Who Gets to Cry at Les Misérables? On Self-Deception, Flattening Distinctions, and Junk Bonds

My first wife, Alyssa, loved musicals. And above all, she loved Les Misérables, which first hit Broadway in 1987, the year we started dating. We saw it three times together. The first two, we sat in the cheapest seats available. The final time, we sat in the best seats in the house at the Shubert Theater in Century City.  And it was then and there I learned what I came to regard as a fundamental truth about human nature.

Here's a name that will bring back memories for my older readers: Drexel Burnham Lambert. In the 1980s, DBL was the swashbuckling darling of Wall Street; a high-flying investment bank that played fast and loose in the bond market.  They had a major operation in Beverly Hills, and Alyssa and her older sister worked as personal assistants to a handful of top executives, including Mark Attanasio and the infamous Michael Milken.  As Alyssa’s fiancé, I was invited to several lavish events. A poor first-year grad student at UCLA, I was scandalized at the extravagance and largesse. I was grateful to have a seat at the proverbial feast, of course – and I was grateful too for what I saw while I was there.

By late 1989, DBL was already in trouble. I’m not a financial historian, but the shorthand is that it would all end in tears, lawsuits, bankruptcy and jail within the next year.  But the spoiling of the staff continued even as the danger drew near – and a few days before Christmas 1989, that spoiling included box seats at the Shubert to see Les Mis.

If you’ve forgotten the story, part of the plot revolves around a student rebellion that gets brutally crushed by the authorities.  The revolutionaries sing the musical’s signature piece, “Do You Hear the People Sing” twice – once in the first act, and then again in the finale. It is very stirring, and if you are the sort of person who cries easily, the reprise is what we once called a “three-hanky number.” I like a good cry as much as anyone, but what I saw that night at the Shubert struck me deeply.

In that glorious finale, the students – and the ghosts of all those who have perished earlier in the show – march out of the shadows. They wave banners and sing:

Do you hear the people sing
Lost in the valley of the night?
It is the music of a people
Who are climbing to the light.
For the wretched of the earth
There is a flame that never dies.
Even the darkest night will end
And the sun will rise!

Will you join in our crusade?
Who will be strong and stand with me?
Somewhere beyond the barricade
Is there a world you long to see?

Then join in the fight
That will give you the right to be free!

Do you hear the people sing?
Singing the song of angry men?
It is the music of the people
Who will not be slaves again!

When the beating of your heart
Echoes the beating of the drums
There is a life about to start
When tomorrow comes!

At this point, visibly and audibly, Michael Milken absolutely lost it. So did those around him. Sitting in that box, I watched some of the richest people on the planet, notorious near billionaires, openly sob as they enthusiastically mouthed the lyrics.  I was stunned. These were the people who already “lived in the light,” people who had given so many others reason to be angry! How, how, how, could they weep so openly while singing about joining a revolutionary crusade against… what? Against themselves?  What level of self-delusion did it require for Michael freaking Milken to sing about longing to be free? What barricade held him back?

My initial response was understandably uncharitable. Perhaps this whole musical was sentimental capitalist propaganda, designed to allow the oppressor the fantasy of imagining himself one of the oppressed! The emotion-driven music and lyrics provoke tears, and tears are cathartic, and what is more cynical than to give a bunch of staggeringly privileged people a catharsis without a concomitant conviction to change their ways?  What a cunning wickedness, to not only reduce revolution to a commercial product, but to invite the bourgeoisie (petit et grand) to pretend that they too are “one” with the oppressed!  

That’s a standard adolescent Marxist analysis, but I’m not temperamentally a Marxist.

My second response – one I’ve held for nearly 35 years now – is to insist, firmly and politely, that we all weep at Les Mis not because we are deceived but because we all rightly feel like slaves at one point or another.  We all long for liberation, whether from literal chattel slavery -- or from the pressure to keep spouses happy, meet a payroll, and elude the relentless scrutiny of the Securities and Exchange Commission. That’s an intentionally grotesque comparison, but I do not do it to exasperate. I do it because I believe the truth itself is both wonderful and scandalous, an offense to all those who insist on binaries between oppressor and oppressed, just and unjust, elect and damned.

Seeing Michael Milken weeping at the Les Mis finale might, for some, make a point about the extraordinary human capacity for self-deception. For me, it made a point about the fundamental innocence of each of us, an innocence that power and privilege can obscure but not erase. I wrote two days ago that to one degree or another, we are all Gus Walz; I write today to say that we are all in chains of some sort. The longing for liberation, literal or psychological, is universal. Compassion is not a zero-sum game, and the need for catharsis – with or without accountability and conviction – is part of what it means to be human.

In her 2017 debut (and semi-autobiographical) novel The Idiot, Elif Batuman recalls a searing moment from kindergarten:

The teacher showed us Dumbo, and I realized for the first time that all the kids in the class, even the bullies, rooted for Dumbo, against Dumbo's tormentors. Invariably they laughed and cheered, both when Dumbo succeeded and when bad things happened to his enemies. But they're you, I thought to myself. How did they not know? They didn't know. It was astounding, an astounding truth. Everyone thought they were Dumbo.

Here's the secret: everyone IS Dumbo. Everyone is “lost in the valley of the night.” (That’s bad writin’, but it is good feeling.) Everyone wants the chain broken, whether they fashioned it or not. Everyone has a world they long to see on the other side of the barricade. Even, even, if they were the ones who put those barricades in place.

I am intentionally flattening distinctions, not out of obstinacy, but out of a fundamental conviction. The distinctions are illusory, no matter how real they feel.

I’ve always been grateful to the junk bond king for first showing me that truth.