This Is Not My Review of La La Land

It's late into the night, I've had a couple of beers, a brownie, and I'm feeling just a tad emotional - but let that not invalidate my pressing to talk about something, or rather to gather a few, whirling thoughts and let them spill out into a more coherent and helpful narrative. I want to talk about La La Land and a certain scene that touched some intrinsic parts of me which I deem necessary to share. Before you assume, you should know that this isn't a review of the film nor is it a plot-heavy regurgitation of every critic that's ever seen it and typed out their two cents. It's not me convincing you to go or not to go (although you should definitely go). But, I'll say that to get to my point, there may be a few spoilers and everyone resents a spoiler, so do what you need to do to save our relationship.

First of all, this movie was - no doubt - a piece of art, as is anything else created, shared, and up for interpretation, but more than that, it was a risk and it freaking stuck the landing. We could talk about the cast or follow the lines of symbolism or praise the Chazelle/Hurwitz duo or argue the ending or applaud the original score. The internet is swarming with those things if you need it, but when I asked the Lord to make me mindful this year, it's like he's constantly subverting what I've given myself to on earth and he's saying, 'How can we make this about me'. And now I'm learning about the character of Jesus through the science of brewing coffee and I'm being sanctified through musicals and everything seems weird but also exactly as it should have been all along.

For quick context, Mia is a barista and an only-aspiring actress living in Los Angeles. She attends parties and auditions and is waiting for her big break but still breaking under the weightiness of competition and rejection and just waiting. Sebastian is a musician with a passion for jazz, the nuance of its history and culture. He's sort of a messy dead-beat who desperately wants to reignite a respect and a reverence for this lost-on-everyone art form within the city. They have separate dreams of taking the stage and owning a club but in the meantime they'll be scolded at work and sleep under unpaid bills and eventually fall in love, and it's this beautiful, ethereal tension that keeps us until the end.

The two experience a crucial transition, something that I've done the splits over as a writer, and if you're a dreamer at all, you have or will. It's the stuck between going for it (I mean, really going for it) and being realistic (in this order: realizing that sleeping, eating and making money are still important, exercising the mundane muscles of existing, letting someone else go for it, and finally - keeping a safe and steady job that allows you to think silly of your young and trampled dream). Seb finds stardom in a pseudo-jazz band but loses his heart behind why he started, and Mia decides to write a one-woman play. She buys out the theater and performs So Long, Boulder City - a view of the world from her bedroom and a nod to her childhood home in Nevada.

To sum it up, no one comes. Okay, maybe eight people come. Sebastian gets caught at a work gig he had forgotten about. The show ends with a golf clap. Mia overhears dismissive comments about not quitting her day job, and it confirms everything she'd ever gone out on a limb for and felt scared in doing so. And this scene...this is the scene that keeps drawing me back, and I held my breath as I watched a second time, and I still think about it a lot because how many times has this been you and me.

She immediately packs her things and heads to the car, where she'll sop up clumpy tears that are some sad but mostly mad because she had known better. Seb stops her and asks where she's going and she says home and he says, "This is home." "Not anymore," she says. And the irony, as the signs for an empty So Long, Boulder City become ants in her rearview and she drives straight to the place that had fueled her but was no longer meant for dreaming.

. . .

I wasn't much of a recess girl. I liked doing my work in the classroom, and just as I'm a homebody today, I wondered why anyone would need to venture outside the safe walls of learning. One time, in lower grade school, we had been sent out to play or do whatever you do with thirty other cooped-up children in a field. I didn't like just standing by myself but I also cringed at the thought of fitting in to pass the time. In some God-forsaken moment of courage, I made my way over to the monkey bars, which - no - of course, I had never done before. I get about three swings in and I'm sweaty as all get-out and the next time I blink, I'm on my back in the dirt making a sound that an animal makes. Later, I'd come to find out that I'd had the wind knocked out of me and I was unable to speak for a few seconds that had felt like a day. It wasn't until I was able to simultaneously touch my hands to the bars and my feet sturdy on the ground that I gave the monkey bars a second, un-failable shot, and going for it and falling and getting your breath gutted from your insides and making your way back to a safe place seems like how Mia must have felt.

We curdle and we go to the house in front of the library and Mom cooks for us and we lay our belongings in the same room that we became a dreaming woman and our bedspread's the same and our soccer trophies on the shelf look dustier than we remember. It feels like settling but at least the arrows have stopped coming after you. And while you lick your wounds and the world practices its told-you-so voice, there's someone waiting outside and he's the last one we want to see. How'd you find me here. But he's listened and he's known and he says that he's not leaving until we start making some goddamn sense.

We tell him thanks a lot for breathing this dead dream into me and that maybe I'm not good enough. Yes, you are. Maybe I'm not. You are. Maybe I'm not, and maybe it just hurts a little too much. Maybe I'm done being embarrassed and talked over and laughed at and it's about time I start exchanging creativity for success - so that I can be worth something someday. He tells us about an opportunity to come again with him in the morning and his persistence and excitement to watch us win reinvigorates us. But we're still tired. We go anyway. And we find an entire life of freedom in trying again. 

Here's to the dreamers and triers and doers. Bring on the rebels, the ripples from pebbles, the painters and poets and plays. May we hang our hats in Boulder City - thanking the library house for its service and safeness. May we hear a Voice louder than the echo of golf claps and know that in the hearing there is holiness. May we never confuse our work with the squandering of time, because it is good work, faithful work. His You are will fill up every gaping hole and let you start again.