Escaping Reality: La La Land versus Moonlight
I didn’t stay up to watch the 2017 Oscars broadcast, but I read the news of the pandemonium that occurred when the wrong film was named Best Picture. I enjoyed La La Land, though it was not the grand picture I thought it would be. And because we’d heard so much about it, the week after the Oscars my wife and I watched Moonlight.
I was struck by how many ways these two films are similar. They are both beautifully shot, with stunning visuals that are almost dreamlike. Both films have a color and a vibrancy that make them seem so real, as though we are not watching a movie so much as watching real life happen. It’s a technological advancement of modern moviemaking that moving pictures can seem so real and yet be so unreal at the same moment. Neither of these movies seemed unreal. Even when Sebastian and Mia dance through the air in the Griffith Observatory it feels as though this is something that could actually happen.
Both movies are about dreamers. Mia and Sebastian are artists struggling to realize their dreams in Hollywood, one in the movies and the other in the LA jazz scene. In Moonlight the main character, Little/Chiron/Black, dreams of simply being who he is without fear of persecution by his friends, his mother, or society.
Both movies are stunning portraits of American life. But here is where I think they differ, and where, for me, they become, in some way, political films in a deeply divided America.
La La Land is an ode to a past that, really, never existed. It is a paean to a time when movies were dreams, when they were escapes from the struggles of real life. The “golden age” of movie musicals was during the 1930s when Americans struggled economically. The Great Depression had hit this country hard, dust storms rolled across the midwest, people were out of work, food was scarce, homelessness was rampant (though they didn’t call it homelessness then). Movie musicals were an escape from the hardship of daily life.
Later, musicals became a dream-like way of coping with the uncomfortable realities of the day. The Von Trapp family sings their way out of the oppression of the Third Reich. Eliza Doolittle rises above her social position to become almost royalty, ultimately fulfilling, on the screen, America’s promise of social mobility. Singin’ in the Rain is a musical remix of uplifting Broadway melodies from the 30s repackaged for a post-war audience. Still, all of them reflected a white, European view of the world, ignoring huge parts of America’s cultural history. Even West Side Story, that venerable musical about street gangs in New York (one of which was Puerto Rican), was populated by mostly white actors (Rita Moreno being a notable exception),
The characters in La La Land reflect the whitewashed image Hollywood musicals have almost always presented to and of America, cleansed of racial strife or segregation. Mia doesn’t hail from the inner city; she grew up in small Boulder City, Nevada, a public housing project built by the federal government to house the white workers who built the Hoover Dam. Sebastian struggles financially because he chooses to, not because he is forced to by circumstances or birth.
Sebastian’s stated goal in the movie is to “save” jazz and there is an unintentionally implied subtext to the fact that the only significant minority character in La La Land is himself a representation of the very thing Sebastian loathes. Keith produces “fusion jazz” that sells, but it is, for our titular hero, not the “pure” jazz that he wants to preserve.
By the end of the film both Mia and Sebastian have fulfilled their very American dreams, and by extension so have we. There is a part of each of them that, personally, still “lead lives of quiet desperation.” (Henry David Thoreau) But professionally they are exactly where they want to be.
La La Land is an ode to the past. It is a #MAGA film that seeks to remind us of a time in America when we wanted to believe in dreamers, that hard work and perseverance were all that it took to succeed. As long as you were white, educated, and upper middle class.
Moonlight is also an American story, but it is one not commonly seen on movie screens. It is populated not by the Hollywood dreamers but by the traditionally unrepresented and repressed. The men and women who live in the shadows and in the backgrounds. The ones who play the instruments on Sebastian’s stage occupy the foreground of Moonlight.
Little is a black boy running from bullies in Miami’s drug infested Liberty City when he meets Juan, a drug dealer from Cuba who sees himself in Little. “I was a wild little shortie, man. Just like you,” Juan tells the boy.
Little fights to survive a cycle of poverty and dependence that is not of his making. Liberty City, once a thriving middle class suburb north of Miami, became a den for the poor and disenfranchised during the 50s and 60s, especially when the construction of Interstate 95 through Miami cut the community off from more affluent neighborhoods. (The highway’s construction was touted as a “slum clearance program” by a Miami newspaper.)
Little is the result of that segregation and repression. Through three phases of his life — boy, adolescent, and adult — we see not America’s idealistic promise, but her hard truth. This is not a “bleeding heart” America seeking to save the downtrodden from themselves. It is not a whitewashed America that tries to pretend that this country’s racism is history. This America shines a spotlight on the bullied and abused and repressed who exist in the shadows and live in the moonlight.
Whereas Moonlight puts these characters in focus, La La Land makes them members of the band in Sebastian’s club: playing music to entertain the rest of us.
The characters in Moonlight are not waiting to be saved. They are not background filler in a whitewashed escapist fantasy. They are real people, doing the best they can in a society, in a country, that has shuffled them to the periphery and then blamed them for not doing enough to get out of the very cycle that has put them there.
La La Land is nostalgia for a whitewashed past that never was, a dancing, musical dream that only every really existed in the movies. It is full of characters who are looking for themselves through the lens of others, who fulfill their dreams in the perceptions others have of them. Mia finds success when someone else finally sees her talent. Sebastian “saves” jazz by getting a white audience to come see the black men play.
Moonlight is the real world, the past, present and future. It is about real people struggling not only with their place in a world that doesn’t seem to want them, but also struggling with their own identities for and within themselves. Ultimately, Moonlight is the reality from which La La Land is desperately trying to escape.
