By Slavoj
Žižek
Among the PC reproaches to
Damien Chazelle’s La La Land, the one that stands out for its sheer stupidity
was that there are no gay couples in the film which takes place in LA, a city
with a strong gay population… How come those PC Leftists who complain about the
sub-representation of sexual and ethnic minorities in Hollywood movies never
complain about the gross misrepresentation of the lower class majority of
workers? It’s OK if workers are invisible, just that we get here and there a
gay or lesbian character…
I remember a similar incident
at the first conference on the idea of Communism in London in 2009. Some people
in the public voiced the complaint that there was only one woman among the
participants, plus no black person and no one from Asia, to which Badiou
remarked that it was strange how no one was bothered by the fact that there
were no workers among the participants, especially given that the topic was
Communism.
And, back to La La Land, we
should bear in mind that the movie opens up precisely with the depiction of
hundreds of precarious and/or unemployed workers on their way to Hollywood to
search for a job that would boost their career. The first song (“Another Day of
Sun”) shows them singing and dancing to make the time pass while they are stuck
in a highway traffic jam. Mia and Sebastian, who are among them, each in
his/her car, are the two who will succeed—the (obvious) exceptions. And, from
this standpoint, their falling in love (which will enable their success) enters
the story precisely to blur in the background the invisibility of hundreds who
will fail, making it appear that it was their love (and not sheer luck) which
made them special and destined to success. Ruthless competition is the name of
the game, with no hint of solidarity (recall numerous audition scenes where Mia
is repeatedly humiliated). No wonder that, when I hear the first lines of the
most famous song from La La Land (“City of stars, are you shining just for me /
city of stars, there is so much that I can’t see”), I find it hard to resist
the temptation to hum back the most stupid orthodox Marxist reply imaginable:
“No, I am not shining just for the petit-bourgeois ambitious individual that
you are, I am also shining for the thousands of exploited precarious workers in
Hollywood whom you can’t see and who will not succeed like you, to give them
some hope!”
Mia and Sebastian start a
relationship and move in together, but they grow apart because of their desire
to succeed: Mia wants to become an actress while Sebastian wants to own a club
where he would play authentic old jazz. First, Sebastian joins a pop-jazz band
and spends time touring, then, after the premiere of her monodrama fails, Mia
leaves Los Angeles and moves back home to Boulder City.
Alone in LA, Sebastian receives a call from a casting director who had attended
and enjoyed Mia’s play, and invites Mia to a film audition. Sebastian drives to
Boulder City and persuades her to return. Mia is simply asked to tell a story
for the audition; she begins to sing about her Aunt who inspired her to pursue
acting. Confident that the audition was a success, Sebastian asserts that Mia
must devote herself wholeheartedly to the opportunity. They profess they will
always love each other, but are uncertain of their future. Five years later,
Mia is a famous actress and married to another man, with whom she has a
daughter. One night, the couple stumble upon a jazz bar. Noticing the Seb’s
logo, Mia realizes Sebastian has finally opened his own club. Sebastian spots
Mia, looking unsettled and regretful, in the crowd and begins to play their
love theme. This prompts an extended dream sequence in which the two imagine
what might have been had their relationship worked out perfectly. The song ends
and Mia leaves with her husband. Before walking out, she shares with Sebastian
one last knowing look and smile, happy for the dreams they have both achieved.
As was already noted by many
critics, the final 10 minutes fantasy is simply a Hollywood musical version of
the film: it shows how the story would be told in a classic Hollywood musical.
Such a reading confirms the film’s reflexivity: it stages in a movie how the
movie should end with regard to the genre formula to which it relates. La La
Land is clearly a self-reflexive film, a film on the genre of musicals, but it
works alone; one doesn’t have to know the full history of musicals to enjoy and
understand it (much like what Bazin wrote on Chaplin’s Limelight: it is a
reflexive film about the old Chaplin’s declining career, but it stands alone;
one doesn’t have to know Chaplin’s early career as the Tramp to enjoy it).
Interestingly, the more we progress into the film, the less musical numbers are
in it and the more of pure (melo)drama – till, at the end, we are thrown back
into a musical which explodes as a fantasy.
Apart from obvious references
to other musicals, Chazelle’s more subtle reference is Sandrich’s classic
Rogers/Astaire musical screwball comedy Top Hat (1935). There are many good
things to say about Top Hat, beginning with the role of tap dancing as the
disturbing intrusion into the daily life routine (Astaire practices tap dancing
in the hotel floor above Ginger Rogers, which makes her complain, thus bringing
the couple together). Compared to La La Land, what cannot but strike the eye is
the total psychological flatness of Top Hat where there is no depth, just
puppet-like acting which pervades even the most intimate moments. The final
song and its staging (“Piccolino”) in no way relates to the story’s happy
ending; the words of the song are purely self-referential, merely telling the
story of how this song itself came to be and inviting us to dance to it: “By
the Adriatic waters / Venetian sons and daughters / Are strumming a new tune
upon their guitars / It was written by a Latin / A gondolier who sat in / His
home out in Brooklyn and gazed at the stars // He sent his melody / Across the
sea / To Italy / And we know / They wrote some words to fit / That catchy bit /
And christened it / The Piccolino // And we know that it’s the reason / Why
everyone this season / Is strumming and humming a new melody. // Come to the
casino / And hear them play the Piccolino / Dance with your bambino / To the
strains of the catchy Piccolino / Drink your glass of vino / And when you’ve
had your plate of scalopino / Make them play the Piccolino / The catchy
Piccolino / And dance to the strains of that new melody / The Piccolino.” And
this is the truth of the film: not the ridiculous plot but the music and tap
dancing as a self-goal. In parallel with Andersen’s Red Shoes, the hero just
cannot help tap-dancing: it is for him an irresistible drive. The singing
dialogue between Astaire and Rogers, even at its most sensuous (as in the
famous “Dancing cheek to cheek”) is just a pretext for the musical-dancing
exercise.
La La Land may appear superior
to such an exercise since it dwells in psychological realism: reality intrudes
into the dreamworld of musicals (like the latest instalments of superhero films
which bring out the hero’s psychological complexity, his traumas and inner
doubts). But it is crucial to note how the otherwise realist story has to
conclude with the escape into musical fantasy. So what happens at the film’s
end?
The first and obvious Lacanian
reading of the film would be to see the plot as yet another variation on the
theme of “there is no sexual relationship”. The successful careers of the two
protagonists which tear them apart are like the ice hitting the Titanic in
Cameron’s movie: they are here to save the dream of love (staged in the final
fantasy), i.e., to mask the immanent impossibility of their love, the fact
that, if they were to remain together, they would turn into a bitter
disappointed couple. Consequently, the ultimate version of the film would have
been the reversal of the final situation: Mia and Sebastian are together and
enjoy full professional success, but their lives are empty, so they go to a
club and dream of a fantasy in which they live happily together a modest life,
since they both renounced their careers, and (in a dream within a dream) they
imagine making the opposite choice and romantically remember the missed
opportunity of their life together…
We do find a similar reversal
in Family Man (Brett Ratner, 2000). Jack Campbell, a single Wall Street
executive, hears on Christmas Eve that his former girlfriend, Kate, called him
after many years. On Christmas Day, Jack wakes up in a suburban New Jersey
bedroom with Kate and two children; he hurries back to his office and condo in
New York, but his closest friends do not recognize him. He is now living the
life he could have had, had he stayed with his girlfriend—a modest family life,
where he is a car tire salesman for Kate’s father and Kate is a not-for-profit
lawyer. Just as Jack is finally realizing the true value of his new life, his
epiphany jolts him back to his wealthy former life on Christmas Day. He forgoes
closing a big acquisition deal to intercept Kate who also focused on her career
and became a wealthy corporate lawyer. After he learns that she only called him
to give back some of his old possessions since she is moving to Paris, he runs
after her at the airport and describes the family they had in the alternate
universe in an effort to win back her love. She agrees to have a cup of coffee
at the airport, suggesting that they will have a future… So what we get is a
compromise solution at its worst: somehow the two will combine the best of both
worlds, remaining rich capitalists but being at the same time a loving couple
with humanitarian concerns… In short, they will keep the cake and eat it, as
they say, and La La Land at least avoids this cheap optimism.
So what effectively happens at
the film’s end? It’s, of course, not that Mia and Sebastian simply decide to give
preference to their careers ahead of their love relationship. The least one
should add is that they both find success in their careers and achieve their
dreams because of the relationship they had, so that their love is a kind of
vanishing mediator: far from being an obstacle to their success, it “mediates”
it. So does the film subvert the Hollywood formula of producing a couple
insofar as both fulfil their dreams, but NOT as a couple? And is this
subversion more than simply a postmodern narcissistic preference of personal
fulfilment over Love? In other words, what if their love was not a true
Love-Event? Plus, what if their career “dream” was not the devotion to a true
artistic Cause but just a career dream? So what if none of the competing claims
(career, love, etc.) really displays an unconditional commitment that follows a
true Event? Their love is not true, their pursuing of career is just that — not
a full artistic commitment. In short, Mia’s and Sebastian’s betrayal is deeper
than choosing one alternative to the detriment of the other: their entire life
is already a betrayal of an authentically-committed existence. This is also why
the tension between the two claims is not a tragic existential dilemma but a
very soft uncertainty and oscillation.
Such a reading is nonetheless
too simple, for it ignores the enigma of the final fantasy: WHOSE fantasy is
this, his or hers? Is it not HERS (she is the observer-dreamer), and the whole
dream is focused on her destiny of going to Paris to shoot the film, etc.?
Against some critics who claimed that the film is male-biased, i.e., that
Sebastian is the active partner in the couple, one should assert that Mia is
the subjective centre-point of the film: the choice is much more hers than his,
which is why, at the film’s end, she is the big star and Sebastian, far from a
celebrity, is just the owner of a moderately-successful jazz club (selling also
fried chicken). This difference becomes clear when we listen closely to the two
conversations between Mia and Sebastian when one of them has to make the
choice. When Sebastian announces to her that he will join the band and spend
most of the time touring, Mia does not raise the question of what this means
for the two of them; instead, she asks him if this is what HE really wants,
i.e., if HE likes playing with this band. Sebastian replies that people (the
public) like what he is doing, so his playing with the band means a permanent
job and a career, with the chance to put some money aside and open his jazz
club. But she insists correctly that the true question is the one of his
desire: what bothers her is not that, if he chooses his career (playing with
the band), he will betray her (their love relationship), but that, if he
chooses this career, he will betray himself, his true calling. In the second
conversation which takes place after the audition, there is no conflict and no
tension: Sebastian immediately recognizes that for Mia acting is not just a
career opportunity but a true calling, something she has to do to be herself,
so that abandoning it would ruin the very base of her personality. There is no
choice here between their love and her calling: in a paradoxical but deeply
true sense, if she were to abandon the prospect of her acting in order to stay
with him in LA, she would also betray their love since their love grew out of
their shared commitment to a Cause.
We stumble here upon a problem
passed over by Alain Badiou in his theory of Event. If the same subject is
addressed by multiple Events, which of them should be given priority? Say, how
should an artist decide if he cannot bring together his love life (building a
life together with his/her partner) and his dedication to art? We should reject
the very terms of this choice. In an authentic dilemma, one should not decide
between Cause and love, between the fidelity to one or the other event. The
authentic relationship between Cause and love is more paradoxical. The basic
lesson of King Vidor’s Rhapsody is that, in order to gain the beloved woman’s
affection, the man has to prove that he is able to survive without her, that he
prefers his mission or profession to her. There are two immediate choices: (1)
my professional career is what matters most to me; the woman is just an
amusement, a distracting affair; (2) the woman is everything to me; I am ready
to humiliate myself, to forsake all my public and professional dignity for her.
They are both false, as they lead to the man being rejected by the woman. The
message of true love is thus: even if you are everything to me, I can survive
without you and I am ready to forsake you for my mission or profession. The
proper way for the woman to test the man’s love is thus to “betray” him at the
crucial moment of his career (the first public concert in the film, the key
exam, the business negotiation which will decide his career). Only if he can
survive the ordeal and accomplish successfully his task while deeply
traumatized by her desertion, will he deserve her and she will return to him.
The underlying paradox is that love, precisely as the Absolute, should not be
posited as a direct goal. It should retain the status of a by-product, of
something we get as an undeserved grace. Perhaps, there is no greater love than
that of a revolutionary couple, where each of the two lovers is ready to
abandon the other at any moment if revolution demands it.
The question is thus: how does
an emancipatory-revolutionary collective which embodies the “general will”
affect intense erotic passion? From what we know about love among the Bolshevik
revolutionaries, something unique took place there and a new form of love
couple emerged: a couple living in a permanent state of emergency, totally
dedicated to the revolutionary Cause, ready to sacrifice all personal sexual
fulfilment to it, even ready to abandon and betray each other if the Revolution
demanded it, but simultaneously totally dedicated to each other, enjoying rare
moments together with extreme intensity. The lovers’ passion was tolerated,
even silently respected, but ignored in the public discourse as something of no
concern to others. (There are traces of this even in what we know of Lenin’s
affair with Inessa Armand.) There is no attempt at Gleichschaltung, at
enforcing the unity between intimate passion and social life. The radical disjunction
between sexual passion and social-revolutionary activity is fully recognized.
The two dimensions are accepted as totally heterogeneous, each irreducible to
the other. There is no harmony between the two—but it is this very recognition
of the gap, which makes their relationship non-antagonistic.
And does the same not happen
in La La Land? Does Mia not make the “Leninist” choice of her Cause? Does
Sebastian not support her choice? And do they in this way not remain faithful
to their love?
