Michael

 “My childhood was completely taken away from me. There was no Christmas, no birthdays… there was nothing normal.” (M. Jackson) 

Presented at the Festival Internazionale del Cinema di Berlino, Michael initially presents itself as a conventional biopic. In reality, it is something more ambiguous: a work that stages the construction of a mythic body while avoiding—or suspending—the moment in which that body fractures. The film does not lie; rather, it chooses where to stop. 

The screenplay follows an ascending, almost programmatic trajectory: childhood, discipline, exposure, consecration. Michael Jackson’s rise thus becomes a sequence of appearances: talent is never questioned, the world offers no resistance, conflict is always already neutralized. There is no real collapse, no fracture capable of transforming the narrative into inquiry. 

Music—rather than accompanying—replaces storytelling. Each performance operates as a narrative shortcut, an emotional montage that prevents the viewer from lingering in discomfort. It is a strategy seen before, yet here pushed further: conflict is not merely avoided, it is dissolved. 

At the center, as an unresolved matrix, stands the figure of the father, Joe Jackson. He is not simply an authoritarian parent, but economic and symbolic apparatus—much like in Partisan by Ariel Kleiman—a closed system that produces subjects through mechanisms of control and discipline. A form of violence that is at once industrial and intimate, where childhood is both denied and simulated, and where fatherhood, rather than educating, tends to program the life of its offspring. 

The film constructs him as a body oriented toward profit, incapable of recognizing in his children an autonomous subjectivity. Violence—both physical and symbolic—is never gratuitous: it is functional, productive, almost serial. 

Michael thus emerges as the product of a discipline rather than an individual. His talent is cultivated, but at the cost of subtraction: childhood itself. 

Alongside this figure, the mother, Katherine Jackson, appears as an affective yet powerless presence. Her gaze protects without truly intervening, as if the family system were already too rigidly structured to be altered. 

One of the film’s most subtle—and unsettling—elements is its depiction of somatic transformation. Michael’s face, his skin tone, the very configuration of his body are never explicitly addressed. And yet, they unfold before the viewer as a continuous transformation, almost imperceptible yet radical. 

There is no declaration, only a gradual dematerialization of identity. The body becomes a surface to be rewritten, a site where conflict is not processed but displaced. In this sense, the film suggests without stating: physical mutation is the visible trace of an unresolved internal fracture. 

From this fracture emerges a need for regression. The film hints—without ever fully exploring—the genesis of that parallel world that would later become Neverland Ranch. Animals, toys, fairytale-like settings: not mere eccentricity, but an attempt to reconstruct a childhood never lived. 

Michael does not return to being a child; he constructs a dispositif through which to retroactively inhabit what was taken from him. 

Here, a clear psychoanalytic line emerges: the unresolved Oedipal conflict, the persistence within a pre-adult dimension, the difficulty of symbolically separating from the paternal figure. And yet, the film stops precisely before this tension can become manifest crisis. 

With the genesis of the album Bad, a gesture of rupture finally appears: emancipation from the family unit, the assertion of an autonomous voice, an attempt to escape paternal control. It is an act of separation, but also a belated one—not a full liberation, but rather an incomplete declaration. 

The film treats it as a point of arrival; in reality, it is only the beginning of a crisis that will not be shown. 

The most radical choice of Michael is to stop beforehand: before the accusations, before the media collapse, before the myth is called into question. This is not naïve omission; it is deliberate construction. 

The film does not seek to interrogate Michael Jackson, but to preserve his legend. In this sense, it operates as a precise cultural gesture: removing the subject from complexity in order to return him to the surface. 

And yet, everything suggests a continuation. What is only hinted at here—regression, bodily transformation, psychic fracture—is destined to emerge elsewhere, in a hypothetical second chapter. 

Michael is not an incomplete film; it is a first act disguised as a finished work. 

Fuqua’s film does not fail; it withholds. It avoids risk, suspends judgment, protects the myth. But in doing so, it allows us to glimpse, in negative, everything it does not dare to show: a body that changes in order to escape itself, a childhood reconstructed as refuge, a father who never ceases to act—even in absence. 

And a spectator who leaves the theater having seen everything—except what truly matters. Still, there remains a cautious anticipation for a second act. 

“If you didn’t have a childhood, you try to create one as an adult.” (M. Jackson)