Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of Michael
2026 · Antoine Fuqua · Michael on Sightlines
On the first day of shooting, before any of the family story was on film, Antoine Fuqua staged the Bad tour. Several hundred extras filled the crowd for the Bad tour, and Jaafar Jackson stood in front of them as his uncle. Later the production took “Thriller” back to its original location and, Fuqua says, filmed it under a full moon. Those two facts tell you what kind of film Michael is. It is built from the outside in. First comes the image the world already remembers, and then the life that has to lead up to it.
That order is a good place to bring in Gilles Deleuze, because he had a name for the pictures we already carry. Borrowing from the philosopher Henri Bergson, he separated two ways of capturing movement: privileged instants and the any-instant-whatever. A privileged instant is a posed peak, the tableau, the frozen moment a movement is meant to be remembered by. The any-instant-whatever is what a film camera actually records: ordinary slices of time at a steady rate, none more important than the one before. Deleuze thought cinema's great discovery was the second kind, movement caught as it happens instead of rebuilt from its high points.
Michael is pulled between the two, and that is what makes it interesting. Its subject is a man whose career survives in the public mind as privileged instants. The audience arrives knowing the poses. As the problem is usually put, the frame has to call them up without turning into a waxwork. Yet the camera system Dion Beebe chose is built for the opposite job. Several handheld Sony VENICE 2 cameras, each with a long Angénieux zoom, let the operators find a performance as it happens: push in, reframe, keep rolling. Fuqua didn't assemble the numbers shot by shot. He restaged them whole, at real or matching locations with real crowds, and let the cameras hunt. That is an any-instant-whatever method aimed at privileged-instant material.
When it works, a pose you've seen a thousand times seems to turn up on its own, in the middle of a movement. Dominic Griffin at Looper thought the recreations got past the waxwork problem. When it fails, you get what Harris Dang described: concerts that feel oddly confined. A camera that stays close to catch the instant loses the full body, and Jackson's art was the full body moving through space.
The same tension runs through the casting. Jaafar Jackson studied his uncle's mannerisms for more than a year, and reviewers said he got the physicality exactly right. But the critics kept noticing something else, the quiet. Dang disliked the film and still singled out moments where Jackson's eyes carry the weight of his father's pressure. Deleuze calls this the affection-image: a face, usually in close-up, holding a feeling that hasn't yet turned into action. In a biopic built around dance, these are the moments when the body stops moving and the family resemblance stops being an impression. Watch for them. The performance's inner life is in the stillness between the famous moves.
Then there is the story those moments sit inside. Deleuze's first great category, the movement-image, describes classical cinema, where a situation presses on a character and the character acts to change it. Its grand version he calls the large form: a world, a confrontation, a decisive act, a new situation. Michael runs on exactly that engine. The world is Gary, then the Motown machine. The confrontation, which Deleuze calls the binomial (force against force), is son against father, with Colman Domingo's Joseph Jackson supplying what Dang called a palpable menace. The decisive act is the break from group act to solo star. A Substack critic complained that Joe comes across as a flat tyrant. That is the price of the large form. It needs a clear opponent, so the screenplay's moral bookkeeping ends up simpler than Domingo's acting.
The editing strains under the same form. Four editors, including John Ottman, who cut Bohemian Rhapsody, squeeze more than twenty years into 127 minutes by jumping from milestone to milestone. RogerEbert.com said the film plays like a sequence of songs in search of a story. In Deleuze's terms, the cuts link one privileged instant to the next and don't let time build up between them. The grainy 16mm footage from a Canon Scoopic, set against the clean digital image, does something gentler. It dates the past and marks certain scenes as a former present, which is how Deleuze's recollection-image works. These are memories with a timestamp, and they stay in their own era.
What about the space outside the frame? Deleuze called the area just past the edge of the image, which we know is there even though we can't see it, the relative out-of-field. Michael ends before the 1993 allegations, and nearly every critic said so. Everyone watching knows what comes after that point, so the omission doesn't vanish. It presses on the story from just offscreen. A casting detail sharpens the pressure. Miles Teller plays John Branca, the attorney who later became a co-executor of the estate that supervised this film. The film doesn't say whether it is avoiding that material or saving it for the reported sequel, and you can feel that uncertainty in how neatly the triumph wraps up.
The film's ancestry is unusually easy to read. Ray set the rules for a lead performing to the artist's own master recordings, physical tics included. Walk the Line hung a life on performance beats. Elvis treated the singer's body onstage as pure cinematic event and supplied the controlling-manager figure that maps onto Joe. Bohemian Rhapsody, which shares a producer, Graham King, gave the whole blueprint: estate-approved, building to a note-perfect restaged live set, with the subject's transgressions sanded out of the frame. Two debts are personal. Fuqua's Southpaw had already driven a male body to punishing extremes under a fraught father figure, and here that labor moves into rehearsal and choreography. John Logan's script for The Aviator gave him the driven, self-mythologizing genius whose grandeur sours into private compulsion. This film stops before most of the souring.
What did it do to film as an art? To be honest, Michael doesn't break its form. It perfects a commercial one. With a reported worldwide gross above $1 billion, it is the biggest film of the music-biopic cycle that followed Bohemian Rhapsody, so the next estate biopics will likely study it. Its real contribution is quieter. Fuqua brought over a habit from Training Day: real places and real people, meaning Hayvenhurst, the original studios, and members of the local community for “Beat It.” The critic André Bazin, who argued that film draws its truth from the real world in front of the camera, would have recognized that faith in place.
So watch it twice, paying a different kind of attention each time. The first time, watch for the privileged instants, which is how everyone will watch it. The second time, watch for the in-between moments: the handheld camera arriving at a famous pose a beat early, or a nephew standing still while his eyes do the work. That second film is the one worth seeing.
Concepts in play
- privileged instants — The film is organized around restaging iconic, already-remembered performances (Bad tour, “Thriller” at the original location under a full moon, “Beat It”), where the frame has to call up the familiar image without becoming a waxwork.
- any-instant-whatever — Multi-camera handheld VENICE 2 bodies with long 12:1 zooms follow restaged performances live instead of building them shot by shot, catching the pose in the middle of a movement.
- affection-image — Critics, including Dang, located Jaafar Jackson's inner life in quiet moments where his eyes convey the weight of his father's pressure, in the stillness between impressions.
- action-image (large form) — A classic rise arc: the Gary childhood and the Motown machine press on the hero until the decisive break from group act to solo star turns the situation into triumph.
- binomial — Son against father: Colman Domingo's Joseph Jackson as the disciplinarian opponent, read by critics as menacing or as a flatly villainous tyrant.
- synsign (the encompassing milieu) — The family home (shot at Hayvenhurst) and the Motown 'factory' as the surrounding world that calls forth the hero's action.
- recollection-image — Grainy 16mm Canon Scoopic footage set against clean digital, with formats chosen to mark different eras and kinds of memory: a dated former present.
- relative out-of-field — The timeline closes before the 1993 allegations, an adjacent stretch of the story every viewer knows exists just past the frame's edge, sharpened by Miles Teller playing future estate co-executor John Branca.
- montage — Four editors compress more than twenty years into 127 minutes by jumping from milestone to milestone, 'a sequence of songs in search of a story' (RogerEbert.com).