a childishly adult man nor the child sexual abuse trial.

If you have seen the documentary Leaving Neverland, in which the two men accusing Jackson recount the abuse they suffered as children, you can hardly enjoy Michael. Here, separating the man from his work ceases to be a comfortable debate: both narratives are identical, parallel, without them having known each other. In fact, one replaced the other as the idol's 'chosen one'. As they grew up, they stopped being useful.

It's true that Leaving Neverland only portrays the victims. There is no counterpoint. But it's also true that during the trial, these voices did not have the same credibility, in a context where the world didn't find it suspicious for an adult to share a bed with ten-year-old children while their mothers slept in another room.

There were families who, faced with the impossibility of anyone believing them, accepted a check for their silence. Meanwhile, audiences worldwide will once again applaud in cinemas the prodigious talent of a child abuser whose story cinema has decided not to tell in full.