La La Land

So, then: La La Land. I liked it, I didn’t love it, I confess to having got a bit bored in places – I do think that sometimes people get so thrilled just by the fact that something is a musical that they lose a portion of their critical judgement (e.g. the Xena: Warrior Princess musical is really very patchy at a musical level but the fans just adored it simply because it was ooo, a musical). Nonetheless, I forgave La La Land its moments of ‘oh get on with it’ and its rather dubious privileging of the white boy over the black boy as the authentic exponent of jazz because of the first and last seven minutes of the film, two sequences which frame it as a musical in a way that seem to refer back in a very self-conscious way to everything the classical Hollywood musical of the 1930s and ‘40s was; and in the act of doing this position the film both as a classic film musical and as a commentary on the nature of such musicals in relation to what life is really like.

OK, I am going to do theory in a blog, something I generally avoid, but here goes. When I was writing my chapter on TV musicals for Sounds of Fear andWonder, I came across a really useful idea from Richard Dyer about the way that the classical musical provides a Utopian solution to the social tensions within our day to day lives, which I present below in a wee table:

‘Real Life’	Utopian	Dystopian
Scarcity (poverty, unequal distribution of wealth)	Abundance	Excess
Exhaustion (work, labour, pressures of life)	Energy (work = play)	Over-exuberance; inappropriate playfulness or cheerfulness
Dreariness (monotony, predictability)	Intensity (excitement, drama)	Danger, anxiety, crisis
Manipulation (advertising, bourgeois democracy, sex roles)	Transparency (open, spontaneous and honest communication and relationships)	Excessive honesty, involuntary spontaneity, incomprehensibility
Fragmentation (job mobility, high rise flats, legislation against collective activity)	Community (togetherness, collective activity)	Isolation, illusion of community, insincerity

Adapted from: Richard Dyer, (1981). ‘Entertainment and Utopia’. In Rick Altman (ed) Genre, The Musical: A Reader. London and Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul. 175–89.

In my chapter, I extended this to look at how TV musicals tend to explore dystopian solutions (the third column); and actually if you look at Chicago, the most successful film musical of recent times before La La Land, that too offers a dystopian solution to social tensions in its celebration of murder, awash with inappropriate playfulness, a great deal of excessive honesty and the illusion of community in the prison among the merry murderesses (something I have been having enormous fun exploring recently with one of my final year undergrads in her project on Chicago and Assassins).

But La La Land does not go down that route, and instead balances itself quite finally between ideas of real life and their possible Utopian solutions, right from the word go. In many ways, this is absolutely a classic ‘backstage’ musical in the model of 42^nd Street and Singin’ in the Rain: the central characters are performers desperate for success, persuing their drams of becoming stars; and after various set backs, they succeed. But the twist in La La Land is the compromised happy ending – the Utopian solution of the classic musical would dictate that the lovers must both achieve their dreams and end up together, but La La Land denies us this resolution and instead presents us with the much more realistic ending, that they have both achieved their dreams but only by accepting that scarcity sometimes prevails over abundance: we rarely get to ‘have it all’ and some things (in this case, the relationship) must be sacrificed in order to have others.

The film frames itself with two fantastic (meant in both senses of the word) sequences that present us with a specific and overt movement between the real world and the Utopian version of the musical. The opening sequence starts out completely rooted in the real: cars stationary in blazing heat on the freeway. We pan past different cars – each occupant is listening to their own music, each one isolated from the others. This is social fragmentation; this is exhaustion and dreariness. And then we linger on one woman who starts to sing along to her radio, and then gets out of her car and starts dancing as well as singing. In the real world, everyone would think she had gone a little crazy in the heat and would either start filming her on their phone or desperately try not to catch her eye in case she’s about turn dangerous. But no, we have made a move into the Utopian world of the musical, and the music instead acts to turn these strangers into a community of energetic performers, their cars into a set on and around which they dance in perfect coordination – this is the perfect musical moment in which we actually witness the moment that our own real, dreary and uncomfortable world is transformed into an exuberant theatre of playfulness in which all occasions conspire to support the abundance of performative energy, perhaps at its most intense in the moment that a truck door is raised to reveal a band inside, already playing along (rather than dead from heat stroke).

At the end of the song, everyone returns to their cars, life returns to normal and indeed nothing has changed – the couple who we know (because we’ve seen the trailers, the publicity, the TV interviews) are going to be the stars of this show have an annoyed altercation with each other: no one has come out of the fantastic moment any less isolated than they went in, but the alternative mode of existence possible in this narrative has been very clearly established.

To some extent, the rest of the film proceeds by exploring the balancing act between the Utopian and the real, with the real increasingly winning through toward the end of the film: the lovers want Utopia, but it cannot be sustained and in the end they part – we see the moment before the decision is made and then cut several years to the end of the film, the point where Mia is now a star and Sebastian has his jazz club, but they have not seen each other in the intervening time. And here, the film closes the frame with a second fantastic sequence in which the entire film is replayed as a music and dance sequence in which the purely Utopian version of the story (very An American in Paris) is played out before our eyes from their first encounter to the happy ending where they are married and have a child; every real-life decision and event which conspired to pull them apart is reworked with the happier outcome to produce the ending the musical should have had. And we are seduced, because that is what we want from musicals – we want happy endings. I sat there in the cinema, and started crying in this sequence because I knew it wasn’t true, and that knowledge kind of broke my heart because I really wanted them to get the happy ending a musical should have given them. And although, as I have said, I liked rather than loved this film, I cannot help but respect what it did in taking the genre of the musical, understanding what a Hollywood film musical is to its very core, and then denying us the ultimate Utopian pleasure that we want from it, reminding us that life just isn’t like that. I shall go and have a little weep now.