A Metropolitan Review Film Chronicle

Two Young Writers On 'Michael' and 'Backrooms'

Michael Jackson in New York City, 1984, Photograph, Getty Images

Welcome to IP Hell

After an eight-year hiatus from feature films, actor and comedian Mike Myers shocked audiences around the world with a surprise return in 2018’s Bohemian Rhapsody, playing a fictional record executive who rejects the titular song for its length and perceived radicalism. Myers’ appearance remains one of the more bizarre facts of his late career, given that his character is wholly made-up and the struggles presented on-screen for Queen are entirely fake, which does raise the question of whether he simply wandered onto set and started messing around. In Michael, the latest film from Training Day director Antoine Fuqua, Myers once again plays a record executive, this time the very real Walter Yetnikoff, who ran CBS Records from 1975 to 1990. That Myers is the best thing in both films tells you everything you need to know.

Michael, released in April from Lionsgate, follows Michael Jackson from his childhood success in the Jackson 5 through his attempt to break free from his abusive father and launch a solo career. It is not, technically speaking, the same movie as Bohemian Rhapsody — though it may as well be. Both are cynical exercises in IP-maximization dressed up as celebration, both are edited by enemy-to-all John Ottman with what can only be described as hostility toward the audience, and both exist not to tell the truth about their subjects but to present the story approved by their living estates, business managers, and friends. In Bohemian Rhapsody’s case, that meant turning Freddie Mercury’s AIDS diagnosis into a tidy third-act surprise and presenting his sexuality as a poison on the otherwise strait-laced members of Queen. Although all the band members did drugs and partied, Bohemian Rhapsody launders the violently homophobic suggestion that Mercury, genius though he may have been, could not overcome the sin of a homosexual life. In Michael’s case, an equally dark retelling of history is presented. But first, let’s review the film. Spoiler alert: it’s bad, bad, really, really bad.

Michael is a tortuous effort that moves too fast through almost 20 years of story, edited with such glib disregard for the audience’s ability to orient themselves to the carousel of images, songs, and transitions that at times Michael Jackson, a real human being, seems to exist in a kind of mythical vacuum where cause and effect do not apply. When Bohemian Rhapsody won Best Editing at the 91^st Academy Awards, a decision that was met with widespread bafflement in the film community, it seemed to signal a new Hollywood standard, namely that more cuts are always better because we cannot trust audiences to follow a movie, and the more coverage a director gets, the more control the studio can have. With Michael, Fuqua and Ottman take that lesson to its logical conclusion. I counted at least 65 cuts in one scene: Michael’s famous performance of Billie Jean at the Motown 25 concert, which is a clip that is still available online and that anyone reading this review can watch right now, unobstructed, for free. One has to wonder why Fuqua would go to the considerable effort of recreating an already world-famous performance, and then edit it with such malice that even the moonwalk is buried under bizarre audience reaction shots, inserted as if to remind us that Michael Jackson was, in case we had forgotten, famous.

The performances are, to be generous, a mixed bag. Colman Domingo plays Joe Jackson, Michael’s abusive father, and is certainly trying his best, though he ends up coming across as a cartoonish villain, all scowl and menace with none of the psychological texture that might make the character worth watching. The film’s genuine bright spot is Juliano Valdi, who plays the 10-year-old Jackson with a charming and at times genuinely moving innocence, and the early scenes built around him are the film’s best: a young star unable to make friends, relying on characters like Peter Pan and a pet rat as his only companions, performing in adult nightclubs while his father watches from the wings. The effect of stardom on a child that young is a story rich with tension and emotional weight, and Michael, which features all living Jacksons as executive producers (except Janet, who does not appear to exist in this universe), is not willing to tell it.

Jaafar Jackson, who plays Michael in adulthood, is, on a technical level, good. He has the movements, the voice, and the alienating aura down, though as the son of Jermaine Jackson, Michael’s literal brother, one has to wonder how much of that is craft and how much is simply genetics. Of all the roles one could land as a first film appearance, playing your own uncle is probably near the bottom of the list in terms of difficulty. Jaafar does look quite a lot like Michael, though that seems to have more to do with their blood relation than any formal craft. Born in 1996, he likely spent considerable time with his uncle growing up, and though it would be unfair to say that dancing like MJ is easy, it must be somewhat easier if you were raised around him. The voice, which is genuinely the most impressive element of the performance, is not Jaafar’s at all but rather high-quality master recordings of MJ himself, lip-synched with reasonable precision, which is a detail the film does not exactly advertise. Ultimately, Jaafar’s performance comes across as the image Jackson’s family would like you to have of Michael, an attempt at brand management all too familiar by this point.

None of this would matter much if Michael were simply a bad film, because bad films come and go and the world keeps turning. What makes Michael worth discussing, what makes it in fact genuinely enraging, is what it is doing underneath the schlock.

By following the exact formula perfected in Bohemian Rhapsody and since employed in what feels like every biopic greenlit in the last five years, Fuqua seems to be acknowledging, consciously or not, that Michael is not really a film at all but rather a piece of franchise infrastructure, the musician biopic as IP-maximization. There is no need to manufacture cultural relevance when your subject arrives with a built-in global audience of hundreds of millions. In a society that has lost any semblance of a monoculture (there is genuinely no one like Michael Jackson alive today for reasons that go well beyond talent), studios are rushing to adapt the stories of world-famous stars before the window closes and the nostalgia curdles. What does it say about America that our cultural icons are being reduced to paint-by-numbers comfort food for a weary public? With Michael, that question becomes genuinely disturbing, because this piece of comfort food has a specific job to do, and it does it with grim efficiency: it is a machine designed to rehabilitate Michael Jackson’s legacy and allow the Jackson family brand back in the mainstream.

According to reporting in the Hollywood trades, Michael originally intended to confront the allegations of child sex abuse directly, with the original script allegedly opening in 1993 with Jackson reacting to the police raid on his Neverland Ranch. After the film was completed, however, it became clear that both the Jackson estate and lawyers for his victims would not allow it, and the allegations were removed. What remained, apparently without anyone noticing the problem this created, were all the scenes of Jackson with children.

Jackson is constantly surrounded by children in this film. He goes to a toy store in one scene and, after buying a cartful of toys for himself (this is treated as normal, and cool even), spends time signing autographs for a line full of kids. In another notable scene he sits alone in a hospital room with a young child who appears to be suffering from cancer, for what feels like a very long time, at one point calling the boy “Doo Doo Head,” which is a nickname that appears throughout the HBO documentary Leaving Neverland in letters and voicemails Jackson sent to two of his accusers. This name is such a specific detail that it simply had to have been a remnant of a prior script that addressed these allegations head-on. The fact that it remained in the final film shows a level of callousness that boggles the mind.

The film’s explanation for all of this — its alibi, if I may — is Peter Pan. All throughout Michael, Jackson’s inability to grow up is the film’s central metaphor: the boy who never grew up, stunted by his father’s abuse, forever seeking the childhood Joe Jackson stole from him. It is, in theory, a coherent reading of his life, and in a different film, made by different people with different intentions, it might even be a moving one. In this film it is a cover story. The Peter Pan framing does not exist to illuminate Michael Jackson but to make his proximity to children feel poignant rather than predatory, to transform a pattern of behavior documented in extraordinary detail by his accusers into a symptom of trauma rather than evidence of anything else.

The film is full of dropped threads that gesture toward a more honest version of itself that will never exist. After the famous Pepsi incident, in which Jackson suffered severe burns while filming a commercial (that the film suggests his father pressured him into), a doctor tells him he will need Demerol for the pain, and Jaafar’s Jackson resists, visibly frightened, before the doctor insists and the scene moves on. We never return to this idea again, not once, the suggestion that his drug dependency began as a direct consequence of his father’s exploitation, dissolving quietly into the carousel of images like everything else the film raises and abandons. His drug use, his decline, and his death do not appear. The film simply ends during a performance of “Bad” and text fills the screen: “His Story Will Continue.”

After sitting through the two-hour straitjacket that is Michael, this feels more like a threat than a promise. The estate is not done making money off his image, and they would very much like your cooperation with this effort.

No matter what you think of Michael Jackson, or where you come down concerning his criminal allegations, Michael is a boring slog that mutes or neuters anything interesting about the artist into a pre-packed exercise in branding. Hopefully, the musical biopics stop here. We’ve got enough.

Max Bolen is a writer and critic who runs the Substack The World Outside Our Window. They are interested in film, politics, and culture.

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There’s Something Haunting the Backrooms

There’s something haunting the backrooms. Not the creatures that may be roaming its halls, not the repeating yellow tinge of the wallpaper, or the hum that permeates every inch of the place. What’s haunting the backrooms is the past itself, calcified and embodied in the very halls. Though the backrooms sit as a space unmoored from time and reality, the film takes place in the ’90s. The flicker of the camcorder and cable TV ads, the anonymous office spaces, and cropped shirts calling for the end of apartheid all mark it as a product of the era. Yet director Kane Parsons was born in 2005. I’m a year younger, and we do not know this time or place, though we recognize it. As Parsons explained to Vice: “I mostly remember that time through little glimpses of memories here and there and then family photos. . . . The flash is always on, the lighting is gross looking, there’s yellow walls, the white balance is all off.” Just as everything in the backrooms is a memory of real things that once existed, captured as images within its many rooms, Backrooms as a film captures the same memory of the ’90s. It is a distorted mirror, a damning image of both then and now in its fragments. At just 20, Parsons has captured a distinct and unique feeling of dread, one that deeply and clearly understands and resonates with the fear of our generation.

The backrooms live within Francis Fukuyama’s conception of the end of history, its own liminal space. At the uncomfortable threshold between the end of the Cold War and the beginning of the War on Terror that would define the early 2000s, the liminality of the backrooms asserts itself in the gap left by history. Though liberal democracy had triumphed, history nevertheless continued without any promise of renewed fortune. The Cold War’s end did not mean anything particularly different for American life as people knew it, and no better future lay around the corner for having won it. With any potential challenge to capitalism defeated, global capitalism sat in stasis, awaiting the next challenger to its order as globalization took its course. As a space of transition, the ’90s become the empty hallways of the office spaces that adorned American victory, the absence of a future expanding into a promise of a future beyond the Cold War that never came. As a liminal decade, it makes for the ideal setting for a film about the token image of the liminal space itself.

The fear and fascination generated by the liminal space are born of the tension between recognition and uncanny rejection. There’s something to be found in these spaces that is familiar, but not quite right, normally comforting or banal images reproduced in a way that alienates their sense of homeliness. The movie is full of reproduced images that aren’t quite authentic, be it the still-life people or the camcorder aesthetic. We’re looking at people who have been copied, but they’re not quite right in their distortion. We view camcorder found footage that has been shot on digital and filtered with distortion to produce an analog effect. A barely remembered Christmas sits deep within the maze, glowing with nostalgic memory of a past that’s found in photographs, but that Parsons and I can never live.

The film’s climax features Clark and Mary reenacting a scene that already happened.

Everything that exists within the backrooms carries the incomplete qualities of memory, logic jumbled but the image reproduced nonetheless. Parts are left behind to fit the reproduction, but the reproduction nevertheless continues. In one of the most striking shots of the film, we are transported through the floor, through degrading versions of the same house, mirroring generation loss in analog recording. As the same thing is copied over and over again, the image on the tape itself is destroyed. Without a future to advance toward, the past repeats on the same principles. Though the end of history was not actually the end of historical events themselves, it was the end for a distinct era of hope for the better future, to which nostalgia can only return. As things continue only in memory, they fade farther and farther away from anything until they are imitations of something that never existed. The backrooms are a horrific approximation of how nostalgia takes physical form in the world, playing at the edges of memory without a view forward.

The horror underlying the backrooms seems most aptly diagnosed by British writer and cultural critic Mark Fisher in his conception of hauntology. Building off the earlier work of Jacques Derrida, Fisher refers to hauntology as the inability to imagine new futures, the haunting of the present by the spirit of the past. “What haunts the digital cul-de-sacs of the twenty-first century is not so much the past as all the lost futures that the twentieth century taught us to anticipate,” he writes. The backrooms exist in the same anonymous and interchangeable space as the cul-de-sac, born from one of the digital cul-de-sacs Fisher describes. The backrooms are a non-place, one akin to the many interchangeable “airports, retail parks, and chain stores” that, lacking their own characteristics and sense of place, “resemble one another more than they resemble the particular spaces.” The backrooms, in pulling from disparate elements across space to contain within itself regardless of context, act as the ultimately globalized non-space. It is no wonder that the corporation lingering on the sidelines of the film is the sole resemblance of order to be found in this space; the miles and miles of office space and inoffensive lighting are to their comfort. As Fisher states, the “ominous proliferation” of these non-spaces is a general product imposed by the “erosion of spatiality” caused by globalization and the end of history. At the end of history, profit is the last frontier and only future. The backrooms represent the final form of this phenomenon, a space finally devoid of all character and origin, truly anonymous, containing within itself only what has been remembered in the far off days of the past. It is a void of culture, a cardboard cutout greeting whoever may view its homogenized scenery in many global languages. Ready to be sold.

Further linking the film together with Fisher’s hauntology is the appearance of music by the Caretaker, whose music was a frequent point of discussion for Fisher around hauntology. In the film, the Caretaker’s song “B1 - All that follows is true” ushers Mary through the final memory of her agoraphobic mother being wheeled away in a mental hospital. Even beyond the halls of the backrooms, this too is a lifeless non-space. The backrooms are horrific because, though a decayed memory, they are a recreation of that which already existed, made unreal and uncanny through repetition. Just as Parsons deploys the camcorder and the visual language of the ’90s to create the past, the Caretaker does the same in music with “the crackle,” creating, musically, a coherent texture for it. Both the film and the Caretaker take care to show the degradation of memory and the process of nostalgia at work in the brain, with media left as the sole archaeological record for a life that has been left behind.

Where the music of the Caretaker and Everywhere at the End of Time look back to the ’30s, Backrooms does the ’90s. The horror in the backrooms comes as the product of a nostalgia run rampant, an entire banal and lifeless alternate reality in which there is neither change nor confrontation with the possibility of it. Before Clark is consumed by his own image at the climax of the film, finally conceding to the backrooms, he reassures himself that there is no need to change. Unwilling to move forward, he is consumed, the profitable avatar of his now forever commodified self nursed back to health by the corporation Async as he himself dies alone in the backrooms at the film’s end. The backrooms will continue on regardless. As Fisher himself states, the acceptance of hauntology means “the acceptance of a situation in which culture would continue without really changing,” history a place trapped and littered with what has come before in eternal avoidance of any future that could have been. At the end of history, the only thinkable thing left to do is rewind the tape, to play for and populate the world with the same horrors of the past.

In a culture dominated by pastiche and reboot, Backrooms’ suspicion of nostalgia and its indulgence — in the same weeks that the likes of The Mandalorian and Grogu, Masters of the Universe, and Scary Movie take up space in theaters and box offices — is tremendously refreshing. They are still-life films. Culture is still stuck with the bloated franchise corpses of what came before, haunted by generations who embraced the sentiment that they didn’t have to change, and that the box office of their childhood and decades past should still necessarily be the box office of today. In this cyclical culture, the revolving reboots, remakes, and reimaginings of the same tired franchises are the yellowed wallpaper of a trapped culture looking for a way out. The same things take shape, over and over, nostalgia growing more and more distant from the reality of things, lingering in front of any potential future beyond it. At some point the skeletons will outpace the necromancy, and something new must be found. Nostalgia is by nature brittle in the long term. Though brittle in construction, I’m scared of being stuck with this corpse of things I never experienced, never buried, continually haunted by the same things my parents’ generation loved forever. For this reason, it’s heartening to see original films from young directors like Backrooms and Obsession do well. Wading through the mess of nostalgic junk that’s come before, we are truly in a great artistic age for cinema, and what a joy it is to actually be around to experience it.

Grant De Micco is a Boston-based writer born in Arizona and currently attending school for creative writing at Emerson College.