Millions of Americans, including myself, have been turning over the same question in their minds for the past four months: How do you solve a problem like MJ? The task of memorializing such a complicated figure — a music legend, but with a twisted mind and a tarnished reputation — is a difficult one, and must be treated delicately so as to avoid stepping on any moon-walking toes.

Considering this weekend is both Halloween (the inspiration behind Michael’s iconic “Thriller” video) and the release of This Is It, a film about his preparation for his now-cancelled ’09 -’10 tour, I thought I’d finally take a stab at organizing my thoughts on the King of Pop.

It’s hard for me, and many of my peers, to truly understand the national uproar that MJ’s death caused among Generation X. As much as we may brag that we know all the words to “Billie Jean” and can moonwalk with the best of them, we didn’t really live through Jackson’s glory days. Most of us were too young to appreciate music during Michael’s good years, if we were even alive for them.

So the Michael that comes to mind for me and my friends is not a fresh-faced, curly-haired pop genius but a pasty, greasy, surgically-altered-beyond-recognition freak with pedophiliac tendencies — basically, a figured abhorred by all of society.

Society gave up on him by the mid-90s, so we never even gave him a chance. We were skeeved out by his appearance, his creepy Neverland Ranch, and his molestation trial. While everyone else fondly remembers his days on top, we could only judge him on what he had become.

Naturally, the aftermath of his death shocked and confused me. Now that he is gone, are we all supposed to forget the last 20 years? Are his terrific songs enough to make him an almost godlike figure after all that he’s done to destroy that image?

A friend of mine even admitted recently that she only started really listening to MJ after he died and everyone started calling attention to his genius. She, and many young people like her, are struggling to reconcile the repulsive image we’ve held of Michael as long as we can remember with the lionized image the country projected upon him after his death.

This confusion is what makes me so curious to see This Is It (if I can get tickets sometime this decade). The film, cut from hundreds of hours of rehearsal footage of Michael and his team over the past few years, will show Michael as no one has seen him before — the publicly shunned disgrace of 2009, displaying the musical prowess and work ethic of the icon of 1984.

This Is It chronicles the comeback that could have been — the highly-anticipated tour could have brought Michael back to the divine status he enjoyed during the heyday of “Thriller.” Those of us who never got a chance to see MJ as he should be seen, to understand how his album changed our culture, could finally have seen the light. But instead of making a comeback in life, the old Michael only returned in death.

But while we may not ever have gotten to experience Michael in the flesh, we have the privilege of seeing him in celluloid — not the glorified 80s legend, and not the disgraced pajamas-in-court freak show, but the man — and the musician — that Michael eventually became. The mystery of the last decade of Michael’s life may finally become clearer: Those of us who never really got what all the hype was about may finally glimpse a bit of the magic, and the Gen-Xers that have been kissing his Walk of Fame star since June may remember that the man who died this summer is no longer the one-gloved sensation of their youth.