The Greatest Showman, an unabashed movie musical loosely based on the life of P.T. Barnum, just hit theaters. It is a delightful celebration of the musical genre with imaginative visuals, well-crafted song and dance numbers, and a broad strokes message of acceptance that offers a few hours of feel-good escapism in an end-of-year climate that desperately needs it. Today, the biggest movies may be superhero flicks, but there was a time when movie musicals were the dominant Hollywood genre, and when people paid big bucks to see their favorite stars burst out into song and dance on a regular basis. If you look at the highest-grossing films of all time, by year, you’ll see South Pacific (1958), Mary Poppins (1964), The Sound of Music (1965), Funny Girl (1968), and Grease (1978) all make the list. If you expand the list to include highest-grossing films of the 1930s and ’50s, or even Disney animated musicals, then musicals pop up even more frequently. Today, it is not uncommon to hear someone say they don’t like musicals because it is unrealistic for people to burst out into song or dance as part of their everyday life. However, the average moviegoer has no problem believing that someone could swing from skyscraper to skyscraper using only their web-shooters. It’s the form of illusion we’ve chosen as a pop culture generation. Perhaps it has something to do with the way we were eased into it. Hollywood didn’t throw us into the superhero genre deep end with the deity-laden space road trip of Thor: Ragnarok; it gave us Peter Parker, an ordinary kid who developed very specific powers as a result of a spider bite. It gave us Tony Stark, the dude who built his superpowered suit in a cave. It gave us mutants, people who develop abilities along with a universal human experience we can all relate to: puberty. It might help that modern musicals, like The Greatest Showman and Les Miserables and La La Land before it, are being released to a Millennial generation that grew up on Disney animated musicals, and who are therefore potentially much more able to suspend disbelief in the necessary ways to enjoy a movie musical. The Baby Boomer generation more or less rejected the movie musical’s form of unreality, causing studios to make musicals that centered the musical sequences in a logical context. In 1972’s Cabaret, all of the musical sequences take place on the stage, with the film cutting any non-diegetic numbers from the stage musical it is adapted from. The same strategy was undertaken for 2002’s Chicago, in which all of the musical numbers are either diegetic or in Roxy Hart’s head, a departure from the stage musical. 2001’s Moulin Rouge!, 2012’s Les Miserables, 2016’s La La Land, and this year’s The Greatest Showman represent a shift away from that strategy and an attempt to stage more traditional movie musicals where the unreality does not need to be explained away by a stage version or a hallucination. Thus far, the attempts have been met with success, with those first three examples enjoying both box office and criticial success. We’ll have to wait and see how The Greatest Showman does—the film’s marketing campaign seemed to want to keep the fact that it was, in fact, a musical relatively hidden—but I wonder if perhaps we’re past the need for an origin story in our genres of unreality. We’re certainly tired of them when it comes to the superhero genre. Could that extend to a renewed capacity to suspend disbelief for a movie musical, too? It also might help that The Greatest Showman is clever in its attempts to ground the viewer in some recognized version of reality by giving us a place in its in-universe audience. Throughout the film, there are dozens of shots of the circus’ audience joining in with the troupe’s musical numbers through laughing, clapping, and even singing along. The message is clear: anyone who wants to be a part of this world, can be. Just start singing. It’s the difference between a backstage musical like The Greatest Showman and a musical set in the “real” world, like La La Land or Once. In the former, we are encouraged to be part of the world of the film as a member of the diegetic audience. In the latter, there is a narrative distance, a fourth wall that keeps us separate in some way. Talking to Digital Spy about the difference between The Greatest Showman and Logan, Jackman said: “I mean, one couldn’t be lighter and one couldn’t be darker, really. I think, maybe me and the audience needed some kind of antidote to that, and that’s what this is.” For all of their similarities, there is a joy to the movie musical that soothes a particular part of our cultural psyche that the superhero genre just can’t reach. They’re different instruments with different specialties, even when they’re applied to the same “problem”: i.e. as a mythic form of working through our national anxieties and reinforcing the dominant structures of our culture. In other words, as a way to explain to ourselves who we are—or at least who we think we are. From where I’m sitting, admittedly as someone who is already sold on the idea that discussing pop culture has value, The Greatest Showman‘s logic is sound: If we want to use stories to have necessary discussions about what kind of society we want to be, it has to be in a language that everyone understands and has access to. Otherwise, we’re leaving way too many people out of the conversation. “Does it bother you that everything you’re selling is fake?” asks the theater critic, this film’s equivalent of that dude at the party who has never read a comic or seen an MCU movie, but has an opinion on The Modern Superhero. “Do these smiles look fake?” Barnum asks in response. Just because it’s entertaining, doesn’t mean it’s empty.
