I did this out of genuine curiosity. I’d never gained a reliable sense of where we’d landed on this matter, as consumers and judges of pop culture. On one hand, there’s been little sustained effort to render Michael Jackson anathema, to cancel him, even though the accusations against him are numerous, and they concern offenses on which the judging public is disinclined toward mercy. Yes, he was acquitted in the one trial he faced, but he’s also accused of assaulting several other boys, as recounted in Leaving Neverland, the troubling documentary series from 2019. And the things he indisputably did, like having young boys spend the night at his house and sleep with him in his bed, would mean permanent infamy for a normal celebrity. Instead, in 2022, people made a Broadway musical about Jackson — a “jukebox musical” that focused on the songs and ignored the creepy stuff altogether. 

On the other hand, the name and memory of Michael Jackson are noticeably tainted. His famous songs get played in various places, but the people who play them seem to rush past the tainted name in mentioning the great music. No one’s doing lengthy digressions on the beloved genius who sang “Beat It” and “Billy Jean”. Jackson’s memory, it seems, is veiled not so much in outrage or open disgust as in careful and rigorous discretion. It’s as if the case of Michael Jackson has returned us to an earlier, less lurid era, in which — unlike our own sex-mongering, scandal-happy time — a respectable person didn’t openly discuss the seedier types of crime and folly. 

Or that, anyway, is how it’s felt to me in the 17 years since Jackson died of a drug overdose administered by his personal physician. So when I started reading the comments under the trailer, wondering who would bring up the bad stuff, I figured lots of people would. But instead they made me think that I was just imagining a broader culture seized in the queasy ambivalence I felt myself. Because there was nothing about the bad stuff. I scrolled and scrolled but found no comments in which Jackson was treated like an Epstein or a Weinstein. All I saw were things like “Boy is he missed” and “There will never be another Michael Jackson!!!!!” I had to scroll through hundreds of comments before I found one that even mentioned his troubles, and that comment was entirely sympathetic, and the troubles it mentioned were totally different from the ones I was thinking of: “[W]hen he was alive they were killing his soul with rumors and talking about him being broke and bad money habits.” 

Bad money habits? I honestly don’t remember any talk about Michael Jackson having bad money habits, my mental access to those biographical details obstructed, perhaps, by all the things I recalled about him allegedly molesting little boys. It seems the general public, at least as represented by those thousands of YouTube comments, has chosen a psychic strategy of repression or denial, to act as if that sexual assault stuff either doesn’t matter to us now or, perhaps, never happened, not even the allegations. 

The makers of Michael chose denial as well, but not the subconscious sort of denial psychologists talk about. Theirs was a conscious, defiant sort of denial. Antoine Fuqua denies there’s anything to be ambivalent about. He denies that Jackson’s accusers are telling the truth. Of those accusers Fuqua said, “sometimes people do some nasty things for some money”. Fuqua seems to believe that Jordan Chandler, the source of the earliest allegations from 1993, was induced to lie by his parents, for money. And, to be fair to Fuqua and Jackson’s other defenders, those parents do not make the most trustworthy accusers. They won a $23 million settlement against Jackson, after which the family stopped cooperating with the prosecutors and the criminal case they initiated was dropped. Fuqua’s skepticism about Jackson’s accusers also grows from a broader belief that white America has it out for successful black people. “When I hear [accusations] about us — Black people in particular, especially in a certain position — there’s always pause,” he said. 

Accordingly, and defiantly, Fuqua opened his original cut of his film with a flash-forward shot of the 1993 police raid of Jackson’s Neverland Ranch in response to the Chandler allegations, with the rest of the movie focused on his earlier conquest of the pop music world. So Fuqua’s intended version of Michael had the tragic structure he alluded to, in which black success leads to racist persecution. “I shot [Michael] being stripped naked,” Fuqua said, “treated like an animal, a monster.” 

But the Chandler settlement prevented Fuqua from realizing his defiant vision. After the film was shot, according to Variety, “attorneys for the Jackson estate realized there was a clause in the settlement that blocked the depiction or mention of Chandler in any movie”. Fuqua was forced to reshoot much of the film, at a reported cost of $50 million, so that the final cut carries no reference to Jordan Chandler, sexual assault, criminal persecution, or any of the other things that make up the iffy parts of Michael Jackson’s reputation. Contrary to the intentions he brought to Michael, then, Fuqua was forced to replace his defiant sort of denial with the other sort, where people pretend not to be aware of something they’re probably all aware of, subconsciously if not consciously. 

But, even for someone who wants to defend Jackson against unproven allegations, it’s pretty much impossible to present his life in any detail without reminding people of those allegations — even people desperate not to be reminded. Michael contains truly touching scenes of Jackson sitting with dying children in hospital wards, but, for obvious reasons, the meaning of these scenes can’t be contained within any defensive or hagiographic framework, and so even as you’re being moved by Michael’s generous way with the child dying of cancer, your mind’s wandering to Jordan Chandler and Wade Robson and James Safechuck. There are several other scenes as well in which we see how Jackson, hemmed in by fame and terrorized by his father (Colman Domingo), relates to children in a way he can’t with anyone else but his mother, Kate (Nia Long). The film wants the viewer to sympathize with poor Michael, the genius performer forced to live this distorted life, but the viewer’s like, “Damn, there’s those little kids again.” 

Of course, Fuqua’s original cut sought to order this interpretive mess preemptively, with that persecution imagery in the opening scene. It’s hard to know how well this would have worked. Perhaps it would have immunized the audience against their own unwanted thoughts, imposed a potent presumption of innocence that, among other things, justified Antoine Fuqua in directing a sympathetic movie about Michael Jackson, accused child molester. But in making that opening statement about persecution, and thereby conceding the allegations in explicit terms, Fuqua would also have raised the whole matter to the level of polemic: “If you think Michael molested those boys, then you belong with his (racist) persecutors.” I don’t think that would have made the movie more enjoyable. 

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And Michael is, for much of its running time, pretty enjoyable. There’s a great deal of clumsy earnestness in it, and not much wit, and Fuqua’s touch as a director is inconsistent at best, and the character of Michael Jackson is frankly unpleasant in its ominous weirdness. But, because Fuqua’s persecution framing went in the editing can, the movie is largely, and sort of naively, about Michael Jackson’s music, and Michael Jackson’s music is, of course, fantastic. The movie puts you in the seats for early Jackson 5 performances, at clubs and theaters, where you get to imagine the audience’s awe in watching the young Michael (Juliano Valdi) sing “I’ll Be There” and “ABC”. It portrays the historic partnership of the older Michael (played by Jaafar Jackson, son of Michael’s brother Jermaine) and Quincy Jones (Kendrick Sampson) at its origins, their recording of Jackson’s breakthrough solo album “Off the Wall”. It re-stages the filming of the famous “Beat It” and “Thriller” videos with a fidelity that brings to mind both liturgical Christianity and Jorge Luis Borges. For anyone who remembers those videos from MTV, these are rousing, if also eerily postmodern, scenes. 

And Michael puts Jaafar Jackson through some very impressive paces in recreating Michael’s famous concerts. Handsome, gentle-voiced Jaafar really learned to dance like his superstar uncle. I found these concert scenes quite powerful, despite my efforts to keep suspicion and misgiving at the center of my Michael experience. Michael performs “Billy Jean” at Motown’s 25th Anniversary extravaganza in 1983, inciting madness in the audience as he Moonwalks for the first time, which is an undeniably exciting thing to see faithfully recreated in a movie. Michael, rejoined by his brothers for the Victory Tour in 1986, sings “Human Nature” to a swooning crowd in Los Angeles, which is pretty irresistible. And then Michael does a fierce rendition of “Bad” for 70,000 people at Wembley Stadium in 1988, which is a real tour de force. 

And that’s it. That’s the end of the movie. It’s the relatively prelapsarian year of 1988. The Jordan Chandler allegations are still half-a-decade away. Michael’s nose has been shaved down several times, but it still resembles a human nose, pretty much, and not the alien vestige it was on its way to becoming. And, crucially, it’s been close to an hour, when the movie reaches this triumphant musical conclusion, since we’ve seen Michael befriending any children. Michael leaves us with an apotheosized Michael, the abstract, mass-consumed Michael Jackson who ruled the Eighties, a phenomenon of musical talent and huge celebrity, but not really a person. 

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Forced to skirt the controversy about Michael Jackson the accused child molester, Fuqua inadvertently raises another, more fundamental dispute — whether we should or can separate artists from their art. I’m not going to pretend here. I don’t think there’s much of a dispute on the first matter. We should separate the artist from the art. When an artist of bad character or evil conduct leaves us with works of real beauty and greatness, it’s self-defeating and philistine to banish the art from our cultural life. To make such banishment a principal is to empower the would-be political bosses among us.  

A more interesting psychological question, perhaps, is whether we can separate the art from the artist, whether we can have an experience of art purified of the damning knowledge about the artist we bring to the experience. Michael makes a strong, probably accidental case that we can. Antoine Fuqua began wanting to prove that the nasty things people said about Michael Jackson were not true, but he ended up showing that, at least as a matter of art and aesthetics, these accusations are easily set aside. In moving from Jackson’s personal formation as a quirky child prodigy to his musical triumphs of the Eighties, Michael slowly distills the suggestive personal weirdness from its portrait, and ends up staging another jukebox musical. At the end of the movie, if you want to go back to thinking about the damning stuff, you first have to wipe the smile off your face and stop tapping your toe. 

But this peremptory resolution of the art/artist debate doesn’t really close the issue of what to do with this movie, or how it will land with audiences this weekend and beyond. There remains the matter betokened by Antoine Fuqua’s combative language, the counter-accusations he levels at Jackson’s accusers and anyone inclined to believe them. I attended a preview screening open to the public the day before the movie’s general release, and the audience was about 80% black, with one young black man costumed as Eighties Michael Jackson, with the turned-down porkpie hat, the silver jacket and the black slacks, the silver socks bunched over black loafers, and the glove. This was in contrast to the movie’s portrayal of Jackson’s fans and concert audiences, which were racially mixed and, indeed, predominantly white. Like those YouTube comments, it made me think that the cultural ambivalence I’ve sensed around Michael Jackson since his death is not really ambivalence. It’s just another racial division, his posthumous reputation just another racial Rorschach test, with black Americans perhaps more willing than whites to believe him innocent and, thus, readier to attend and enjoy a movie about his life and music. As someone who harbors naive dreams of a post-racial America, I find these regular Rorschach moments depressing.

But even if the ambivalence I discerned in our collective treatment of Michael Jackson is just another racial division, my own ambivalence is a real thing, informed by the art/artist matter I describe above. I might express that ambivalence in these terms: I admit to enjoying Jackson’s music when I hear it, and I don’t renounce this enjoyment, but I’m not sure we should be making toe-tapping movies about his ugly, unhappy, tragic life.

When it comes to songs about friendship, Michael Jackson’s first US number one “Ben” (1972) is among the best known and the most sentimental. But unlike others of the genre — such as “Lean On Me” by Bill Withers (1972), or “With a Little Help from My Friends” by The Beatles (1967) — the key difference is that the subject isn’t human. “Ben” is a rat.

That this mawkish song about a boy and his pet rodent could have catalysed the career of one of the biggest pop stars of all time is only one aspect of the strangeness of this story. The inspiration for the song can be traced directly to a Belfast seed merchant and CND activist called Stephen Gilbert who, in 1968, published the novel Ratman’s Notebooks about a man who trains rats to wreak vengeance on his enemies. When this was filmed in 1971 as the movie Willard, the reissued paperback of the novel sold over a million copies. And it was for the sequel, Ben in 1972, that Michael Jackson provided the theme song.

All art is imitative. Even the greatest geniuses, those for whom there is seemingly no precedent, have learned their craft in the observation of other artists. The canon of literature is not formed at the behest of academics issuing decrees from their ivory towers, but rather from those works that are most emulated and admired by creatives. And this applies as much to popular culture as it does to high art. Take, for instance, T’Pau’s breakthrough hit “China in Your Hand” (1987) which was inspired by Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Some of these ripples of influence are admittedly more arbitrary than others. But there is something especially gratifying about being able to trace the work of a relatively obscure Northern Irish novelist such as Stephen Gilbert all the way to the “King of Pop”, who died 15 years ago to the day..

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I remember speaking to a senior member of the Northern Irish Arts Council who was lamenting his country’s poor track record of sustaining the legacy of its creative sons and daughters. Of course, the likes of C.S. Lewis need no further promotion, but what of the lesser-known names? When I attempted to arrange a blue plaque for the birthplace of Belfast novelist Forrest Reid, I was met with bafflement from one of the decision-makers. Even this person so steeped in local culture apparently had no idea that Reid was considered Northern Ireland’s foremost novelist by E.M. Forster, and had won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction in 1944. Such is the fickle nature of literary trends.

As for Gilbert, you won’t find his work on any of the shelves of Belfast’s bookshops. But there is much to admire in the five novels that were published during his lifetime. Reading these books, one is immediately struck by the sheer imaginative range on display. The Landslide (1943) is a fantastical tale about a boy who encounters primeval creatures in his village that have been brought back into existence after a landslide exposes their long-dormant eggs. Bombardier (1944) is a vivid and compelling roman à clef about the author’s experiences as a gunner in France during the war which includes some fascinating insights into the evacuation of Dunkirk from the soldier’s perspective. Gilbert followed this with Monkeyface (1948), an eccentric story about an ape boy who is brought from a forest in South America and raised in a Belfast suburb. Then came The Burnaby Experiments (1952), in which Gilbert seems to take revenge on his mentor Forrest Reid by casting him in the role of a voyeuristic villain with supernatural powers. (The intense love-hate relationship between Reid and Gilbert is far too complex and intricate to explore here.) Ratman’s Notebooks finally appeared in 1968, an outlandish horror story to round off this bizarrely varied catalogue of work.

That Ratman’s Notebooks was destined to become famous due to a Hollywood adaptation was a source of some irritation for Gilbert. He died in 2010 having refused to watch Willard, its sequel Ben, or the 2003 remake of Willard starring Crispin Glover. He wasn’t happy with the studio’s decision to christen his unnamed narrator Willard Stiles, and to relocate the story to California. His instincts were right; this off-kilter tale is far better suited to a provincial rather than a cosmopolitan setting. Ratman’s Notebooks concerns a discontented man, dominated by a scornful mother and bullied by his boss, who resorts to acts of horrific violence. Somehow this all makes so much more sense in Belfast, a city with a troubled history and where the borderland of reality and fiction has always felt malleable.

Ratman’s Notebooks is often dismissed as a lurid and dispensable work of pulp fiction, but its influence on the horror genre has been hugely significant. The critic Kim Newman has argued its success following the release of Willard “made rampaging vermin a major horror theme of the 1970s and ’80s” and has pointed out that even Stephen King’s debut Carrie (1974) follows the same story archetype of the “turning worm” revenge fantasy.

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Gilbert presents Ratman’s Notebooks in the form of a diary, and opens with the arresting line: “Mother says there are rats in the rockery.” Although it would be wrong to see the narrator as a fictionalised version of Gilbert, there are certainly parallels with the author’s life. After the death of his father in 1934, the family had been compelled to adapt to more meagre circumstances. They moved from Kensington Park in East Belfast to a relatively modest terrace house just off the Antrim Road. Having grown accustomed to an affluent way of life, they were forced to make many changes; the car was sold, along with many items of furniture. “Tea isn’t high tea anymore,” Gilbert wrote in his unpublished autobiography. “Just tea, with bread, jam and margarine. Mother watches us all to make sure nobody spreads the jam or the margarine too thickly.”

In tone and substance, this could have been a line from Ratman’s Notebooks. This theme of social decline seemingly obsessed Gilbert, and recurs continually in his novels. The narrator of Ratman’s Notebooks is forced to suffer the indignity of having to work as a subordinate in a company once owned by his deceased father, a scenario that bears some resemblance to Gilbert’s own experience. As our anti-hero’s bitterness festers, so too does his desire for revenge, not solely against those who have directly wrong him, but against society as a whole.

Gilbert was born in 1912 in Newcastle, County Down. He was one of four children, although his father William also had two other daughters from a previous marriage. William was the manager of Samuel McCausland Ltd, a Belfast-based seed merchants, the business that Stephen was later to inherit. His early life was relatively privileged; the family could afford to put him through boarding school, first in England at the Leas in Hoylake, Merseyside, and then at Loretto School in Edinburgh. His headmaster at Loretto, James Greenlees, once wrote a prescient remark about Gilbert: “I think it more than probable that he will eventually do something quite out of the ordinary, as he has an original way of looking at things.” In Ratman’s Notebooks, Gilbert was to prove Greenlees right.

In the archives at Queen’s University one can read Gilbert’s immense unpublished four-volume autobiography, in which he makes clear that Ratman’s Notebooks was his final attempt to fulfil his lifelong ambitions. “My service to Mammon”, he writes, “has kept me from serving literature”. His ultimate aim, “to leave business and become a whole-time writer”, never came to fruition. That said, he enjoyed a highly successful career in the seed industry and realised his goal “to marry and have four children – two boys and two girls”. As far I am aware, I am the only person to have read his autobiography. To open the pages, I first had to clear away layers of cobwebs and desiccated spiders.

The Gilbert archives at Queen’s University gives us a fascinating insight into his creative process. He was a meticulous researcher; there are handwritten notes about rats detailing their feeding habits, and the physical and behavioural characteristics of various species. One of Gilbert’s many idiosyncrasies was to record the precise times that he began and completed his novels. For this reason, we know that he started work on the eventual version of Ratman’s Notebooks at 6:30am on St Patrick’s Day, 1967, and finished his first draft at 7:31am on Tuesday 10 October of the same year. The first outline of the novel dates from 1938, which shows that the idea had been germinating for over a quarter of a century.

A number of manuscript drafts of Ratman’s Notebooks are still extant, some of which contain tantalising annotations regarding the various directions the novel could have taken. In one handwritten note — “Ben can read” — Gilbert has even toyed with the possibility of making the story explicitly supernatural. Another note sees his unnamed narrator make the claim that “there is nothing wrong with homosexuality except that it is entirely unfashionable”. Where such a line of thought might have taken the plotline is anyone’s guess.

It is perhaps no surprise that Gilbert’s sole foray into the horror genre turned out to be his most successful book. He was instinctively drawn to the fantastical, as evinced in works such as Monkeyface, The Burnaby Experiments and the unpublished dystopian novel The Labyrinth. “I need something out of the ordinary to work round,” he wrote in his journal on 29 October 1999, “which is what has taken me to Fantasy”. His body of work is infused with a baleful darkness relating to issues of morality and human corruption. Ratman’s Notebooks is not just a revenge story, but a study of hubris. The narrator makes himself into a kind of deity to the rats, who become engines of his most malevolent desires.

And so it is remarkable that such a bleak story should ultimately lead us to Michael Jackson’s “Ben”. The lyrics by Don Black included a middle eight which Jackson later said were his favourite in all his songs: “I used to say ‘I’ and ‘me’; now it’s ‘us’, now it’s ‘we’.” This sentiment seems so far from Gilbert’s original conception that it is curious to reflect on the connection. But it’s a reminder that an artist’s legacy does not necessarily end with the work itself, and there are myriad and unexpected ways in which it might endure.

Since Leaving Neverland, aired earlier this month, fans of Michael Jackson have been fiercely defending their hero from the latest round of paedophilia accusations. Yet that documentary merely bolstered what everybody but the most die-hard Jackson fans had known for years. Michael Jackson’s relationship with children was stomach-turning at best, and the rumours were compelling.

Given the court cases and the multi-million dollar pay-offs, it was one of the most open secrets – and scandals – of modern stardom. But, along with his ability to change colour in front of the eyes of the world, the public always made allowances for a simple reason. Michael Jackson gave us “Thriller”, “Bad” and “Billie Jean”.

He’s a clear-cut beneficiary of ‘the genius exemption’. This moral ‘get out of jail free card’ has existed throughout artistic history, it is only now that it appears that the exemption – awkward and compromising as it always was – might itself have become unacceptable.

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Accusations like those made against Michael Jackson would have ended the career of anybody less talented. When similar charges were levelled at Gary Glitter, the world dropped him and his work even before the law had taken its course. It turned out to be remarkably easy to live without “Doing alright with the boys” and “I’m the leader of the gang (I am)”. Whereas it is hard, if not impossible, to imagine any radio station, wedding or birthday disco where Michael Jackson’s back-catalogue would be put onto the same ‘do not play’ list as Gary Glitter’s.

The social forces working behind the genius get-out are fascinating, not least because they are so rarely aired. There has, though, at least since the idea of ‘the artist’ came about, been some tacit recognition that artists are allowed to behave slightly differently from everybody else, and that truly great artists can be forgiven anything short of (though occasionally including) murder.

One obvious contemporary recipient of the genius exemption is Roman Polanski, who has been allowed to continue his career on the run from American justice. There is some sympathy for his past history (Holocaust survivor, murdered wife), but mainly he continues because he is reckoned in the film industry to be a director of genius. In almost no other area of life would somebody be able to survive accusations of child-rape. An accountant would not. Nor a solicitor, politician or small-business owner. But if the person is thought to have crossed a certain threshold of artistic greatness, almost anything is allowed.

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Cultural history is littered with people who have got off the most serious charges imaginable solely because of their greatness. Richard Wagner survives the anti-Semitism because it is impossible to erase him from musical history and because if you have written Tristan and The Ring people will err towards leniency. Ezra Pound wavers, his poetic reputation going down again in recent years, but if he hadn’t often had the air of genius about him, he would not have survived his own fascist political affiliations. Likewise Celine (Louis-Ferdinand, not Dion) whose fascism can be overlooked, if not forgiven, because of Journey to the end of the Night.

If there is a reason why the exemption is so little discussed, it is because it suggests that even the most non-negotiable taboos are more contingent than we would like to admit.  But the whole thing is contingent on unquantifiable factors. For example, there is ongoing indecision about what behaviour ranks where in the lists of iniquity and who exactly counts as a genius. People drift in and out of immunity based on very unclear criteria.

For decades, Woody Allen was immune to almost any and all accusations against him because of Annie Hall. He was even forgiven for every film since. But at present his own genius opt-out appears to be up for reconsideration because of fresh claims about long-ago aspects of his private life. It is a familiar problem. At various times in recent decades, Oscar Wilde’s reputation has again teetered on a ledge for similar reasons. Today, when anybody mentions the rent boys and their age, defenders of Wilde understandably stress their counter-arguments. In truth, it has simply become recognised that we cannot do without the greatest comedies in the English language. So small evasions are permitted.

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But it is a messy moral business. Until John Bridcut settled the matter a decade ago, Benjamin Britten seemed always to be at risk of a Michael Jackson-like fall. In fact, his own relationships with children turn out never to have crossed over any physical line. But there was definitely a sense of near-terror around the subject for many years. Britten could not be written out of musical history. Like Wagner, we could not do without his music. And like Wagner the accusation against him was not completely divorced from the inspiration behind some of his music, but was actually embedded within great chunks of it.

If Britten had been proved to have abused a child both The Turn of the Screw and Death in Venice would have become unperformable. The innocent verdict means we do not have to live with the cognitive dissonance which would come from not doing without his work and not condoning the worst taboos.

Eric Gill turned out to be more easily disposable when his vices (paedophilia, incest, bestiality) came to light. But although his work is still in the Tate and other places, there was definitely a sense that we could ditch Gill if we had to. But these things work in mysterious ways. In popular culture, Michael Jackson inhabits the position of a great artist rather than a disposable one. And that is why the announcement by BBC Radio 2, among others, that they will no longer be playing his music is such a watershed moment.

I suspect that the ban will not last. It will stay for a time before certain early tracks creep back. When a Michael Jackson track comes on at a party, it may for a while be the subject of dark jokes and a bit of comment. But that will recede and people will go on dancing, parking the behaviour of the artist at the back of their mind.

Just one more example of the dissonance which people of talent have always provoked, and the moral exemptions we uncomfortably permit them in gratitude.