There are diminishingly few people around who can remember a time before Michael Jackson was a global icon. Having burst onto the scene as a warbling 11-year-old in the late Sixties, he became the world’s biggest recording artist in the Eighties, and then the planet’s foremost gossip obsession at the turn of the millennium. Now, a new three-part BBC documentary – Michael Jackson: An American Tragedy – exposes how alive our obsession with “Wacko Jacko” still is, even as his legacy plumbs grim new depths.
Over the course of three episodes (titled “Fame”, “The Reckoning”, and “Resurrection”), the series charts the tumultuous life of the so-called “King of Pop”. This is, in some ways, a classic “rise and fall” story, moving from his early years as the breakout star of the Jackson 5 (“they were our Beatles,” opines publicist Steve Manning) to his eventual disgrace and early death. “I was always trying to be perfect,” Jackson recalls of his childhood – but in adulthood these obsessive tendencies metastasise. The precocious, soft-spoken Black kid who entranced audiences in the 1970s becomes a megalomaniac, refashioned by plastic surgery, who cavorts with chimps and snakes on a Texas ranch, and faces increasingly lurid accusations about his private conduct. “When you first think of Michael Jackson, you don’t think what a great artist,” a contemporary observer notes in archive footage. “You think: what a weird guy.”
Jackson’s story has been told over and over. Naturally, it evolved during the decades of his fame, but since Martin Bashir’s 2002 ITV documentary Living with Michael Jackson, the tale has been trapped in the frenzy of tabloid and legal speculation about his alleged paedophilia. In the 1990s, his reputation was tarnished by a first wave of accusations, which he survived through a combination of out-of-court settlements, the wilful blindness of his fanbase, and the venal cynicism of the music industry. Even after the court cases and the Bashir documentary, a drug-addled Jackson was still able to sell records and concert tickets. The establishment – everyone from Donald Trump (“I don’t believe it, I’m gonna stick up for him,” we hear the future president say) to Dermot O’Leary – rallied around him. When he died, in 2009, he was on the cusp of another major 50-date tour.
This new series – timed to coincide with the release of a lavish new biopic, Michael – has been produced by the team behind last month’s The Tony Blair Story. Both projects revisit controversial but well-trodden tales, and both struggle to bring something new to the table. Every beat of the Jackson story (going solo with Quincy Jones, the skin bleaching allegations, dangling his baby over the Berlin hotel balcony, and so on) feels intensely familiar. His ability to ride the wave of suspicion, turning into the world’s most prominent eccentric, remains a vivid narrative. But since the Emmy-winning 2019 documentary Leaving Neverland, which foregrounded the victims of Jackson’s alleged abuse, the onus has been on retellings of this story to find a different perspective.
Director Sophie Fuller has good access, both to archive material and interviewees, from Michael’s sister LaToya Jackson to his former manager Dieter Wiesner. But the documentary is very linear: even as an ominous score hints at the title’s “tragedy”, the three episodes cling to the chronological undulation of Jackson’s stratospheric ascent and subsequent nosedive. Fuller does not attempt to psychoanalyse Jackson or understand his personality; instead, An American Tragedy pulls back the camera and focuses on his public image. That might have offered an opportunity to reflect on Jackson as a manifestation of the cyclical nature of abuse (he, and other family members, have made accusations against their father) or the collusion of powerful individuals and organisations in maintaining the MJ brand at the expense of his victims. But, instead, the series spends three hours romping through a complex story, forgetting, in the process, to say something new.
“I’m not like other guys,” Jackson purrs slyly, during rehearsals for “Thriller”. “I’m different. I’m a monster.” It is hard to look back now on the Michael Jackson phenomenon and not feel winded by the extent to which the horrors of child sexual abuse were hiding in all-singing, all-dancing sight. But that’s the bare minimum that a biography should achieve, and Michael Jackson: An American Tragedy adds little else.
‘Michael Jackson: An American Tragedy’ is available to stream now on BBC iPlayer
