<em>La La Land</em>’s Double-Edged Nostalgia
This post contains spoilers for the entirety of La La Land.
Midway through La La Land, an aspiring actress named Mia (Emma Stone) performs her one-woman show for her love interest, Sebastian (Ryan Gosling). It remains, perhaps mercifully, unseen by the audience. “It feels really nostalgic to me,” she says, fretting about staging it in public. “That’s the point!” he assures her. “Are people going to like it?” she asks. Sebastian shrugs. “Fuck ‘em!”
In the end, Sebastian is right to encourage her; Mia’s play strikes a chord with a casting agent, which is enough to set her on the path to celebrity. But for all its colorful musical numbers and starry-eyed Hollywood mythmaking, has an uncomfortable relationship with nostalgia. Sebastian might encourage Mia’s backward gaze, but the writer and director Damien Chazelle has made a film that understands the limits delights in its throwbacks, referencing some of musical history’s greatest cinematic moments, but clinging to the past isn’t an approach that ends entirely well for its characters.
