La La Land in Relation To Genre Theory [PDF]

Zitiervorschau

Avnish Mehra Intro to Film and Media Studies Prof Robert King November 13, 2017 La La Land in Relation to Genre Theory Within the first few minutes of Damien Chazelle’s 2016 romantic dramedy La La Land, two things become immediately apparent: first, through an elaborate song and dance sequence that spontaneously erupts from a Los Angeles traffic jam, we know we are watching a musical film, but second, through clever camera work and contemporary dance routines, we know we aren’t just watching any musical film. This is a distinctly twenty-first century musical. It speaks to a larger trend in recent times of pastiche and postmodernism, or as literary critic Frederic Jameson describes it, when “stylistic innovation is no longer possible, all that is left is to imitate dead styles.”1 La La Land therefore is a film that manages to balance typical musical conventions, while also subverting traditional genre norms to create a work of art that feels fresh, innovative, and relatable to modern audiences. Chazelle himself said in an interview, “The whole story genesis for me was, essentially, can we go all the way, so to speak, with the musical but still keep it feeling grounded in a real city with real people.”2 In this paper, I discuss the ways in which La La Land is able to tread this fine line, solidifying its place in American cinematic history.

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Robert King. “Hollywood Genres: Myths of Resolution?” Lecture at Columbia University, New York, NY, October 10, 2017. 2 Joe McGovern. “Ryan Gosling & Emma Stone, La La Land costars, discussed by director.” In Entertainment Weekly. Last Modified August 30, 2016. http://ew.com/article/2016/08/30/ryan-gosling-emma-stone-lala-land-2/

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In Jane Feuer’s essay on the Self-Reflexive Musical and the Myth of Entertainment, she identifies three myths of the modern musical. Feuer makes the distinction here that, “to say that entertainment is ‘mythified’ is to institute a triple play upon conventional meanings of the word myth. Most simply, it means that entertainment is shown as having greater value than it actually does.”3 The first myth Feuer discusses is the myth of spontaneity. She writes, “perhaps the primary positive quality associated with musical performance is its spontaneous emergence out of a joyous and responsive attitude towards life."4 In musicals, a song and dance sequence can erupt out of any random moment, and it appears to be simultaneously both planned and unplanned. Take for instance the opening sequence mentioned earlier, that takes place on a highway in Los Angeles. Ordinary people in the midst of a traffic jam, burst into song and dance, weaving in and out and over cars in what is made to look like a fiveminute-long single shot. This sequence also speaks to how the musical, while “technically the most complex type of film produced in Hollywood, paradoxically has always been the genre that attempts to give the greatest illusion of spontaneity.”5 The shot was difficult to choreograph, both in terms of dancing and camera work. The scene utilizes a camera on a crane on the back of a truck that moves back and forth throughout the scene. While it appears to unfold as a one-shot, there are at least three hidden cuts. Another scene in La La Land which speaks to the myth of spontaneity follows Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone’s characters leaving a party together at the end of a night. After seeing the beautiful Los Angeles sunset, Gosling begins to sing a song about how there’s

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Jane Feuer. “The Self-Reflexive Musical and the Myth of Entertainment.” In Film genre reader II, ed. by Barry Keith Grant (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995), 443. 4 Ibid., 443 5 Ibid., 447

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“nothing there” between them, and then hangs on to the lamppost in a direct callback to Gene Kelly’s similar act in Singin’ in the Rain (1952). It appears to be a spontaneous response to the romantic feelings evoked by an ordinary night, a classic “boy teases girl” moment. The sequence continues with Gosling and Stone eventually sitting down on a bench. She pulls out tap dancing shoes from her bag and at this point the audience realizes that Gosling already had his own pair on this entire time. It speaks to what Feuer terms “a type of bricolage”6, where the actors make use of props they have on hand. This moment is particularly striking however as though it appears to erupt spontaneously, the actors were oddly prepared for the ensuing tap-dancing sequence. One does not ordinarily carry tapdancing shoes around in their bag, let alone break out into a choreographed dance number on the streets, yet it’s a completely acceptable and plausible sequence in the musical genre. Of this Feuer says, “The myth of spontaneity operates to make musical performance, which is actually part of culture, appear to be part of nature.”7 The second myth Feuer describes is the myth of integration. “Successful performances are intimately bound up with success in love, with the integration of the individual into a community or a group, and even with the merger of high art with popular art.”8 This idea is no more evident than in Gosling’s character’s attempt to integrate Stone’s character into his own world of Jazz. It’s a move to not only take a mainstream girl into the world of a dying art, but to build their relationship, incorporate her into his community, and thus fall deeper in love.

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Feuer, “The Self-Reflexive Musical and the Myth of Entertainment,” 444. Ibid., 447. 8 Ibid., 447. 7

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In a montage sequence about halfway through the film, Gosling takes Stone to a jazz club where she breaks out into a dance amidst other jazz aficionados. The audience gives a standing ovation to not only applaud the now integrated Stone, but to bring the actual film watching audience into the experience, which brings me to the third and final myth: the myth of the audience. Feuer writes, “Successful performances will be those in which the performer is sensitive to the needs of the audience and which give the audience a sense of participation in the performance,”9 and “the use of theatrical audiences in the films provides a point of identification for audiences of the film.” In the second half of La La Land, Gosling’s character joins John Legend’s character in his pursuit of a new kind of jazz: mainstream jazz. The idea is to take a dying genre and reintroduce it to modern audiences with flashy dance numbers and electronic beats. It’s a direct metaphor for the film itself, in its attempt to take the dying musical genre and reinvent it for today’s cinema goers. The audiences for the new age jazz performances are markedly different from the audiences Gosling had played for earlier. The audiences now are younger, energetic millennials, who you would rarely find in a stuffy jazz club. The viewing audience of La La Land itself can feel the difference, and although we are tapping our feet to the gaudy number, we know that Gosling’s character’s heart is not in the performance. We are brought into their world yet the film makes us feel guilty for enjoying it. La La Land also shows its self-reflexivity by harking back to other musical films from the past, as many MGM musicals of the late 1940s and early 1950s did so arftully well. The references are too many to name for the purposes of this paper, but La La Land relied

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Feuer, “The Self-Reflexive Musical and the Myth of Entertainment,” 449.

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notably on the work of Hollywood musical legend, Fred Astaire, and his belief of how musicals should be shot and edited. “Astaire made the camera an involved but unobtrusive spectator at his dances, comfortably distant enough to show the dancers fully from head to toe.”10 Furthermore Astaire once observed, “Either the camera will dance, or I will”.11 In La La Land, Chazelle is careful to stay true to the head to toe shots, but he uses the camera in creative ways, for modern audiences. As Director of Photography Linus Sandgren puts it, “A lot of the older musicals were often just panning and or tracking sideways, but we were more physically involved, in the depth, vertical and circling around, I think.” 12 Through iconography, La La Land further solidifies itself as a classic Hollywood musical. Professor Thomas Schatz writes in his book Hollywood Genres, “iconography involves the process of narrative and visual coding that results from the repetition of a popular film story.”13 Of course, La La Land has the tap-dancing shoes, lampposts and gorgeous moonlight streets, but the filmmakers take it even one step further than that. Chazelle purposely chose to shoot the film on film in cinemascope. As Sandgren tells it, “La La Land is a contemporary story about dreamers, but Damien wanted to tell it in the vein of an older Hollywood musical, inspired by old Hollywood filmmaking.” He continued, “I proposed we should go for Cinemascope 2.55 like Cukor’s A Star is Born from 1954 and other films of that era, when anamorphic cinematography was introduced.” 14 Through bold, vibrant colors, Sandgren and Chazelle utilize the cinemascope and film stock to its full

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John Mueller, Astaire Dancing (New York: Alfred A. Knopf Inc., 2015), 26. Ibid., 26. 12 Kodak Blog. “Shot in CinemaScope, La La Land vibrantly romances the olden days of Hollywood.” Last Modified January 10, 2017. https://www.kodak.com/US/en/motion/blog/blog_post/?contentid=4295000679 13 Thomas Schatz, “Film Genre and The Genre Film.” In Hollywood Genres: Formulas, Filmmaking, and The Studio System, (Boston: McGraw Hill, 1991), 22. 14 Kodak Blog. 11

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advantage, in turn creating a nostalgic look that feels immediately like an old Hollywood musical. It is in this way that La La Land proves that “a film genre is both a static and dynamic system.”15 Schatz draws up another metaphor in order to drive this point, in his comparison of the study of language to the study of genres. “Through the ‘circuit of exchange’ involving box-office ‘feedback’, the studios and the mass audience hold a virtual ‘conversation’ whereby they gradually refine the ‘grammar’ of cinematic ‘discourse.’”16 At the end of La La Land, we expect the traditional “Hollywood ending, where the boy gets the girl, but it doesn’t happen. Instead, we see the harsh realities of modern love where they don’t always end up together, which reflects changing cultural attitudes. For a genre film to work efficiently, it is key that viewers should find the plot structures and conflicts that they would ordinarily expect from said genre. For the musical film, it’s the notion of artists trying to keep a dying high art alive, or the idea of two starcrossed lovers trying to win each other’s affection. La La Land was successful because not only did it have both, the filmmakers effectively took those ideas and played with them.

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Schatz, Film Genre and The Genre Film, 16. Ibid., 19.

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Bibliography Feuer, Jane. “The Self-Reflexive Musical and the Myth of Entertainment.” In Film genre reader II, edited by Barry Keith Grant, 441-455. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995. King, Robert. “Hollywood Genres: Myths of Resolution?” Lecture at Columbia University, New York, NY, October 10, 2017. Kodak Blog. “Shot in CinemaScope, La La Land vibrantly romances the olden days of Hollywood.” Last Modified January 10, 2017. https://www.kodak.com/US/en/motion/blog/blog_post/?contentid=4295000679 McGovern, Joe. “Ryan Gosling & Emma Stone, La La Land costars, discussed by director.” In Entertainment Weekly. Last Modified August 30, 2016. http://ew.com/article/2016/08/30/ryan-gosling-emma-stone-la-la-land-2/ Mueller, John. Astaire Dancing. New York: Alfred A. Knopf Inc., 1985. Schatz, Thomas. “Film Genre and The Genre Film.” In Hollywood Genres: Formulas, Filmmaking, and The Studio System, 15-34. Boston: McGraw Hill, 1991.

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