While watching La La Land, the new musical from Damien Chazelle, I was consumed with thoughts of another film. Not one the technicolor musicals of Hollywood’s supposed golden age this film so desperately gropes for, but 2016’s own Hacksaw Ridge. How could a blood-soaked, Mel Gibson-directed WWII fantasy even tangentially connect with a feel-good studio musical throwback? Quite readily, as it’s the same product but for different audiences.
Hacksaw Ridge is a true story reimagined as a work of red state masturbatory fiction. La La Land is the urban archipelago’s fever dream of effortless multiculturalism and smarter-than-you nudge-wink references. Hacksaw places a premium on values of righteousness and war. A demand for blind adherence to institutions like religion, family, and capital ‘A’ America. La La Land finds pleasure in its patchwork of empowered individuals, self-obsessed creative types, fame as a worthy aspiration, and Los Angeles as center of the universe. Both films are, to that end, rife with problems.
Hacksaw Ridge is set in some version of Lynchburg, Virginia, and the Pacific Theater conspicuously missing black Americans who—not only fought bravely in WWII—but comprised at least 11 percent of enlisted men. The only non-whites we meet are Japanese soldiers described as, “Satan himself,” who crave death and only own their modicum of honor in a perverse episode of ritual suicide. It’s a Norman Rockwell painting with a gory, morbid, cynical center meant to illustrate the true sacrifices of war, but I believe only further exacerbates the chicken hawk nation we’ve become. La La Land, well, more on this later but most pressing...what L.A. is this set in? Where are all of L.A.’s staunchly ethnic neighborhoods? Where are the freaks, weirdos, scum bags, and homeless seemingly disappeared from her mural lined streets?
This divergence in view is indicative of a larger problem we collectively, urgently have to pull apart. In my bubble, Hacksaw Ridge was a laughable piece of jingoistic non-art, but it did $75 million on no press after being dumped in the lull between summer and prestige season. In my bubble, La La Land is spoken of with breathless wonder. It will undoubtedly be a Best Picture nominee—if not winner—as Hollywood has gone a whole year without patting itself on the back over a movie about THE BIZ. It’s hard to know how La La Land will fare in the “real” world—the nationwide theater kid demographic can only push the needle so hard—but I’m eager to see the results.
It boils down to one product: the connective tissue between both films, nostalgia. Choose your delusion. Hold fast to the noxious idea of some remembered village, sanitized for your protection, a place you can never truly occupy. In a line you’ll likely see quoted in every La La Land review, Gosling’s character Sebastian comments that in L.A., “they worship everything and value nothing.” Whether the line is intended to be as thoroughly panoptic and revealing as it is, that’s the nut. Nostalgia is an illusory altar of half-truth and quarter truth and faulty embroidered memory, each recreation and reimagining a more grotesque lie. Yet, people throw themselves in front of it, prostrate, chanting like a holy invocation, “things used to be better, things used to be different.”
To its credit, La La Land allows for something Hacksaw Ridge wouldn’t dare fold into the equation: moments of self-reflection. Yes, the picture is outfitted with weapons grade nostalgia—up to and including the fact that the movie was shot in CinemaScope (*intense eye roll*)—but the film at least challenges itself to play with and subvert the idea. Our leads, Mia (Emma Stone) and Sebastian (Baby Goose) recognize they’re throwbacks consumed by their kitsch. Sebastian is a beleaguered musician and a staunch enemy of jazz aka a dude who really loves jazz. Mia is a plucky wannabe actress who has a wall sized Ingrid Bergman poster looming over her. And it’s as though their fantasy of a bygone, velvet upholstered, glamorously lit Hollywood is so consuming, that when they’re together they block out any semblance of the real world/industry/Los Angeles around them.
"Wow, Monte, bruh, so you hated this movie, huh?" Nope. Not at all. It’s perfectly fine. Heck, it’s briefly pretty damn good, but young homie isn’t gonna lie to you neither. What Chazelle has achieved is genuinely mind boggling. For a movie of its scope and caliber, he made it for next to nothing, and it is visually sumptuous. I mean, taking your eyes to a buffet of sound and color. Stone and Gosling are wonderful together. The music, where I don’t think it’s something I’d enjoy independent of the production, is incredibly thoughtful. There are hooks, themes, shapes, and reprises. There are massive numbers at the outset and tiny, quiet, sweet duets. There are moments of pure, unmitigated magic. Yes, even this coal-furnace-grown-cold heart of mine had embers left enough that I was whisked away by the glorious sequence set at Griffith Observatory. The courtship number with an L.A. sunset in the background? Knock me over with your Criterion copy of The Umbrellas of Cherbourg.
Ultimately, the tale of the tape is that La La Land is obsessed with what it perceives itself to be. Like some quixotic Ouroboros, the film is about two people locked in a self-imposed identity, who long for and linger in a world of which they were never a part. Yet they manage to forge the life they want wrapped around these tenets. Through this sentimentality woven wormhole—strictly reserved for the fools who dare to dream—we arrive at a climactic sequence of things remembered and approximated futures, a replication engine of personal nostalgia inside a glittering edifice of ‘remember when.’
Where this seems exhausting, I found sincere truth in the final sequence. La La Land elevated itself beyond precious musical to something unexpected and emotionally profound. Because when you see them years from now, after they’ve slipped through your fingers like strands of their silken hair, you’ll realize the memories and imagined outcomes are little more than moveable painted sets and scratched eight millimeter film of the imagination. The agonizing bliss of memory, the cruel necessity of nostalgia. A component of our mind so powerful, that these sequences can devour us. But it’s the rebellion of the now, the strength to puncture this unreality that creates some semblance of the present. And then you can dare to carry on in the messy, uncomfortable world we all have to occupy together.
—Monte Monreal
Hacksaw Ridge is a true story reimagined as a work of red state masturbatory fiction. La La Land is the urban archipelago’s fever dream of effortless multiculturalism and smarter-than-you nudge-wink references. Hacksaw places a premium on values of righteousness and war. A demand for blind adherence to institutions like religion, family, and capital ‘A’ America. La La Land finds pleasure in its patchwork of empowered individuals, self-obsessed creative types, fame as a worthy aspiration, and Los Angeles as center of the universe. Both films are, to that end, rife with problems.
Hacksaw Ridge is set in some version of Lynchburg, Virginia, and the Pacific Theater conspicuously missing black Americans who—not only fought bravely in WWII—but comprised at least 11 percent of enlisted men. The only non-whites we meet are Japanese soldiers described as, “Satan himself,” who crave death and only own their modicum of honor in a perverse episode of ritual suicide. It’s a Norman Rockwell painting with a gory, morbid, cynical center meant to illustrate the true sacrifices of war, but I believe only further exacerbates the chicken hawk nation we’ve become. La La Land, well, more on this later but most pressing...what L.A. is this set in? Where are all of L.A.’s staunchly ethnic neighborhoods? Where are the freaks, weirdos, scum bags, and homeless seemingly disappeared from her mural lined streets?
This divergence in view is indicative of a larger problem we collectively, urgently have to pull apart. In my bubble, Hacksaw Ridge was a laughable piece of jingoistic non-art, but it did $75 million on no press after being dumped in the lull between summer and prestige season. In my bubble, La La Land is spoken of with breathless wonder. It will undoubtedly be a Best Picture nominee—if not winner—as Hollywood has gone a whole year without patting itself on the back over a movie about THE BIZ. It’s hard to know how La La Land will fare in the “real” world—the nationwide theater kid demographic can only push the needle so hard—but I’m eager to see the results.
It boils down to one product: the connective tissue between both films, nostalgia. Choose your delusion. Hold fast to the noxious idea of some remembered village, sanitized for your protection, a place you can never truly occupy. In a line you’ll likely see quoted in every La La Land review, Gosling’s character Sebastian comments that in L.A., “they worship everything and value nothing.” Whether the line is intended to be as thoroughly panoptic and revealing as it is, that’s the nut. Nostalgia is an illusory altar of half-truth and quarter truth and faulty embroidered memory, each recreation and reimagining a more grotesque lie. Yet, people throw themselves in front of it, prostrate, chanting like a holy invocation, “things used to be better, things used to be different.”
To its credit, La La Land allows for something Hacksaw Ridge wouldn’t dare fold into the equation: moments of self-reflection. Yes, the picture is outfitted with weapons grade nostalgia—up to and including the fact that the movie was shot in CinemaScope (*intense eye roll*)—but the film at least challenges itself to play with and subvert the idea. Our leads, Mia (Emma Stone) and Sebastian (Baby Goose) recognize they’re throwbacks consumed by their kitsch. Sebastian is a beleaguered musician and a staunch enemy of jazz aka a dude who really loves jazz. Mia is a plucky wannabe actress who has a wall sized Ingrid Bergman poster looming over her. And it’s as though their fantasy of a bygone, velvet upholstered, glamorously lit Hollywood is so consuming, that when they’re together they block out any semblance of the real world/industry/Los Angeles around them.
"Wow, Monte, bruh, so you hated this movie, huh?" Nope. Not at all. It’s perfectly fine. Heck, it’s briefly pretty damn good, but young homie isn’t gonna lie to you neither. What Chazelle has achieved is genuinely mind boggling. For a movie of its scope and caliber, he made it for next to nothing, and it is visually sumptuous. I mean, taking your eyes to a buffet of sound and color. Stone and Gosling are wonderful together. The music, where I don’t think it’s something I’d enjoy independent of the production, is incredibly thoughtful. There are hooks, themes, shapes, and reprises. There are massive numbers at the outset and tiny, quiet, sweet duets. There are moments of pure, unmitigated magic. Yes, even this coal-furnace-grown-cold heart of mine had embers left enough that I was whisked away by the glorious sequence set at Griffith Observatory. The courtship number with an L.A. sunset in the background? Knock me over with your Criterion copy of The Umbrellas of Cherbourg.
Ultimately, the tale of the tape is that La La Land is obsessed with what it perceives itself to be. Like some quixotic Ouroboros, the film is about two people locked in a self-imposed identity, who long for and linger in a world of which they were never a part. Yet they manage to forge the life they want wrapped around these tenets. Through this sentimentality woven wormhole—strictly reserved for the fools who dare to dream—we arrive at a climactic sequence of things remembered and approximated futures, a replication engine of personal nostalgia inside a glittering edifice of ‘remember when.’
Where this seems exhausting, I found sincere truth in the final sequence. La La Land elevated itself beyond precious musical to something unexpected and emotionally profound. Because when you see them years from now, after they’ve slipped through your fingers like strands of their silken hair, you’ll realize the memories and imagined outcomes are little more than moveable painted sets and scratched eight millimeter film of the imagination. The agonizing bliss of memory, the cruel necessity of nostalgia. A component of our mind so powerful, that these sequences can devour us. But it’s the rebellion of the now, the strength to puncture this unreality that creates some semblance of the present. And then you can dare to carry on in the messy, uncomfortable world we all have to occupy together.
—Monte Monreal
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