In the Fox special of 24 April 2003, Michael Jackson's Private Home Movies, Jackson speaks of Neverland, describing it as a place beautiful, joyful, and safe. It is inside that account, as though the house had led him there, that the sentence arrives. "I would never ever sell Neverland. Neverland is me… you know? It represents the totality of who I am. It really does. I love Neverland."1 The declaration is documented and dated; what I read into it remains a hypothesis of mine, and as such I declare it.
He will never sell, and the reason he gives touches the substance of a man, for the safe beauty he has just entered does not furnish a property but draws the profile of what he declares himself to be. To represent the totality of oneself says more than to resemble, since a resemblance chooses one trait and abandons the rest, whereas a totality leaves nothing outside, and a place that carries a person entire ends by coinciding with them. So the second sentence clarifies and reinforces the first, and in that "It represents the totality of who I am" there surfaces an adult, cultivated awareness of self, rare in public statements seldom pushed past the plain measure of "I love," the only measure the public gaze, set on seeing him as a child, would allow him; "It really does" holds it an instant, before "I love Neverland" draws everything back and, closing every opening to speculation, leaves the listener reassured. That reassured listener is Baudelaire's placid, bucolic reader,2 the one the epigraph to a condemned book turns away because his eye cannot descend into the abyss.
Here the thesis of this work anchors to its clearest source. Neverland does not represent Michael Jackson. It is Michael Jackson, rendered as space, and in April 2003 he affirms it himself, in the first person.
The chronology gives those words their full and profound truth, for seven months later, on 18 November, the officers will cross the gate and search the property, and the year that had opened with an identity spoken aloud closes upon its violation.
History will set its seal on the vow never to sell, in the years when Jackson will risk ruin rather than part with a house he will no longer be able to inhabit, and in that refusal to sell at any cost the April sentence reveals, in hindsight, a tragic dimension that cannot be reduced to an owner's whim or to affection for a place. This work reads 2003 as the compressed declaration of the whole affair, and this entry marks its beginning, the April in which the self tried to disclose itself, once again, and went unheard.