On The Darkness of Hollywood in La La Land

It is easy to wonder why La La Land has been quite as hailed as it has been. The film starts hesitantly and slips easily into well-worn clichés. Apart from the musical numbers its narrative isn’t that different from the 200 romantic comedy The Break Up. Its leading lady is good, but a recognisable character and in short, apart from all the singing and dancing, many people would not separate it from many of the fun but forgettable rom-coms that litter cinema screens every year.

Yet, underneath the shimmering seediness of LA, La La Land prods at deeper themes, those of careerism versus familial, or masculinity in the 21^st century. And it is here that we find the reality in Damien Chazelle’s fantastical picture. Emma Stone’s want-to-be-actress-waitress appears to be a romantic; she gets lost in film sets and soliloquises about her childhood dreams of being an actor. Ryan Gosling’s jazz pianist, the more interesting character of the two, also has dreams, but roots them far more in reality; he knows life knocks you down and fighting back is not worth it and after overhearing Stone tell her mother he doesn’t work full time, he sets his dream aside in favour of regular, yet unfulfilling work.

When the film moves us forward five years, we find that our initial reading of these characters may have been misplaced. Stone’s conversation with her mother about job security, one we read as the mother’s beliefs are revealed as Stone’s. She is now the famous actor with the husband and child, but Chazelle’s framing of her family exposes it is she that is the careerist as her husband, shirt untucked, shoeless, playing with the child, endlessly passive, has no defining characteristic to speak of. It is to be assumed he has given way to whatever life he had to be her other half. A role the complicated, vibrant and creative Gosling never could have become.

As for Gosling, five years later he has opened the jazz club he always wanted, yet his life, unlike Stone’s carries reminders of their year together. The logo for his club is her design, initially dismissed by him. And, when she stumbles in there with her husband for a nightcap, he comes off worse, leaving the stage alone with a mournful smile. While she accepts this as acceptance of their separate lives and leaves with her husband.

Their romance was destined to fail from the start, as the film’s continuous state of reverie suggests. Gosling even offers the biggest clue of their fate when passionately describing jazz, a musical genre he makes her love through his own passion. It is, he decries, complicated, conflicting, confusing and improvised as it develops; it is hard work and everyone has to be individual and together at the same time. This it turns out, is their own relationship and in the end, the pull of being an individual was too great; they both needed someone to offer no conflict, no confusion and Stone found it in the passive, anonymous husband and Gosling doesn’t find it. La La Land, the title referring to the dream like world of Hollywood also refers to the attitudes of people who live there. Attitudes which are selfish and careerist and reveal this to be a far more interesting and darker film that initially imagined.