The Thing About the Other, or What We Can Hear in Leaving Neverland

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article explores how what appears to be a weakness or limitation of the film Leaving Neverland—hearing only from the victims, being one-sided in its investigation, lack of empirical evidence, narratively episodic—proves to be the film’s greatest strength. More precisely, the film’s patient and hyper focus on the victim’s speaking, coupled with editing decisions to prolong certain points of emphasis, creates the uncanny effect that Jacques Lacan termed das ding, which, therein, has the effect of gesturing to another scene, indeed, the very scene that cannot be seen but that can be heard, and that thus implicates Michael Jackson’s guilt and the victims’ (real) trauma.