The Disorientating Nature of La La Land and Life

“City of stars, are you shining just for me?

City of stars, there’s so much that I can’t see.

Who knows? I felt it from the first embrace I shared with you

That now, our dreams - they’ve finally come true.”

La La Land (2016)

 

City lights.

Remember La La Land?¹ Oddly, although it absolutely cleaned up at the 2016 Oscars and seemingly everyone spent a couple of months raving about how amazing it was, I get the impression that it dropped off the radar at a near-vertical gradient subsequent to that. Indeed, I’ve barely heard anyone mention it since, except when I went to an evening screening of it at one of those big Christian holiday event thingbobbies this spring just gone.² When my older sister and I arrived back at our accommodation afterwards, our flatmates of course made polite enquiries as to whether we’d enjoyed the film.³ We looked at each other with furrowed brows. Like, it wasn’t terrible, but was it really worth all those Oscars? was the gist of our response. Then I added something to the effect that I felt I needed longer to ponder in order to decide whether I liked it; I hadn’t yet acquired a satisfactory sense of what I thought it was trying to do. What was the point it was making? What were the ideas it wanted me to buy into?

As a bit of a side note, I have come to realise that not everyone agrees with me that all films (and books and video games and every other kind of fiction) are trying to get their viewers (or readers or players or whatever) to buy into one particular set of ideas or another. But I for my part don’t believe it’s possible to tell a story in a way that doesn’t advocate certain notions about the nature and purpose of life, the universe, and everything, over against other ones. Consequently, I’d much rather be able to discern something of what the director or writer or creator wants me to buy into, and so to decide from an informed perspective the extent to which I actually want to buy into that, than to not be able to, and so render myself susceptible to starting to buy into it without particularly noticing or thinking through the relevant rationale. I don’t mean that there’s inevitably some ruthless agenda lurking behind every tiny element of a piece of storytelling, and that I take it upon myself to expose the conspiracies; I’m just trying, as ever, to watch watchfully.⁴ And to that principle, La La Land presented something of a challenge. It was a disorientating film. It defied my attempts to map and delineate it. It constantly confounded my expectations even as I readjusted them.

Still, a good deal of time and thought later, I think I might have grasped the thrust of it. I think disorientating the viewer and confounding her expectations is precisely what it’s designed to do: specifically, it deliberately falls short of every Hollywood trope it can get its hands on. In a market saturated with the same old rosy-glowing story - though beset by evil opposing forces, our heroes ultimately overcome every obstacle until everything they ever dreamed of, including each other, is theirs - it punches real-life disappointment through that shining bubble. The really key place I think this comes across - spoilers ahead - is during that dream-sequency bit right before the end of the film, that takes place while Mia and her husband watch Sebastian perform a piano piece in his jazz club.⁵ The dream sequence represents what was supposed to happen. When Mia first went to compliment Sebastian on his playing, he was supposed to stop and chat, instead of barging past her in a huff. When Mia took a gamble by staging her one-woman play at her personal expense, it was supposed to enjoy a full house and a standing ovation, instead of sparse applause from an even sparser audience. When the story ended, Mia and Sebastian were supposed to have stayed together despite everything stacked against them, instead of having broken up for the dull, pragmatic reason of allowing each to pursue his or her own career. I know, because every time, what really happened caught me by surprise, whereas the dream-sequence version felt, you know, right.

La La Land denounces La La Land as a mere la la land, if you catch my drift: it denounces Hollywood and everything Hollywood normally wants us to buy into as mere fantasy. In a properly delicious bit of generic playfulness, it’s a Hollywood musical, made in something close to the traditional style, that dedicates itself to dismantling everything Hollywood musicals have traditionally represented. In real life, the story doesn't tend to go the way you’d think it was supposed to if your life were a Hollywood musical. Sometimes you get a lucky break, sometimes you don’t, and that doesn’t come in a nice predictable story arc. Sometimes pouring your heart and soul into a project isn’t enough to persuade other people to believe in it. Often the paths available to you aren’t as clear cut as chasing your dream at any cost versus outright abandoning it. Often it turns out that you can only have some of the elements of the perfect happy ending you’d imagine for yourself.

 

Often life, unlike certain forms of cinema, does not turn out all rainbows and smiles.

The very neither-here-nor-there-ness of this set of ideas made it harder than usual to pin down as the fundamental point of the film. And, to move us into this week’s scriptural content, I think a similar thing is going on in the book of Qohelet, or Ecclesiastes.⁶ You read it and think, hang on, what are the ideas this wants me to buy into? If you’re looking at the epistle to the Romans or something, the argument is all nicely laid out in logical order, but Qohelet seems to chase dead ends and contradict itself and come out with some weird stuff that doesn’t feel as if it really belongs in a library dedicated to the glory of God, any more than an ending where the key couple aren’t together belongs in a Hollywood musical. It disorientates the reader and confounds her expectations, and you know what? I think that’s precisely what it’s designed to do. Very much like La La Land, the structure of the thing is a key part of how it makes the point that sometimes things don’t turn out the way you think they’re supposed to.

It’s good to be wise, says Qohelet. Things work out well for people who behave wisely. And we go, great, yes, that makes sense. But then he adds, mind you, the wise person and the fool both end up dead, just the same as one another; and you can be as wise as you like and still be forgotten after your time; and fools often seem to end up powerful, and it only takes a little foolishness to bring all the benefits of your wisdom crashing down; and anyway, nobody’s really wise, because nobody knows the future, and so we can all be caught unawares and left floundering by unexpected turns of events; and it’s impossible for anyone to really understand the world and how it works. All right, we frown, so wisdom is actually useless, then. And he replies, well, no, it’s still definitely a lot better than folly. And while we’re busy scratching our heads over that, he continues: it’s good to be righteous. Things work out well for people who fear God and do what’s right. And we go, great, yes, that definitely makes sense. But then he adds, mind you, the righteous person and the wicked both end up dead, just the same as one another…⁷

If you try to catch hold of one thread of thought in the book of Qohelet and follow it along, you end up tied in knots - and that’s really the whole point. The book is about the nature of life, the universe, and everything, and its conclusion is that life is disorientating and confounds our expectations. It makes you think it’s going to go one way, and then turns around and does something else instead.

This is actually all stupendously comforting, because it means that when we look at life, the universe, and everything, and see exactly the disorientating mess that Qohelet did, that’s not because we’re lacking the wisdom to discern a nice, neat story arc hidden somewhere under the chaos. Qohelet is most readily identified as Solomon,⁸ literally the wisest person ever if we don’t count Jesus, and yet his conclusion about life is that it’s impossible to truly make head or tail of it. We should be expecting that things won’t turn out the way we think they’re supposed to.

But the really good news is that the reason life seems like such a disorientating mess is because we can’t make head or tail of it, in that we can’t see the big picture. We can’t grasp the totality of the ginormous, impossibly elaborate story that God is telling through the whole of human history. It confounds us because we’re too tiny to get how all the individual elements of it work together. The way life disorientates us, then, isn’t a cause for despair, but for rejoicing, that we have a God great and mighty enough to purpose order out of all this seeming chaos.

La La Land is right that things often don’t work out the way we think they’re supposed to. But if we’re trusting a God whose wisdom to decide and power to ordain how the world works soar an infinity above ours, that fact need neither surprise us nor trouble us. The comfort of Ecclesiastes is that it doesn’t hold back in describing the chaos of life, the universe, and everything - and thereby it declares the full disorientating extent of it subject to the will and rule of almighty God.

Footnotes

¹ If not, here’s the opening scene to remind you: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xVVqlm8Fq3Y.

² Namely Word Alive, which takes place each spring at Pontins in Prestatyn: https://wordaliveevent.org/. It’s really good, but it’s probably already all booked up for next year because that’s what seems to happen, so my recommendation might be slightly pointless by now.

³ Another thing we did with our Word Alive flatmates was play a lot of Ticket to Ride, a stupendously fun board game first introduced to me by a dear friend maybe a month before that: https://www.daysofwonder.com/tickettoride/en/usa.

⁴ This is a principle I explored in ‘The Art of Watching Watchfully’, which you can find under March 2017 in my blog archives if you’re mad enough to want to read more of my ramblings today.

⁵ I can’t find said scene on YouTube. Sorry.

⁶ Qohelet (קֹהֶלֶת) is the Hebrew title, Ecclesiastes (Ἐκκλησιαστής) the Greek translation of it: in both cases the book shares its title with the character who provides most of the narration. Often this character is called the Teacher in English; the Hebrew word occurs in no other book of the Bible, but it’s from the root קהל (qhl) meaning to assemble, so the idea behind the English translation is that this was someone who gathered a bunch of people to listen to what he had to say. The Greek word for ‘assembly’ is ἐκκλησία (ekklēsía), which in the New Testament is used in the specific sense of ‘church’ – so that’s why the title Ecclesiastes bears so strong a resemblance to words like ‘ecclesiastical’, ‘ecclesiology’, French église, and so forth.

⁷ The book circles round to these ideas repeatedly, so I won’t link to a particular part of it; you’ll get a better feel of what I’m getting at by giving the whole thing a skim: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Ecclesiastes+1&version=ESVUK.

⁸ Qohelet 1:1 identifies the author as ‘the son of David, king in Jerusalem’; verse 16 adds that he was wiser than anyone in Jerusalem before him; 2:7 adds that he had greater possessions than anyone in Jerusalem before him, and verse 9 of the same chapter that he was himself greater; 12:9 adds that he taught the people and wrote down collections of proverbs. Methinks ’tis Solomon.