Michael, more whitewashed

The success of a movie so bad it's a parody like Bohemian Rhapsody has punished us with a trail of musical biopics following the same pattern: glorification of the idol and tiptoeing around the most scandalous aspects of their biographies. Sometimes, they outright ignore them, 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 imparted pulse, personality, and electrifying aesthetics to reflect how Presley appropriated Black music and popularized it to white audiences to a delirious degree.

Now, the promotion for Michael bombards us to pay for a cinema ticket and contemplate how, in two hours, they recount the childhood and leap 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 exploited his children to achieve success. Like the members of Queen in Bohemian Rhapsody, the family of the singer of Thriller 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 portrayal where there's no trace of the eccentricities of a childlike adult or the pedophile trial.

If you've seen the documentary Leaving Neverland, in which the two men accusing Jackson explain the abuse they suffered as children, it's hard to enjoy Michael. Here, separating the man from his work ceases to be a comfortable debate: both narratives are identical, parallel, without them ever knowing each other. In fact, one replaced the other as the idol's 'chosen one'. As they grew up, they became useless.

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

There were families who, unable to get anyone to believe them, accepted a check for their silence. Meanwhile, audiences worldwide will once again applaud in cinemas the prodigious talent of a child molester whose story the cinema has decided not to fully tell.