There are some artists who do not just belong to pop culture. They belong to our childhood.
Michael Jackson was one of those artists for me.
If you were around in the early 1980s, you know what I mean. He was not just a singer. He was the sun. His music was everywhere. His videos felt like events. His clothes, his dance moves, his voice, his whole presence in the culture felt larger than life. For a lot of kids, me included, those songs were not just songs. They were part of the wallpaper of growing up. They were joy. They were energy. They were the sound of being young and thinking pop stars were magic.
Michael Jackson and My Childhood
I was one of those kids. I wanted a BEAT IT jacket or a THRILLER jacket. I was not picky but my mom and dad were absolutely not having it. I had a Michael Jackson doll, basically a Ken doll with all the iconic outfits, and I thought that was about the coolest thing on earth. THRILLER might still be the greatest music video ever made. His Motown 25 performance of BILLIE JEAN might be the greatest live solo performance I have ever seen.
At one point, in a truly elite display of elementary-school commitment, I took my dad’s prescription sunglasses to school because I thought they made me look more like Michael Jackson. This was 1983 or 1984, so these things were not stylish little costume shades. They were giant, heavy, made-of-actual-glass dad glasses. I bent over in class, they slid off my giant-headed little face, hit the floor, and shattered. So yes, I was in.
So when a new Michael Jackson movie comes along, I understand the pull. I understand the nostalgia. I understand why people want to sit in a theater and revisit the legend, the songs, the iconography, the moonwalk, the mythology. I get it.
Why I’m Not Seeing the Michael Jackson Movie
But I am not seeing it.
And the reason is not complicated. It is painful, but it is not complicated.
At some point, the child sexual abuse allegations surrounding Michael Jackson became too serious, too consistent, and too deeply unsettling for me to keep engaging with his legacy the way I once did. I know people will say there are two sides to every story. I know people will say he was acquitted. I know people will say there were money motives, fame motives, family motives, media motives. I have heard all of it.
But I also know that when people talk about survivors, the rules somehow always change when the accused is famous enough, beloved enough, talented enough, or useful enough to our own nostalgia.
That is the part I cannot get past.
Who Do We Believe?
Who decides which survivors we believe?
Who is the moral referee handing out permissions and exceptions? Who gets the benefit of endless doubt, and who gets scrutinized, dismantled, mocked, and ignored? Why are some stories treated as sacred testimony while others are treated like inconveniences to a legacy brand?
Too often, the answer is depressingly simple: we believe the stories that cost us the least.
If the accused is someone we never cared about, belief is easy. If the accused is someone whose work soundtracked our childhood, decorated our bedroom walls, or made us feel less alone, suddenly people become amateur prosecutors, private investigators, forensic linguists, and historians of technicality. Suddenly the burden is impossibly high. Suddenly certainty becomes the only acceptable threshold, even though certainty is a luxury almost no survivor of abuse ever gets to offer the world.
And so we stall out in the same place over and over again: “Well, I just don’t know.”
Sometimes “I just don’t know” is honest. Sometimes it is even fair.
But sometimes “I just don’t know” is just a prettier way of saying, “I do not want to let go.”
What Do We Do When Our Heroes Fail Us?
That, to me, is the bigger question here. Not just what did Michael Jackson do or not do. That question matters, obviously. But the deeper and more uncomfortable question for a lot of us is this: what do we do when our heroes fail us? What do we do when someone whose art helped shape us becomes inseparable from accusations so disturbing that returning to the work no longer feels innocent?
There is no single universal answer.
Some people separate art from artist. Some cannot. Some draw hard moral lines. Some make case-by-case judgments. Some keep the music but abandon the mythology. Some walk away entirely. Some keep coming back because the art still means too much to them. Human beings are messy, and so are our relationships with art.
But what I think is dangerous is pretending this is a simple, consequence-free exercise. It is not just a playlist decision. It is not just “let people enjoy things.” When we consume media, especially biopics and legacy restorations, we are not just revisiting art. We are participating in canon formation. We are helping decide who gets polished, protected, redeemed, monetized, and reintroduced to the next generation as greatness.
That is not nothing.
A glossy prestige biopic is not neutral. It is not merely historical. It is an act of framing. It tells audiences how to feel, what to foreground, what to excuse, what to sentimentalize, and what to leave in the shadows. It says: here is the version of this person we would like to preserve. Here is the version worthy of your time, your money, your tears, your applause.
How We Navigate Art, Fame, and Conscience
And maybe that is where I land as a media consumer right now: I am trying to be more honest about what my attention means.
Attention is currency now. Maybe it always was, but now it is impossible to ignore. Every stream, every ticket, every click, every “well, I’m just curious” purchase becomes part of the machine. As consumers, we are constantly told that our only job is to be entertained. But that is too convenient. We are also participants. We choose what gets amplified. We choose what gets normalized. We choose what gets another chance. We choose what gets rebranded as timeless and untouchable.
And I am just not willing to lend my attention to that particular rebrand.
That does not mean I have everything figured out. Far from it.
There are countless artists, filmmakers, actors, musicians, and public figures whose work people still consume despite disturbing accusations, terrible behavior, cruelty, exploitation, or moral rot. If you are looking for total ethical purity in art, you are going to end up in an empty room staring at a blank wall. The modern media landscape does not allow for easy innocence.
So no, I am not writing this from some mountaintop of moral certainty.
I am writing it from the mess.
From the place where a person can still remember loving the songs and also feel sick thinking about the accusations. From the place where admiration has curdled into discomfort. From the place where growing older means realizing that talent and goodness are not the same thing, and that charisma can obscure a lot of damage.
That is one of the hardest things about adulthood as a media consumer: eventually you learn that genius is not character. Artistry is not decency. Greatness is not innocence. A person can make something transcendent and still be monstrous, or at the very least still leave behind a moral wreckage too serious to shrug off with a greatest-hits montage.
I think a lot of people resist that because it feels like losing something.
And it is.
When a hero falls, there is grief in it. Real grief. Not because your pain equals the pain of victims or survivors, obviously. It does not. But there is still a kind of private mourning in realizing that something you loved no longer feels safe to love in the same way. That the soundtrack of your childhood now comes with a knot in your stomach. That innocence, once lost, does not come back just because the chorus still slaps.
Maybe that is what so many of these public arguments are really about. Not truth, exactly. Grief.
People do not want to lose the version of the artist they built inside themselves. They do not want to rewrite memory. They do not want to admit that what once felt pure now feels compromised. They do not want to do the work of making a new moral map.
But that work matters.
The world does not get better because we cling harder to expired narratives simply because they are familiar. It gets better when we are willing to be unsettled by new information, by uncomfortable patterns, by testimony that does not fit the hero story we were handed. It gets better when we stop treating charisma as an alibi. It gets better when we stop assuming that enormous talent should buy enormous moral leniency.
And maybe most of all, it gets better when we stop asking whether this person deserves our skepticism and start asking why we are so desperate to preserve our permission to adore them.
That is where I am with Michael Jackson.
I am not telling anyone else what to do. I am not interested in wagging fingers at strangers in a theater. I am talking about my own conscience, my own line, my own inability to sit through a glossy celebration of that life and legacy without hearing all the other noise around it.
For me, the songs are no longer just songs.
The icon is no longer just the icon.
The legend is no longer just the legend.
And if that means I miss a big, buzzy movie event, so be it.
We all have to decide how to live with the art we inherit, the heroes we outgrow, and the truths that arrive too late to keep innocence intact.
This is one of those times where I know my answer.
Why I Skipped the Michael Jackson Movie
There are some artists who do not just belong to pop culture. They belong to our childhood.
Michael Jackson was one of those artists for me.
If you were around in the early 1980s, you know what I mean. He was not just a singer. He was the sun. His music was everywhere. His videos felt like events. His clothes, his dance moves, his voice, his whole presence in the culture felt larger than life. For a lot of kids, me included, those songs were not just songs. They were part of the wallpaper of growing up. They were joy. They were energy. They were the sound of being young and thinking pop stars were magic.
Michael Jackson and My Childhood
I was one of those kids. I wanted a BEAT IT jacket or a THRILLER jacket. I was not picky but my mom and dad were absolutely not having it. I had a Michael Jackson doll, basically a Ken doll with all the iconic outfits, and I thought that was about the coolest thing on earth. THRILLER might still be the greatest music video ever made. His Motown 25 performance of BILLIE JEAN might be the greatest live solo performance I have ever seen.
At one point, in a truly elite display of elementary-school commitment, I took my dad’s prescription sunglasses to school because I thought they made me look more like Michael Jackson. This was 1983 or 1984, so these things were not stylish little costume shades. They were giant, heavy, made-of-actual-glass dad glasses. I bent over in class, they slid off my giant-headed little face, hit the floor, and shattered. So yes, I was in.
So when a new Michael Jackson movie comes along, I understand the pull. I understand the nostalgia. I understand why people want to sit in a theater and revisit the legend, the songs, the iconography, the moonwalk, the mythology. I get it.
Why I’m Not Seeing the Michael Jackson Movie
But I am not seeing it.
And the reason is not complicated. It is painful, but it is not complicated.
At some point, the child sexual abuse allegations surrounding Michael Jackson became too serious, too consistent, and too deeply unsettling for me to keep engaging with his legacy the way I once did. I know people will say there are two sides to every story. I know people will say he was acquitted. I know people will say there were money motives, fame motives, family motives, media motives. I have heard all of it.
But I also know that when people talk about survivors, the rules somehow always change when the accused is famous enough, beloved enough, talented enough, or useful enough to our own nostalgia.
That is the part I cannot get past.
Who Do We Believe?
Who decides which survivors we believe?
Who is the moral referee handing out permissions and exceptions? Who gets the benefit of endless doubt, and who gets scrutinized, dismantled, mocked, and ignored? Why are some stories treated as sacred testimony while others are treated like inconveniences to a legacy brand?
Too often, the answer is depressingly simple: we believe the stories that cost us the least.
If the accused is someone we never cared about, belief is easy. If the accused is someone whose work soundtracked our childhood, decorated our bedroom walls, or made us feel less alone, suddenly people become amateur prosecutors, private investigators, forensic linguists, and historians of technicality. Suddenly the burden is impossibly high. Suddenly certainty becomes the only acceptable threshold, even though certainty is a luxury almost no survivor of abuse ever gets to offer the world.
And so we stall out in the same place over and over again: “Well, I just don’t know.”
Sometimes “I just don’t know” is honest. Sometimes it is even fair.
But sometimes “I just don’t know” is just a prettier way of saying, “I do not want to let go.”
What Do We Do When Our Heroes Fail Us?
That, to me, is the bigger question here. Not just what did Michael Jackson do or not do. That question matters, obviously. But the deeper and more uncomfortable question for a lot of us is this: what do we do when our heroes fail us? What do we do when someone whose art helped shape us becomes inseparable from accusations so disturbing that returning to the work no longer feels innocent?
There is no single universal answer.
Some people separate art from artist. Some cannot. Some draw hard moral lines. Some make case-by-case judgments. Some keep the music but abandon the mythology. Some walk away entirely. Some keep coming back because the art still means too much to them. Human beings are messy, and so are our relationships with art.
But what I think is dangerous is pretending this is a simple, consequence-free exercise. It is not just a playlist decision. It is not just “let people enjoy things.” When we consume media, especially biopics and legacy restorations, we are not just revisiting art. We are participating in canon formation. We are helping decide who gets polished, protected, redeemed, monetized, and reintroduced to the next generation as greatness.
That is not nothing.
A glossy prestige biopic is not neutral. It is not merely historical. It is an act of framing. It tells audiences how to feel, what to foreground, what to excuse, what to sentimentalize, and what to leave in the shadows. It says: here is the version of this person we would like to preserve. Here is the version worthy of your time, your money, your tears, your applause.
How We Navigate Art, Fame, and Conscience
And maybe that is where I land as a media consumer right now: I am trying to be more honest about what my attention means.
Attention is currency now. Maybe it always was, but now it is impossible to ignore. Every stream, every ticket, every click, every “well, I’m just curious” purchase becomes part of the machine. As consumers, we are constantly told that our only job is to be entertained. But that is too convenient. We are also participants. We choose what gets amplified. We choose what gets normalized. We choose what gets another chance. We choose what gets rebranded as timeless and untouchable.
And I am just not willing to lend my attention to that particular rebrand.
That does not mean I have everything figured out. Far from it.
There are countless artists, filmmakers, actors, musicians, and public figures whose work people still consume despite disturbing accusations, terrible behavior, cruelty, exploitation, or moral rot. If you are looking for total ethical purity in art, you are going to end up in an empty room staring at a blank wall. The modern media landscape does not allow for easy innocence.
So no, I am not writing this from some mountaintop of moral certainty.
I am writing it from the mess.
From the place where a person can still remember loving the songs and also feel sick thinking about the accusations. From the place where admiration has curdled into discomfort. From the place where growing older means realizing that talent and goodness are not the same thing, and that charisma can obscure a lot of damage.
That is one of the hardest things about adulthood as a media consumer: eventually you learn that genius is not character. Artistry is not decency. Greatness is not innocence. A person can make something transcendent and still be monstrous, or at the very least still leave behind a moral wreckage too serious to shrug off with a greatest-hits montage.
I think a lot of people resist that because it feels like losing something.
And it is.
When a hero falls, there is grief in it. Real grief. Not because your pain equals the pain of victims or survivors, obviously. It does not. But there is still a kind of private mourning in realizing that something you loved no longer feels safe to love in the same way. That the soundtrack of your childhood now comes with a knot in your stomach. That innocence, once lost, does not come back just because the chorus still slaps.
Maybe that is what so many of these public arguments are really about. Not truth, exactly. Grief.
People do not want to lose the version of the artist they built inside themselves. They do not want to rewrite memory. They do not want to admit that what once felt pure now feels compromised. They do not want to do the work of making a new moral map.
But that work matters.
The world does not get better because we cling harder to expired narratives simply because they are familiar. It gets better when we are willing to be unsettled by new information, by uncomfortable patterns, by testimony that does not fit the hero story we were handed. It gets better when we stop treating charisma as an alibi. It gets better when we stop assuming that enormous talent should buy enormous moral leniency.
And maybe most of all, it gets better when we stop asking whether this person deserves our skepticism and start asking why we are so desperate to preserve our permission to adore them.
That is where I am with Michael Jackson.
I am not telling anyone else what to do. I am not interested in wagging fingers at strangers in a theater. I am talking about my own conscience, my own line, my own inability to sit through a glossy celebration of that life and legacy without hearing all the other noise around it.
For me, the songs are no longer just songs.
The icon is no longer just the icon.
The legend is no longer just the legend.
And if that means I miss a big, buzzy movie event, so be it.
We all have to decide how to live with the art we inherit, the heroes we outgrow, and the truths that arrive too late to keep innocence intact.
This is one of those times where I know my answer.
I’m sitting this one out.