ET’S free-associate. Monica: Bill; thong underwear; oral sex in the Oval Office; Ken Starr; impeachment; semen on a blue dress; Linda Tripp; and, if you’re Robert M. Polhemus, the reason that ”the full Lot text moved from relative obscurity into new prominence in the 20th century.”

”Lot’s Daughters: Sex, Redemption, and Women’s Quest for Authority” is Polhemus’s dispatch from the place he calls Daughterland, where Oedipus is irrelevant, his filial complex eclipsed by a sister condition, ”the Lot complex.” Remember Lot? It’s his wife we’ve been told to keep in mind, that pillar of salt Christ made the indelible image of failing to renounce past corruption altogether. Lot we prefer to forget. As told in Genesis 19, Lot fled the annihilation of Sodom, lost his mate because she couldn’t resist a backward glance and ended up in a cave with his two daughters, who conspired to get him drunk and then seduced him.

”The Lot story is shocking,” Polhemus says, ”does describe offensive behavior, does probe shameful erotic secrets,” which might not be so troubling were it not included in the Judeo-Christian canon. But it is; what’s more, biblical genealogy traces Lot’s seed through David all the way to Jesus. Ultimately, the hope of mankind, of ”a new heaven and a new earth,” arrives through an act of incest. The intercourse described is not iconoclastic so much as it is desperate, the price of having a future. Lot’s daughters believed themselves and their father the sole survivors of universal destruction; humankind, they thought, depended on their breaking taboo by having sex with their father.

The story becomes a complex — the Lot complex — because its ”primal interest imposes itself upon history, religion, art and individual psychology, and people in turn impose their history, experience, personal mind-sets and imaginative skills on the biblical text.” Polhemus doesn’t invent the Lot complex any more than Freud invented the Oedipus complex. What he does — thoroughly and brilliantly — is identify what has existed for millenniums of recorded history, introducing diverse examples of the archetypal transaction between a young, sometimes very young, woman and the man who, if he isn’t actually her father, is old enough to substitute.

So welcome to Daughterland, where we don’t read much Hemingway, or grill meat outdoors, and where we’re mystified, and a little bored, by all the hysteria over Oedipus, who didn’t even know it was his mother he was sleeping with. Oh, he was unlucky, certainly, so unlucky that he happened into what’s more usually the female contretemps of being sullied by sex. But can you imagine if every woman who discovered herself the unwitting accomplice to her own defilement thrust pins into her eyes? Seeing Eye dogs would march cheek by jowl down supermarket aisles.

Polhemus is the chairman of the English department at Stanford University, but ”Lot’s Daughters” is not (or not merely) an academic unpacking of text. Its material includes paintings and movies and scandals — an exciting array of opportunities, from Midrash to Monicagate, each offering an answer to Daughterland’s eternal, critical question: what do young women want? What do Jane Eyre and Catherine Earnshaw want? Is their deepest desire distinguishable from that of their creators, Charlotte and Emily Bronte? What will Dora take from Dr. Freud in exchange for his penetrating her unconscious? For what does Lolita use Humbert’s lust? Why did Soon-Yi Previn choose Woody Allen as her benefactor over Mia Farrow? And what about Monica Lewinsky — did she get it, whatever it is, from Bill Clinton?

Men have power. At this late date, they still run everything — churches and states and multinational corporations. They invent — machines, institutions, ideas. They claim the moral high ground, make and enforce laws, break them when it’s advantageous. They’re potent; they have seed women require to project themselves — and men — into the future. And the coupling need not necessarily be sexual. Knowledge, position and money are disseminated, too. Sometimes the woman who trades fecundity for position in this world, and in the next, is a girl and the man is her father, symbolically if not biologically. (If her mother isn’t as dead as a pillar of salt, she’s past bearing life, and looks it.) The moral of ”Lottish” tales is that incest (and, to a lesser degree, the intercourse of older men and younger women) is ”the human experience that epitomizes the vulnerability of women, the potential for moral degeneration in family structure, and the need to control raw male lust.”

Whether Monica Lewinsky, one of the ”disposable hotties who serve as moral warnings about bad parenting and the evils of libido” (i.e., the anti-Chelsea, who represents ”nice daughters who deserve and need paternal protection”), succeeded in ”controlling” male lust is a matter of debate. Certainly she parlayed it into fame, her blue dress the means of literally following the original Lot’s daughter’s command to ”preserve seed of our father.” Polhemus, writing ”on the side of the angels, telling of women’s progress and men’s progress too,” implies that Lewinsky’s refusal to present herself as a victim may be news as good for women as Monica herself was bad news for Bill, ushering in an era in which women needn’t apologize for ambition, even when it’s vulgar and destructive. After all, she didn’t.

”Educational history of the last two centuries features an academic Lot complex,” Polhemus observes, a little slyly. Indeed. ”Lot’s Daughters” raises consciousness of a permanent and morally ambiguous fact of life. Reading Polhemus will make it difficult to enjoy a novel, watch television or follow the lives in People magazine without remembering the complex he identifies. He’s that rare teacher whose class you don’t cut because what you get isn’t information but an essential way of seeing the world around you.

AGHDAD, Iraq, Jan. 30 – Nobody among the hundreds of voters thronging one Baghdad polling station on Sunday could remember anything remotely like it, not even those old enough to have taken part in Iraq’s last partly free elections more than 50 years ago, before the assassination of King Faisal II began a spiraling descent into tyranny.

The scene was suffused with the sense of civic spirit that has seemed, so often in America’s 22 months here, like a missing link in the plan to build democracy in Iraq. Gone, for this day at least, was the suspicion that 24 years of bludgeoning under Saddam Hussein had bred a disabling passivity among the country’s 28 million people, an unwillingness, among many, to become committed partners in fashioning their own freedoms.

At the Darari primary school, east of the Tigris River in central Baghdad, the courtyard teemed with people of all ages, and of all ethnic and religious groups, doing what American military commanders here have urged for so long: standing up for themselves, and laying down a marker, with their votes, that signaled they could not be intimidated into surrendering their rights by the insurgents who have terrorized the country with guns and bombs and butchers’ knives.

The voters were the same people, mostly, who crowded polling centers in the fall of 2002, six months before American troops toppled Mr. Hussein, to re-elect him in a one-candidate referendum by an official vote count of 100 percent. Then, all was uniformity, and cries of fealty to the dictator.

On Sunday, everything about the voting resonated with a passion for self-expression, individuals set on their own choices, prepared to walk long distances through streets choked with military checkpoints, and to stand for hours in line to cast their ballots.

“A hundred names on the ballot are better than one, because it means that we are free,” said Fadila Saleh, a 37-year-old engineer, as she hurried about the courtyard trying to find an official who would allow her to transfer her vote to the Darari center, setting aside a mistaken register that had her living miles away. Eventually, she prevailed, along with several friends dressed like her in the head-to-toe cloaks of conservative Muslim women.

After the surprise of Sunday’s heavy turnout – perhaps as many as eight million people across Iraq, according to Iraqi electoral officials – there was much that remained to daunt American hopes that Iraqis would come together in a new political compact, one that would enable their new national assembly to draft a constitution, submit it to a referendum, and hold another election late this year for a full-term parliament and government.

Only detailed voting figures to be released over the next 10 days will show the size of the vote in Sunni Arab areas, home to the insurgents, and indicate whether, as election officials suggested Sunday, enough people defied boycott calls there to support hopes that many Sunnis will eventually disavow the rebels.

Almost as important, only a detailed breakdown of the seats won by the 110 individuals, parties and alliances on Sunday’s ballot, and weeks of political maneuvering that will follow, will show whether the good will evident at the polling stations extends to the elected politicians.

Nor, it seemed clear, could Americans assume that elections made possible by United States military power would reverse, except briefly, the hostility toward their country. Many voters said they would not have been there choosing new leaders if the United States had not led the invasion that rid them of Mr. Hussein. But as often as not, the words seemed reluctant, as if crediting Americans for anything was a step too far.

One man, Ahmed Dujaily, 80, a London-trained engineer who was agriculture minister under King Faisal II, put it politely. “We thank the Americans for destroying the regime of Saddam,” he said. “But often, they were not careful for the people; they did many wrong things. Now, we know what they are looking for. They are looking for oil, and military bases, and domination of the new regime. They will have their military headquarters for the region in Iraq, and when they will leave, nobody knows.”

But as the polls closed today, it was clear that ordinary Iraqis in large numbers had shattered some of the commonplaces about their lack of willpower in the face of an insurgency here that has tightened its grip on their lives in the past year.

Just as clearly, the Americans who have remained the decisive authority here, even since Iraq’s interim government was established last year, emerged from the voting with a large measure of vindication for having pressed ahead with the election despite predictions that the enterprise could collapse amid uncontrollable insurgent violence or a crippling voter boycott.

American soldiers on checkpoint duty hundreds of yards back from the Darari school showed what a morale boost the elections had been for them as they relaxed in the sunshine beside their Humvees and Bradley fighting vehicles, with lowered weapons and ready smiles for the voters passing by. There had been no day like it since the first American units arrived to the cheers of crowds and the tossing of flowers in April 2003, and that lasted barely 24 hours, as unchallenged looting began to devastate the city.

Foreigners who have been visiting Iraq for 15 years and knew the tension that crackled under Mr. Hussein could remember no other day when the city, in wide areas, seemed so much at ease.

The sound of distant bombs, mortars and rifle fire punctuated the day, and televisions quickly spread the message that there were at least 28 new Iraqi victims of the insurgent violence in Baghdad. Overhead, American attack helicopters bristling with missiles were never far away.

But much of the larger part of the tableau, to those who have lived in a city paralyzed by the war, was the fact that great streams of people flowed down avenues and side streets emptied of traffic where, for months, the watchword has been haste and vigilance about the risks of sudden death.

At Darari, the garden party atmosphere seemed bereft of the bitterness and contention about politics that Western reporters here have made the coda of much of their coverage. Along the lines, interviews quickly established who was a Sunni, a Shiite or a Kurd, and, in one case, who was a Jew – a 41-year-old engineer who gave only his first name, Samir. He said he was one of only eight Jews he knew of still living in Baghdad, which until the 1950′s was home to the largest community of Jews, outside Israel, in the Middle East.

But what was striking was how many people seemed puzzled, and at least mildly irritated, by being asked their ethnic and religious identities, and how, too, they gently rebuked reporters for making an issue of it.

“Yes, I am Shiite, but I am an Iraqi before I am anything,” said Mr. Dujaily, the former agriculture minister. He appeared at the school in a gray pinstriped suit, well-polished shoes and a dapper black wool hat, which gave him the appearance of having stepped straight out of an old sepia photograph of the royal entourage.

Mr. Dujaily said something else that suggested that Iraqi politics could prove to have a stronger integrating dynamic than the past months of fighting among many of the parties have suggested. He had, he said, voted for the United Iraqi Alliance, a coalition of mainly Shiite parties that is dominated by Iran-backed religious groups. With the alliance widely favored to win the largest bloc of seats in the 275-seat assembly, there have been fears that it could be the harbinger of an Iran-like theocracy in Iraq.

But Mr. Dujaily scoffed at the idea. “Religion, it is myself,” he said. “The vote is for my country.” He said he had chosen the alliance because he judged it to have the leaders best able to govern the country.

Many others seemed more intent on the act of casting a ballot than on the parties they chose. One man said he had voted for Ayad Allawi, the interim prime minister, in the hope of getting a pension for his brief stint as an American prisoner of war after Iraq’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait.

A woman said she had chosen Adnan Pachachi, Iraq’s foreign minister in the late 1960′s, because of his long-ago service in the government of the king.

Still another woman said she had chosen a party known as the Elite of Diyala because she hailed from there. But most said they were there to be a part of something that would make Iraq a better country, and something that would make them, as individuals, count for something in the nation’s affairs. This, for many, appeared to be the heart of it: that voting gave them a chance to regain the sense of self-worth and dignity crushed under Mr. Hussein.

Far from taking away their instinct for asserting themselves, they seemed to be saying, the humiliations of tyranny had made them hungry for a chance to take a stand.

The point was made by another elderly Shiite, Hachim Shahir, 83, who said he had been a bricklayer for much of his life. Dressed for the occasion in a faded <a style=’text-decoration: none; border-bottom: 3px double;’ href=

hen the Clint Eastwood film “Million Dollar Baby” came out last month, critics praised the film for its subtle power, moving performances and the quiet confidence of its director. But not wanting to give away its ending, few mentioned that a controversial social issue was buried in its plot.

But now that it has been nominated for seven Oscars, social activists and conservative commentators have emerged to criticize the film, which they say sends a message advocating assisted suicide.

Defenders of the film say its intention is not to make a broad political statement, and that it is the filmmakers’ right to tell the story he or she chooses. (Those who have not seen the movie and do not wish to know the plot may not want to read further.)

The movie is not principally about assisted suicide and euthanasia. “Million Dollar Baby” tells the story of a young woman (Hilary Swank) who strives to be a champion boxer, being groomed by a crusty old trainer, played by Mr. Eastwood.

But when her character is badly injured and paralyzed, Mr. Eastwood’s character must decide whether to help her die, and ultimately – despite the urging of a priest to do otherwise – does so.

Both Ms. Swank and Mr. Eastwood were nominated for their performances, along with Morgan Freeman, playing an ex-boxer, who is up for best supporting actor. Mr. Eastwood was also nominated for his direction, and the film is up for best picture.

Conservative critics including Michael Medved, Rush Limbaugh and Debbie Schlussel have criticized the film widely on the air and elsewhere, with Ms. Schlussel calling the film “a left-wing diatribe” on her Web site, a somewhat unusual claim given Mr. Eastwood’s status as a gun-slinging Dirty Harry and real-life history as a Republican former mayor of Carmel, Calif.

But advocates for the rights of the disabled are also taking aim, saying the character’s decision to die sends the wrong message to those struggling to deal with spinal cord injuries.

“Any movie that sends a message that having a spinal cord injury is a fate worse than death is a movie that concerns us tremendously,” said Marcie Roth, executive director of the National Spinal Cord Injury Association. She cited a letter from a mother with a paralyzed son, who said the film had made it more difficult for her to keep hope alive in him.

Others are angrier still. “This movie is a corny, melodramatic assault on people with disabilities,” wrote Stephen Drake on the Web site of a Chicago-based activist group called Not Dead Yet, which picketed the film there this month. “It plays out killing as a romantic fantasy and gives emotional life to the ‘better dead than disabled’ mindset lurking in the heart of the typical (read: nondisabled) audience member.” Mr. Eastwood said in a telephone interview on Saturday that he was not surprised at the protest, but that the film was not about the right to die. “The film is supposed to make you think about the precariousness of life and how we handle it,” he said. “How the character handles it is certainly different than how I might handle it if I were in that position in real life. Every story is a ‘what if.’ “

Mr. Eastwood noted that the movie is based on a story by F. X. Toole and hews closely to his plot. “That’s one person’s feeling,” he said of Mr. Toole’s story. “He wrote that as her desires. Probably no quadriplegic has ever not asked himself that question, or ever broached that subject. It’s the ultimate trauma a person could suffer, short of losing all bodily control.”

Gannon Boyd, a son of Mr. Toole (who died in 2002), said that his father suffered throughout his life from heart trouble and had strong feelings about not wanting to live in a reduced state. But, he stressed, it was Mr. Toole’s personal choice, not something he preached for other people.

“My dad was never saying, ‘This person isn’t worth anything, so kill him,’ ” said Mr. Boyd. “That wasn’t it. If you see the movie, Clint Eastwood’s character is doing the hardest thing he’s ever had to do, and if you read the story you’ll see, it’s the same thing. It’s never a rubber stamp approval, and that was never his intention.”

What is puzzling about some of the protest about the film is that another Oscar-nominated, and critically lauded film this year, the Spanish-language “The Sea Inside,” up for best foreign-language film, is primarily about assisted suicide and euthanasia. But it seems to have attracted little controversy.

The film, by director Alejandro Amenábar, tells the real-life story of Ramón Sampedro, a quadriplegic who fought a 30-year battle with the Spanish government for his right to end his own life. In the film, Javier Bardem plays Sampedro, who is ultimately helped to die by a woman who loves him.

Ms. Roth of the Spinal Cord Injury Association said she had not seen that film yet, but intended to.

With pitched campaigns now part and parcel of Oscar season, controversy over nominated films has become a part of the lobbying process, with suspicions rife over competitors smearing films in the lead for best picture.

While there is no evidence that this is the case with “Million Dollar Baby,” in response to the film’s attackers, the critic Roger Ebert has questioned whether movies are supposed to make choices that will satisfy the concerns of all viewers.

“The characters in movies do not always do what we would do,” he wrote in The Chicago Sun-Times on Saturday. “That is their right. It is our right to disagree with them.” He added, “What kind of movies would there be if everyone in them had to do what we thought they should do?”

Said Mr. Eastwood: “You don’t have to like incest to watch Hamlet. But it’s in the story.”

Filed at 12:59 p.m. ET

BERLIN (AP) — The presidents of France and Russia, top opponents of U.S. policy in Iraq, joined world leaders Monday in praising this weekend’s landmark Iraqi elections as a success of democracy over terrorism, but the welcome was tempered by concern that Sunni Arabs be included in a future government.

French President Jacques Chirac spoke with President Bush by telephone, saying he was satisfied by the “participation rate and the good technical organization.”

“These elections mark an important step in the political reconstruction of Iraq. The strategy of terrorist groups has partly failed,” Chirac said, according to a French presidential spokesman.

Russian President Vladimir Putin also praised the elections, calling them “a step in the right direction and a positive event,” according to the ITAR-Tass news agency.

“The conditions for holding the elections were quite difficult, to put it mildly,” Putin said after meeting in the Kremlin with Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas. “At the same time, I must say that the very fact of it is an important event, maybe a historic event, for the Iraqi people because it is undoubtedly a step toward democratization of the country.”

Putin’s comments were a far cry from his harsh warning in December that the elections could not be fair amid a continuing U.S.-led occupation.

Iranian government spokesman Abdollah Ramezanzadeh said the elections were “held freely” but under “difficult circumstances.”

He expressed hope the vote would contribute to security in Iraq and hasten the departure of U.S. troops, adding that Shiite-ruled Iran was “ready to cooperate” with the future Iraqi government — which is likely to be dominated by Shiite Muslims.

British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw said the successful election was a psychological blow to insurgents because it demonstrated that Iraqis were committed to democracy. Britain has been Washington’s chief ally in the Iraq war.

“Yesterday’s elections represent a real blow to this disgusting campaign of violence and intimidation,” said Straw, who also recognized Iraqi security forces for helping police the election.

Straw said Britain would call for an early meeting of the Sharm-el-Sheik group of Iraq’s neighbors and the G-8 industrialized countries to build international support for the new national assembly.

In Brussels, Belgium, the European Union’s foreign policy chief said Iraq’s move toward democracy would pay off in the provision of more aid.

“They are going to find the support of the European Union, no doubt about that, in order to see this process move on in the right direction,” Javier Solana told The Associated Press.

Areas where the EU was looking to help include drafting a new constitution and training the judiciary and security forces, he said.

NATO Secretary-General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer said the election could lead to the alliance stepping up training efforts for the Iraqi military.

But the issue of Sunni participation — both in the vote and in the government that will emerge — was high on many leaders’ minds.

“The most difficult task lies ahead — to make sure the results of the elections have a stabilizing effect on the situation in the country,” the Russian Foreign Ministry said in a statement.

German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer praised Iraqis “for the will they have shown to shape the future of their country peacefully and democratically, despite massive intimidation.”

But, he added, “it is of decisive importance in this to integrate all political, ethnic and religious groups in Iraq … no part of the population must be excluded from shaping the common fate of all Iraqis.”

New Zealand’s Foreign Minister Phil Goff echoed that view.

“Sunni Arabs make up 20 percent of the population and Sunni extremists are at the core of the insurgency,” he said. “Ways must be found to involve Sunnis in the drafting of the constitution, which will define power among Iraq’s disparate groups, and to give them a stake in the new government.”

The vote was to elect a 275-member National Assembly and lawmakers in 18 provincial legislatures. Once results are in, it could take weeks of backroom deals before a prime minister and government are picked by the new assembly.

Turnout among Iraq’s estimated 14 million eligible voters will take some time to determine, Iraqi election officials have said, but Iraqi and U.S. officials said they believe it was higher than the 57 percent predicted.

But a U.S. official said Monday it appears turnout was low in Sunni Arab regions.

Italian Premier Silvio Berlusconi expressed hope the elections would help spread democracy in Arab countries.

“Iraq will become influential, a factor of change and democracy for all the other countries” in the region, he said on state radio. “This vote can have a positive knock-on effect in all the other Arab countries where there is authoritarian rule, where the situation of women is not one of liberty or dignity, where there are still many steps to make to emerge from the Middle Ages.”

Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim nation, said it was encouraged by Sunday’s turnout among Iraqis, which the Foreign Ministry said showed “commendable determination to decide their own destiny.”

In neighboring Malaysia, Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, who chairs the 57-nation Organization of the Islamic Conference, said he was “very sad” about a series of attacks that marred Sunday’s voting. At least 44 people died in suicide and mortar attacks on polling stations, including nine suicide bombers.

“At the time the election is being held, people are still dying,” Abdullah told reporters. “There doesn’t seem to be any real way of stopping it.”

Former Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev took a dim view of the vote.

“These elections have not yielded much,” he said, according to the ITAR-Tass news agency. “It is necessary to wait and see the results, but I think all this is unreliable and dubious.”

ANTA MARIA, Calif., Jan. 30 – Fourteen months after a small army of sheriff’s deputies laid siege to Michael Jackson’s Neverland ranch seeking evidence of lewd acts by Mr. Jackson with a 13-year-old cancer patient, jury selection began today in California’s latest and greatest celebrity show trial.

Mr. Jackson arrived at the courthouse here today just before noon Eastern time, dressed all in white and surrounded by a team of lawyers and bodyguards, one of whom held a parasol to shade him from the sun. As he got out of a black vehicle, he waved to the throngs of fans and other onlookers, and the hundreds of news media representatives who have crowded the steps of the small courthouse here.

This will be the setting for what promises to be a months-long legal saga, whose every procedure and turn will be televised, pored over and otherwise dissected by the industry spawned by celebrity trials.

Mr. Jackson, who has said he is not guilty of child-molesting charges brought against him, did not say anything today before going through the metal detectors at the entrance to the courtroom, and a strict gag order will limit what is known about the proceedings.

But this morning, Mr. Jackson’s parents, Katherine and Joe Jackson, told CBS’s “The Early Show” that their son’s accuser was only after his money.

“I know my son, and this is ridiculous,” Mrs. Jackson said in the interview. She said people who believe her son is guilty “don’t know him.”

Mr. Jackson’s father said racism was behind the accusations, as well as financial gain: “It’s about money.”

On Sunday, with his liberty, his livelihood and what is left of his reputation riding on the outcome of the trial, Mr. Jackson himself made a pre-emptive move by releasing a videotaped statement, approved by the judge, in which he proclaims his innocence. In the videotape, Mr. Jackson responded to reputed grand jury reports leaked to the news media over the last few weeks that said his accuser, who is now 15, had testified that the entertainer groped him and plied him with alcohol two years ago.

On the videotape, Mr. Jackson denied the accusations against him, pleaded for a fair hearing from the jury and the public, and predicted he would ultimately be “acquitted and vindicated.”

“In the last few weeks, a large amount of ugly, malicious information has been released into the media about me,” Mr. Jackson, 46, said in the video, which he released on his Web site, www.mjjsource.com. “Apparently, this information was leaked through transcripts in a grand jury proceeding where neither my lawyers, nor I, ever appeared. The information is disgusting and false.”

The entertainer said he had invited the boy and his family to stay at his Neverland ranch because they had told him the boy was ill with cancer and needed his help. Over the years, he said, he has helped thousands of similar children who were ill or in distress.

“These events have caused a nightmare for my family, my children and me,” Mr. Jackson said. “I never intend to place myself in so vulnerable a position ever again.

“I love my community, and I have great faith in our justice system. Please keep an open mind and let me have my day in court,” he continued. “I deserve a fair trial like every other American citizen. I will be acquitted and vindicated when the truth is told.”

Mr. Jackson’s life and music career have seemed on a downward spiral for the past decade, beginning with similar accusations involving sex with a young boy in 1993, which Mr. Jackson settled out of court for $15 million to $20 million.

The attention this new case has generated has further damaged the onetime King of Pop’s already bizarre image and slashed his economic value. Music industry executives said conviction on some or all of the counts against him could effectively end his career as a public performer, although he still stands to profit from royalties on music catalogs he controls.

Hundreds of prospective jurors are expected to be screened for service on a trial that court officials project will last into the summer. Nearly 1,000 reporters, photographers, television technicians and courtroom artists have applied for credentials to cover the trial, which will be re-enacted nightly by a combined British-American television group that includes E! Entertainment.

Months of pretrial maneuvering have already produced thousands of pages of legal pleadings and teased a global audience awaiting the lurid details of Mr. Jackson’s extravagant and eccentric life at his 2,700-acre private Xanadu in the hills between Santa Maria and Santa Barbara.

The case itself offers all the elements of a pop culture roundelay, including a music superstar who likens himself to Peter Pan; a grandfatherly prosecutor who has pursued him for 12 years; a silver-maned chief defense lawyer who is a colorful defender of the famous and the downtrodden alike, and a scandal-saturated media horde, many of them fresh from the Scott Peterson murder case. And throngs of Jackson groupies are promising daily courthouse rallies.

Court documents and pretrial arguments indicate that evidence will include testimony from experts on Mr. Jackson’s finances, sexually explicit books and magazines taken from Mr. Jackson’s bedroom, notes written by the performer to his young accuser, and a pair of white briefs, boy’s size small.

The stern ringmaster in the case, Judge Rodney S. Melville of Santa Barbara County Superior Court, has conducted the pretrial action under extraordinary secrecy. The judge sealed virtually every piece of paper and silenced all the lawyers and other parties to the case under threat of jail time.

The lawyers have complied with the judge’s order silencing them. But hundreds of pages of explicit grand jury testimony recently leaked out and have hurtled around the globe on the Internet and on ABC News programs.

In the final pretrial hearing before Judge Melville on Friday, Gordon Auchincloss, one of the lead prosecutors, said he expected the trial to produce “scorched-earth combat.” “There’s no mystery this will be a very contentious lawsuit,” Mr. Auchincloss said.

Judge Melville, offering his final commentary before the legal winds begin to howl on Monday, noted dryly that he had felt a marked increase in tension around the courthouse. “Tempers are beginning to get short,” he said. “There is a lot of pressure on everyone to have a case of such public scrutiny.”

The defense team, led by Thomas A. Mesereau Jr., has made it clear it is going to put the accuser and his family on trial, accusing them of changing their stories and seeking to extort millions from Mr. Jackson. And the defense lawyers clearly intend to put the state on trial as well, beginning with the Santa Barbara County district attorney, Thomas W. Sneddon Jr., who they contend has a long-running vendetta against Mr. Jackson.

After his first run-in with Mr. Sneddon over the 1993 pedophilia accusations, Mr. Jackson wrote a satirical song about a “Dom Sheldon” who “really tried to take me down by surprise.” The song’s refrain, rendered “Dom Sheldon is a cold man” in the liner notes, sounds very much like “Tom Sneddon” on the album.

Mr. Sneddon, in his sixth and final four-year term as district attorney, is leading the prosecution himself. He was asked early on if he believed Mr. Jackson had gotten away with a crime in 1993.

“I think there’s a sense in the public that he did that,” Mr. Sneddon said. “My feeling about this is I’m sad that there’s another victim out there.”

The trial will exert pressure on Mr. Jackson’s financial empire, which has appeared increasingly fragile in recent years. Even his close advisers say he is an extravagant spender whose wealth has been eroded by an overly lavish lifestyle, poor investments and a rogue’s gallery of business associates.

Mr. Jackson has taken out an estimated $270 million in loans from Bank of America Corporation, backed by his two major music-publishing catalogs, and at least part of the debt must be repaid – or refinanced – - by early 2006, according to advisers close to Mr. Jackson.

For his income, Mr. Jackson relies heavily on the profits from the two publishing companies, which generate sales when the songs they own are recorded or licensed for commercials, films and the like. There has been speculation for years that Mr. Jackson might put his publishing assets on the auction block to pay off his loans, and there is little doubt that such a move could help clear his balance sheet.

Mijac Music, which holds the copyrights to Mr. Jackson’s own hit compositions and other songs, including “People Get Ready” by Curtis Mayfield, has been valued at roughly $75 million. Mr. Jackson’s share of Sony/ATV, a joint venture with the Sony Corporation that holds rights to the Beatles hits, is worth perhaps $400 million or more, music executives say.

Mr. Jackson’s worth as a performer, once of incalculable value but steadily declining for years, hinges on the outcome of the trial, industry executives said.

“If he’s convicted, that’d be a tough mountain to climb,” said Steve Rennie, the former West Coast general manager for Sony’s Epic Records label, which releases Mr. Jackson’s albums. But even if he is acquitted, the prospects for a lucrative new contract appear dim, Mr. Rennie said, noting that Mr. Jackson’s music is extremely expensive to produce.

Nevertheless, Mr. Rennie said, Mr. Jackson still could cash in on the international concert circuit, and even perhaps profit from his new notoriety.

“Forgetting Michael Jackson’s personal circus, there was never a more electrifying performer, ever,” he said. “It’s a big world out there. I think there are promoters that would step up.”