Monsters: A Fan's Dilemma

by Claire Dederer

In any case, we’re left, like it or not, with the stained work. The deed colors all it touches. (And at the same time, “I Want You Back” sounds as good as it ever did.) None of us want to know the things about Michael Jackson that we know. We wanted to keep loving him. When the Leaving Neverland documentary came out, no one really even wanted to watch it. It was a dreary task we thought we ought to do. We felt we should witness the survivors and their stories. (But why am I resorting to “we”? Because it felt like a shared responsibility?) Too weary of monstrousness, of stains, for months I didn’t watch that documentary. But nevertheless I knew what it contained—the information came to me the way information does now, through the internet, which means less that I somehow consumed it than that it happened to me or that it entered my skin on a pore level or that I breathed it in like a vapor. The confirmation of Jackson’s predation was something that I received whether I liked it or not. Now I knew. Did I want to know?