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).
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
Hamilton gets my vote!