#can you tell that i think about newsies as a political text often.

[sarahjacobs]

something that i think gets overlooked about david is how he's just as full of impertinence as jack is -- even at the start of the movie. from the moment david meets jack, he questions and calls him out at every turn, despite there being a power imbalance between them, in which david is the lowly new kid, while jack is equipped with much more experience in selling papers and influence over the newsies. and jack likes this about him! he likes that david's got some bite to him!

but david's impertinence is tamped down by his pragmatism, which tells him that he has to think about his family, that there's no use being in struggle when it'll only invite punishment from the boss and the state, making it harder to survive -- it's what has him saying in hard promises that "yeah, [socialism] sounds good, but it doesn't put food on the table."

which is why jack is so good for david, i love them as a pair because they have such a good opposites attract, push-pull relationship that's grounded in their shared core values. in this case, they both have an anti-authoritarian streak to them, but jack is much more willing to take high risk actions, while david is low risk.

and i find that people are often low risk due to them not having experience, knowledge, and trust in other people, and as a result, they think every action that isn't state sanctioned will be crushed, dismissed for bad optics, etc. i see this in david, too, when he insists that in order to strike, they need to go through official channels to formally become a union, otherwise they're "just a bunch of angry kids with no money" -- to which i say, that's the beauty of the wildcat, you don't need permission! fuck liberal ideas of legitimacy! and all signs point to jack being of the same mindset ("even though we ain’t got hats or badges / we’re a union just by saying so").

this interaction is just so special to me -- the way that jack pokes at david's boundaries, trying to see if he's got guts or if he's going to chicken out. and david does him one better; he issues a challenge right back, gives him as good as he gets. sends HIM off to an unfamiliar place to meet a scary authority figure, too.

which, you know, i think is kinda funny, i really enjoy how neither of them are nice (even if they are ultimately kind), especially not to each other. but on a more serious note, this kind of egging each other on is sooo important for political agitation. thinking about all the communiques and conversations had about this topic, a huge contributor to why people are able to be brave on the streets is that the people next to them are brave. and this shared bravery/terror/excitement feed into each other until it becomes a powder keg of emotion and action, blowing a hole into so called "normal life" and opening up a time and space in which something, anything can happen -- there's a lot of hope in this, too.

this is really just a long winded way of saying that jack's wild ungovernability is the spark of the strike and david's first foray into political action. that jack possesses a kind of charisma and conviction that david lacks, while david brings a much needed level headedness and political knowledge/intuition to the table. and they both have moments in which they're doubtful of the strike's power and unable to commit, but the other always pulls them back into the fray. they make each other brave.

and all of this is inextricable from their romance. there's one other moment i want to point out, when david tells jack what to say during 'the world will know,' fanning the flames of the strike, even though a part of him remains unconvinced that they can actually pull it off. and he's completely out of sync from the others, not singing or dancing, just an observer -- that is, until jack grabs him by the shoulders, telling him, "pulitzer may crack the whip, but he won’t whip us." it's only after this that david's relationship with the strike is reconfigured, in that he finally joins the crowd and sings along, now fully committed.

this was david's quintessential oh moment. to me.