Singing, Dancing, and Fighting in La La Land
This aging father is defending a romantic musical to his teenage daughter, who dared to call it boring.
La La Land turned out to be one of the most pleasant surprises of my adult life.
In 2016, my wife and I did something we almost never do: we went to a movie theater and saw a movie when it came out. We didn’t wait for the dollar-theater release in a few weeks, or the movie rental via streaming a few months later, like we usually do.
We actually “went to the movies” to see it, when it was still new and popular — I think I can count on one hand the number of times we’ve done that.
I didn’t want to go at first. I’m such an anti-conformist that my first inclination is to always believe that if something is popular and people are talking about it, I’ll probably hate it. If not, I’ll find out years later when it isn’t cool and popular anymore.
(For example, everybody on earth talked about “The Matrix” when it came out. I ignored it for 25 years and saw it last year for the first time. I hated it.)
But La La Land is something different.
On paper, it doesn’t make a lot of sense that I’d like it.
It has an actor I don’t really like (Ryan Gosling as “Sebastian”) and an actress I’m not a big fan of (Emma Stone as “Mia”).
It has silly nonsense like people jumping on top of cars and spinning around in the middle of the 105 in Los Angeles during rush hour.
It has a strange “dream sequence” where Mia and Seb twirl around inside the Griffith Observatory after hours, in the dark, where nobody else is there, and all the doors are magically unlocked, and they float up into the stars.
It has a lot of fighting. Mia and “Seb” (Sebastian) fight a lot.
Sometimes, it’s friendly, good-natured ribbing, like when they tap dance on the asphalt by the lamppost overlooking Mount Hollywood Drive, and Mia pokes fun at his “polyester suit” (it’s wool).
Sometimes, it’s a full-blown spat where dinner gets burned and there’s smoke in the kitchen, harsh accusations, bitterness, resentment, and permanent relational damage.
But La La Land has something else too… familiarity.
It’s extremely familiar to me. So last week, when one of my teenage daughters watched it for the first time, she told us what she thought at the dinner table.
“Meh. I finally watched it after all this time, and it was boring. I can’t see why people made such a big fuss about it.”
I was shocked. Almost insulted. And it put me in the decidedly awkward position of defending it.
You’d think it would be my daughter arguing in favor of a movie called “La La Land” starring Gosling, a teenage heartthrob, and former Mouseketeer, but in fact… it was me.
I thought about this for a while, and it started to make sense.
I guess she didn’t like it because she didn’t live it. What I like about the movie is that it was so REAL.
When I saw Seb and Mia on the screen, I saw my own life. It was remarkably close to what my wife and I were living out.
When the movie was released, it couldn’t have come at a better time. I was singing opera in Denver, and my wife was a dance student in Boulder. We were both going to school full-time, in our 30s, as parents of five kids, pursuing our lifelong passions in what we perceived was our very last chance before the doors slammed shut forever.
Everything in our lives was hard: money, carpooling, parenting, simply getting through the week without calls from the school principal saying, “Your son has been suspended again, please come pick him up.”
Adding our artistic visions and dreams on top of that seemed almost irresponsible.
What I liked so much about the movie was how it showed how two people with differing drives and passions can find each other’s artistic pursuits both endearing and obnoxious at the same time.
For us, singing and dancing gave us life, but it was also the source of so much conflict in our relationship, just like what you see on the screen.
My wife and I were constantly at odds about almost everything: what to spend money on, how to prioritize our time, what truly mattered and what didn’t, and what role music and movement might have in our daily lives and our future.
Really, we wondered if we’d even have a future.
We argued all the time about how much was too much and if we were being irresponsible.
Could she get a job as a dancer or a dance teacher? Could I make money as a singer or instrumental musician? Were we both being stupid for pursuing these things because we were adults now, and we should have given up on our dreams a long time ago?
Were we neglecting the kids—or each other—by being selfish? And were we doing it for us? Or for “us?”
One thing I know to be true from the years I’ve spent in and around artistic folks is that two people with the exact same end goal in mind make bad marriage partners.
I know one married couple who are both professional singers, and they argue like cats and dogs, constantly keeping notes about their respective successes and failures, and criticizing each other’s technique and work ethic. They drive each other crazy.
This happens a lot with musicians who marry musicians: two people with the same dream just don’t make good couples, usually. It feels like a zero-sum game: if one wins, the other loses, or vice versa.
If he passes his audition and she fails hers, it’s going to get awkward at home. There’s no way to avoid this. Resentment creeps in under the bedroom door, no matter how much you tell yourself, “I’m happy for them.”
Unlike the singing married couple I know, I didn’t marry a singer—I married a dancer. Our fields are just different enough that we have a lot in common, but not the same end goal.
I didn’t want to be a professional dancer. She didn’t want to be a professional singer.
So I could legitimately clap with approval when I came to see her dance on stage, and to see her choreograph and stage works with other dancers. It had no pull on me.
And she could legitimately applaud at the curtain call after one of my operas, or watch me compete in a song competition and cheer me on from the audience.
My winning didn’t make her lose, or the other way around.
But our pursuits were also just close enough that there was some very real tension.
When I auditioned for the voice program at CU Boulder, they said “no.”
When she auditioned for the dance program at CU Boulder, they said “yes.”
That was really awkward, especially since I was the one who applied first.
Even though they were not the same thing, it felt like I failed and she succeeded. I wasn’t mad at her about it, since my pursuits had nothing to do with her, really. But it hurt my pride, to be sure.
Having these similar-but-diverging interests can wreak havoc on a marriage, either directly due to the pressure of your passions or indirectly in other ways.
In our case, even though I failed to get into the music program, because she got into the dance program, we changed our lives drastically to support that anyway. We sold our house, and we moved three hours away to be close to her school.
We made it happen, but boy, was it hard. We fought a lot. We fought so much that we were even fighting about going to see La La Land in the first place.
I thought going to a movie in theaters was irresponsible: it would be an expensive date when we were totally broke, and it would keep us out super late on a school night. She said we could just use student loan money, and who cared if we stayed up too late?
That seemed like a really bad idea. But I relented, and we went to see it anyway.
I was almost determined not to like it just to spite her. I think my arms were crossed in anger as the credits rolled.
…and it was GREAT! I loved this movie.
It was inspiring to see the beautiful scenery on the big screen that reminded us both of our childhoods in California. I grew up in the northern part of the state, so some scenes definitely reminded me of home (pool parties, green backyard lawns, palm trees, etc), but mostly, it was really familiar to my wife.
She was raised in L.A. County, and most childhood memories of road trips involve looking out the window and seeing the Hollywood sign from the 101. Really, all of Hollywood was a constant backdrop to her childhood: the Hollywood Bowl, the downtown Los Angeles skyline, big concrete overpasses, and interchanges.
While I didn’t care a whole lot about the dancing, I did tap dance as a little boy and always admired the original Hollywood hoofers like Gene Kelly and Donald O’Connor, so that was quite familiar to me.
Seeing new movies made with modern-day actors and actresses who are keeping the tradition alive made me really happy.
And the jazz…
This movie has some great jazz in it.
The flashy cinematic scenes and jump cuts are jazz.
Real brass bands play jazz on the screen (which I loved, as a trumpet player).
It even has jazz in the dialogue—the back-and-forth dinner table conversation and verbal fight is improvisational jazz.
And it has magic.
The “dream ballet” at the observatory is pure magic.
The loud, starkly colored clothing sparkles like magic on the screen throughout the whole film.
The golden-hour lighting of the setting sun as they sing and dance by the lamp post feels magical.
It’s real. Even when it’s fake, it’s real.
The fake musicianship of Gosling (the actor) pretending to be an amazing piano player (Seb) in the restaurant, as he zones out in a trance-like state, pounding away at the keys in a rapturous interlude, is magical, and even that results in a fight.
His boss just wanted him to sit down and play boring, standard, Christmas crap.
BONG BONG BONG / BONG BONG BONG / JIN-GLE BELLS / JIN-GLE BELLS
Boom. He gets fired.
This movie has it all: singing, dancing, music, magic, fighting, and firing.
I’ve performed enough times to see this play out in real life.
I’ve watched professional musicians who have graced some of the world’s greatest stages and studied at the top conservatories get treated like trained monkeys.
They’re told what to play… and where… and when… and how… defeating the entire purpose of having live music in the first place.
There is no creative freedom.
There is no interpretation.
There is no room for personality or expression.
But there is money… at least a little bit. That’s why they put up with it. But that constant, nagging dream eats away at them.
“Am I doing this for money? Is that what this is all about?”
So, there my wife and I were, sitting in the theater, a man and woman angry at each other, trying to pursue their dreams, watching a movie about a man and woman angry at each other, trying to pursue their dreams.
At that season of our lives, I found her involvement with dance to be thrilling and annoying. I loved seeing her happy, doing what she loved to do. But I hated that it made her physically exhausted all the time, and it took a gigantic bite out of our family life with her being away from home so often.
I know that Seb reminded her of me in a lot of ways, too: he’s impatient with Mia because she just can’t see why jazz is so great. Like Seb, I also want to be taken seriously as a musician, and I’m also a “purist.” I, too, don’t understand why my wife doesn’t find the same music that I do thoroughly intriguing.
There were so many scenes that struck a nerve with either me, or her, or both of us… by the time it was over, we were holding (and squeezing) each other’s hands.
The argument over competing interests, and how there’s a fear that artistic couples have, where one person might succeed and the other might fail. That involves a complicated mix of anger, sadness, and jealousy?
Been there, done that.
The disagreement over whether he’s a “sellout” for abandoning his artistic vision to play music he doesn’t like in front of crowds he doesn’t respect just because it pays?
I’ve had this discussion with multiple people many times.
The inability of Mia to see how Seb is sacrificing his dream to give them a better future, and how it sucks now, but they’ll both benefit from it later?
I think just about every husband has promised this to his wife at some point.
The discordance of how their dreams are calling them to different places (Paris vs. Los Angeles) and how they may have to pick between the person they love or the place they feel they need to go in order to succeed, and that maybe they can’t do both?
It’s shocking how often we’ve had this discussion.
Music, money, stability, security, timing, desire… It’s all there. We’ve done all that.
My wife and I decided it was worth trying to chase our dream until her school was over. Then we’d reassess and see how it goes.
Right after graduation, she tried to put together a dance show with a bunch of her former classmates who said they might be interested. She booked some dance studio time, worked on recruiting dancers, and started putting together choreography.
The night of the first rehearsal… nobody came. Not a soul decided to participate after all. Looking out into a room filled with empty seats was a huge wake-up call.
For her, the magic was gone.
Our La La Land was over.
Today, when we watch this movie, seeing that scene where Mia stages her own play, and walks out on opening night to an almost completely empty hall… That hurts. Bad.
We got the memo. It was time to move on. She said goodbye in her heart.
We let the dream end, but we stayed together.
In the movie, the dream stays alive, but they split up.
Their relationship just couldn’t weather their different artistic paths… and temperaments… and personalities… and dreams…
The ending, which explains this, is the best part, in my opinion.
Earlier, Seb had always been so militantly insistent that someday he was going to start a jazz club and call it “Chicken on a Stick.”
Mia thinks this is dumb. He should just call it “Seb’s.” He hates this.
“It’s DEFINITELY ‘Chicken on a Stick.’”
This is not negotiable. It doesn’t make sense to do otherwise.
A few years later, we find out that he has opened his jazz club after all. But he named it “Seb’s,” just like Mia said he should.
She annoyed the hell out of him, but she also left a huge imprint on him.
La La Land left a huge imprint on me. Maybe someday my daughter will see it too.