#tgs hate

I was asked if the reason I disliked TGS was because of its fictionalized portrayal of Barnum. Here is my response, which I am saving here for posterity due to the ephemeral nature of Facebook comments.  ----- Part of it is that. That's not all of it though. It is kinda tone deaf as fuck to adapt the story of a slave-owning exploitative capitalist and cast him as something of a woke hero of the downtrodden, but I also have just general issues with the movie in general from a plot, music, framing, and characterization standpoint. I don't think I'll copy my whole rants right this second but it can basically be boiled down to: The music felt generic and uninspired. This is more personal, I suppose, but I prefer music in musicals to have some bearing on or reference the plot. Approximately 1.5 songs in TGS do this. It feels like a jukebox musical of contemporary top 40s, despite the fact it is a 100% original score. The songs all sound the same and not only that, they all sound the same of P&P's other work, complete with the same chord structures, similar instrumentation, and even similar themes. For instance, This Is Me bears a striking resemblance to You Will Be Found, musically. It feels like P&P have forgotten how to write original music and everything here sounds like it was tailored for radio play first and to serve a narrative purpose a distant second. An addendum to that - Jenny Lind's opera song was egregious. It doesn't even make sense that they included her, given what they did with the character, but the entire scene killed my suspension of disbelief. I have minor quibbles with things like pacing, but ultimatelty I am most critical of the plot. There is no plot and there are no real dimensional characters. If you remove all the problematic elements of the musical you're still left with little to no story and very little in the way of characters. (Which makes the decision to cast Barnum in such a positive light even more bizarre because it really does not serve any narrative purpose and could have been literally anyone else). Barnum, for instance, is not an active agent in his own story. Things happen to him but we are never actually shown how or why. There are literally no stakes at any point in this film. He loses his job but don't worry he can commit consequence-free fraud to open his museum. When he can't sell tickets, his daughter offers him a gift-wrapped solution, and he is able to exploit people for money with extremely little shown effort on his part. When he can't get the snooty rich to appreciate him, he manages to make a shiny new Zac Efron friend who can apropos of nothing introduce him to Queen Victoria. He gets Jenny Lind to come to America without so much as a proper conversation. His wife leaves him for cheating and losing all their money, but he gets her back (bizarrely by train even though she's at her parents' house which it was previously established is right down the road; also she is framed as hysterical and irrational for not listening to him but that's another can of worms). When the museum burns down, Zac Efron and the Manic Pixie Dream Freaks bale him out no questions asked. He never had any real stakes, is never shown actually, the """plot""" acts on him, rather than him being the propelling agent of the plot. He has no real character traits to speak of, either. And neither do any of the other characters, for that matter, Most of the Freak characters can be boiled down to one trait if that. Hell, most of them don't even get names. And for some, it's not even explained why they even merit a place in a Freak Show. Is it because they're black....? Asian? Bald? It took me the second time seeing the movie before I realized that the two Asian men who look nothing like who stood kinda near each other were supposed to be Chang and Eng Bunker. The only Freaks given any real "spotlight" were Ann, Lettie, and Charles. And all of their subplots are dropped without real resolution. Charles gets all of a 6 lines of dialogue and we know that he is... cocky but insecure about being a little person, that's it. Lettie gets a bit more, but we know that she's simultaneously insecure about her beard and also empowered by it (though we are never given insight into where this empowerment came from, it is only relevant for This Is Me and there is no narrative build up to it). Ann is the only of the Freaks that gets a proper subplot (albeit one that is ultimately also dropped in favor of Barnum's nonsense), and is also a Freak because.... she's a beautiful black woman? Certainly, being a trapeze artist is a fairly specialized and unusual skill but not exactly "Freakish." We know that the narrative frames her as cold and uncaring when she rebuffs Zac Efron's advances for extremely logical reasons and that the narrative drops the Romeo and Juliet angle entirely - despite the fact the film takes place in pre-Civil War America. Hell, racism is never addressed by name in the narrative, despite that being what they are clearly angling at addressing. seriously, the issue of race and class divide is brought up with Ann's subplot and is subsequently dropped with little to no meaningful examination, and then dwarfed by Barnum's "plot." The Freaks in general function more like Manic Pixie Dream Girls, they have some conflict in regards to Barnum's treatment of them but ultimately exist to forgive, affirm, and support him while exhibiting little to no character of their own. It's extremely disquieting that Barnum's story is framed as equal to -- and larger than -- the strife faced by the Freaks. When the Museum burns down, for instance, the Freaks lose their home, but it is framed as Barnum's tragedy, and the Freaks sing to him to cheer him up and Zac Efron will even front him the money to rebuild, no questions asked. Barnum's minor and easily overcome setbacks are framed by the narrative as having equal or more weight than the systemic oppression of the people he employs/exploits. And that brings us back around to irl Barnum. Irl Barnum, an exploitative capitalist who literally owned several people who performed in his Freakshow, is the hero of this story. He's a white savior in a story that doesn't even make sense to have a white savior character -- A story which is ultimately a glitzy by the numbers rags to riches showbiz story which could have literally been about anyone else. And would have been more interesting if it had been about literally anyone else. The irl Charles, for instance, who had fascinating rags to riches story of his own. Or Lettie. Or Ann. This movie could have been a story about a marginalized person clawing their way up and finding a unique place in a world and culture which systemically oppresses them, against the backdrop of racism and classism hinted at but never substantiated in the film, but instead holds up and celebrates their oppressor. And worst of all -- it doesn't even have anything interesting to say about Barnum. They changed his story and personality so much that it literally could have been anyone else. A good plot can cover a multitude of sins, good music can spackle over holes in the plot, but this film, in my opinion, has neither a good plot nor good music and as such, exists only as a curiously and problematically positive portrayal of a man who ought to be the villain of this story.

I just wanna hammer home that this SHOULD have been a movie about Anne or one of the other “freak” characters finding their place in a world that is fundamentally opposed them and exploited them but was instead yet another film which celebrates an abusive and exploitative mediocre white man.