[Please note: there is some discussion below of La La Land‘s ending—spoiler alert]

Before she left for summer break, G and I watched La La Land. The first time for her, the second for me. Once again it brought up a jumble of emotions. I remember coming home from the theatre, taking a strong drink outside in the freezing cold, looking at the stars. I remember how it hurt. Because love. And dreams.

As a kid, I believed in the premise that my mother squelched my father’s dreams. As an adult, I developed a more nuanced perspective, but my early certainty was a driving force behind a number of my youthful thoughts and actions. To wit, I married someone with dreams and vowed to support them without limit.

La La Land made me ask myself whether X and I are both dreamers. Followed by: are two sets of love and dreams sustainable? Maybe there’s only room for one dreamer and one cheerleader per relationship. Or maybe dreams fulfilled come at such a cost that love must assume second place.

The final scene of the film is the subject of some debate: is it shot from Mia or Sebastian’s point of view? My reply is neither one. I interpreted it as an elegy to dreams, dreamers, and the price of art. On a personal note, it felt like an elegy to our lives in LA, too. How we started—bonded and believing—and left—fractured and fragile. The price of being so close to the flame.

Could Mia or Sebastian’s love have lasted? Can their love be redeemed? Is their love the one-and-only kind? Are dreams compatible with relationship or does relationship inevitably become the scapegoat for the pain and suffering of dreams unfulfilled? Alternately, what is the cost of one dream fulfilled if a relationship of two stays intact?

Can we serve more than one god at a time?

And more: is the air supply needed to sustain a relationship the same thing that fuels dreams? You pick the tank you fill. I wonder if the biggest dreamers treat their dreams as greater than anything, even their love for another.

Like most of us, G got wrapped up in La La Land’s romance and was disappointed by the ending. I hadn’t stopped to think that the demise of an idealized love would hit her so hard. The only remedy at hand was to watch Dirty Dancing to banish the sadness; a movie with a proper ending: “Nobody puts Baby in a corner.” But the next morning G’s sadness was back. I was reminded of her long ago, a little girl who needed to leave the theatre during Lion Witch and the Wardrobe, who couldn’t read Grimm. Who struggled to see the line between fact and fiction. To her, the scrim was almost transparent; she felt the emotions in all stories as real and raw.

Is there only one true love for each of us? Or is this yet another myth?

The day after our shared La La Land screening, instead of addressing my work, I decided to read about the director. Damien Chazelle already had piqued my curiosity with Whiplash—a gutting film about the emotional depths a student will plumb, depicting masochistic and destructive tendencies in teacher and student. Extremes I neither know nor understand myself but always have aroused a curiosity in me. Who would seek success at such a price? Is the brink of insanity what it takes?

I read more on Chazelle, yearning to know more about a person who thinks these thoughts and finds a way to represent them on film. He speaks to themes that dance in my head and sing clearly in my relationships: achievement, pain, dreams, fear, drive, discipline, success, loss, love, cost. The youngest ever to win an Oscar for Best Director, Chazelle went to that Crimson school in Cambridge, married a classmate, and divorced after four years that included ten years of working together. His composer and collaborator was his college roommate.

I am not surprised at all. There is a reason these are familiar themes. Under my Orange and Black passion lurk dark questions: have I simply not worked hard enough? Not made the right decisions? Not walked close enough to the edge? Or, back then, was I an admissions error? There are times I feel overwhelmed with the thought that I don’t measure up to the expectations others had for me or—perhaps most importantly—I had for myself.

I note that Chazelle and his ex divorced the year that Whiplash came out and made him a sensation. At what price, success? I note he “quietly” made her executive producer on La La Land “because he wanted to acknowledge her collaborations over the years.” She produced his first film and was a “key figure in development and production” of Whiplash. Of course she was. In her own right she is every bit his equal, not to mention a world champion fencer, as well as a writer, producer and director.

“We’re still like family,” Chazelle says of his ex.

Returning to the ending of La La Land, producer Fred Berger says the characters Mia and Sebastian “will always have each other. They needed each other to get to this place, they’re better off for having known each other.” Actor Emma Stone quotes a friend who said, “this movie celebrates those loves that came before… they’re just as important as the love you have now.”

And Chazelle: “Most of the greatest love stories in history don’t end with happily ever after… If you’re telling a story about love, love has to be bigger than the characters… Even if the relationship might be over in practical terms, the love is not over. The love lasts, and I think that’s just a beautiful kind of thing.”

I’ve always liked sad stories, sad songs, grand passion, and the ephemeral nature of deep connection—like art, it’s something you touch now and then throughout your life, but you don’t get to keep it. It’s not really yours in the first place; rather it’s a visitation, a moment, a coup de foudre.

Maybe success, to a degree, is like that, too. And the endless striving to hold onto one or the other is where we fall down.

It never ceases to amaze me the depth of feeling this seemingly airy film conjures in me. Maybe that is the point. There is the opening dance sequence in traffic, and then there’s real traffic. There’s romance, and then there’s real life.

In the end, I’m pondering what to say to G about all of this. Don’t put love ahead of dreams? Or don’t put striving for success ahead of relationship? But what if the relationship is only for a season? We only can see looking backward as Kierkegaard says. What should we keep on the front burner? If we don’t love, who are we?

And the big question: are love and dreams mutually sustainable? From my own experience, I don’t know that they are. But I do know how exciting it is to be up close to both of them.

With the taste of La La Land still on my lips, I want to tell her this: it’s the journey you take and the love you make along the way. It’s the bravery, the mess, the madness. The trial and error. The faith, the doubt. And the in-between.

Tears are just as real as shards of bliss.

Add this to the list of questions for which I have no answer. Just go out and discover, my child. Go and find out… for you.

 

 

 

Sources: http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/la-la-land-ending-meaning-explained-978105

 

http://www.usmagazine.com/celebrity-news/news/damien-chazelle-attended-golden-globes-with-girlfriend-ex-wife-w460080