Michael Jackson didn't begin with a song, he began with a story.
The Way I Scene It: My spoiler heavy reflections on Michael 2026 starring Jaafar Jackson.
If you're anything like me and you've been scrolling online, you might've noticed that they're so many people not only obsessed with this movie but also revisiting Michael Jackson's discography or engaging with his music for the very first time.
It has been an absolute joy to see so many people coming together and the way that Michael Jackson’s music always talked about. I don't think I've had this much fun on any platform online in a very long time.
But with that fun has come some reflection. And I want to share my biggest takeaways from the movie that has not only recontextualized one of my favorite Michael Jackson songs, it's also made me feel so proud that I have found a sense of purpose as a fiction writer (and disney-adult!)
The Power Of Stories
One thing that this movie did especially well was the visual storytelling. As a writer there's a saying show don't tell and I feel like this biopic executed this on a level that was so subtle but yet so beautiful if you were paying attention.
A great example of this is when we first see young Michael on screen and he's sitting on the couch, peering out the window watching the kids play in the snow. It's never stated that it's Christmas but for anyone who's followed Michael Jackson's interviews he has spoken about how there was no Christmas and there were no birthdays in his house.
Do you remember the colors of the shirt young Michael is wearing in that scene?
It's red with green and white patterns. His pants are also a deep shade of green. And the two accent pillows on the couch where young Michael was sitting to look out the window? Yes, they are also red and green—colors largely associated with Christmas, even though it's never explicitly stated that it’s that time of year.
The beginning of the movie does a lot of heavy lifting like this not just in the visuals, but also in how the first set list of songs unfolds and foreshadows Michaels journey.
We begin in 1966 with The Jackson 5 rehearsing Big Boy (released later in 1968) and Michael leading with the lyrics:
Fairy tales, fairy tales
I don't enjoy…
'Cause I'm a big boy now…
This is an omen in the film. It is the first time Michael is asked to verbalize the surrender of his childhood on screen.
It’s also a lie for Michael—well sort of…
The part of the film, where Michael defies Joseph Jackson for the first time was a really hard one to watch. Especially because I had a very similar upbringing myself. The sound of his father’s belt coming off… the screams of little Michael Jackson in the movie… it all brought back some very unpleasant memories. But in the end, it brought back some cathartic ones as well.
Shortly after this scene takes place, Michael is seen running to the bathroom to cry, and then later that night he can be found on the bunkbed under the covers with a sheet over his head, reading a book.
There was an acute kind of kinship that I found in that scene mostly because that’s exactly how I used to cope as a child as well.
If I wasn’t under the covers reading, I would sneak into the closet to read until I passed out and most times that’s where my mother found me in the morning.
And I think this scene is really powerful not just because of my personal attachment to it, but because it really says something about how the stories we read become the stories we tell ourselves and imprint upon our own lives.
There’s even scientific studies that suggests that when a character you love in a book or a movie passes away, your mind does not know the difference between real grief and fictional grief. And this can be seen across all media, even for those sitting in the theater, watching Michael for the first or fifth time. We’re not just watching a story unfold. We’re emotionally engaged and invested.
Peter Pan was a way from Michael to see himself as a child in a world where he did not get to be one. The boy who never got to be a kid meets the boy who never grew up.
The directors and the screenwriters could have introduced us to Michael's connection to Peter Pan starting with Neverland. Why didn't they open the page to the most identifiable part of the story we associate him with?
If you can recall the procession of the pages of the book we are shown throughout the film, you might have noticed that each new page slots itself perfectly between specific milestones in Michael's life.
The first milestone we get to witness is the most important. For me it really operated in two distinct ways.
First, it illustrates the inception of story—the moment we the audience gets to see the story that Michael tells himself. But it also doesn't allow us to be at the beginning with him.
He's already written in the book and he reads with the kind of enthusiasm that implies that he's done it so many times before.
I think this is one of the most clever choices on the filmmakers part to tell the story because it conditions us to think about Michael in a way that there is so much more to his story that we do not know and that we were not there for.
For us it feels like a beginning or an origin of something, but for Michael, both the character and the human being, there's more to his story than we could ever know.
When he's under the covers and he's reading Peter Pan, it is on a page where he is labeled Hook as Joseph Jackson, open to the part of the book where Peter Pan overpowers Hook, and essentially defeats him, and becomes the hero of the story.
We, the viewers, hold in our minds that this is how Michael begins to see himself as someone who will eventually overpower hook. Earlier we witness Michael singing the lyrics to Big Boy, here is where that foreshadowing pays off and opens a new loop for us.
The reason I said that it was a lie sort of is because Peter Pan is not considered a fairytale as much as it is literary fantasy. This scene completely contradicts the lyrics ‘fairytales I do not enjoy’ from the song Big Boy because the film shows us that Michael enjoys ‘fairytales’ very much.
It forces us to see Michael not through Joseph’s eyes, but as he should’ve been seen—as a child—a child who is not a big boy, but who is just a little kid wanting to be a boy just as Peter Pan was.
The filmmakers also trusts us to be familiar with Pan’s story and everything that happens before we get to this place in the book the same way there's so much more that happens in the film before Michael finally stands up to Joseph. This then becomes the essential foreshadowing of the entire movie in one scene.
Michael's emancipation from his father and his tyrannical ways did not start with his first solo album. It started with him seeing himself as Peter Pan defeating Hook.
That was the story that planted the seed for how he would eventually become the hero of his own story in the film. This one scene directly mirrors exactly how the entire biopic gets told.
Let's think about the cold opening of the film; Michael walking out to perform in his Bad Era attire.
This is the moment that he is officially become Peter Pan. It is the culmination of Michael becoming the hero of his own story.
We start as the audience in Michael story exactly where we see Michael start in Peter Pan story. Then the filmmakers take us through everything that happens before Peter Pan overthrows Hook…
It's subtle. It's genius. And it gives me chills every time I think about it.
I think my favorite thing about this format—about what the filmmakers achieved here, is that it doesn't boast about what it's done, it just lets it lie for those who are paying attention enough to grasp the story structure.
The other thing I love about it is that it doesn't sanitize what it means to imprint yourself upon someone as a child as young as Michael in a book where the hero does not look like you.
I wanna make a call back to when I said that every single time a new page of Peter Pan appears on screen, it's happening at a milestone in Michael's life.
We see it when we meet Ben, Michael’s rat and just before Michael meets Bill. Then again after we meet baby Bubbles and just before Michael decides to undergo surgery. The filmmakers anchors us to the story like a page turning between these major transitions in Michael’s life.
Right before Michael makes that decision he's looking at Peter Pan then he looks at himself on the cover of his solo album the filmmakers trust us to remember how his father made fun of his nose and then the next scene is him going to consult with the surgeon and move forward with the surgery.
Now, I'm also a Marvel fan and a huge Marvel nerd.
One of my favorite characters is Spider-Man and I'm gonna call upon uncle Ben here when he says, with great power must also come great responsibility.
Stories are powerful therefore they should be represented responsibly. I am a Disney adult myself who also loves Peter Pan. It happens to be one of my favorite childhood stories as well, though it is not without it’s representational mistakes. But I can't help, but wonder if Peter Pan were a character who looked like Michael how would that have impacted his life?
And as a fan of Spider-Man, this is why I'm so happy that we have characters like Miles Morales, giving us iterations of heroic stories we love with nuanced and layered characters that allow us to extract the same lessons, beliefs, and hope from them.
We still have so much work to do to make this a reality more widely, but Michael Jackson was living at a time where there was even less representation than we have today.
In the movie he repeats that he needs to be perfect for the cameras—because of the power of stories and what the film implies as well, this is partially because of Joseph’s bullying and Peter Pan’s eurocentric features at that time was the beauty standard and still are today. There aren't enough books and characters that center diverse facial features, hair texture, food, language, you name it.
One thing I'm proud of about this film is that they made it very clear that in no way that Michael Jackson wanted to deny or erase who he was as a Black man. But this movie made me reflect on the responsibility I have as a storyteller to keep centering people who look like me and who share my identities in my stories as the main characters, because hope that does not look like you can can only get you so far.
I don't think it's enough for people who have been marginalized to imagine themselves as the heroes, we deserve to see ourselves as the main character, and I think the beautiful thing about the way this story unfolds for Michael Jackson is that he becomes the hero that he did not see on the page.
We see this in the way that he handles going to New York City and demanding to be put on MTV. And this is such a core message in Michael's music. We hear it in Man in the Mirror—becoming the change you desire in the world. And there's a line in this scene where Michael tells that executive, “I made music for everyone, black or white.” This is Michael, actively rectifying the part of his own story that was missing.
Being Good Will Get You Nowhere
I think another interesting piece of commentary that I was able to pull from this movie. Was this feeling that being good will get you nowhere.
When I was growing up (and still to this very day) one of my vocal stims was, “I'll get you Peter Pan if it's the last thing I do!” Now, if you're a Disney adult like me and you've watched these cartoons countless times like I have you didn't just read that quote, you heard it.
No one can deliver that line like Hook! Probably because no one is as fed up as Hook is with Peter Pan and all his antics.
For me in the film this definitely mirrors Joseph Jackson. He doesn't see Michael's behavior as someone trying to emancipate himself from his control. Joseph treats, Michael as if he's being a bad kid. This evolves to him treating him as a bad son and a bad person.
And largely the way that he manipulates Michael through guilt tripping him works.
There's so many times where Michael says, “I'm gonna look him in the eye and I'm gonna tell him…” and then Michael looks to someone else to save him.
It's not until after the accident that hospitalizes him that he operates from a place of agency and says that he's gonna do the tour for his family, but then he's done and he's gonna do the thing for himself.
Disney paraphernalia also shows up in the scene again as a motif when Branca brings in the oversized Mickey Mouse plushy.
This is the moment Michael realizes that he has a platform that he has a stage that he is Peter Pan and we the fans, and his brothers are his lost boys.
He quits on stage and it's one of the most iconic things that anyone could ever do! But really what deep in the impact of him walking away was how the story loops in on itself back to the beginning—back to the page where Peter Pan is hovering over Hook as he's getting ready to sink into the sea and be chased by Tick-Tock the crocodile.
The movie opens up with Startin’ Something. A song that feels almost antagonistic and one that's definitely a question. But it also ends on a very important question—a recontextualization of one of my favorite songs from Michael Jackson.
Who's bad?
I think one of the core personality traits that we associate with Peter Pan is that he is mischievous. And to someone like Hook, Peter Pan is very bad. He challenges his authority and he lives outside the systems hierarchy and responsibilities that someone like Hook has been made to live under his entire life.
Because Peter Pan can do something that he cannot.
He can fly.
And on that stage, Michael finds his own magic. He feeds Joseph Jackson to the crowd as if it were a crocodile. It's in this moment that Michael realizes. that defiance can lead to freedom—that if he wanted to get to where he wanted to go in life, he couldn't be a good son—that he had to step out of the script that he been given and into the story he used to read under the covers.
I remember growing up my parents used to make jokes about Michael Jackson (which I took very personally by the way) they would say that he was pretending to be tough, especially in videos like Beat It, Smooth Criminal and Bad.
But after seeing the movie, I'm not only disagreeing with them (again) retrospectfully because I'm a big fan, but seeing his story unfold to then be anchored to the lyrics of Bad as a celebration of emancipation from his father, I think he has all right to ask who's bad and then to also answer it and say that he's bad.
Because it takes immense courage to walk away from someone like Joseph Jackson.
I know because I've also done it.
So when Michael took that stage, or Jaafar Jackson I should say (who portrayed him immensely well) he sang that song as if he was bad to the bone and he knew he was.
Michael had earned the right to ask the question rhetorically.
So now I'll end with asking you a question as well;
When you look at your life and all the things that you survived…
When you think about the stories that have helped you overcome, and given you the courage to advocate for what you deserve and to walk away from what you didn't…
When you look in the mirror and you see yourself and ask, who's bad?
What is your answer?
Many of us associate power with dominance and I think what Michael Jackson was able to illustrate not just in the film, but largely with his life is that sometimes the most powerful thing you could ever do is suffer under violence and ridicule, and still meet the world with magic and kindness.
Because that's bad, that's tough, that’s bad bad!
Who’s bad?!
Meet the Author
Divinity Rae (she/they) is a romance and fantasy indie author, multi-passionate human, professional yapper and self-proclaimed wielder of whimsy. When she’s not writing or rushing to the theater so she doesn’t miss the previews, you can find them with their face in a book, playing their switch, or doing a fun cozy craft.
Divinity writes stories with action, spice, and heart that explore themes ranging from grief and love after loss to low stakes meet cutes and kisses.
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Loved every second of this read❤️