LA LA LAND - An exercise in screenplay writing or how not to lose yourself to the Hollywood dream

Seeming to be presented as a conventional Hollywood film, La La Land is, in fact, a psychoanalytic look at the insidiousness of the Hollywood dream machine. La La Land, looks like a musical, but is not a musical. At least, not in a predictable sense. It is, instead, a subversion of the musical genre, and its effects on the minds of young, impressionable hopefuls in search of the (post-modern) American dream - which is now a huge, undisputed lucrative media and entertainment industry. La La Land can be seen in two different ways: seeing that or seeing as (in the Wittgensteinian sense of his ‘duck/rabbit’ drawing). It can be taken to be merely a musical and a love story, or delve a little deeper to explore its subtext to discover the real intention of the writer/director.

The screenplay is a clever structure, crafted using a plot and character-driven story, with visual cues and unusual plot points to denote back story and character arcs. Presented in the manner of the musical genre of the 1940s and 1950s, its visual treatment (including the use of Cinemascope and Technicolor), refers to many iconic musicals of yesteryear like An American in Paris (1951) and Singin’ in the Rain (1952). Set in contemporary times, the film’s dialogue avoids present-day delivery and coarseness of language, with only two ‘glitches’ being Mia (Emma Stone), giving the middle finger to Sebastian (Ryan Gosling), as he stops to glare at her in the traffic jam in the opening sequence of the film. This scene not only shows her to be a product of present-day America, and a contrast to the gentlemanly character of Sebastian, it is also an index as to the theme of the film, including a premonition of their eventual break-up. The other is when Sebastian describes himself as an ‘asshole’ for being curt with her in the restaurant. It is, in fact, a form of apology.

Briefly, the story of La La Land is about jazz pianist, Sebastian, and aspiring actress, Mia, who are both struggling artists trying to fulfill their dreams in contemporary Los Angeles, the city of stars (stars here denoting destiny, albeit it being artificial). Both of them eventually meet and fall for each other. Though both support each other’s hopes and aspirations, fate does not deal a good hand. At the end of the story, even though both of them have achieved their individual personal objectives, they do not ‘live happily ever after’. It is a modern-day tragedy in the best traditions of Shakespeare, one that he would have given a nod to.

La La Land’s theme is about going after one’s dreams, but Mia does not realise that her sense of reality has been clouded by the fantasy of Tinseltown. Her daily life, at work and at home, is like a scene out of a movie. Her working place (a café on a Hollywood lot) is plastered with pictures of movie stars. So is her home. And when she goes to a party, it is like she is on a film set. In their exuberance, she and her friends act out a dance sequence as they head for a night on the town. A montage of images of the city (as seen in their minds) reflects their aimlessness.

The party that they arrive at is also like another delirious scene out of a movie. And as she walks home (because her illegally-parked car has been towed away), she passes Lipton’s, a late night supper restaurant where Sebastian plays Christmas songs on a piano. There is a panoramic mural painting of an audience in a cinema on the exterior of the restaurant, looking old and faded. The audience in the painting seems to be watching Mia as she goes past. It is as if she is performing in a film. This is a visual cue as to La La Land being actually about cinema. In a sense, the audience in the painting is also looking at the audience in the cinemas watching La La Land. Who is actually looking at whom? One of the characters in the mural is Charles Chaplin, who, with a remarkable ouvre of films, has given people a look at themselves and their society. The Master had pointed the way but what has cinema come to in an age of ‘advancement’?

Mia pauses at the door of Lipton’s, listening to Sebastian’s piano playing, a strange trepidation on her mind. The red neon lights on the door are a cue, a sign of danger, an indication that her meeting with Sebastian is going to bring her life into conflict with the image that she has created for herself. She enters, beguiled by his rebellious piano playing, and is entranced when she recognizes him. And in a remarkable flashback sequence, we are not only taken into her memory of him, but also into the backstory of

Sebastian and his relationship with his sister who is shown to be a very down-to-earth woman (unlike Mia and her friends). This is in contrast to Mia’s parents who are only seen from a distance (purposely made impersonal). Mia’s interest in acting stems from her aunt who was an actress. Back home, Mia lived in front of the town library. They become pointers as to Mia’s source of knowledge and experience, i.e., from books and her aunt’s involvement, while Sebastian’s is more dynamic, and comes from actual mixing with jazz musicians and their music, where there’s ‘conflict and compromise, and it’s exciting!’, and where ‘every night the music is different’.

The cinematography of the scene of Sebastian and his sister is realistic. The decor is sparse with blank walls. Present day problems about paying bills are taken up in their conversation. This scene is a total contrast to the earlier scenes of Mia and the world of fantasy that she has created for herself. In the Hindi psychological thriller, Fan (2016), director Maneesh Sharma has conveyed something similar in theme to La La Land. Bollywood, the media and family negatively affect the young fan from his childhood days. Who then is to blame when he becomes obsessive and cannot separate reality from fantasy when he grows up? Like La La Land, Fan is the new movement in mainstream cinema that blends psychology with art but without losing track of the producer’s commercial requirements. Brash, young directors are experimenting with the form to show how the burgeoning entertainment industry is affecting the minds of young people for whom the boundary between reality and fantasy have blurred. Character-driven stories are now moving out of the established paradigm.

Mia’s concept and grasp of ‘the world as picture’, rather than having ‘a picture of the world’ as Sebastian has. Mia has become a subject, as has been theorized by Martin Heidegger in his The Age of World Picture. Her point of view is coloured by her impressions of cinema through heightened technology that blurs the line between fantasy and reality, while Sebastian’s concept of the world is more rooted in real life. And with the next phase of life today heading towards hyperreality, life becomes more and more subjected to technology. Human culture and technology have converged for the first time in history (as argued by Heidegger and Manovich), and is creating new problems for mankind, in particular young people.

La La Land’s screenplay is a tour de force of writing that allows the director, in his stylistics, to effortlessly blend the psychological realms with the expressionist, surrealist and the gothic while still staying within the boundaries of the mainstream. Together with cinematography, production design, art direction, editing and music, what is on screen is akin to a cubist painting in which all facets of an object are seen simultaneously.

Expressionists seek to put across the meaning of emotional experience rather than physical reality. Chazelle was drawn to the musical genre as he found it to be ‘more genuinely emotional than it is given credit for’. Accordingly, he took the expressionist approach in depicting Mia’s world from her subjective perspective in which she is not able to differentiate reality from fantasy. He distorts her world by applying the musical approach for emotional effect to present his ideas about Hollywood, and its deleterious effects on impressionable minds. In his own words, Chazelle uses ‘expressive means’ and ‘dreams and fantasy to comment on reality’. Like an expressionist artist, Chazelle employs swirling and exaggeratedly executed ‘brushstrokes’ in the sets and execution of the musical numbers that convey the unbalanced, emotional state of the artist (and the protagonist), that are a reaction to the anxieties created by the dream factory of Hollywood.

Chazelle invokes the gothic not as itself but by either referencing earlier films or by in situ lighting. The planetarium sequence is a parallel to the scene in Rebel without a Cause (1955). The scene of Sebastian and Mia arriving by car is shot in almost exactly the same manner as in Rebel without a Cause which they had previously seen in a cinema. The building resembles a gothic structure, and is incongruent in associating it with a couple who had just fallen in love. Lighting in many scenes are what we would see in a gothic horror movie (bluish or maroon, and light coming from a low level), where attention is drawn to technique. Light that falls on Mia makes her look eerie. But not so on Sebastian. This can be seen in the surprise dinner prepared by Sebastian for Mia, and in the final scene when Mia leaves with her husband from Sebastian’s jazz club.

A remarkable depiction of the surrealistic is in the scenes of characters looking at themselves. Characters seeing themselves in the mirror is already a common cinematic device that is an allusion to their having psychological problems. Sebastian looks at himself in the mirror which has bright bulbs all around it. He is seen as not really being happy at what he sees (he is forced to join a band that does not play jazz). It is not the life of glamour that he had envisioned for himself. After her hot bath, Mia comes out and has a fuzzy image of herself in the mirror. He has to wipe the steam off the mirror before she can look at herself. Another cinematic device is the taking of a bath. It usually denotes being ‘born again’, that the character leaves something negative behind. But by looking at herself in the mirror, the ambiguous side to Mia’s character becomes evident as compared to Sebastian.

But the most innovative use of the surrealistic (but which is not surrealism), is in the final scene when Mia arrives with her husband and stands at Sebastian’s jazz club. The shock of seeing him propels her into imagining how things could have been if she and Sebastian had come together. And in the imaginary sequence, she sees herself in a home video. Then with Sebastian, she comes into the club, and sits looking (supposedly) at Sebastian playing the piano on stage. The break in her reverie to the present time is an excellent piece of editing that tells us that it is not Sebastian’s point of view but it is actually Mia’s (distorted) point of view. The graphic relationships between shot through the editing tells us that Sebastian has come to terms with his loss (the skin tone is more natural), while Mia’s face is bluish due to the club’s coloured lights, but it is a signifier that she has been absorbed into the dream factory of Hollywood.