A friend of mine was tweeting about Hamilton, and I had the most cursed revelation: Hamilton is basically the Forrest Gump of its time. I think Hamilton is much better — this could be generational bias, but it doesn’t really matter, because where we fall in loving/hating these pieces of culture doesn’t matter to the conversation I want to have about how they exist in weirdly similar spaces within the culture.
They were both sensations. They made a lot of money, and won a lot of awards. Hamilton seeped into the greater cultural conversation in a way that most Broadway shows don’t. Forrest Gump had a long life outside of its theatrical release, on home video, and in endless parody. They were both huge deals. And it’s absolutely wild to me that they were so successful. I wrote about how weird Gump’s success is, and nothing has made it make more sense to me. Hamilton is a wonderful piece of art, but it’s still a hip hop musical about the founding founders, and the fact that it was a huge cultural sensation is absolutely ridiculous. “Hip-hop musical about the founding fathers” sounds like a MadLibs answer. It’s success is a testament to Lin-Manuel Miranda’s talent, but also some real wild shit. Gump and Hamilton are remarkable objects, and the magnitude of their success is never not going to be weird.
Thinking about Hamilton helps me make sense of Forrest Gump — sometimes there is just an agreement that something is awesome, and it is embraced and celebrated for its boldness. Living through Hamilton fever was really fun, and exciting, and if this is how people felt about Forrest Gump, then good for them I guess? Sometimes things just hit right, and become the zeitgeist.
But why these things, at these moments?
They’re representative of the democratic presidents who were in office when they came out. Forrest Gump captures the boomer neoliberalism of Clinton. Hamilton speaks to the increased focus on representation and diversity in the Obama era. Both ask big questions about what America is, and why it’s important. Gump has a thread of cynicism, and Hamilton is speaking back to the flaws it finds with the founders, but they’re both ultimately patriotic, finding value in the ideal of America even when the reality falls short.
I don’t have a conclusion here, I just think it’s fascinating. I feel sort of bad comparing Hamilton, a play I really respect, to Forrest Gump, a deeply cursed object that I would like to shoot into the sun, but it makes sense, right? There’s something here! Or maybe Forrest Gump fully broke my brain. That’s also a possibility.
PICTURE OF THE CAT
My submission to the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art. It tells a beautiful story of a boy who thinks he wants ice cream.
WHAT I WATCHED YESTERDAY
In preparation for sharing my definitive 2019 film rankings I finally got around to watching Uncut Gems, something I had hoped to catch at the Riverview last year but then pandemic. The reputation of this movie is that it’s incredibly stressful, and I’ve been feeling incredibly stressed, so I thought it would be fun to introduce some new fictional stress into my life, just for variety’s sake. What a great idea. This is indeed a very stressful movie, and I imagine it would have been even more so in a theater where I couldn’t knit or bother the cat or look at my phone. So I guess I should thank the world for saving me from putting myself through that? But it’s also a very well made movie. I explained the plot to Gus when they got home from work last night — somehow they had even avoided the memes! It sure is a lot of plot that I did not explain well, but also the plot is not the point. It’s about a man, played by Adam Sandler, who keeps on fucking up his life. Stuff happens. I am not going to have a take on Uncut Gems in 2021. The world has progressed past the need for takes on Uncut Gems. Sandler should have gotten an Oscar nomination. I think my dad watched this movie early into the pandemic because it’s on Netflix and he likes Sandler? If my dad has a take on Uncut Gems I will let you know.
SONG OF THE DAY
This oral history of the A*teens isn’t all that exciting, but it did make me deeply nostalgic for the A*teens. They were deeply important to my childhood years spent listening to Radio Disney.
I think you're really onto something with Gump / Hamilton. FWIW (nothing), I think FG is neither as terrible as its detractor say, nor as great as its champions say. It was immediately, though, a hipness litmus test -- one of those things the Truly Cool regarded as the epitome of bourgeois cluelessness, and that, in my experience, was true from the start. Hamilton is a little bit that, too, but the love for it has been far more of a -- "grassroots" is far from the right word; you'd need something that indicated a super-rarified, bourgie-hipster variety of grass -- phenomenon. The fact that it was a Broadway show, for which tickets were legendarily hard to get (and expensive) made it, and the over-the-top enthusiasm of some of its champions turned me off on it so much I don't think I could ever make myself watch it. I'm probably missing out! But a weird kind of virtue-signalling accompanied HAMILTON fandom that just pissed me off. Add to that the serious historical inaccuracies -- the really egregious overstatement of Hamilton's opposition to slavery, and the lionization of the Founder people on the New Deal left used to dismiss as a near-fascist -- and I just can't. I think GUMP's politics can be read in more ambiguous ways, at least as far as the movie is concerned. Unlike HAMILTON, it's not an overtly political statement. And it doesn't pretend to be historically accurate -- the whole pretense is that history seems nonsensical. I'm sure I'm being unfair to HAMILTON, to some degree, because I have resisted seeing or hearing it. But no group of die-hard FORREST GUMP fans ever insisted it was the Greatest Thing Ever, and that "I love FG more than anyone, which is a great credit to ME!" which I honestly saw with some HAMILTON fans (some, not all -- and it's partly because there was no social media when FG was in theaters).
really liked the Gump v. hamilton essay