I was re-reading Patton Oswalt’s great book Silver Screen Fiend, updated to include several of his essays about film. One of them caught my attention—a piece about 100 of his favorite moments in film, be they performances, whole sequences, or effects. Since I revere Patton, I decided to write my own list of moments that I think about constantly. Not necessarily the most iconic, or the “greatest,” but the ones that touch something in me or provide a new understanding of how actors, cameras, or sound can communicate emotion. These are 100 of the first ones that came to mind—I could easily fill another article with a completely different 100 from different movies. So here goes.

The camera moving in on Joan Fontaine when she realizes Louis Jourdan doesn’t remember her in Letter from an Unknown Woman.

Eddie Murphy running across the freeway in Bowfinger.

The little boy watching his dad jump on the bike at the end of Bicycle Thieves.

The bicycle race at the end of Breaking Away.

Ian Richardson taking Jonathan Pryce to his new office in Brazil.

Roy Scheider watching Ann Reinking and Erzsebet Foldi do “Everything Old Is New Again” in All That Jazz.

Donald O’Connor running up the wall in Singin’ in the Rain.

Kevin Kline in A Fish Called Wanda.

Joe Pesci in My Cousin Vinny: “Everything that guy just said is bullshit.”

The look on Ben Kingsley’s face when he realizes he has to explain just how awful Ralph Fiennes is to Liam Neeson in Schindler’s List.

“Silly Games” in Lovers Rock.

“I Lied to You” in Sinners.

Daveed Diggs’ rap at the end of Blindspotting.

Gene Wilder in Blazing Saddles: “These are people of the land. The common clay of the new West. You know – morons.”

John Cazale saying “Wyoming” in Dog Day Afternoon.

Edward G. Robinson in Double Indemnity.

The final line of I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang.

John Goodman in The Big Lebowski: “You want a toe? I can get you a toe by 3:00 this afternoon, with nail polish. These fucking amateurs.”

The final scene of Burn After Reading.

Antonio Banderas checking in with his ex in Pain and Glory.

“What have the Romans ever done for us?” in Life of Brian.

Toshiro Mifune’s death in Throne of Blood.

Chishū Ryū peeling the apple at the end of Late Spring.

The cat bus in My Neighbor Totoro.

Eli Wallach in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.

Albert Brooks trying to convince Garry Marshall to give him back the money in Lost in America.

Beulah Bondi’s face on the train platform at the end of Make Way for Tomorrow.

Fredric March coming home to his family in The Best Years of Our Lives.

Gena Rowlands asking Peter Falk if he still loves her at the end of A Woman Under the Influence.

The Oprichniki’s musical number in Ivan the Terrible Part 2.

The woman running down the hall to correct the misprint in Mirror.

The camera moving in on Paul Newman when the verdict is read in The Verdict.

Moonstruck: “Dad, why are you crying?” “I’m confused.”

The first time Peter Simonischek appears as his alter ego in Toni Erdmann.

“My Rifle, My Pony and Me” in Rio Bravo.

Cagney tap dancing down the White House stairs in Yankee Doodle Dandy.

Peter O’Toole’s monologue in Ratatouille.

Larry Hagman as the translator in Fail Safe.

Walter Matthau’s face at the end of The Taking of Pelham One Two Three.

Christopher Plummer in The Insider: “That’s MISTER Wallace!”

The Fugitive: “I didn’t kill my wife.” “I don’t care!”

David Thewlis in Naked.

“The Carousel Waltz” in The Long Day Closes.

Rock Hudson getting the shit kicked out of him in the diner in Giant.

The magic candies in Céline and Julie Go Boating.

Ann Miller in Mulholland Drive.

James Cromwell dancing in Babe.

Philip Seymour Hoffman teaching Patrick Fugit how to be a rock critic in Almost Famous (uncut version.)

Pee-Wee Herman’s basement meeting about his stolen bike in Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure.

The waitress welcoming Jon Voight to Miami in Midnight Cowboy.

Yoda in The Last Jedi: “We are what they grow beyond. That is the burden of all masters.”

Tim Meadows introducing John C. Reilly to drugs in Walk Hard.

Bigger Than Life: “God saved Isaac!” “God was wrong!”

The trial of Chico in Duck Soup.

William Redfield patiently explaining (and re-explaining) to Walter Matthau that he’s broke in A New Leaf.

The husband and wife dancing to Dinah Washington’s “This Bitter Earth” in Killer of Sheep.

The Black acting school sketch in Hollywood Shuffle.

Mink Stole in Female Trouble: “I wouldn’t suck your dick if I was drowning and there was oxygen in your balls!”

The women in the jail cell chanting “we want the formula!” in Salt of the Earth.

David Lynch’s cameo as John Ford in The Fabelmans.

The guitar moving towards the camera and snapping back in Mad Max: Fury Road.

Kathleen Byron putting on the lipstick in Black Narcissus.

The 16mm and 35mm breaking at the ends of Acts I and II of Steve Jobs.

Tony Shalhoub and Stanley Tucci fighting on the beach in Big Night.

Yul Brynner sticking the gun between Horst Bucholz’s hands in The Magnificent Seven.

Bob Hoskins in Who Framed Roger Rabbit?

Michael Caine in The Muppet Christmas Carol.

Dorothy Malone literally dancing her father to death in Written on the Wind.

Kimberly Rivers rapping “I don’t need you to tell me that I’m amazing” in Trouble the Water.

Brian Cox as Robert McKee in Adaptation.

Kevin Kline beating up his friend who told him Barbra Streisand was too old for Yentl in In and Out.

The Weenie King in The Palm Beach Story.

The blind man destroying W.C. Fields’ store in It’s a Gift.

The witnesses in Reds.

Joel Grey watching Liza Minnelli from the wings singing “Maybe This Time” in Cabaret.

Boris Karloff’s eyes opening just before he’s sealed into the wall in Bedlam.

David Lean yelling “Who are you?” at Peter O’Toole at the Suez Canal in Lawrence of Arabia.

Robert Pattinson as the dictator at the end of The Childhood of a Leader.

Johnny Walker singing “Sar Jo Tera Chakraye” in Pyaasa (dubbed by Mohammed Rafi.)

Bing Bong in Inside Out.

Robert De Niro’s letter to his parents in Taxi Driver.

Philip Seymour Hoffman singing “Slow Boat to China” in The Master.

Jean-Louis Trintignant’s shadow disappearing during his conversation with the Professor in The Conformist.

The uncle climbing the tree in Amarcord.

Jim Piddock having to keep a straight face next to Fred Willard as the dog show commentators in Best in Show.

The banging in the hall during the first night in The Haunting. (Original version.)

The cat in Inside Llewyn Davis.

Candice Bergen laughing while Jack Nicholson and Art Garfunkel talk to her from offscreen in Carnal Knowledge.

The crowd yelling the names of other race riots at the police after they kill Radio Raheem in Do the Right Thing.

John Wayne kicking the guy in the face without looking in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.

Donald Sutherland asking Mary Tyler Moore what difference it made what he wore to the funeral in Ordinary People.

The bonfire in Portrait of a Lady on Fire.

Catherine O’Hara mouthing Fred Willard’s lines during the audition in Waiting for Guffman.

Robert Shaw’s monologue in Jaws.

The sound effect of the tugboat after Barbra Streisand finishes “Don’t Rain on My Parade” in Funny Girl.

Maximilian Schell going from speaking German to English in Judgment at Nuremberg.

Daffy pushing “The End” card away in Duck Amuck.

William Powell in My Man Godfrey.

Fred Willard (again) in A Mighty Wind: “Ay! Wha happened?”

The entire sequence of Hannibal escaping the jail in The Silence of the Lambs.

Everywhere I turn, I see Democrats arguing about whether or not they should embrace far-left personality Hasan Piker following Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed’s decision to campaign with him at an event this month. If you are one of the 55% of Democrats who haven’t heard of him (and I envy you), Piker is a Twitch streamer who has made millions through his 10-12 hour daily streams where he rants about how great socialism is and how lame Democrats are, while occasionally doing animal abuse. If Kamala Harris had won the 2024 election, he would probably remain on the fringe, but instead, some want to make him the Democratic Party’s Joe Rogan, given that he’s a young(ish) White man - a long-sought-after demographic - and can maybe bring people around to progressive issues like Gaza.

In case you can’t tell, I don’t like this guy—which is why I’ve avoided writing about him. I started out as a journalist writing snarky pieces taking down far left gadflies, and I’ve outgrown it because there’s only so many ways you can get a thousand words out of “this person sucks and their arguments do too.” So in the interest of my readers, and my sanity, I haven’t written anything about Hasan Piker.

And then I saw this clip from a Yale Debate Society event this week in which Piker uses near-identical language to Vladimir Putin to describe the collapse of the USSR:

Please forgive that the above tweet comes from the RNC, who would love nothing more than to tie the entire Democratic Party to Communists because there are some parts of this country where that works (namely the one that starts with “Flor” and ends with “ida”). Before you kill the messenger, know that this isn’t the first time Piker has said this. Here he is at Zohran Mamdani’s election night party not six months ago:

Since writing these articles, I’ve been devouring books on the Soviet Union1—mostly while my seven-month-old son sleeps on me—and in that time I’ve come to radical conclusion that the Soviet Union was bad. Not that you need reminding of that, but maybe you do, because the further it recedes from living memory, the more likely people think it couldn’t have been all that bad (much the way people argue about the Nazis today) and that its collapse was indeed terrible for Eastern Europe. “If a dictatorship is inevitable,” Piker said earlier that evening, “I’d rather have it be a dictatorship of the proletariat.” Well that’s exactly what the Soviet Union was, Hasan. And again—I cannot stress this enough—it was bad.

The difference between right-wing and left-wing dictatorships is that far-right dictators believe that societies suffer from too much freedom, as Mussolini argued in “The Doctrine of Fascism,” while left-wing dictators believe that the working class must be freed so that the state can institute policies that level the playing field. Vladimir Lenin obtained power and a strong following because the tired, poor huddled masses believed his argument that imposing Marxist principles on the country would bring new freedoms stemming from collectivism and reducing class and sexual inequality.

Of course, the actual outcome of Lenin’s policies resulted in the same hallmarks of right-wing authoritarianism: suppression of free speech, mass purges, the takeover of adjoining nations, and a scarcity of resources that furthered income inequality. Alexei Navalny writes in his memoir, Patriot, about having to wake up early to get on the breadline so his family would have something to eat. Know who never had to stand on a breadline? Stalin.

That not enough, Hasan? Let’s take a look at some numbers:

• 3.9 million—Number of people who died in the Holdomor, a genocide in Ukraine during which Stalin starved the farmers who populated the rural countryside. (Actual number probably higher.)

• 486—Maximum number of Gulags, the Soviet prison system established under Stalin’s reign which lasted until the early 1950s.

• 1.6 million—Estimated number of people who died in the Gulags between 1930 and 1956. (Actual number probably higher.)

• 1 million—Number of people killed during Stalin’s first Great Purge between 1937-38 out of the 7 million arrested.

• 14—Number of Eastern European states the Soviet Union took over in its 73-year existence.

And that’s to say nothing of the stifling of Russian artists and art, which flourished in the 19th century and even into the early years of the Soviet Union before socialist realism got imposed. Hasan Piker has never struck me as someone who cares about theater, so he probably isn’t interested in learning about the execution of Meyerhold, the censorship of Mikhail Bulgakov, the murder of Jewish stage actor Solomon Mikhoels and the forced shutdown of Alexander Tairov’s theater. But he doesn’t need to take a class on this—or read my essays—to understand how bad the suppression of artistic freedom was. All he needs to do is watch Battleship Potemkin, Man with a Movie Camera or any classic of early Soviet cinema and then compare it to The Fall of Berlin, the 1950 film in which Josef Stalin reunites two young lovers.2 Free societies don’t greenlight movies like that.

But there’s a larger problem with Piker’s statement, which isn’t just the fact that, again, Putin said basically the same thing—it’s that Piker has no problem praising dictatorships with left-wing roots. This past year he’s been to both China and Cuba, and said nothing but good things about both while downplaying or outright ignoring their gross human rights atrocities, including the Uyghur genocide, and praising leaders like Mao Zedong, who killed millions through famine and purges. Jeremiah D. Johnson did an excellent job collecting many of these incidents in a persuasive Twitter thread, so rather than restate what he did, I invite you to read it for yourself:

Democrats should run from Hasan Piker not because he has made antisemitic or sexist comments but because he does not see democracy itself as worth defending. Those who hyper-focus on the failures of the United States, particularly in post-WWII foreign affairs, often find themselves excusing dictatorships because if the U.S. is the bully, then Cuba, China or Russia must be victims. The answer to this ahistorical myopia is not shallow patriotism but a nuanced view of this nation as one that represents both the generosity and the cruelty of human nature. And it sure doesn’t include any revisionism of the Soviet Union.

Before going to Harvard, I majored in Performance Studies at Northwestern. One of the oldest departments in the school, Performance Studies began as oral speech training1 and by mid-century had evolved into adapting literature for the stage. Since I loved reading and theater, I chose Performance Studies instead of a theater major because it was more academically rigorous, and because I love adapting literature. I’ll confess it was not without its social downsides: I never got to take an acting class with the theater majors and wasn’t invited to any of their acting class parties. On the other hand, I got to take classes I would never have taken anywhere else, like “Performing Film Noir” and “Performing the American 1950s.”2 It also gave me the creative freedom to flex my muscles as a writer and director, which climaxed my junior year when I adapted John O’Hara’s Appointment in Samarra for the stage.

It should come as no surprise that the Russians love adapting literature for the stage. They have a rich history of literature to draw on, and the psychological realism of characters like Raskolnikov and Anna Karenina make them actors’ dream roles. Some of the greatest productions in modern Russian theater are adaptations of novels, most notably director Lev Dodin’s nine-hour play of Dostoevsky’s Demons, which is high on my list of Shows I Wish I’d Seen. Here are a few stage plays of novels that I did see from my first month of theatergoing:

The Sound and the Fury – A group of MXAT acting students devised and performed this adaptation of William Faulkner’s breakout novel, which changed my life when I read it in high school. The most memorable performance came from the actor who played Benjy Compson, the “idiot” son whose memories comprise the first fourth of the novel. His physical contortions as his siblings undressed him, limbs writhing out of control at the most basic of actions, allowed us to empathize with him without feeling like the actor (or Faulkner for that matter) condescended to him. Unfortunately, he promised he’d take us out drinking afterwards but he totally flaked on us. Not that I’m upset or anything.

The Master and Margarita – One of the 10 greatest novels of the 20^th century, Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita has become a staple of Russian theater, with most major companies having their own adaptation in the repertory. This production, directed by János Szász for MXAT, was only five years old at the time but already showed its age: the stage violence felt hokey, and although some of the digital backgrounds looked cool, the flying sequence where Margarita flew over aerial images of Moscow, felt like a bad imitation of Disney’s Soarin’ Over California. The adaptation also made the mistake of focusing primarily on the love story between the title characters and knocking the devil Woland and his associates to the side. This flattened the novel’s satiric edge and robbed the audience of the comic relief provided by Woland’s henchman Behemoth, the six-foot-tall Black cat whose constant swearing and drinking make him one of the funniest characters in all of literature (and played by Anora’s Yura Borisov in a recent film of the book).3 Still, I’m grateful to have seen it because it was the one play I saw to feature Igor Zolotovitsky, a wonderful actor who was my classmates’ acting teacher in Cambridge and Moscow, and who passed away last January at 63.

Sir Vantes: Donkey Hote – My first exposure to the theater of Dmitry Krymov, whom I profiled for The New York Times a few years ago. This wordless, 90-minute play based on Don Quixote starred two people standing on top of each other in a long coat – a.k.a. Vincent Adultman from BoJack Horseman – as Cervantes’ country gentleman who goes insane from reading too many second-rate Medieval romances and thinks himself a knight. In a scene echoing the chapter where men come and steal his books to try and “cure” him, Donkey Hote (the misspelling is intentional) undergoes an autopsy behind a white muslin, during which the actors pull silhouettes out of his head shaped like images from the novel, such as him attacking the windmill. Donkey Hote-Adultman reappeared in Krymov’s adaptation of Our Town, Everyone’s Here, filmed for Stage Russia and streaming on Kanopy.

The Karamazovs – I mentioned in my essay on An Ideal Husband that Konstantin Bogomolov’s five-hour adaptation of Dostoevsky’s magnum opus was one of the few plays I saw that broke me – as one of my teachers said, “it’s also too long for Russians!” It still had its moments: for his performance as evil patriarch and murder victim Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov, actor Igor Mirkurbanov used the exact same high-pitched squeal that my professor at Northwestern, Gary Saul Morson, used for Fyodor’s voice. It also featured Alexei Kravchenko as a perfectly cast Ivan Karamazov, and he delivered his monologue about atheism very well. But overall, the show was plodding, with none of the dark humor present throughout Dostoevsky’s works. It’s one of the few shows I’ve ever walked out of.

Dead Souls – Widely regarded as the funniest novel in the Russian language, Nikolai Gogol’s Dead Souls is about Pavel Ivanovich Chichikov, a former government official and con artist who buys dead serfs off of their owners, who keep their names in the register even after they died, a common practice among serf-holders. Along the way, Chichikov meets townspeople who range from depressed widows to braggart hunters, all the while getting the better of them. Although the book is episodic and has no linear plot, its many comedic setpieces make it ideal for stage adaptation.

Kirill Sebrennikov, Dead Souls’ director, was then one of the rising stars of Russian theater and an innovator in theater space. At the time, he was the artistic director of the Gogol Center. Before he took it over in 2013, the Gogol Center had a reputation as the worst theater in Moscow. By the time I was there it was one of the best, not just because of his artistic programming but because he’d transformed the space into something akin to off-Broadway theaters like Signature and the New Studio on 42^nd, with a café out front and an auditorium that could be reconfigured from proscenium to arena setting. I always took advantage of the café whenever I went, both to get work done and to mingle with other theatergoers.

Serebrennikov’s Dead Souls began with the wheels coming off Chichikov’s wagon on the road, a metaphor symbolizing how you can’t drive through a country that has never fully organized its roads – how can you drive across a tundra? Gogol’s protagonists, like Chichikov, struggle through chaos without attempting to impose their own rules on it, rather just chipping away at the existing order one bit at a time, like buying dead serfs. The antagonists in his works are often those who desire to impose their systems on others, such as in his play Marriage, about a man whose best friend forces him to get married, which director Anatoly Efros depicted as a metaphor for communism in his famous 1970s production. Serebrennikov played with aspects from Marriage, as Chichikov weasels his way out of a forced marriage before getting sent to prison. The production as a whole was hysterical and introduced me to one of my favorite actors in Moscow, Yevgeny Sangadzhiyev, who donned drag to play the wife of one of Chichikov’s victims. It was also the only show I saw in my whole study abroad to have English subtitles.

Alas, the excitement that the Gogol Center brought to Russian theater is no more: it closed following the invasion of Ukraine, and Serebrennikov, who’d provoked authorities for years and even undergone house arrest for his outspoken political views and his open homosexuality, fled the country. Their loss.

During my time in Moscow, I took a class in an apartment where a woman had her eyes gouged out by Stalin’s secret police.

The apartment belonged to Vsevolod Meyerhold, who was, along with Konstantin Stanislavsky, one of the two most influential Russian stage directors of the 20^th century. His apartment is now a museum dedicated to his life and work. Nina Nikolaevna, who ran the museum and taught our class, was a Meyerhold obsessive who possessed the uncanny superpower of tying anything that you brought up to Meyerhold. And I mean anything—I swear to God, if I’d asked her to tie The Room to Meyerhold, she could have done it.1

It was the least interesting course I took in Moscow, since I had already taken several classes on Meyerhold in Cambridge and in undergrad at Northwestern, and Nikolaevna didn’t add anything new to my understanding of his work. But my inability to concentrate on her lectures had as much to do with the location as anything else.

In June of 1939, Meyerhold was arrested in Leningrad for a speech he gave at the All-Union Conference of Theatre Directors, in which he decried the barren Moscow theater scene that Stalin had decimated. According to Meyerhold biographer Yuri Yelagin, he said:

“Without art, there is no theater! Go visit the theaters of Moscow. Look at their drab and boring presentations that resemble each other and are each worse than the others. . . . Everything is gloomily well-regulated, averagely arithmetical, stupefying and murderous in its lack of talent. Is that your aim? If it is-oh! you have done something monstrous! You have thrown out the baby along with bathwater. In hunting down formalism, you have eliminated art.” [italics mine]

A month after his arrest, the NKVD broke into his apartment and stabbed his wife, actress Zinada Reich, 17 times, gouging out her eyes in the process. Her blood was still on the wall when the caretaker found her body. The apartment was passed on to NKVD chief Lavrenty Beria, a child rapist and torturer played chillingly by Simon Russell Beale in Armando Iannuci’s The Death of Stalin. To this day, we do not know the identities of her assailants or the motivation for her murder.

My home in LA is up the street from where OJ killed Ron and Nicole2, and I feel more comfortable walking by it than I ever felt in Meyerhold’s apartment.

Dictatorships persecute artists because they speak truth to power, but not only for that. Art is abhorrent to the totalitarian because it provides people with an alternative to the governing “ism.” My teacher, Moscow Art Theater (MXAT) dramaturg Anatoly Smeliansky, once asked Mikhail Gorbachev how the Soviet Union ended without a war. Gorbachev said, “Soviet life had a lot of problems, but it built libraries all over the country, so matter where you were, you could find Chekhov and Tolstoy. If you read those authors, you know what life is about and you will be done with Communism.”

Artistic innovation in Russian theater stagnated in the 1930s because Stalin mandated that all theater conform to Socialist Realism, which demanded that plays conform to Soviet ideology, and be representational and relatable to the masses—so basically, propaganda. Due to MXAT’s status, Stalin and his culture ministers made it and Stanislavsky the standard for all theater to aspire to: it had already premiered the most famous plays in the country’s recent history—most of which had been realistic—and developed a system for training actors that could be copied elsewhere. In making Socialist Realism the only acceptable theatrical “ism,” anyone who dared express an alternative point of view automatically became an enemy.

Meyerhold, who embraced every ism that permeated Russia at the turn of the 20^th century, might have been safe if he had stuck to realism, but his restless personality would never have allowed that. As an original ensemble member of MXAT, he played Konstantin in Stanislavsky’s 1898 production of Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull, which cemented the theater’s reputation and established the play as a modern classic after its disastrous 1896 premiere in St. Petersburg. In 1901, he originated the role of Baron Tusenbach in Three Sisters, a role Chekhov wrote for him. Stanislavsky viewed him as a prodigal son, but Meyerhold broke with him due to his burgeoning social conscience (Stanislavsky was largely apolitical), as well as a dispute over the company’s financial restructuring.

Meyerhold then moved to Kherson, in Ukraine, where he staged and/or acted in more than 150 plays in two years—in his first season alone, he did 79 plays. One of them was Chekhov’s final play, The Cherry Orchard, in which he played the upstart tutor Trofimov, a role he probably would have originated if he’d stayed at MXAT. Both Chekhov and Meyerhold did not like Stanislavsky’s production of the play, because he made the same mistake I’ve seen many directors make: they interpret it as pure tragedy and ignore how it’s really Chekhov’s Arrested Development.3 This excerpt from a letter Meyerhold wrote to Chekhov about the production offers a glimpse into how he had begun to expand his artistry:

“Your play is abstract… Above all else, the director must get the sound of it. In Act Three, against the background of the mindless stamping of feet—it is this ‘stamping’ that must be heard – enters Horror, completely unnoticed by the guests: ‘The cherry orchard is sold.’ They dance on. ‘Sold’—still they dance. When one reads the play, the effect of the third act is the same as the ringing in the ears of the sick man in your story ‘Typhus.’ A sort of itching. Jollity with overtones of death. In this act there is something Maeterlinckian, something terrifying.”

“Maeterlinckian” refers to Belgian playwright and theorist Maurice Maeterlinck, whose essays on symbolism influenced Meyerhold and other Russian writers who embraced it as an alternative to realism. In plays like The Blue Bird, Maeterlinck emphasized fairytale-like settings with characters who were more allegorical than realistic, a fascination with death and fate, and a desire to make theatergoing an act of secular religiosity itself, all of which Meyerhold would strive for. He returned to MXAT in 1905 to establish a studio adjacent to the main company that would rehearse and produce Symbolist plays. The studio did not succeed, as its first production was cancelled following a disastrous dress rehearsal, but his interest in Symbolism rubbed off on Stanislavsky: his 1908 Symbolist production of The Blue Bird was one of his biggest hits; and he collaborated with British designer Edward Gordon Craig on an influential 1912 Hamlet.

A year after the studio’s closure, Meyerhold staged Alexander Blok’s The Fairground Booth in St. Petersburg, a play about the French clown Pierrot (whom Meyerhold played in one of his greatest performances) and his pursuit of the beautiful Columbina. This Symbolist production demonstrated how clashing styles like circus and commedia, and the use of character archetypes like Pierrot and Columbina, created a formal tension that could replace Aristotelian principles of dramatic tension. Meyerhold called this “grotesque”:

“It is the style that reveals the most wonderful horizons to the creative artist…. The grotesque does not recognize the purely debased or the purely exalted. The grotesque mixes opposites, consciously creating harsh incongruity…. The basis of the grotesque is the artist’s constant desire to switch the spectator from the plane he has just reached to another that is totally unforeseen.”

Up to 1917, Meyerhold continued to work through Symbolism and the grotesque, developing new techniques with his actors that moved beyond Stanislavsky’s realism so that they spent less time trying to perfectly imitate what an old person would sound like and more about the impact that voice would have on the audience. He encouraged them to improvise based off of comedic lazzi – prompts from commedia plays that could be as simple as “tie your shoelaces” – and the actors would devise scenes based off of them called études.

Following the Revolution, Meyerhold joined the Bolsheviks and briefly ran the Soviet theater department. In a manifesto repudiating Stanislavsky and what would come to be called “the Method,” he wrote, “the psychological makeup of the actor will need to undergo a number of changes. There must be no pauses, no psychology, no ‘authentic emotions’ either on the stage or whilst building a role.”

The throw-stuff-at-the-wall ethos of the early Soviet Union suited Meyerhold. His devotion to refining actors’ physicality led to the creation of biomechanics, a series of physical exercises along the lines of the grotesque meant to eliminate superfluous movement that grew out of études, as poses are accompanied by prompts like “man draws cross-string bow,” accompanied by instructions for the actor to properly contort himself. He would put this on display in his 1921 production of The Magnanimous Cuckold.

Written by Fernand Crommelynk, The Magnanimous Cuckold is the most famous play theater students haven’t read, because nobody ever teaches the text—it’s basically a trashy play about a guy whose wife sleeps around a lot—they just teach Meyerhold’s production. All you need to get a student’s attention is a picture of Liuba Popova’s set:

Every time I look at it, whether in photographs, scale models, or this video of a re-creation of the play by students at the University of Iowa, the only word that comes to mind is “badass.” You could do any play on it—even the horribly reviewed Broadway production of Dog Day Afternoon that opened this week—and I would still want to see it. Popova designed this constructivist jungle gym with biomechanics in mind, as its malleability allowed the actors to break down their movements one step at a time. The play itself was secondary to the fact that Meyerhold now had a technique, and actors, who could physically free themselves from what he called “emotional narcotics.”

The other 20s production Meyerhold devotees obsess over is his revival of Nikolai Gogol’s The Government Inspector, which became the foundation for all productions of the play ever since. A farce about a con man who tricks the residents of a small town into thinking he’s a government inspector, Gogol’s play is to Russian theater what Our Town is to American theater: everyone has read it in school, or seen it, or been in it, and it seems so self-explanatory that you ignore its deeper meanings. For nearly 100 years, audiences had been subjected to hacky productions of it that begged for laughs. Much the way he sensed the “jollity with overtones of death” in The Cherry Orchard, Meyerhold knew that a successful production of The Government Inspector must emphasize both the comedy and the drama pulsating underneath.

Meyerhold’s process for The Government Inspector owed much to Stanislavsky in that he gave the actors detailed biographical notes for their characters emphasizing their given circumstances, but broke away from his realism with striking visuals and costume designs (Khlestakov, the con man, was visualized with geometric right angles and very deliberate biomechanical movements), and he encouraged the actors to find their own eccentricities. He staged some scenes simultaneously, such as having every bribe the townspeople offer Khlestakov take place at once. Most impactfully, at the end of the play, after the characters have discovered Khlestakov isn’t the real government inspector, but the actual government inspector is about to arrive, the show curtain moved from the bottom to the top of the stage with the telegram announcing the arrival printed on it – and when it disappeared into the rafters, all the actors had been replaced with mannequins of themselves, their faces frozen in terror.

Although Meyerhold never stopped directing, the totalitarianism of the Soviet state caused frequent setbacks. In 1928, he was set to direct the premiere of Nikolai Erdman’s satire of Soviet life, The Suicide, but Stalin shut it down before it could open. (The play was not staged in the Soviet Union until the 1980s, a decade after Erdman died.) His 1937 production of the play One Life was cancelled by the Glaverpertkom, the censorship board. The government shut down his theater for good in 1938, and the one he built to replace it was never finished. At this point, only Stanislavsky had the power to protect him. Both men had a healthy respect for each other, and Stanislavsky offered him a job as his assistant at his new musical theater. Unfortunately, Stanislavsky died in 1938, before Meyerhold could take the job.

In June of 1939, Meyerhold attended the directors’ conference and gave the speech that supposedly led to his arrest. I say “supposedly” because it wasn’t until late in the writing of this essay that I learned he didn’t give the speech Yelagin quoted him as giving. The full content of the speech would not be published until 1991, but Alexander Kaun’s 1978 book Soviet Poets and Poetry contains excerpts that would appear in that version:

“We must bring to light the fundamental mistakes of the formalists and naturalists, so that these mistakes may not be repeated. We who had erred, who had caused considerable damage to art—myself, [Dmitri] Shostakovich, and Sergei Eisenstein—have been given full opportunities to work, and to rectify our mistakes… Who knows what outrages the formalists might have committed in art had they not been stopped in time. For this reason the closing of the theater which I had directed was perfectly just. This is a lesson for all those who follow wrong paths in art.”

Meyerhold even went so far as to apologize for the liberties he took in his interpretation of The Government Inspector, a mistake he described as “the substitution of external form for inner content,” and praised Stalin as “our leader, our teacher, the friend of toilers throughout the world.” Attendees were stunned that one of the giants of Soviet theater had capitulated to Stalin. Critic Moissei Yankovsky said he had “destroyed everything that he has stood for throughout his life.” Meyerhold’s state of mind is impossible to ascertain—the most logical explanation one can surmise is that perhaps he thought it would allow him to keep working.

So why was he arrested? The truth, as outlined by biographer Edward Braun, is that NKVD arrestees had already named Meyerhold as a foreign agent for the Japanese two months before the conference. Stalin—who never attended Meyerhold’s theater—summoned writer Alexander Fadeyev, who had spoken in support of Meyerhold, to a meeting in May 1939, telling him “with your permission, we intend to arrest Meyerhold.” If Fadeyev did not tell Stalin directly to arrest him, he did not try to stop it, either.

Reading Meyerhold’s descriptions of his life in prison reveal the brutality of the NKVD. In a letter to Chairman Vyacheslav Molotov, he wrote:

“They beat me, a sick sixty-six-year-old man. They laid me face-down on the floor and beat the soles of my feet and my back with a rubber truncheon…. In the days that followed, when my legs were bleeding from internal hemorrhaging, they used the rubber truncheon to beat me on the red, blue and yellow bruises…. I screamed and wept with pain…. Lying face-down on the floor, I discovered the capacity to cringe, writhe and howl like a dog being whipped by his master.”

In the subsequent months, he was repeatedly tortured, forced to sign false confessions, named names, and put through a show trial. In February 1940, he was executed and buried in a mass grave. Perhaps most chillingly of all, we have no evidence that he ever learned what happened to his wife.

Meyerhold was subsequently erased from Soviet life, removed from photographs like other Stalin enemies. He was rehabilitated in the 1950s during the first wave of de-Stalinization, and his influence can be felt today in everything from the plays of the late Russian director Yuri Butusov, which broke down The Seagull and King Lear into études, to the constructivist towers of Boris Aronson’s set for the original production of Company, and the traveling skywalks of the Paris Opera House in The Phantom of the Opera - Company and Phantom director Hal Prince was a huge Meyerhold fan. But I didn’t spend all week writing this so that you could go “well, I’m sorry he died, but, if it weren’t for him we wouldn’t have Phantom!” because that’s not the world we live in.

The loss of Meyerhold wasn’t just the loss of a great director: it was the loss of his techniques. 11 years ago this week, my classmates gave their Meyerhold presentation, in which they presented us with biomechanics prompts like drawing the cross-string bow to try them ourselves — mostly without success. While many of Meyerhold’s notes survive, the notes on biomechanics were lost, and many of the people who learned it from him were suppressed or killed. Those who survived spread his teachings from person to person like a game of telephone, the meaning blurred by those who added to it. All attempts to revive them as originally done, even in the Iowa production of The Magnanimous Cuckold, are best guesses.

My classmates did a fine job with the presentation, but what I remember best is the anger in Anatoly Smeliansky’s voice during his wrap-up lecture. The right-wing backlash over the productions of Tannheuser and An Ideal Husband, which climaxed that week with the pig incident, showed how the religious right didn’t just attack plays that challenged their worldviews; they attacked art itself. If they’d been around in the 30s, they would have advocated for Socialist Realism too, because Socialist Realism was less of an artistic school of thought that purported to promote the teachings of Stanislavsky, and more a means to suppress all dissenting voices.

“Socialist realism is one of the best ways to kill people,” Anatoly said. “This ‘realism’ is the enemy of art, and the enemy of ‘realism.’ It is just a propaganda idea. It’s dangerous to give power to someone who has his own vision of theatre. He wants to create everything as a model of his own life.”

I’ll keep that in mind the next time I drive by the Kennedy Center.

Sergei Loznita’s adaptation of Georgy Demidov’s novella Two Prosecutors depicts the Soviet Union’s Kafkaesque legal system, one which shot first and asked questions later. In 1937, the year the film is set, Josef Stalin and the NKVD were approving kill lists without consideration as to who or why, sometimes as many as 1300 in one day. Writer Lidiya Chukovskaya, who lost her husband in these purges, wrote of the fruitlessness of interpreting these decisions, saying: “If you let it sink in…that they were doing it ‘just because,’ that killers killed just because it is their job to kill, then your heart, though no bullet has pierced it, will be torn apart, and your mind, in its intact shell of a head, will grow shaky.”

Kornyev, a Soviet prosecutor played by Aleksandr Kuznetsov, is summoned to a prison outside of Moscow after receiving a note written in blood from Ivan Stepniak, whom he recognizes from a speech he gave at Kornyev’s law school’s Jubilee Day. Loznitsa makes a gutsy decision (by the standard of American storytelling at least) to let Kornyev’s visit to the prison play out in real time. For one hour, with barely any camera movements and no music, we see Kornyev work his way past guards seeking to stop him until he reaches Stepniak’s cell.

Played by Aleksandr Filippenko, Stepniak is a broken old man who took part in the Bolshevik Revolution but whom the NKVD has left to rot for his refusal to name names. Filippenko’s tour de force performance is highlighted by a nearly 10-minute monologue in which he shows off his scars as bodily proof of the damage the system has inflicted not just on him, but on thousands of others who once considered themselves true believers. “Honest, knowledgable experts are substituted by ignorant charlatans,” he tells Kornyev, begging him to bring his case before prosecutors in Moscow. “You insisted on a meeting with me, so they won’t leave you in peace. Before you know it, you yourself will end up in a hole like this one.”

The “ignorant charlatans” Stepniak describes are all depicted as men trying to do their job just as earnestly as Kornyev tries to do his. Throughout the film, none of the state’s employees even so much as raise their voices. Many of them are as bored going through their routines as the pilots under Major Kong’s command in Dr. Strangelove, always playing cards or guzzling down coffee to get through what is to them just another day at the office. It’s not so much the banality of evil that Loznitsa is after as much as the boredom.

This can make Two Prosecutors feel slow. The austere camerawork and lack of non-diagetic music continues into the film’s second half, in which Kornyev returns to Moscow to meet with a general prosecutor about Stepniak’s case. A great deal of screen time is spent watching Kornyev in the waiting room as he bides his time before his meeting. But Loznitsa’s style purposely grounds the viewer in the monotony of autocracy. To an observer, autocracy is thrilling—to paraphrase Mark Zuckerberg, they move fast and break things. But for those who have to live in it, autocracy slows down everything it touches, reducing daily life to an unending grind. And by the time Loznitsa reaches his conclusion, he’s fulfilled Stepinak’s warning: All fall prey to the system’s machinations. Watching it, I was reminded of a poem by Naum Korzhavin, about a woman who complied with the NKVD but found herself in the Gulag anyway:

“The work of the Party is sacred, no room for emotions.
Stick to the substance.
Discard everything else.”

Two Prosecutors goes into wide release today.

I don’t speak fluent Russian, but I know that “kto ubil Loru Palmer?” means “who killed Laura Palmer?”

In Act Three of the Moscow Art Theater’s production of Oscar Wilde’s An Ideal Husband, directed by Konstantin Bogomolov, a character repeatedly asks David Lynch who killed Laura Palmer while Lynch cries and eats Twinkies. If cinephiles weren’t already interested, the actor playing Lynch was Alexei Kravchenko, who not only looks exactly like Lynch but also played the little boy in Elem Klimov’s Come and See.1 It was one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen on stage, even as I asked myself a question I’d ask many times while seeing theater in Moscow – “what the fuck is going on?”

You don’t have to have read An Ideal Husband to know that it doesn’t have Twin Peaks, the three sisters, rock music or Dorian Gray. Listing all these together makes it sound like I’m Bill Hader as Stefon describing New York’s hottest club on SNL, and this goes for many of the other plays I saw in Russia. It was also four and a half hours long.

The actual play An Ideal Husband is about Robert Chiltern, a member of the House of Commons who is blackmailed by his wife’s rival, Mrs. Cheveley, to invest in building a canal or she’ll reveal that he built his fortune on insider trading. This grounds the ensuing comedic misunderstandings with real-world stakes, which take on even greater significance given that the same year as An Ideal Husband premiered, Wilde was arrested and tried for gross indecency.

MXAT had previously staged Wilde’s play in 1946, where it had also caused controversy. According to The New York Times, critic P. Novitsky attacked the theater for performing Wilde, asking, “what creative purpose is solved by the play?” He praised the theater’s recent production of Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s School for Scandal, which “seethed with scathing and satirical, though noble, moral indignation,” but called An Ideal Husband “cold, dignified and indifferent to the fate of human beings.” This is nothing compared to the scandal of Bogomolov’s production, which took only the blackmail from the text and the homosexuality from the subtext.

The plot Bogomolov devised dealt with an assassin-turned-rock star, Lord, played by Bogomolov favorite Igor Mirkurbanov, who spends the first of the play’s three acts singing bad rock songs and dealing with a love triangle between himself, male government minister Robert Ternov (also played by Kravchenko) and Lord’s ex-girlfriend. Ternov is blackmailed into marrying Miss Cheveley, and they commit mutual suicide at the play’s end.

Lord and Ternov, critics pointed out, are allegories to Vladimir Putin and Dmitry Medvedev, who switched roles as President and Prime Minister from 2008 through 2012, when Putin returned to the presidency. In Act Two, they take a backseat to Dorian Gray, who resembles Putin not just for his bullying but because his vanity recalls Putin’s shirtless photos and hyper-masculine fixation. That act, which ends with a naked woman suspended in midair on a crucifix, was the catalyst for one of the most notable controversies in modern Russian theater, one which would climax with a dead animal on the steps of MXAT.

The return of the Russian Orthodox Church following the collapse of the Soviet Union brought back a far-right religious zeal not unlike the kind seen in the American Evangelical movement. The main difference between us and them is that without the precedent of a First Amendment, it is easier for the Orthodox Church to have their way when it comes to prosecuting anyone who dares offend them.

In February 2012, five members of the punk rock collective Pussy Riot performed an anti-Putin anthem called “Punk Prayer: Mother of God Drive Putin Away” in Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Savior. A month later, three members of the group, Nadezhda Tolkonnikova, Maria Alyokhina and Yekaterina Sumtsevich, were arrested that March and sentenced to two years’ imprisonment after a trial that resembled a kangaroo court. Sumtsevich was freed in October of that year; Tolkonnikova and Alyokhina in 2013. The justified international outrage over this decision led Russia to do what it does best – double down. In April 2013, the Duma (Russia’s parliament) passed an anti-blasphemy law targeting anyone who “intentionally or…publicly offend[s] religious sensibilities” and/or “desecrate[s] religious sites and paraphernalia,” carrying prison sentences of up to three years.

An Ideal Husband, which premiered the same year as the passage of this law, became a cause célèbre when Orthodox activists from the group God’s Will (think the Westboro Baptist Church) leapt onto the stage to denounce the production during the cross scene. One of the two activists, Dmitry Enteo, said they did it to “appeal to the hall’s conscience. We explained that an infernal blasphemy was happening on stage: a naked woman was hung from the ceiling and representing the crucified Jesus Christ, and an actor playing a homosexual priest was worshipping her. This deeply offended us.” Later, he posted on Twitter that he would “strive to have Bogomolov receive three years in jail for offending the feelings of believers.”2

God’s Will continued its campaign against An Ideal Husband by gathering signatures to force the Committee of Inquiries to Moscow to investigate both it and another MXAT Bogomolov production of Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. Said Archpriest Vsevolod Chaplin: “Today, believers not only can, but must ensure that law enforcement agencies examine and give a clear estimation as to whether this is a violation of the law that has, for many years already, banned desecration of objects venerated by the faithful… The people who committed this unlawful act must answer for it.” This led to a court case with the epic title “Moscow Art Theater vs. God’s Will,” which was thrown out. But censorship, which had not been so prevalent since the days of the Soviet Union, had darkened the theatrical landscape.

Shortly before my arrival, the Russian Orthodox Church found a new target for their anger: A production of Richard Wagner’s Tannheuser at the Novosibirsk State Opera and Ballet Theater that premiered in December 2014. Timofey Kulyabin, who staged the production, had featured scenes that religious critics claimed took the Bible in vain, including one where a woman holds a cross with Jesus between her legs. Several artistic luminaries, including MXAT Artistic Director Oleg Tabakov, defended Kulyabin’s freedom of expression. A trial against Tannheuser opened on March 5, 2015 and was thrown out of court five days later, in no small part due to the testimony from religious scholar Boris Falikov, who called it “religious ignorance” for “a believer to equate an artistic construct with reality.” The prosecutor withdrew his attempt to appeal, but on Sunday, March 29, the head of the theater, Boris Mezdrich, was fired and replaced by a shady businessman with religious ties named Vladimir Kekhman.

“All the old problems are coming back,” said my main teacher in Moscow, MXAT dramaturg Anatoly Smeliansky, in a lecture two days after Mezdrich’s firing. “Yesterday night, officials said it would be important to come see the shows at the Federal Companies before they go to the audience. That is completely, 100% Soviet style.” The day after that class, April 1, Enteo returned to the theater with God’s Will to protest An Ideal Husband, dumping the severed head of a pig on the steps with the name “Tabakov” written on its forehead. Enteo would continue to wage protests against any art he claimed went against the Orthodox Church. Fortunately for Russian theater, he shifted to protesting American heavy metal bands.

An Ideal Husband was by far and away the best and the most daring of the four productions of Konstantin Bogomolov that I saw. Whatever complaints I had about the length or the inscrutability of its message (“even Russians want to know what’s going on in An Ideal Husband!” Anatoly told us once) I will never get tired of explaining to people that I saw a play that turned into a Twin Peaks homage before the end. Bogomolov was the dominant figure in my first month of theatergoing, and along with Kirill Serebrennikov and Dmitry Krymov, the director whose work I saw the most. Unfortunately, none of his other plays grabbed me.

The very first play I saw in Moscow was Bogomolov’s The Seagull, originally staged for Tabakov’s theater separate from MXAT and featuring Tabakov as Dorn. It was a dull production which only came to life in the final act, when he cast a different actress as Nina for her goodbye scene with Konstantin to emphasize how the two years that pass between Acts III and IV shattered her. His production of Nichola McAuliffe’s Maurice’s Jubilee (retitled Jeweler’s Jubilee) starred Tabakov as a dying jeweler who hallucinates a conversation with Queen Elizabeth at the play’s end. It was less of a great play and more of a great vehicle for Tabakov, who said he chose the role because, as an old man, he wanted to play someone in his last days to prepare himself for the inevitable. But whatever admiration I had for Bogomolov turned to apathy when I saw his five-hour production of The Brothers Karamazov, in which he turned one of my favorite novels into something inert. I walked out after the second intermission – thank God, because the play ran so late that my classmates barely made it back to the dorm before the babushkas at the front desk locked the doors for the evening.3

In the years following my study abroad, the religious right’s social conservatism has influenced what can and can’t appear on Russian stages following the invasion of Ukraine. MXAT has now been reduced to performing “patriotic plays” according to a 2023 article in The Conversation by Russian literature professor Julie Curtis of the University of Oxford – “in other words,” she wrote, “theatre has now been fully instrumentalized by the state in line with its new patriotic cultural policy.” The majority of the directors whose work I studied all live in exile now after they spoke out against the war and had their theaters taken away from them. The exception, unfortunately, is Konstantin Bogomolov.

Once a supporter of Alexei Navalny’s when he ran for Mayor of Moscow in 2013, Bogomolov is now a devoted Putinite. Some of this had to do with his ambitions: After switching his allegiance to Putin, he was appointed head of the Malaya Bronnaya Theater in Moscow, and Putin eventually bestowed him the title of “Honored Artist of Russia.” But Bogomolov’s brownnosing didn’t stop there. In 2021, he wrote a piece for the newspaper Novaya Gazeta called “The Rape of Europe 2.0,” in which he called Western movements such as multiculturalism, feminism and Black Lives Matter “the new ethical Reich.” “The Nazis have given way to an equally aggressive mix of queer activists, fem-fanatics, and eco-psychopaths who have an equally aggressive thirst for the total reformatting of society,” he wrote. He’s now no different from the men who threw Oscar Wilde in prison.

What was hyped up as one of the most suspenseful Best Picture races in recent years turned out to be less than that by the time the 98^th Oscars ended. Although Sinners got a surge from its wins at the WGA and the SAG-AFTRA Awards – sorry, “The Actor Awards” – One Battle After Another ultimately won the night, as had long been predicted. Paul Thomas Anderson finally won a long-deserved Best Director Oscar, as well as Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Picture. The film also got awards for Best Editing, Best Casting, and Best Supporting Actor, for Sean Penn’s performance as alt-right Popeye - and who ditched the ceremony, thank God, as there’s nobody worse in front of an Oscar mic.

Meanwhile, Sinners, the most-nominated film in history, won four Oscars, although it was a rough climb. Sinners’ casting director Francine Maisler’s loss early in the evening to One Battle’s Cassandra Kulukandis, one which Maisler was widely expected to win, gave fans a lump in their throat. They could breathe more easily when Ryan Coogler and Ludwig Göransson1 won for Best Original Screenplay and Best Score. Later, Autumn Durald Arkapaw became the first woman ever to win Best Cinematography, and, in the film’s biggest award of the night, Michael B. Jordan won Best Actor, riding a wave of good will from his victory at “The Actor Awards.”

Fans will debate which film should have won for a long time, but having two of the strongest films out of a historically strong Best Picture lineup go head-to-head affirmed that movies still matter, the one nugget of hope to take away from a telecast that returned to the standard dull show after the highs of the 2022 and 2023 awards, and last year’s, the best since Hugh Jackman’s 2008 telecast, which is still considered by many to be the gold standard (get it?) for modern ceremonies. But Conan O’Brien, who was so effortless last year, felt rushed, as if he had a responsibility to bring the show in under three and a half hours lest Adrien Brody gum up the works again. (I’ve still got it!)

Ironically, Brody was one of the few presenters who did well, as everybody else’s jokes were deadly – seriously, reconsider kicking out your old Congressperson and think about kicking out these hacky writers. Once again, the producers decided that the speeches needed cutting above all else, because letting the KPop Demon Hunters producer finish his speech is a sin when you’ve got to get to the next bit. The only non-winner-related moments worth rewatching were the performance of Sinners’ “I Lied to You,” which joins “I’m Still Ken” and “Glory” as one of the best performances of a nominated song in the last 15 years, and the in memoriam, which, with its tributes from Billy Crystal, Rachel McAdams and Barbra Streisand, was the best I have ever seen. (On another note – shut up, these puns are better than any of the jokes last night! – the sound people should be fired too. I could barely hear Streisand.)

But the main story of this year’s Oscars wasn’t the triumph of One Battle After Another, the strength of Sinners, Warner Brothers’ 11 wins, or the horror genre’s 8 wins. The story is how the framework for discussing the Oscars has evolved from “X vs. Y” – with X being the film critics love and Y being the inferior film Hollywood loves – to “stop Y.”

X vs. Y goes back to 1941, when Citizen Kane lost to How Green Was My Valley, but it really took off in 1994 when Pulp Fiction lost to Forrest Gump. That race coincided with the rise of the internet, where Pulp Fiction fans found refuge on message boards both to voice their discontent and debate what was really in the briefcase. The internet played a large role in another X vs. Y race, The Social Network vs. The King’s Speech, in which old folks who couldn’t understand what Jesse Eisenberg was doing when he kept hitting the refresh button at the end of David Fincher’s masterpiece voted for a film about a man equally as frightened of technology as them – in this case, the radio, which many of those voters grew up listening to. Other X vs. Y races include Brokeback Mountain vs. Crash, Moonlight vs. La La Land, and Roma vs. Green Book. In all cases but one, Y triumphed.

This is a reductive framework to talk about movies, even if you’d have voted for X every time, but it creates content and drives traffic. For example, the 2016 Oscars inspired countless articles about “What La La Land Gets Wrong About Jazz” or “Why Moonlight Should Win” and got thousands of clicks. That doesn’t happen in years without a Y: In 2013, the best you could do was have Neil DeGrasse Tyson write a thread about what Gravity got wrong about space.

However, there hasn’t been a true X vs. Y year since Roma vs. Green Book. Yes, people got clicks out of articles excoriating Best Picture nominees Jojo Rabbit, Joker, Don’t Look Up, Maestro, etc. but with the exception of Don’t Look Up, none of these were ever a serious threat to win (and that one only got derailed because its creators wouldn’t stop harassing their critics online.) That leaves people with one option: Find Y and beat up on it.

This is best personified by 2024’s Emilia Pérez, the most vilified Oscar contender since Green Book. For fans, this trans-narco-musical was an X for its tonal balancing act; for haters, it was Y because of…well, everything. Dozens of articles were written in defense or condemnation, but by the time it got 13 nominations, it seemed all but unstoppable. It wasn’t until journalists discovered star Karla Sofía Gascón’s racist tweets that the film got knocked off its pedestal, as her bigotry generated entertainment news cycles and drove traffic.

This race signified that “find Y” was here to stay, because there was never an attempt to find X. This isn’t to say Anora didn’t fit the bill for X – auteur-driven indies (even ones by people with problematic Twitter histories) almost always do – but nobody ever went in framing the race as Anora vs. Emilia Pérez. It was just “stop Emilia Pérez.” And even as a hardcore Emilia Pérez hater, I regret that the discussion has gotten to this place because the search for a villain is tiresome, reductive, and in some cases, all too revealing.

Although the 2025 race turned into X vs. X by the time the nominations came out, it didn’t start out that way. In the months prior to the nominations, film critics and influencers worked overtime to take down other films. There was a month of “Train Dreams Discourse,” in which people insisting that director Clint Bentley and co-writer Greg Kwedar’s adaptation sacrificed that book’s complexities into something more palatable. There was Noah Baumbach’s Jay Kelly, which seesawed between indifference and praise with every festival it played to the point where you had no idea where the consensus lay. Ultimately, people decided that Marty Supreme and its star, Timothée Chalamet, were the final bosses, with Timothée’s try-hard campaign and his comments about opera and ballet giving him 15 minutes of shame.

But the most disgraceful “find Y” campaign this year was the takedown of Chloé Zhao’s Hamnet, my choice for the year’s best film. As a theater nerd, a huge fan of Maggie O’Farrell’s book, and a new dad, I sensed it would be my favorite going into this Oscar season, but Zhao’s film transcended the novel with its third act, in which Agnes sees Hamlet for herself. I’ve seen critics argue that Zhao and O’Farrell’s interpretation of the play reduces its power, but I have always agreed with Ray Bradbury that the animating force behind Hamlet as a character is “my father is dead and I hate it, but how can I bring him back?” Hamnet’s genius is not just to tie the play’s creation to Will’s grief, but when everyone in the audience reaches towards the dying Hamlet, you realize that they have all lost someone they love to the plague, and Will has allowed them all to channel their own grief through his work.

It was deeply insulting to read the writings of so many men who dismissed Hamnet as grief porn, or refused to see it, or gave it zero stars and described it as “misery porn” as Film Freak Central’s Walter Chaw did in a review that said nothing about the film and everything about his mommy issues. Yes, there were some good-faith critiques of Hamnet, such as Christy Lemire’s mixed take for Rogerebert.com, but those were few and far between. Men who believed they owned the ability to interpret Hamlet, or refused to engage with a work made by a woman, vilified Hamnet to the point that by the time it won its Golden Globe for Best Drama, it was fated to be an also-ran.

Perhaps I am giving too much power to the haters, and Sinners and One Battle After Another were fated to be the top contenders from the get-go. I have no problem with that. But having endured an agonizing six months of “find Y,” and with less than six months to go until Venice and Telluride kick things off for next year, I’m dreading what this fall will bring. Last week I quoted set designer Boris Aronson, who said there are two rules of theater: one, in every production there is a victim, and two, don’t be the victim. If he were alive today, he would agree that the Oscars—and for that matter, all of social media—now operates under two similar principles: one, every year there’s a villain, and two, don’t be the villain. And if from now on, every contender has to waste valuable time threat modeling against takedown campaigns, then we’re all screwed.

11 years ago this month, I studied abroad at the Moscow Art Theater School in Russia. In honor of this anniversary I’m publishing at least one essay a week about my time there.

The Russian set designer Boris Aronson, who did the sets for the original productions of Cabaret, Company and Follies (among others) had two rules of theater:

Rule One: In every theatrical production, there is a victim.

Rule Two: Don’t be the victim.

This axiom isn’t always true. I’ve done plenty of shows where there was no victim. But there are instances – usually when a show fails – where one person takes the blame, even though theater is a team effort. My semester studying at the Moscow Art Theater School began and ended with the worst shows I’ve ever worked on because it was the only time in my career that I was ever the victim. Fortunately, it did not overshadow the rest of my time there.

How did this come about?

First, some backstory: From 2014 to 2016, I attended graduate school at Harvard’s American Repertory Theater, which once offered a two-year training program for theatrical practitioners – specifically, actors, voice teachers and dramaturgs, a discipline that’s impossible to define and has probably made more than one HR person scratch their head when looking at my resume. Simply put, a dramaturg is the person in the room who, on a new play, mediates between the playwright and the director as an objective party to give notes; or, on a revival of an old play, helps the director construct their interpretation and does a shit ton of background research to help everybody out.

My motivation for getting this degree was less that I wanted to be a dramaturg and more that the program offered something no other graduate program in the United States did – a three-month study abroad at the Moscow Art Theater School (MXAT). Harvard didn’t have an undergraduate theater concentration until the year of my graduation, so A.R.T. had to partner with another school for the MFA. They chose MXAT to give out the MFA while Harvard would give us certificate. (It was only later that we all learned Russia doesn’t actually offer MFAs, which is one of many reasons the Department of Education shut the program down.)

Obviously I didn’t know any of this at the time. I just wanted to go to Russia and get the Harvard name on my resume because I thought it would mean instant employment after graduation (ha ha ha.) Besides, I am a huge nerd for all things Russia: As an undergraduate at Northwestern, I studied under one of the great Russian literature experts in the United States, Gary Saul Morson, who taught classes on Dostoevsky and Tolstoy. I had also memorized the major plays of Chekhov and acted in two of them—as Solyony in a high school production of Three Sisters (opposite Oppenheimer’s Alden Ehrenreich as Andre!) and as an A.D. and background pianist for a college production of The Cherry Orchard (opposite no one famous – yet.) Harvard’s program felt practically designed for me.

Throughout grad school, the dramaturgs would be assigned to work on plays that were either done on the mainstage of the A.R.T., or just faculty-directed productions starring the students. For my first year, I was assigned “The Russia Project” that the acting students would perform at MXAT. The previous year’s students had done a devised adaptation of The Brothers Karamazov; the students the year after us did Alexander Vvendensky’s play Christmas with the Ivanovs. Our project was an adaptation of the short stories of Nobel laureate Ivan Bunin that we called The Lonely Voice. The director was a MXAT faculty member named Ilya, who had sat in on our acting classes during our summer semester.

We began work on The Lonely Voice in January 2015, when we were all still in Cambridge. We built scenes from Bunin’s short stories while also telling Bunin’s life story, focusing primarily on the ups and downs of his relationships with women (there were A LOT.) I got along with Ilya, who also seemed to have a good rapport with both the company, I worked on the script while taking rehearsal notes. The one exception was our last rehearsal at the end of January, when I had to attend a conference at UMass Amherst. After that, Ilya flew back to Moscow, leaving us with a third of a script.

During the middle of our Cambridge rehearsals, Ilya made a startling decision to do a second play with us, Alexander Ostrovsky’s A Profitable Position. Ostrovsky was one of the most prolific Russian playwrights of the 19^th century, and his plays are as familiar to Russian audiences as Tennessee Williams’ plays are to ours. However, he is significantly less well-known in the United States because his plays are untranslatable. The characters mostly speak in proverbs, and English flattens all beautiful Russian proverbs into banalities. Because of this, there was only one English-language translation of A Profitable Position. This made my job significantly easier, as I didn’t have to do line-by-line comparisons of 10 different translations to determine the best one, which I would have had to do if we were doing, say, Three Sisters. (Similarly, there were only two translations of Bunin’s stories, and I chose the newer one because many of the stories we did hadn’t been translated before.) I wrote a packet filled with background research on Ostrovsky and the context of the play, handed it and the script to Ilya, and never heard from him again regarding it.

I would not see Ilya again until I got to Russia, after a week of studying at the Krakow Theater Academy in Poland (a spectacular experience—Krakow is one of the best cities in the world.) We flew to Moscow on March 7, 2015, and our first full day was March 8, 2015.1 That morning, Ilya picked me up from the dorm and drove me to the theater. Having watched the pilot of Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt the day before, my first week in Russia made me feel like Kimmy experiencing New York for the first time and being astonished by the speed of everything. If you think New Yorkers walk and talk fast, multiply that by three and you’ll understand how disorienting it is.

We sped down Tverskaya Street and pulled up to Kamergersky Pereoluk, the street where I would spend most of the next three months. Walking up to the MXAT for the first time, seeing the statues of founders Konstantin Stanislavsky and Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko, as well as the photograph on the side of the building of Chekhov and the original company members reading the script of The Seagull, I nearly burst into tears. This is where 20th century drama, modern acting, and the very concept of a repertory company all got started. I started crying. This is a common reaction – the French director Ariane Mnouchkine also broke down in tears the first time she came to the theater. If theater is the one place a secular person can have a religious experience, then MXAT is a temple.

It was the last time I’d feel that way the rest of the week, as I was thrust into that common American theater experience: Rewriting a show that’s in trouble. It gave new meaning to Larry Gelbart’s famous comment that “if Hitler is alive, I hope he’s out of town with a musical.”

For seven days, I was stuck in a black box trying to finish The Lonely Voice and fix what was wrong. The script we had come up with so far was unworkable. Lines that were given to certain actors in Cambridge were now spoken by other actors; much of the devising work that had been done was left out; and several passages were missing, including the ones from the one day of rehearsal I didn’t attend, even though the stage manager had given me what she had of them before I left. I later learned that the actors had little confidence in the play and were unwilling to rehearse in between Ilya leaving and their coming to Moscow because they assumed everything was going to change anyway—which in fairness, it did. I sat around rewriting everything in Final Draft, printing out pages for the actors, and trying not to get jealous of my dramaturgy classmates, who were already seeing plays at MXAT, many of which I wouldn’t get to see, as they didn’t appear in the repertory again. The only good thing about that week was that I read Crime and Punishment, the first of three Dostoevsky novels I’d read while in Russia.

The first performance of The Lonely Voice took place Sunday, March 15^th, and while I can technically say I wrote a play that was performed at the Moscow Art Theater, I take no pride in it. The Lonely Voice is a horrible play with unspeakable dialogue, tangents about Bunin’s love life that make him seem less like a genius and more like a second-rate lech, and some horrific scenes of violence towards women. One of the short stories we performed opens with a man raping a woman, followed by him gaslighting her into believing it was consensual. To our credit, we raised this issue with Ilya in the first rehearsals, but he was the boss, and his explanation sounded good enough, so we backed off. I hope that if he tried this today, we’d be a lot more forceful in our complaints.

After opening The Lonely Voice, Ilya went into rehearsals with the actors for A Profitable Position—and again, never asked me to attend rehearsals, thank God, because I wanted to start seeing theater ASAP. I wouldn’t check in with that play until the final week in Moscow, when I saw the last performance. It was of the worst things I’ve ever seen, and I know the actors will not take offense when I say that because they hated doing it. Ilya basically directed them to scream at each other the entire time and missed the point of the play entirely. On our last day of classes, Ilya apologized to the actors for doing the play – but he didn’t apologize to me.

During that last week, our teachers came to see the plays. They liked The Lonely Voice—liked it enough to consider reviving it in Cambridge the next year—but hated A Profitable Position, and took some of their anger out on me for not fixing the translation. They were also frustrated about the miscommunications that happened during The Lonely Voice, blaming me and asking me to come in for a separate meeting to explain what went wrong. The meeting took place that summer, when I took a day trip to Cambridge while performing in a production of Fiddler on the Roof out in Plymouth, Mass. My Mom said to think of the meeting as my witness testimony to salvage my future in the program, so as evidence, I brought a 200-page binder of every draft of The Lonely Voice to explain exactly what went wrong, and to emphasize my lack of involvement with the Ostrovsky. Afterwards, I realized that for whatever mistakes I made, the reason the meeting took place at all was because Ilya threw me under the bus for everything that went wrong. I was the victim. Fortunately, the meeting succeeded on two fronts—I exonerated myself, and the Institute severed their relationship with Ilya, ending the possibility of a Lonely Voice revival.

My whole experience working with Ilya gave me PTSD that lasted the rest of my second year. I had to throw out my copy of Bunin’s short stories because I couldn’t look at it without shuddering. Hell, there were times that I winced just looking at the word “onion” because it had five letters and Bunin had five letters. The truth, I later learned, is that A.R.T. was a magnet for mean directors who acted like know-it-alls and broke you down without ever building you up. In the constellation of these meanies, however, Ilya was a minor figure, somewhere above Karin Coonrod and beneath David Hammond (IYKYK). And I only had to deal with Ilya’s fuckery for one week, after which I could get on with my life in Moscow and do the things I really wanted to—see theater, learn as much as possible, and explore this extraordinary city.

One postscript to all this: The day I went to Cambridge with the script, I shared a car ride into town with none other than Bobby Morse, whose daughter Allyn co-starred in Fiddler. Morse had originated the role of J. Pierrepont Finch in the musical How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, which, four decades later, would land him the role of Bert Cooper on Mad Men. He asked what was in the binder, and I told him it was the script for The Lonely Voice. He looked at the 200+ pages in there and said, “you mean they had to memorize that?”

It’s hard to remember now, given its infamy as one of the worst films ever to win the Best Picture Oscar, that Paul Haggis’s Crash received considerable praise from many American film critics upon its release. The New Yorker’s David Denby wrote that “apart from a few brave scenes in Spike Lee’s work, Crash is the first movie I know of to acknowledge not only that the intolerant are also human but, further, that something like white fear of black street crime, or black fear of white cops, isn’t always irrational.” Roger Ebert championed the film for its structure of “telling parables in which the characters learn the lessons they have earned by their behavior… and are better people because of what has happened to them.” He would later name it his favorite film of 2005.

But one critic may have been the most hyperbolic of all, writing that “Crash is this generation’s The Night of the Hunter: the beginning and the end are weak, but everything in between is an American masterpiece.” These are some of the most embarrassing words ever written by a film critic.

Unfortunately, that film critic was me.

I was 15 at the time, closing out my freshman year of high school. I kept a blog which (mercifully) has been deleted from the recesses of the internet where I would write about film and whatever else came to my mind that week, including that review. I wrote about Crash again in another (mercifully deleted) MySpace post-Oscar recap, calling it “Chekhovian” for its establishment of a gun in the first act that gets fired by the end. Looking back at these early cave drawings, I’m more embarrassed by the comparisons than my praise for the film: Chekhov is one of my favorite writers of all time, and The Night of the Hunter one of many films I have called the GOAT at one time or another. Both should be spared the indignity of being mentioned alongside Crash in any way.

The critics who raved over Crash have no excuse—especially Denby, whose invocation of Spike Lee belies that in 1989, he was one of the many critics who implied that Do the Right Thing would cause Black audiences to riot. But these raves are one thing coming from professionals who’ve seen thousands of movies; it’s another coming from high schoolers who’ve seen comparatively fewer films. Interrogating my reaction to Crash means interrogating why so many of my friends felt the same way.

Growing up in LA, my peers and I didn’t experience racism—not because we were White, but because we were so blinkered by our privilege that if and when micro-aggressions took place around us, we weren’t trained to recognize them. Anti-racism and critical race theory were not zeitgeist concepts, and we were years away from #BlackLivesMatter. What we learned of racism occurred primarily in history textbooks, studying stories that conservatives want to rip out of them today.

I’m grateful to have learned about slavery, Jim Crow and the Civil Rights movement as a middle schooler. Every student should learn about the bravery of Ruby Bridges, the Little Rock Nine and John Lewis, who stood up to racists like Orval Faubus and George Wallace. But learning about this only takes you so far. If your image of racism is just Faubus, Wallace, and others like them, you don’t realize just how exceptional they are. The vast majority of racists dress their prejudice in code to add a thin vernier of palatability. Ronald Reagan didn’t explicitly say Black women were freeloaders mooching of the government: he called them Welfare Queens.” He disguised his racism in such a way that you might mistake it for a debate over policy instead of a perpetuation of the “Blacks just want free stuff” stereotype that began during Reconstruction. All this brings us back to Crash, a film where every character expresses their prejudice so bluntly that they, and their behaviors, barely resemble anything in real life.

Insofar as I can praise Crash, it occasionally makes its arguments well enough to show glimpses of the film it might have been in the hands of someone more capable of subtlety than Haggis. Ludacris, whose performance as Anthony is hands-down the best in the film, is introduced with a monologue about how Sandra Bullock’s Jean grabs her husband’s (Brendan Fraser) arm closer as he and his partner-in-crime Peter (Larenz Tate) pass by. It’s on-the-nose, but it’s about as good as the film gets:

“Look around you, man. You couldn’t find a whiter, safer or better lit part of this city…But yet this White woman sees two Black guys who look like UCLA students strolling down the sidewalk and her reaction is blind fear? I mean look at us, dog! Are we dressed like gangbangers?...If anyone should be scared around here, it’s us!”

However, immediately afterwards, Ludacris and Tate carjack Bullock and Fraser, undermining the speech by affirming that Bullock was right to be afraid. This is the first of the many manufactured conflicts comprising the film, as Haggis smashes the characters together like pinballs to re-enforce his larger points, even if he has to defy dramatic logic in order to do so.

One of the film’s more infamous contrivances comes when Officer Ryan (Matt Dillon) pulls over Christine and Cameron (Thandiwe Newton and Terence Howard) and sexually assaults Newton. Christine and Cameron replay these events in agonizing back-and-forth, as she accuses him of not standing up for her and he accuses her of being aggressive towards Ryan and affirming the “Black women are hyper-sexual” stereotype dating back even further than Reconstruction. This devolves into a discussion of how neither knows what it’s really like to be Black:

Cameron: Maybe I should have let them arrest your ass! Sooner or later you gotta find out what it’s really like to be Black!

Christine: Fuck you, man, like you know! Because the closest you ever came to being Black was watching The Cosby Show!

Cameron: Yeah, well at least I wasn’t watching it with the rest of the equestrian team!

Less believable than this dialogue is the resolution of Ryan’s arc, in which he saves Christine from a burning vehicle. As a 15-year-old, I was on the edge of my seat watching this scene; as an adult, it plays like a Very Special Episode of The Perils of Pauline. The scene reveals that Christine has no agency of her own: rather, she is a prop for Ryan to both demonstrate his racism and then overcome it. There’s even a shot where he pulls her dress down to cover her waist before removing her from the car. As Susan Collins would say, “he’s learned his lesson.”

The same can’t be said for Officer Hansen (Ryan Philippe), who the film initially establishes as “the good one” who understands that racism is bad, but does no self-interrogation to ask how he might be a problem too. He works with Ryan until his disgust over Christine’s harassment spurs him to seek another partner. Later, he pulls over Cameron (again!) after another Ludacris carjacking. With several LAPD officers threatening Cameron, Hansen comes in to diffuse the tension. Although he empathizes with him, Hansen says, “these guys want to shoot you and they’ll be completely justified!” – as if a Black man can’t understand how dangerous cops are until a White person explains it to them. Just as Ryan’s rescue of Christine isn’t about Christine, Hansen’s de-escalation with Cameron isn’t about Cameron; it’s a red herring designed to keep the audience thinking that he’s “the good one” – until the end of the second act, when he kills Peter after he reaches for a statue of St. Christopher and Hansen mistakes it for a gun.

So why did my friends and I love this film so much?

There is a cynical brilliance to Crash in that by contorting every scene to be about “racism bad” it convinces audiences that they’re watching something capital-I Important, especially young audiences who aren’t as attuned to these tricks. We were the perfect audience for Crash: teenage liberals in a blue state figuring out who we were and how we related to a political scene defined by the ultra-conservative Bush Administration who, when the film came out, seemed unstoppable, and by the time it won Best Picture had begun a downward slide that would culminate with America doing the unthinkable and electing a Black President. We wanted to stand up for the right thing, and since the wrong thing is racism, we figured that not being like those people was enough. On top of that, Crash is skillfully made– well-edited and well-shot, and well-acted enough given what everyone has to work with – that if you haven’t seen any of the films it mimics, from Short Cuts to Do the Right Thing, it’s like watching Citizen Kane. If you’d taken a poll on my campus, most of us would have voted for Crash. And even I was happy when it won – although I would’ve voted for the other film.

So what did we think of Brokeback Mountain?

I hate to say “it was a different time,” but if you weren’t around in 2005, you don’t understand how pervasive—and acceptable—homophobia was. The anti-gay marriage movement had arguably swung the 2004 election to Bush, gays and lesbians had almost no representation in Congress, and homophobic jokes were de rigueur: just watch any episode of Family Guy from that time, or any of the bro comedies whose “no homo” jokes aged like milk. If Tracy Morgan had said “if my son was gay, I’d shoot him” in 2005 instead of 2011, he would never have had to apologize.

Brokeback Mountain was one of the only films with fully dimensional gay characters to have any cultural status in the early-to-mid-2000s. LGBT+ movies almost always flew under the radar of critics back then, and it would be years for some of the era’s cult classics, like Jamie Babbitt’s But I’m a Cheerleader, finally got the recognition they deserved. Brokeback didn’t just get good reviews and awards, it made money, and with that money came cultural ubiquity. Even if you hadn’t seen the film, if you heard that iconic guitar riff from the score or the words “I wish I knew how to quit you,” you knew exactly what they referred to.

I saw Brokeback during winter break of my sophomore year and left the theatre staggered. To this day, I still remember how I felt when I saw Heath Ledger’s Ennis Del Mar breakdown in the alley at the end of the film’s first act. It wasn’t just about saying goodbye to Jake Gyllenhaal’s Jack Twist; it was the cry of anguish that comes from living in the closet. And while I understand the criticisms of the film’s ending, given the history of the “one dead gay” trope in LGBT+ cinema, I still think it’s the ending the film needed to have.[1]

I should not have been shocked by the fact that my peers largely hated Brokeback Mountain, but I was. I attended a very progressive high school which celebrated Coming Out Day in October and had a strong gay-straight alliance. Unfortunately, that didn’t mean students wanted to see gay life depicted on screen. It was not uncommon to hear teenagers call Brokeback something along the lines of “two guys poking each other in the butt,” as one of the guys I carpooled with called it, or hearing people say it was boring, pious, or some combination of the above. Even several adults I knew damned it with faint praise, giving it a gold star for being about an “Important Topic” without actually wrestling with why it was important in the first place. Perhaps some of them did not want to look at what the film had to say about them – at least three people I knew who dismissed it would come out as gay years later. Even though I knew a few people who liked it, I don’t think I’ve ever felt so totally isolated in liking a film before or since.

This schoolyard debate was a mirror of what happened within the Academy. Homophobia was not the only reason Brokeback Mountain lost Best Picture. Lionsgate shoveled buckets of money into a Weinstein-level awards campaign for Crash that Focus simply didn’t for Brokeback. (My parents, who were union members, never got any Brokeback DVDs or scripts but got tons for Crash.) But hearing old folks like Ernest Borgnine say they wouldn’t even see the film spoke to deeper divisions that money couldn’t account for. A journalist friend of mine knew Brokeback was doomed after he polled 50 voters and with one exception, a gay filmmaker who called it “his duty” to vote for it, everyone else voted for Crash. The Monday after the awards, none of my classmates even mentioned Brokeback. They were too excited that Crash won. I was too.

20 years later, I’m less disappointed by their not liking Brokeback than I am by the assumption I made that because I grew up surrounded by liberals, these liberals would accept all films about social issues. But, like the Academy members, these liberals wanted to learn about a “serious” issue by preserving their superficial sense of “at least I’m not like them!” while relegating films from a non-heteronormative point of view as “less than.” If the Crash upset proved anything, it’s that homophobia is bipartisan. So is immaturity.

[1] In my defense, I wouldn’t learn this was a stereotype until I saw The Celluloid Closet senior year of college. If I’d known about it then, I’d probably still defend it, but not without a serious debate.

Hamilton, which opened on Broadway 10 years ago today, is still the greatest musical I’ve ever seen. When I saw it at the Public Theater in February 2015, it had been six years since I told all my friends they needed to watch the video of Lin-Manuel Miranda performing the opening number at the White House; and it had been two years since I’d been an apprentice at the Vassar Powerhouse Theater, when Miranda and director Tommy Kail staged a workshop of the first act. I didn’t get to see it there, but I did get to hang with Miranda and quote The Room, which inspired me to make this video:

In retrospect, I’m glad I didn’t see Hamilton at Vassar because I was that insufferable guy who wouldn’t shut up about it for almost all of 2015 — imagine if I’d been that guy for two whole years. Fortunately, by the time the soundtrack came out, my obsession didn’t look so unique. Harvard students would walk around the campus singing along to the songs as they listened to it on their iPhones. (Full disclosure: I was one of these students.) Pretty much every Facebook status I posed from 2015 to 2016 was about Hamilton, and I’m not ashamed of it. And yet I can’t help but feel that the cultural landscape of 2025 somehow wants me to be.

Nothing is popular forever, nor is it immune to criticism, and Miranda has been open to addressing the good faith criticisms of the work. But in the 10 years since Hamilton opened, the United States has become a meaner, more cynical place, one that the 2015 me wouldn’t have recognized, and the aesthetics of Hamilton criticism have become mainstream. And that does a disservice not just to Hamilton, but to the way we interpret art.

The initial backlash to Hamilton came from its association with President Barack Obama, and its status as the definitive artwork of his presidency. If you ever believed that Obama’s presidency led America to a post-racial moment, then Hamilton, with its powerful story of a Latino Immigrant Made Good, written in the style of music Obama himself grew up listening to, and performed by actors who would never have been cast in the roles of the White Founders before, influenced your thinking. This association meant that the initial critiques of Hamilton came from the far-left corners of the internet, who frequently criticized Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and mainstream liberalism.¹

Alex Nichols launched one of the first screeds with a piece in the vanity publication Current Affairs called “You Should Be Terrified That People Who Like Hamilton Run Our Country,” which ran the week of the 2016 Democratic National Convention, an event where then-nominee Hillary Clinton cited Hamilton in her acceptance speech and at which Miranda performed. Describing Hamilton as “a corporate HR department’s wet dream,” he wrote that people only thought was groundbreaking because of its music and its colorblind casting, ignoring that its “superficial diversity lets its almost entirely white audience feel good about watching it: no guilt for seeing dead white men in a positive light required.” Nichols, who hadn’t seen Hamilton, writes the essay like he’s jealous of everyone who did. His take amounts to: If only people who could afford tickets had seen it but I can’t, then why is everyone talking about it? (It should be noted that more people even at that point had seen Hamilton than have ever read an article in Current Affairs.)

Nichols’ screed was nothing compared to American Economic Liberties Project founder and Obama hater Matt Stoller, whose scathing jeremiad “The Hamilton Hustle” described the the real Alexander Hamilton as an anti-democratic, monopolistic oligarch:

“It’s [Hamilton] become a status symbol within the Democratic establishment, offering them the chastened consolation that they might still claim solidarity with the nascent American democracy of the eighteenth century that stubbornly eluded them in the present-day political scene… Our generation’s version of Hamilton adulation isn’t all that different from the version that took hold in the 1920s: it’s designed to subvert democracy by helping the professional class to associate the rise of finance with the greatness of America, instead of seeing in that financial infrastructure the seed of a dangerous authoritarian tradition.”

Stoller’s Hamilton hate is not just an extension of his racism but also his myopic worldview. Like the hedgehog in Isaiah Berlin’s “The Hedgehog and the Fox,” Stoller can only interpret things through a self-imposed dichotomy of antitrust vs. monopoly. Tying Hamilton back to the 1920s is his attempt to tie it to the economists and cabinet members whose financial policies caused the Great Depression. This makes him the worst possible person to interpret any work of art: although all art is political, a critic must, in at least some way, separate the craft of a work of art from its political message so long as the work in question isn’t propaganda.

Few, if any, of this first iteration of Hamilton critics were worth taking seriously. One of the few with any gravitas was Mumbo Jumbo novelist Ishmael Reed. His 2019 play The Haunting of Lin-Manuel Miranda parodies A Christmas Carol, with ghosts excoriating Miranda for whitewashing the Founding Fathers and ignoring Hamilton’s complicity in slavery. The play didn’t get very good reviews, but if the best way to critique a play is to write a play, then Reed deserves respect. Still, takes like these were few and far between.

Hamilton’s association with Democrats solidified further when Brandon Victor Dixon spoke directly to then-Vice President Elect Mike Pence after a November 2016 performance, asking that the incoming administration do right by “the diverse America” he and the cast represented. Now a symbol of The Resistance, Hamilton received a Kennedy Center Honor in 2018. But by the time Trump left office in 2021, criticism that had once been based on “this art doesn’t meet all my priors” had evolved into “this art is cringe,” a reaction against any art which favors optimism over irony (even an optimism tempered by defeat, as in the case of Hamilton), especially if it became popular under the Obama presidency.

A 2021 Vox essay called “Why so much Obama-era pop culture feels so cringe now” by Constance Grady analyzed how Miranda’s efforts with the Democratic Party and nominee Hillary Clinton in 2016 gave his magnum opus, along with Parks and Rec and Harry Potter, an “embarrassing earnestness,” continuing:

“All are media that tends to celebrate people who work through the grind of bureaucracy to make their great achievements; media much venerated for their identity politics of representation; media with a firm but vague political identity of liberal centrism.”

Vulture’s 2024 series of articles on “Obamacore,” the key works of pop culture from the Obama era, further elaborated on the conflation of Hamilton and other works of art from what writer Nate Jones called an “earnest, optimistic, energized, celeb-obsessed, self-conscious, cringeworthy time.” Although the critics who collaborated with Jones on this series praised Hamilton and other entries on their list, their praise felt backhanded at best, as if they were saying “wow, remember when we all believed things would turn out OK? What were we thinking?”

It didn’t help matters that Lin-Manuel Miranda’s overexposure through various projects fueled a familiarity-breeds-contempt backlash. In 2021, Buzzfeed’s Meha Razdan wrote an essay called “How Lin-Manuel Miranda Went from Cool to Corny,” arguing that a combination of overexposure, taking on numerous projects of varying quality and the rise and fall that comes with building “your brand…so squarely under the flags of representation and optimism in the Diversity of the USA.”

Yes, Miranda may have taken on one too many Disney projects. Yes, we may all feel disappointed that progress didn’t take the upward trajectory we thought it would. And yes, it’s become clear over the past few years that colorblind casting, which Hamilton took mainstream, is not a one-size-fits-all solution to addresses the inequalities of theater. But it’s wrong to take out these feelings on Hamilton, or any other work of art that we could write off as “cringe.” Characterizing Hamilton as a cringe relic may have led to some very funny TikToks, but it’s not great shorthand for understanding why it had the impact it did: It really is that good.

Miranda’s decision to marry rap and hip-hop with musical theater transformed Hamilton into a microcosm of the history of both art forms. Listening to it again, I’m struck by the way the show feels like one giant easter egg for music nerds: Hamilton allies John Laurens, Marquis de Lafayette and Hercules Mulligan are introduced with “my name is” raps that harken back to old school rap; Hamilton launches the art form into the stratosphere with “My Shot,” referencing Notorious B.I.G. and Mob Deep’s “Only Nineteen” (including the orchestral string from the title line of that song); then Aaron Burr throws in a reference to “You’ve Got to Be Carefully Taught” from South Pacific; Miranda’s way of telling the less rap-and-hip-hop-savvy audience members that they can catch up to everything too. And that all happens in less than five minutes of stage time.

Not only do the rhythms of rap music alter the sonic landscape of the show, they also bring it close to Shakespeare due to everyone speaking in rhythm, as Miranda realized in workshops that constantly switchingfrom song to spoken word would create awkwardness for both audience and performers. Most through-sung musicals, even the best ones, work too hard to turn every banal utterance into a song without asking whether or not it’s even necessary; Hamilton’s unified rhythm holds it together. Said Stephen Sondheim in his 2011 book Look, I Mae a Hat, “rap is a natural language for [Miranda], and he is a master of the form, but enough of a traditionalist to know the way he can utilize its theatrical potential.”

Authorities on theater and music understood what Miranda had achieved. Sondheim gave Miranda notes during the workshops. Roots drummer Questlove, after becoming an unabashed fan, collaborated with Miranda on a series of Hamilton covers which were published as the album Hamilton Mixtape (the musical’s original title) in 2017. Mike Nichols, who saw a workshop, said in one of his last interviews “oh shit, it’s genius.” Their reactions were not wrong, and we have still not yet seen the full extent of Hamilton’s influence on American culture. The people who call Hamilton “cringe” should take their cues from how artists have interpreted it — the gulf between what critics and artists value can be narrowed if critics look in those artists’ reactions for what specifically it was that moved them, and then zoom out to analyze the whole from that perspective as best they can.

Still, necessary as it is to analyze Hamilton free of its historic context, it’s also impossible for anyone who was there when it came out to do so. When I go back and read my posts about Hamilton, I grow nostalgic for a moment when I not only believed, I knew, that we were better than our worst selves and that progress was linear. Even if the show never said those things explicitly, the moment we lived in did. My feelings bring to mind a line from another musical inseparable from its era, and an inspiration for Miranda, Lerner & Loewe’s Camelot. Late in the show’s second act, as the democratic foundations on which he’s built his kingdom are coming apart, King Arthur speaks to his departed mentor, Merlyn, in the Enchanted Forest, calling out: “Do you remember how often we walked this valley when I was a boy? Do you know what I miss of those days? Not my youth. My innocence.”

[1] Interestingly enough, no such criticism existed on the right — in addition to Mike Pence, Dick Cheney and Paul Ryan were also fans.