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It was an ugly rumor that has been circulating for years, but fans of the great artist have denied until a proof appears to be impossible to refute. I'm talking about the research that was published last week showing that when Charles Dickens had abandoned his wife for a quarter of a century, the mother of his 10 children, to continue his affair with an 18-year-old actress, he had tried to have his wife locked up in a mental asylum. It was not an unusual cruelty for the men of Victorian England to engage with perfectly healthy partners. Dickens only failed in his efforts because the compassionate friend doctor whom he approached dismissed him. As disgusting as history may be, it is hard to believe that it will do more than damage Dickens' reputation. It took decades for scholars to reveal the truth about her long-standing alliance with the actress, but once they did, few communities chose to stop their annual productions of A Christmas Carol. Dickens remains too much at the center of literary culture, while the people that he hurt (he was also a shitty father) are back in the 19thLondon fog Nothing that almost makes Catherine Dickens less horrible.
For all the emotions and problems that will arise when HBO will broadcast the heartbreaking Leave Neverland Michael Jackson's documentary on allegations of sexual abuse of children this weekend, it is a stubborn and disturbing fact that Jackson has been to modern folk music and dancing what Dickens was to the Victorian novel – a parallel that you will not find strange if you do not care about modern pop music. Thriller continues to be today's best-selling album of all time in the world and estimates estimated between 66 and 100 million copies sold do not account for the unimaginable number of versions recorded on cassettes and in popular collections from Boston, Botswana. Nearly ten years after his death, there are weeks when half of the acts on the Billboard chart look like imitations of GM. In terms of global reach, recognition and influence, only the Beatles and Elvis can compare. And John Lennon physically assaulted his first wife and almost beat a man to death for hinting that he was gay. Elvis started dating his future wife when Priscilla Ann Wagner was 14 and he was 24 years old.
I will not raise these cases to excuse Jackson for the horrible allegations against him in the documentary, not to mention the charges he evaded in court while he was alive. The stories of the two alleged victims of sexual abuse in the film are extremely detailed and convincing. They are particularly troubling if, like me and many others, you have practiced Olympian mental gymnastics to maintain some confidence in Jackson's relative innocence.
There are places where the seemingly irresistible force of moral indignation clashes with unchanging objects of culture. l & # 39; history.
Yet I put Jackson alongside Lennon and Dickens to point out that some cases test the limits of fair dismissal. This may seem like a quick and satisfying justice when people on social networks react to reports of fanaticism or abuse, for example, declare the accused "canceled" –persona non grata, never speak again, except to inflict new censorship. But to divert a sentence from the 2008 financial crisis, are some numbers too big to be canceled? Too correlative to write out of the record, especially when they are dead, and beyond any effective sanction? When I mentioned to a friend that I was writing this text, she said, "I'm going to face Michael Jackson when I'm done dealing with Charlie Chaplin." Which, in his implicit tone, may never be .
Alternatively, you can call Miles Davis. Or James Brown. (Bill Cosby, although alive, could also follow your thoughts, but while his career was decisive, I suspect his comedy relied too much on his own personal sympathy to be able to bounce back from all the repulsive revelations.) Without talk about the revolutionary white feminist yet racist writers, such as the Charlotte Perkins Gilman eugenics or Virginia Woolf, whose track record is tainted by primitive anti-Semitism.
It's one thing to put the music of someone like R. Kelly on a blacklist. He is alive and up to now unpunished for his multitude of alleged crimes. It is necessary to dispel the complicity to which the author of the music and the media have devoted themselves for so long. But in addition, although his music occupies a prominent place in the R & B of the 1990s and 2000s, it is ultimately not essential. I do not mean to say that Jackson or the Beatles get a magic "awesome" pass: this title, full of archetypes of Great Man, obscures more than it shines. At best, it should be used to describe the momentary visits of the sublime that occur in a particular creative act, and not as a label permanently affixed to a person, which moves them to an untouchable sphere. There are nonetheless points where the seemingly irresistible force of moral outrage runs up against immutable objects of cultural history.
There are many Jackson songs that will feel radioactive from now on. All those with children's choirs. Certainly "The lost children" and "Do you know where your children are", which now resembles Jackson who accuses society as a whole of the sins that he committed, as if he could not make them forget about him . As my colleague Jack Hamilton points out, Jackson's fixation on children was ubiquitous in his work. But not so much about the things that really mattered. And all the grandiose paranoia and defensiveness that punctuated his songs in the 1990s could now seem atrocious, if the persecution Jackson complained about was just justice. But a lot of that seemed painful at first. Although fans can make compelling arguments for some of these latest songs and albums, such as Dangerous and L & # 39; history, it's not the Michael Jackson who changed the musical world, the Jackson of "I Want You Back", "Rock With You" and "Billie Jean". Likewise, I would be happy to never hear the Beatles' "Run for Your Life" again. , In which Lennon threatens to kill a woman if she cheats on him. Similarly, knowing what we do with Chuck Berry's sexual transgressions, we can get by without "Sweet Little Sixteen" and, for our sake, "My Ding-a-Ling". But we claim to throw away the work of this fundamental performer and songwriter. All that happens in the dump would be an empty rhetorical showcase – if American music matters to you, it's not a real option.
Obviously, individuals can and must make their own calls. When Hannah Gadsby said in it Nanette I thought to Netflix that she had finished with Picasso and his misogyny forever. I had the impression that culture in general had decided a little earlier about Picasso (although I admit that I keep the Guernica). I also sympathize when anyone exasperated by the parade of offensive male leading men decides to focus his attention on the large number of bright, non-masculine, non-heterosexual artists who have been denied the star. It's a necessary fix no matter what. (The best essay that addresses these questions intimately is Claire Dederer, 2017 "What do we do with the art of monstrous men?" She developed it in what should be a crucial book.)
There are immediate practical issues. The music often invades our ears in public, without being invited. In the near future, Jackson's songs should not be broadcast on the radio or in any other way that could lead to victims of abuse meeting his music against their will. Their potential trauma outweighs any other consideration, at least for a moment. Hell, I do not want to hear this music anytime soon, even if I bet I'll do it.
But eventually, Michael Jackson will not go away. This means that we will continue to think about how to think about him and our own moral instincts. How can we simultaneously believe that Jackson committed reprehensible acts for infants and that he also brought widespread joy and changed the sound of world pop? No fact changes the other. All the desire that I could have once had to downplay the alleged crimes was ripped from me. But as this distorts the reality of referring to people's geniuses – as if legitimizing everything in them – we should be reluctant to call people monsters. It is giving in to the opposite fantasy that a person who has committed heinous acts is purely a vehicle of those acts, consumed by malevolence, corrupted and inauthentic in all other respects. This dehumanization protects us from the fear that we have something in common with them or that we do not want to understand them more.
The cultural constraint of making artists and celebrities gods and heroes, and desperately wanting to maintain this illusion, is not cured when one or more of them are finally ejected from consciousness. pantheon.
The London-based criminologist and psychologist, Julia Shaw, published a book this month entitled Evil: the science behind the dark side of humanity, in which she advocates that we collectively stop using the word wrong himself. She stops the conversation, she suggests, exactly where she should start. It does not advocate moral relativism. On the contrary, she argues that black impulses are more universal than we admit, while extreme manifestations are more rare than our brains with media fever imagined. Most murders, for example, are the one-off result of unrelenting conflict, not the manual work of dedicated murderers, and most murderers immediately regret it. In her chapter devoted specifically to pedophilia, she explains how the taboos surrounding disorder – a survey found that impulses in this direction could be found in 6% of men and 2% of women – make it almost impossible. who need it for treatment, lest they be arrested for mere admission. This paradox makes it more likely that real children will be abused. And yet, most people who feel that these attractions never act because they remain human beings who realize that it is wrong. No monsters.
I can not speculate on how Michael Jackson could have wrestled with the man in the mirror, although one might wonder if any of his leaders, friends or family n & # 39; Never took the risk of speaking honestly about his alleged problems instead of automatically reinforcing his denials. Frankly, I'm nervous, even about Shaw's research, lest you make some wrong conclusions about me – another of the syndromes around the "evil" she identifies, which anyone would dare to address such toxic topics risk of being stigmatized. But I think there are corresponding self-destructive patterns in the way we confront these personalities in our culture. It is essential that someone like R. Kelly be charged again and be prosecuted, hopefully, for the years of abuse he allegedly perpetrated against young women. But that does not solve what allowed Kelly to continue so long. The cultural compulsion to embody artists and celebrities as gods and heroes, then to desperately defend these illusions, is not cured when one or more of them are finally ejected from the pantheon. I can not watch Leave Neverland and do not think about that.
Listening to the stories of the families, I noticed that as soon as they entered Jackson's orbit, everything became a little unreal and unreal. It is easy to condemn parents who have failed to protect their children from the star and have even facilitated relationships. But that seems normal to me. Have you had a time when you suddenly fell into the cold crowd, or even a person who seduced you? Such magnetism can blind and disturb. When you look back, you may feel as guilty of what you have done under this influence, whether it is to neglect other friends and family or to take part to something stupid and self-destructive, because pretty people did it.
Celebrity, this atrocity to expect, is what the machinery of this culture is meant to produce, more than any work of art or entertainment.
These limits are much more unstable for children. What's troubling me in the hearing Leave NeverlandThe two presumed survivors, now adult men, is that, despite all that he has said, they each tell a love story. That's why it took them so long to admit the truth – not after Jackson's death – and why they even falsely testified for his defense. As for the 2005 lawsuit, the wife of Wade Robson said in the movie: "Love is so powerful."
The stories of these families reflect the entire culture with the stars and their relationships with us: stories of idolization and exploitation, projection and possession, opportunism and rationalization. And debris left behind. When you love a star, you inherently love a person who does not exist, a product of creating images and your own manipulated aspirations. In the case of Jackson, that's double. He seemed so dissociated from the way he had introduced himself during the latter part of his life that it was difficult to guess how much he lived the reality. Was he a person who did not even exist for himself?
If there is something Leave Neverland makes me want to get rid entirely, it's the child's celebrity, who mutilated the man's psyche and became an attraction to the children and families who attached to him. I could wish the same thing about celebrity in general, but that would be another source of rhetoric. Celebrity, this atrocity to wait, is what the machinery of this culture is meant to produce, more than any particular work of art or entertainment. This is beyond the control of any of us, interpreter or fan, sinner or saint. But if there are, I guess the saints have better things to do.
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