Thoughts on The Greatest Showman

Hi all! I’ve not written in a while, but things in my life are moving along. I haven’t done anything terribly exciting. The most exciting thing has been seeing the red panda at the National Zoo, where she was actually running around. Next week I am seeing Something Rotten! with a friend and then I’m going the NYC to see my sister for President’s Day. I might do an update about fun things after that. General warning about the rest of this post: here be spoilers.

January turns out to have been the month I saw a lot of movies. I saw Proud Mary, I, Tonya, The Post, and The Greatest Showman. The first two I saw because I had Martin Luther King Jr. Day off which made for a lot time to fill and I’m trying to see/watch more media about, starring, and made by women. Proud Mary was excellent. Taraji P. Henson was superb. I could have watched another hour of her running the show. It was slightly more of an action film than I was expecting, but if we can have a million more action films starring women, I will like action films more. I, Tonya was also excellent. Although I was alive when part of the story takes place, I don’t remember any of it. Alison Janney and Margot Robbie were, as Henson was, superb. Janney is amazing in everything I see her in. This is the first time I really saw Robbie, and I was delighted. The Post, as I’m sure you can guess, was excellent. There were some elements that my historian brain questioned, but overall it was compelling, beautifully shot, had a great score, and was funny. Despite the fact that I know the Washington Post is still in business and that the Pentagon Papers were published, I found myself on the edge of my seat. If you haven’t seen any of these films yet, run, don’t walk, to you nearest cinema!

This brings me to the most recent film I saw: The Greatest Showman. Starring Hugh Jackman, Zac Efron, and Zendaya, this musical film is about P.T. Barnum’s creation of his circus. The point of my discussion here is not historical accuracy—that is someone else’s job. Briefly, the plot starts with Barnum as a child, the son of a tailor, and quickly tracks his growth to a member of the middle class married to a girl from a wealthy family he knew as a child. After losing his job, he gets a loan and starts a museum, which quickly evolves to what we know as the circus. Trying to reach the upper classes Barnum takes unnecessary risks, faces ruin, and realizes his follies. We are left with a happy ending for all (which is almost never going to last). The music is fantastic and catchy. And I, for one, hope Hugh Jackman continues to do musicals instead of action films.

As I said, my purpose is not historical accuracy. Today, I am writing about the depiction of capitalism, gender, race, and class within The Greatest Showman as a film watched by modern audiences. My discussion is going to weave the character’s experiences with a meta discussion of those experiences.

One of the most striking themes throughout the film is Barnum’s pursuit of wealth and social standing. This pursuit leads him to ruin. Watching him succeed and fail, we, the audience, can spot his moments of folly—the places he could easily turn back. Much like a tragic hero, Barnum is genre savvy, but, like Hamlet and Othello before him, his story is of a different genre. After striving to become part of the middle class from his working class origin, Barnum continually works to be part of the upper class. This striving comes from a need to prove himself to his wife’s parents. He succeeds in attaining wealth and some measure of notoriety.

Pursuit of his father-in-law’s approval ultimately leads Barnum into folly. In her book The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam, Barbara Tuchman defines folly as “the pursuit of policy contrary to the self-interest of the constituency or state involved. Self-interest is whatever conduces to the welfare or advantage of the body being governed” (6). Tuchman is concerned with state’s governments on a large scale, but the circus is a form state. It is lead by a person who is responsible for the welfare of its population. Therefore, the cross-country tour by Jenny Lind is folly, a point made by Philip Carlyle. He says, “You’re risking everything you’ve built.” To which Barnum responds, “Well, how do you think I built it?” Barnum assumes that the risk is worth the potential reward because it worked once. He doesn’t like to Carlyle, who he hired because of Carlyle’s access to posh society. Luckily for Barnum, his failure to recognize his folly does not end in death for himself or anyone close to him as it does with true tragic heroes.

However, his folly is made much more obvious and frustrating by the fact that he is simultaneously trying to fit into posh society, he is trying to create a place for those shunned by society more generally. At one point, he says, “Well they’re laughing anyway, kid, so you might as well get paid.” Capitalist society shuns non-normative bodies; Barnum recruits those same bodies to turn a profit in that society. Barnum is also trying to bring joy to people’s lives—as evidenced by his interactions with the newspaper critic, James Gordon Bennett, and Carlyle. Throughout the story, he seems to embrace this joy and distance himself from it. In the end, Barnum learns his lesson: that money and fame don’t provide fulfillment the way relationships with other people do.

Just as Barnum works to find purpose and use within capitalism, so too do the performers find belonging. They all find meaning in being able to earn a living, do something they enjoy or are good at, and find folks who were similarly shunned. Many of their bodies are non-normative. They don’t fit within the mold prescribed by capitalism and rejected by society. Lettie Lutz, the bearded woman, is hidden within the laundry where Barnum finds her. Charles Stratton, Tom Thumb, is hidden by his mother. Anne and W.D. Wheeler are black performers in a world that only truly accepts white performers. Despite the fact that Barnum essentially abandons this group during his ill-conceived misadventure with Lind, they stay with the show, and with him. The circus gives them a home and, although they are spectacles, they find purpose. Again, this is within capitalism, but alternative forms of kinship provide the performers a home they never had: “You don’t get it Barnum, it’s not about the money. Our own mothers were ashamed of us, they hid us our whole lives.” Lutz’s point is that the profitability of the show holds less importance to the performers than their value as individuals to each other and the show. At the end, when all seems lost, the performers help bolster Barnum after the fire burns the theater and bankruptcy threatens to end the entire show. At the end of the movie, Barnum brings back his circus, this time under the big top tent we all recognize, he prioritizes his family over wealth. The last picture of Barnum we are presented with is with Charity watching their daughters’ ballet performance. His new measure of wealth is time spent watching his daughters grow up.

Contrarily to Barnum, Carlyle escapes the class he was born into. The pursuit of wealth does not add to his life. During “The Other Side,” when Barnum is persuading Carlyle to join him, the emptiness of the lives of the rich becomes apparent. Carlyle is hesitant at first, but after he commits himself to the circus, and the people who make it, he does his best. It takes him a while to completely reject the norms of post society, but he eventually does so—and ends up happy. Of course, to learn his lesson fully, he almost has to die. Just before the climactic tragedy, Carlyle confronts his father: “Father the world is changing, and I refuse to be a part of yours.” This allows him to fully integrate himself into the circus.

A further point of conflict within Barnum’s narrative is his goal of bringing joy to people who are stuck in misery while he himself is trying to attain entre into the society he sees as miserable. This illustrates one of the dichotomies of the middle class. Attainment of any level of success is almost nullified by the pursuit of more. There is an argument that the middle class does not actually exist; it is simply the most successful of the working class pretending to have more wealth than they actually do. The middle class is one tragedy away from poverty. We see this twice within this film. Near the beginning, Barnum works in an office for a trading company. When the company loses its ships and must declare bankruptcy, the Barnum family is in peril. Borrowing money from the bank by pretending to own the ships that his former company lost, Barnum creates the circus. Later, his folly compounds the tragedy of the fire at the theater. Without his folly, the circus could possibly have rebuilt, but still would have needed to borrow money to do so.

A final theme throughout the film is the importance of fantasy. Barnum’s circus originates in his desire to build “a place where people can see things they’ve never seen before.” Fantasy and reality are interwoven. Fantasies can be over the top spectacles; they are improbably situations that pull at the edges of reality. The edge of our imagination is the edge of reality. By imagining something we imbue it with realness. Barnum’s circus is filled with improbably people with spectacular abilities. The world created within the circus becomes a place of fantasy in resistance to and support of the outside reality. The fantasy resists the outside world in that everyone is accepted, the performers make their own family, and non-normative bodies are accepted for what they can do. But the circus also supports the outside world by allowing an escape that in physically enclosed, where folks can enjoy a distraction without critically endangering the system.

Ultimately, the circus and the film provide joy and distraction to their audiences, wherever they come from. It does not argue for an end to capitalism, which is for the best, as the general audience would not believe that. It does, however, argue that there is space within capitalism for fantasy and the creation of alternative forms of kinship, which provide sanctuary from a world working to kill you. As audience members, then, we are invited into a physically enclosed space, to enjoy a performance like we’ve never seen, to be distracted and diverted, before leaving the theater to return to our ordinary lives. Fissures exist within our reality as they exist within the reality of the film. We can find our own spaces to resist capitalism (especially the racist, sexist, hetero-normative capitalism of contemporary American society). While we may not be able to topple the system, by exploiting the cracks and living in moments of fantasy, it is possible to find home.