Life lessons from Michael

Michael, the film directed by Antoine Fuqua, won’t go down in the annals of history as a great biopic, or even a good one. It is more like a two-hour music video—like if Rocky IV (for which I have deep and abiding affection) were a biopic. You don’t go see Michael to “learn about Michael Jackson” (as per some of the critiques) or to explore the odd mysteriousness of his life or the fact that he may have been both abused and later an abuser himself. The movie doesn’t address the abuse allegations at all.

But for an inch-deep highlight-reel biopic, in which most of the characters are pretty one dimensional, Michael carries a surprising array of life lessons. Here they are, in no particular order:

Social media makes people less mysterious.

At one point during the film, as Jackson’s fame was beginning to ascend, he told an aide, “I just want to be mysterious.” It occurred to me that today, in the social media age, nobody is mysterious. Basically, everyone is pretty boring. Prior to social media, if you wanted to see Sylvester Stallone, you had to go to the movie theater or rent a VHS tape. If you wanted to see Michael Jordan, you hoped that the Bulls were in the Sunday NBC game.

Today you can see your favorite celebrity every day via Instagram/TikTok/YouTube and metabolize just how banal and deeply uninteresting their lives and ideas actually are. By the way, this follows for Christian authors and pastoral celebrity types as well. Less is more, fellas.

A celebrity’s emotional and intellectual development seems to stop at the exact point that a person becomes famous.

I used to write about sports for a living and have written about (or ghostwritten for) some pretty famous athletes, so I’ve been developing this theory for a long time, and Michael Jackson was “Exhibit A” of it. He became unusually famous as a child, and for the remainder of his days (at least per the film) he seemed to think and reason like a child. He missed the usual developmental milestones of school and proms and being dumped and not making the basketball team and all the other stuff that eventually makes us functional as adults.

I’ve seen this with famous athletes as well—hanging around with men in their 50s who still act like they’re five-star recruits. It’s actually pretty sad, because at the exact point that a person becomes famous, the rest of life is lived in the service of delivering that feeling over and over again, and as often as possible. Fame is a drug for which there is no rehab, save for the refining fire of God’s chastening.

Parents are almost always tempted to ruin things for their gifted kids.

The structural spine of the “story” in Michael, if there was one, was how psychotically driven Jackson’s father was to make sure his kids were famous and made him a lot of money. I don’t know if this is a fair portrayal because I didn’t know Joe Jackson. But I saw in him some of the same sinful impulses I disliked in myself when my kids were young athletes. Namely, the impulse to push and drive them to maximize their potential, which I (sadly) placed on a higher organ than their happiness or wellbeing. Jackson’s father, as portrayed in the film, was a Christless version of what it looks like to parent an unusually gifted child.

This can happen in sports, performing arts, debate, academics, or pretty much any other sphere of life in which parents glean their own feelings of success from the performance of their kids. Again, because I’ve lived this, there is no worse hang in the world than the father of an NFL quarterback.

The fact of the matter is, most of us are delusional about our kids’ actual gifts (they’re usually pretty average), and while Michael Jackson was preternaturally gifted, his father completely sucked the joy out of it for him and ruined most of his experiences. This is cautionary for us.

Michael Jackson was a non-sexual object of worship, and worshiping a man is always foolish.

This is a weird one because the movie was chock-full of scenes of people screaming and passing out as a result of being in the presence of Michael Jackson. These scenes were fun. Because of the social media thing above, we’re all gradations more cynical now, and I don’t think we’ll ever see that kind of mass swoon again. But people seemed to be swooning in appreciation of Jackson’s sheer talent and charisma, which is unique because he was asexual and weird. I remember zero girls in my high school thinking Michael Jackson was “hot” by any sort of conventional metric. But almost everybody thought he was interesting.

Our hearts are inclined to worship, believer or not. I’m reminded of covering Tim Tebow’s Senior Bowl in Mobile, Ala., and seeing homeschool moms, grandfathers, children, and lots of otherwise reasonable adult people losing their collective minds over a muscled-up adolescent while wearing Florida Gators jerseys. It was genuinely weird. And if you want a non-quick primer on the folly of worshipping any created thing (man or image or idea) other than the Creator, just read the Old Testament. It doesn’t go well for us when we do this.

Seeking the worship and praise of man is also always foolish.

We’ve got plenty of examples of evangelical “personalities” whetting their beaks on the praise of man, and then having it end poorly. Sometimes “poorly” is a sad scandal, and sometimes “poorly” is trading theological convictions in exchange for the applause of the culture. In fact, with the exception of about one person in every generation, this (ending poorly) is the expected outcome.

“I want to be the biggest star in the world,” Jackson told his lawyer, in the film. It was a childish and almost jarringly honest thing to hear a person say, and there was nobody in Jackson’s orbit willing to tell him that this was a bad idea. Because everybody in his orbit was benefiting from Michael’s fame.

The other day I picked up a copy of Charles Spurgeon’s Morning and Evening devotional off a free book table at my university (shoutout to librarian Mike Garrett who always sprinkles some gold in there for me). Spurgeon, by any metric, pastored his generation’s version of a megachurch. He ran an orphanage. He founded a college. He wrote and published a ton. He was, by his generation’s metric, famous. But to the degree that you can know a man via his writing, he appeared to walk closely with the Lord, with a heart that was deeply attuned to his own sin nature but also to the exceeding kindness of Christ. For some reason, God selected him for fame and gave him the character to handle it. And I’m thankful that He did. Spurgeon was not only famous—he was faithful.