The creative team behind the film had started out with a simple, flashy, embellished version of P. T. Barnum's life and legacy. But when Donald Trump was installed in a bloodless coup and proceeded to take a great steaming dump all over basic human decency, the script was revised to work from a new angle that, true to the man it's based on, didn't just flip the Trump Administration the bird; it did so while riding backwards on a donkey and dressed as a giant penis.
Barnum is most famous and remembered not for the circus company that bore his name for over a century, but for his unique approach to the "human curiosities" sideshow, or what were termed "freak shows" at the time. Medical science was still in its infancy -- 1890s America still legitimately believed in vampires as the cause of "consumption" (what we know today as tuberculosis) -- so people with extreme deformities or mental disorders were a subject of revulsion. Others before Barnum had managed to turn the disgust into fascination, but it was Barnum's showmanship and marketing of "freaks" like General Tom Thumb and bearded ladies as actual performers that transformed public opinion of them into something wholly positive (Charles "Tom Thumb" Stratton was an international sensation, and his marriage to Lavinia Warren, another Little Person, was the celebrity wedding of its day).
In the current era when everyone from Black people to Mexicans to Muslims to transgender people is being increasingly reviled simply for being different, the message that needed to be sent was becoming more and more obvious. And it's something the crew felt a duty to put out there.
You can see the beginnings of this thread in the song "Come Alive" when Barnum is recruiting the freaks. Selling them the chance at being paid to be themselves, and to be free and out in the open:
I see it in your eyesIt's essentially the same thing he sells Carlyle in their number ("The Other Side"), the chance to both make money and be free of the constraints of upper-class respectable society in which he's comfortable financially but his soul is on life support ("Now is this really how you like to spend your days? Whiskey and misery and parties and plays?"). The only difference between Carlyle and the freaks is the latter have nothing to lose. The end result is the same for both in that they get to finally make a living being who they are.
You believe that lie
That you need to hide your face
Afraid to step outside
So you lock the door
But don't you stay that way
Now, Barnum himself is far from perfect. He's a huckster at this point, barely believing his own hype about personal empowerment that he's hawking to the freaks. But it doesn't really matter, because they believe him. And in turn, believe in themselves. Performing and being showcased as entertainers and seeing the cheers and applause from the crowds at the museum for the first time is otherworldly for people who have spent their whole lives being pariahs.
It's this rift, between the man Barnum sold himself to be and the deeply selfish asshole he was turning into, that really sets up his fall later on. But unlike the Wheelers, he has a net to catch him: the freaks, who have become his literal fire-forged family, whether he realized it or not.
For all of its historical inaccuracies, this is one part of the real-life Barnum that the movie nails perfectly. Barnum began his career as a pretty awful human being, exploiting a loophole in New York's anti-slavery laws in the 1830s to lease a blind, mostly paralyzed elderly black woman named Joice Heth for exhibition. Many of Barnum's initial "curiosities" featured the kind of in-your-face racism that permeated antebellum New York City.
But as with most good stories, real and fabricated, there's a twist.
While a huckster who sold his audiences glittery crowd-pleasing fantasies, the other side to real-life Barnum is that he paid his performers handsomely and made sure they were physically cared for, well into old age. Including those like the Davis brothers, a pair of mentally challenged Little People siblings, whom he could have easily gotten away with cheating. While he did exploit them in the most literal sense, it's important to remember that this was the 1840s; there were no other opportunities for "freaks" to make a living other than sideshows. There was certainly no job they could hold that would net them $200,000 in the mid-19th century (the equivalent of more than $5 million in today's money).
It's the kind of delicious, popcorn-flavored irony that only a troll like Barnum would revel in. He played to all sorts of bigotry to get the public to open their wallets, and then turned around and paid the very people they looked down upon more money than the haughty crowds would ever see in their entire lifetimes.
We don't know what made real-life Barnum change his mind later and join the abolitionists. But the fact is he did, even switching parties and running as a Republican during his stint in the Connecticut legislature in 1867 (when the Republicans were the literal party of Lincoln). While The Greatest Showman notably shies away from Barnum's real-life racist exhibitions, it does touch on his early bigotry when he starts to abandon the freaks (who feature prominently people of color) in favor of the blonde, blue-eyed Jenny Lind.
And again, while the film doesn't directly address Barnum's political ventures, it still acknowledges his change of heart in other ways. Most notably, in the penultimate musical number "From Now On" in which Barnum, after losing the museum to fire and his wife and daughters to his lust for fame, realizes that the family he built was what he really wanted, even if he was too blinded by having money and fame for once in his life to see it:
For years and years, I chased their cheersIt’s one of the greatest things about this movie; Barnum may be the protagonist and the star. But the movie flat-out states that he and the circus owe their success to the freaks. That for as much as Barnum helped them be what they are, open and proud, they are key to him having a show at all.
At the crazy speed of always needing more
But when I stop and see you here
I remember who all this was for!
And nowhere is this more evident than in their tearjerking showstopper, "This Is Me." At the height of Barnum’s race and insatiable thirst for more, he keeps them out of Jenny Lind’s post-concert soireé in order to impress the upperclassmen since he wants their money. The freaks, led by Lettie the Bearded Lady, use the very confidence Barnum sold them to crash the party.
The scene is the most memorable and moving one of the whole film for so many reasons, not the least of which is it being written as an artfully direct "fuck you" to the results of the 2016 election. But in the spirit of Barnum himself, it goes way beyond that.
In the latter half of the 20th century, freak shows saw a sharp decline in popularity and a very quick phase-out, as advances in medical science took the mystique out of physical deformities and mental and neurological disorders. But human nature being what it is, we’ll always need people to look down upon and shun for being too different. We always need a Tall Poppy to cut.
Beginning in the 1940s, the visible LGBT community became that group. We became the new freaks, with our crazy makeup, stuffed bras, loud and clashing colors, shaved heads, dyed hair, multiple piercings, giant tattoos, and general not giving a single paltry fuck anymore. And the freak show -- the hiring and display of people on the fringes of society for the entertainment of those within it -- was reborn from its (well-deserved) ashes as Vaudeville and burlesque revivals. Which in turn became the bedrock of the musical theatre golden age beginning in the 1950s.
The arts, and particularly theatre, has always been a safe haven for freaks, whatever that word has meant. In the mid-19th century, it was people with too many or too few limbs, odd-shaped heads, exceptionally hairy women, Little People, and giants. In the mid-20th, it was men and women and everyone in between who didn’t obey the social rules governing who you could be attracted to or the clothes and makeup you could wear. The stage and the theatre has welcomed them all, throughout history. The original "low-brow entertainment" was the one place where people deemed too "other" everywhere else could finally be celebrated and even loved.
"This Is Me" is a deliberate love and thank-you letter to all the queer people who have kept theatre alive for the last century or so, by reclaiming it as our own modern freak show. Where we’re paid to be ourselves, and America at least pretends to love us for a couple hours.
In this way, Barnum himself goes beyond being a complex character. He represents the old guard American attitude toward poverty, wealth, and diversity, and its evolution. He goes from viewing poverty as a moral flaw he must overcome in order to be successful and worthy in the eyes of the elite to seeing the snobbery of the rich as the moral flaw, and neither needing nor wanting their approval. He goes from seeing those who are different as useful tools to achieve success to seeing them as equals deserving of the same respect he is. For they also came from nothing and risked it all.
Likewise, Carlyle represents the next generation, viewing extreme wealth as not worth the wound in his soul that is pretending to be someone he isn’t, and that the social class one is born into should not be the sole determinant of one’s future ("It’s up to you, it’s up to me, no one can say what we get to be!"). He also views those who are different as fellow humans, deserving the same basic decency as anybody else.
Hence, Barnum passing the cane of ringmaster on to him. As the older generation’s harmful attitudes die off and evolve and as the newer generation takes over, the Greatest Show On Earth -- humanity itself -- gets better and better.
Because as the real-life Barnum said, and as the film quotes him, "the noblest art is that of making others happy."
