What La La Land says about Hollywood

Written by The Curmudgeon

Sun-drenched Hollywood hills and a symphony of car horns. Enter a loaded freeway, brimming with vehicles. And then the music starts; various faces singing the glories of how they left their old, perfectly sound lives behind in favour of the glitz and glamour of Hollywood dreams.

Meanwhile, a traffic jam. Everyone is, both literally and figuratively, going nowhere.

Such is the introductory sequence of Damien Chazelle's 2016 musical La La Land. For those unfamiliar with the plot, La La Land tells the story of an actress, Mia, and a jazz pianist, Sebastian, searching for success in Hollywood - to little avail.

It doesn't take much to decipher the inherent irony of the opening scene of La La Land. So many people, so much ambition, yet all that L.A. has in return is stasis, if not stagnation. While they warble their obliviousness to that fact in "another day of sun", the brutal difference between their expectations and reality becomes ever-present. This expectation-reality dichotomy is at the heart of Chazelle's scrutinization of Hollywood life.

For instance, with the introduction of protagonist Mia, she is engaged in what appears to be a perfectly sincere phone conversation. This conversation is then revealed to be totally scripted, literally, while she reads from a screenplay. Our expectation as an audience is, for lack of a better term, proven fake.

To analyse this expectation vs. reality dichotomy further, I'd like to talk about the end of the film. So - in the spirit of spoiler warnings - if you've not seen the film, go watch it and come back. Or if you have seen it, or just don't care about spoilers, read on!

Probably the most definitive difference between La La Land and a typical Hollywood story is that the two protagonists don't end up together in the end. Contrary to what is expected of (what appears to be) a standard Hollywood musical, Chazelle refrains from providing the obvious "and they lived happily ever after" type of ending.

Long since having separated, Mia and Sebastian have gone on to achieve their respective dreams. Mia is married and has a young daughter. But when she, by happenstance, wanders into Sebastian's own jazz club, the two share a glance. The scene then breaks away into an epilogue, tracking their relationship through a medley of the various songs throughout the film. Only this time, things end differently. They go to Paris, they get married, they have a child, all that picturesque stuff. The "happily ever after" that Sebastian desired.

The importance of this is that the epilogue inexorably collapses under the actuality that the "happily ever after" doesn't exist. As we return to reality, the fantastical melodies give way for a slow piano ballad, rich in reverb, echoing the bitterness of Mia and Sebastian's failed romance. The scene sort of ruptures the Hollywood mentality with the brutal bifurcation of expectations and reality.

None of this is to say that the characters don't succeed in the end. It is undeniable, however, that it came at the cost of the relationship which had been developed over the course of the film. But then again, it depends on one's definition of the word "success".