The Subtler Magic of La La Land
This is a spoiler-heavy essay on La La Land. If you haven’t seen it yet, go see it now. And if you have, cue the music below and read on.
When The End became apparent and the credits started rolling, I could sense my heart brimming with a terrific ache. I was washed in the afterglow of incoherent thoughts, inexplicable feelings and sheer awe of cinematic storytelling at its finest. For me, La La Land had pulled off a magic trick like no other.
The film’s plot writes as an enchanting musical love letter to the dreams we yearn for, and the choices and compromises we make to achieve them. Mia, played by the ever wonderful Emma Stone, is an aspiring actress in the land of filmy reveries, aka Hollywood. Sebastian, played by the ever poised Ryan Gosling, is a jazz pianist in Los Angeles who wants to open a restaurant (called Chicken-on-a-Stick) that would reverberate with the purest forms of jazz music. They are both, in one word, dreamers. Their paths iteratively intersect, and they inadvertently fall in love. It becomes fairly evident that what attracts them to each other, more than anything else, is their power to dream big. In between dialogue, song and stunning skylight visuals, Mia and Seb found on their relationship an incubation of assurance and support (or maybe it is the other way around?), fostering and pushing each other’s talents and grit. But of course, not everything goes well, even in our musical and whimsical la la lands. Mia, after a sequence of embarrassing auditions and staging an underappreciated one-woman show, beautifully aces an audition and bags the lead role in a film set in the city of her childhood fluff dreams, Paris. Seb joins a pseudo-jazz band that forces him to stay back and tour the country for a few years. They part ways, and unintendedly meet after five years when fate intertwines their paths once more. Seb too has now achieved his dream of opening a jazzy restaurant (called Seb’s, at Mia’s behest) and Mia, now married, finds herself in the midst of Seb’s — both the restaurant and the person. The meeting of their gaze reignites another certain dream within the two of them: what if they had not parted ways and chosen to remain with each other? The dream plays out in a good ten-minute epilogue, replaying the entire film as if this “alternate” reality were indeed the “true” one. (Yes, that moment when Seb kisses Mia in the replay instead of shrugging her away as had originally happened in their first encounter, broke my heart in anticipation of what was coming.) And when the replay finishes, we find Mia and Seb back from their reverie, smiling at each other for one last time. A smile of gratitude, for they had come to the climax of their professional dreams with the help of one another. A smile of bittersweetness, for they had had great times in their companionship while it lasted.
The spell cast by the film, however, lasts way beyond the magic on screen. To understand how, let’s take a step back and re-observe how La La Land lures us into its magical craft. On the outset, the film is a grand musical. It commences with an elaborate, colourful dance sequence, and instantly plugs well into the expectations of a musical moviegoer. There is plenty of good music and dancing, that accentuates the mood and furthers the plot. Intermittent with some creatively imagined ballady sequences, like the scene at the planetarium of Griffith Observatory, where Mia and Seb are seen elevating both metaphorically and literally into their whirling romance. To the shallow viewer, this could appear as the shallow magic of La La Land, of visual trickery and romantic deceit. But such fantastical sequences are imbued with a strong sensory drama, which subconsciously heightens our appreciation for familiar subtext, by magnifying the distance between the two. This trope is common to theatre, in particular to fantastical narratives, termed as defamiliarisation. Which lends these sequences a purpose beyond just appearing fantastical: they enhance the impending serious reality of where their relationship is headed. (Additionally, they serve a third purpose, which we’ll come back to shortly.)
Even more importantly, the technique which La La Land covertly employs is of mise en abyme: a story-within-a-story. Unlike its more common usage, such as in Shakespearean theatre or in the Hindu epic Mahabharata where a character spawns another story told by them to other characters, the usage is very implicit here which contributes more to its success. Let us, for a moment, explicate this idea. La La Land is a film (an imaginative work of art) that portrays a character Mia, who is an actress herself. We see her giving auditions within the film, inducing an inner bubble of imaginative artistry (acting) within the universe of the film. This induction serves the same role of defamiliarisation, making the movie universe appear somehow “more real” than the inner bubble of Mia’s acting. These metatheatrics continue in more than one scene, more explicitly in Mia and Seb’s date at the Rialto Theatre in LA, where they watch Rebel Without A Cause. As a viewer watching La La Land, showing us Rebel Without A Cause within it increases the distance of film (LLL) to film (RWAC), thus inching us closer to the la la universe. This gap, which exists between a viewer’s conscious reality and the fictional reality presented in a work of art, is called the aesthetic distance. To appreciate how unnerving a closure of this gap can be, imagine the plight of a young heterosexual couple in LA that decides to watch La La Land at the Rialto on their first date, and just as this scene approaches in the film, decides to leave the theatre to pursue their romantic inclinations at the Griffith Observatory. If this is not eerie enough for you, imagine that the boy, Sonny, was a struggling jazz musician and the girl, Maria, was an aspiring actress.
All of this builds up to one of the most intense scenes of the movie, enhanced moreso by defamiliarisation: the dinner conversation between Mia and Seb where they have a very major fallout. This scene happens rather abruptly, catching us almost out of the blue. Which makes us subconsciously question authenticity of the happy sequence of events that have transpired up until this point in the story. Vaguely mirroring the gaga (or in this case, la la) honeymoon period of fierce young love, followed by a sudden waking up into the fault lines of the relationship. It was their respective ambitious selves which their relationship was built on, so seeing Seb give up on his dream and join a clowny jazz troupe exposed this tender realisation to the both of them.
Towards the film’s climax, as it’s made more and more clear that they will part ways for the benefit of their respective ambitions, the film whispers very faintly a very strong remark on the rather mysterious nature of human love. The film distills out the vapour of a common “given” in romantic love: if two people love each other dearly, they must wind up together. Leaving behind a rare elixir in its purest form — Mia and Seb had respected their love for each other by sacrificing their companionship for each individual’s ambition, which is what their love was founded upon in the first place. This is where the fantastical mask of La La Land fulfills its third purpose, of producing the balm that can soothe our love bites.
The epilogue of the film marks the final, and perhaps most crucial epoch in our realisations of love, life, and really everything. Mia’s dream replay sequence, the alternate reality, comes down as an emotional rerun of what could have been. This wrenches us, the viewer, very deeply for obvious reasons: haven’t all of us asked ourselves this question, and fantasised about such what-ifs, feeling crushed by not fulfilling those fantasies for real? What could have happened if I had applied for that job? What could have happened if I had said “yes” to her? What if I had met him at the “right time”? What if I had not left my loved ones behind to pursue a career halfway around the world? These fantasies plague us, and as Mia lives through her own, we reach a point of minimum aesthetic distance with this La La Land of la la lands, engulfing us in tangible, genuine grief.
You finish the film, you walk out of the cinema, and relish the afterglow of numbness for a few minutes or hours. Let a few days pass by during which, if you’re like me, you obsess over La La Land, urging all your friends to watch it. And then you go on with your regular life. Until it hits you.
It was a foolproof magic trick, in that its full effect lies in its reveal.
It was just a film.
A fictional simulation.
La La Land was a la la land in itself.
But in that moment, while the film had immersed you, you experienced something tangible and real. The film was a dream cast by Damien Chazelle onto the canvas of our minds, which left us with a bittersweet smile. Not quite different from the smiles exchanged by Mia and Seb at the end of the epilogue. And through that diagnosis, the movie had supplanted a rare treatment of our what-ifs. That they needed no treatment.
Reimagine for a moment, that you are watching a movie called Ga Ga Grand, in which the characters Sonny and Maria watched this film called La La Land at the Rialto. After the “heartbreaking” ending of the film (LLL), Sonny and Maria were both crying, and realised how much they both loved each other. Eventually, they ended up getting married, having kids,… The End. After this “heartwarming” ending of the film (GGG), you exit the theatre with the imprints of another kind of experience etched in your memory. The creative process of filmmaking and filmviewing had left you with something to ponder over. It is in this eternal braid of immersive recursions that the metatheatrics of La La Land gave us food for our thoughts, and our dreams, and our simulations of what could have been.
Most viewers and film critics have taken La La Land to be a tribute to Hollywood and its classics, like Casablanca. But at its absolute core, La La Land salutes the human power to imagine, and to create. To dream up la la lands that render tangible experiences upon experiences. This tribute is explicated in Mia’s brilliant audition scene, where she sings The Fools Who Dream.
Here’s to the ones who dream
Foolish as they may seem
Here’s to the hearts that ache
Here’s to the mess we make
This is where La La Land meta-exemplifies the purpose of art and literature, as to why we spend so much time reading books, watching films and listening to music. Because it is in these synthesised universes that the producers and consumers of art discover common ground to relate to the human condition. Indeed, evolutionary biology would suggest the human ability to simulate semi-realistic scenarios and what could have beens as our way to not only judge our success in these hypothesised consequences, but to apparently break the physical constraint of our one-directional relationship with time. And in that, our what-if scenarios are rendered rather benign, rather powerful.
Of course, the skeptic would step in here and say, what if (no pun intended) we indulge in them so deeply that we become delusional about these simulations? Which is where we fall back to the feeling that engulfs us a few days after reading a good book or watching a good film.
It was just a film.
The director puts in a huge amount of effort to decrease the aesthetic distance, and bring the audience subconsciously closer to the story they are telling. Can we not do the same, applied in reverse, to our own stories? Spawn these simulations as experiences to learn from, to derive some momentary pleasure from. But increase our aesthetic distance to the protagonist of these simulations. Treat them as just films. Wish them up, but not wish to be them. Detached, but not desensitised. Abjection for further reflection. Which is when we’ll be thankful for those simulations. For what fed the fodder to our stories. For the companionships we lost, but that got memorialised in our minds forever.
A satisfying cohabitation of dreams alongside memories, that lets us smile.
Special thanks to Atabak Ashfaq and Sindhu Kiranmai for enlightening discussions.
