𝙼𝚒𝚌𝚑𝚎𝚊𝚕, 𝚃𝚑𝚎 𝚂𝚒𝚕𝚎𝚗𝚝 𝙼𝚞𝚜𝚒𝚌 𝚘𝚏 𝙿𝚎𝚛𝚏𝚘𝚛𝚖𝚊𝚗𝚌𝚎

𝙼𝚒𝚌𝚑𝚎𝚊𝚕 𝟸𝟶𝟸𝟼

Directed 𝚋𝚢 Antoine Fuqua

 Watching Michael at the Scotiabank Theatre IMAX in Toronto felt less like experiencing a conventional biopic and more like participating in a collective ritual of remembrance. From the moment the music begins, the theatre ceases to function merely as a cinematic space. Bodies react, murmurs emerge, and memory enters before narrative itself. Perhaps for this reason, the film’s central question is not “Who was Michael Jackson?” but rather: How does the world still wish to remember him?

On the surface, the film follows the familiar structure of the Hollywood biopic: a difficult childhood, the rise to stardom, the burden of fame, loneliness, and ascension into myth. Yet as the film unfolds, it becomes increasingly clear that Michael has little interest in uncovering the complicated human being behind the global image. What the film reconstructs with obsessive precision is not the inner life of Michael Jackson, but his visual memory — the body, the voice, the rhythm, the light, and the moments that have remained embedded within collective cultural consciousness for decades.

In this sense, the film functions less as a reconstruction than as a resurrection.

Many critics have pointed toward this very tension. The New Yorker described the film as “sanitized,” more invested in preserving a controlled, consumable image than in confronting the contradictions in Michael’s life. The Guardian similarly situated the film among a growing wave of Hollywood biopics that substitute nostalgia for psychological complexity.

Yet perhaps this restraint is not merely a weakness of the film, but part of the nature of the project itself. Michael Jackson long ago ceased to exist solely as a person. He became a global memory — a mediated body reproduced endlessly through music, MTV, live performance, and popular culture — making access to any singular “truth” about him nearly impossible.

From the perspective of Memory Studies, Michael appears less interested in reconstructing character than in activating collective memory. Maurice Halbwachs described memory not as an isolated individual phenomenon, but as something formed through shared social experience.

The audience enters the theatre already carrying Michael within them — in the body, in music, in childhood recollection, and in the cultural memory of multiple generations.

Within the IMAX setting, this phenomenon becomes even more visible. At many moments, the film resembles a Broadway performance more than a cinema, repeatedly reminding me of MJ The Musical in New York. In both works, what matters is not psychological excavation, but the recreation of performative energy.

The performance sequences feel far more alive than the dramatic passages. Whenever music begins, the film breathes; whenever it attempts to move inward toward psychological intimacy, a certain hesitation emerges.

From the perspective of Performance Studies, this tension is especially compelling. Scholars such as Richard Schechner and Philip Auslander have long written about the collapsing boundaries between performance, concert, ritual, and cinema. Michael exists precisely within this unstable borderland: neither fully film nor concert nor musical theatre, but an uneasy fusion of all three. IMAX intensifies this experience. The scale of the image and the immersive sound transform the spectator from passive observer into bodily participant.

Yet perhaps the film’s most important layer lies not in performance itself, but within the family structure that produced this performing body. The father is repeatedly portrayed as a controlling, success-obsessed patriarch who measures his child's worth by discipline, achievement, and economic value. Although the film avoids fully entering the darkness of this relationship, the paternal figure can still be read through psychoanalysis and family studies.

Research surrounding child performers and performance-oriented families has frequently emphasized the blurred boundary between parental support and emotional exploitation. Within such structures, the child becomes less an autonomous individual than a project through which familial dreams of success are realized. The film repeatedly conveys the sense that Michael’s body and talent entered systems of fame and capital from the earliest stages of childhood.

From a psychoanalytic perspective, the father-son relationship evokes a form of conditional love — affection granted only through perfection, performance, and achievement. Perhaps this is why the image of the “lost child” recurs throughout the film. Not necessarily as factual truth about Michael Jackson’s real life, but as a recurring cinematic construction: the more mythic the figure becomes, the further he drifts from the possibility of ordinary childhood.

Alongside this severe paternal presence stands the mother, portrayed as emotionally warm, gentle, and protective — a temporary refuge for Michael. Yet this tenderness also reveals an inability to alter the structures of power. In many patriarchal systems, silence itself becomes part of the reproduction of authority, even when emotional sympathy remains.

At the same time, the film subtly reveals another refuge for Michael: cinema, television, and memory itself. Among the film’s most moving moments are not the grand stage performances, but the intimate scenes in which Michael sits beside his mother watching television, eating popcorn and ice cream, laughing sincerely while watching Charlie Chaplin.

Here, television is not merely entertainment. It becomes part of an emotional sanctuary. Cinema momentarily frees him from the pressure of performance and reconnects him with the child self hidden beneath spectacle.

Michael Jackson’s attachment to Chaplin becomes deeply meaningful in this context. Both artists, on the surface, generated joy, movement, and excitement for millions. Yet beneath their public images existed profound loneliness, contradiction, and emotional fracture. Michael’s laughter while watching Chaplin feels less like amusement than unconscious recognition — as though one wounded performer recognizes another.

At this point, the film inadvertently approaches one of art’s most important functions: not merely entertainment, but memory and psychic refuge.

This is perhaps why the connection between music and cinema becomes so central throughout the film. Silent cinema is not truly silent; it is another form of music. In silent film, the body replaces language. Gesture, rhythm, pauses, falls, glances — all become forms of composition. Emotion is transformed into movement before it ever becomes speech.

Michael Jackson, too, was this kind of artist. His body spoke before words did. Many emotions that could not be articulated directly emerged instead through dance, rhythm, and performance. It is as though the body animates what the psyche itself cannot verbalize.

From the perspective of psychoanalytic aesthetics, this becomes profoundly significant. Freud, and later theorists such as Winnicott and Julia Kristeva, repeatedly suggested that art creates a space between reality and the unconscious — a space in which individuals can encounter and rework emotional wounds without confrontation. Perhaps this is why cinema and music allow audiences to experience feelings that daily life cannot easily articulate.

In this sense, cinema and music are not merely media; they are living archives of the psyche.

Perhaps art becomes therapeutic precisely here: not because it offers answers, but because it permits individuals to enter hidden, repressed, or ignored layers of themselves without fear.

And perhaps this is where Michael reveals its deepest contradiction.

The film simultaneously seeks to preserve the myth while inadvertently exposing the structures that created it — structures of discipline, spectacle, collective desire, and an entertainment industry that transforms the human body into consumable image.

Yet amid all these systems, there remains a child laughing wholeheartedly in the safe darkness of silent cinema.

Perhaps, in the end, Michael does not reveal the truth about Michael Jackson. But with obsessive precision, it sets in motion once again the ghost, the memory, and the lost child that continue to haunt the cultural imagination.

And perhaps this remains the greatest power of cinema and music: not the restoration of the past, but the preservation of those fragile regions of the human psyche that the outside world has spent years trying to silence.