‘La La Land’ is the Ultimate Victim of Hollywood’s Political Correctness

Memories of the epic Oscars mishap might be receding  but a different sense of injustice to La La Land, completely unrelated to Warren Beatty getting the wrong envelope, still lingers.

On the surface, it might be difficult to argue that a movie that just won six Academy Awards is a victim of anything. But it’s time to ask: is La La Land a victim of sex, gender and racial politics?

Moonlight is a good movie, a lyrical chronicle of growing up poor, gay and black in America. Yet this movie has been made many times before (from Tea and Sympathy in 1956 to Blue is the Warmest Color in 2013). The twist is that this time, it’s a black kid. Mahershala Ali deserved his Oscar. But is Moonlight the best movie of the year?

By contrast, La La Land is a deceptively simple movie. The operative word here is deceptive. It seems like an old-fashioned movie, but it’s not. It’s an homage to sentimental Hollywood musicals that is never sentimental itself.

It tells one of the oldest stories in the book. Boy meets girl, boy gets girl, boy loses girl. Also, much has already been said about La La Land. The seemingly uncut opening scene is a magic trick that will be taught in film schools forever. While it’s devastating that the boy doesn’t end up with the girl, if he had the movie would be another stupid Hollywood musical with a happy ending.

La La Land is in fact about art, what it means to be an artist and what you have to sacrifice to become one. Dedication to one’s craft at the expense of all else, is one of writer-director Damien Chazelle’s themes (see the painful break-up in his previous film Whiplash).

When the two characters first meet, they’re in la-la-land, in other words, immature, and confused. By the end of the movie, they have achieved what they set out to do. They made each other better and put each other on their proper paths. Their relationship was not a failure; it was essential to their development as artists. But are they happy? The look of resignation on Mia’s face as Sebastian simply nods, as if to say “It’s OK”, speaks volumes in the last shot.

While Ryan Gosling can’t sing and Emma Stone isn’t much better, this is not supposed to be My Fair Lady. It had to be two actors singing badly and dancing imperfectly. The point is that ordinary people can do extraordinary things when inspired, by love or by art, as were the filmmakers here.

It would be meaningless if they were great singers and dancers—their craft is jazz and acting, not singing and dancing. It is not coincidental either that they make “beautiful music” together and that the singing and dancing stops once their relationship begins to sour. It was planned.

The point of making a musical (Dancer in the Dark for instance) is exactly to contrast the real life struggles, non-musical scenes, with one’s imaginary world (La La Land) where everything is beautiful like an Astaire and Rodgers musical number. Chazelle may be only 32, but with La La Land he has made a true masterpiece.

However, the movie has committed several sins against politically correct Hollywood. To begin with, it had the audacity to be commercially successful, making over $371 million worldwide.

Hollywood doesn’t like rewarding success with an Oscar (look at Steven Spielberg’s blockbuster Oscar track record or Alfred Hitchcock, arguably the greatest director of all time, only having won an honorary Academy Award).

More importantly, La La Land has been accused of political incorrectness by various groups including women, blacks and jazz lovers. Critics have complained about the movie’s gender politics.

Morgan Leigh Davis noted in the LA Review of Books that Mia is not much more than a bystander in her own story: “Sebastian’s drive and dedication are more textured than Mia’s, and it is his melody that recurs through the film to denote particularly important moments in their relationship.” Er, it’s called a musical motif.  Sebastian is the author of their relationship who, by introducing her to jazz and taking her to see Rebel Without a Cause, is teaching her about life.

Sebastian is director Chazelle’s alter ego and therefore, the driving force behind the movie. The movie is essentially told from his point of view. Maybe it would have been different if a woman had written and directed it. But a woman didn’t.

Worse yet, the movie has been hammered for racial politics. Critics who are perhaps still getting over Trump’s election accuse Chazelle of agreeing that life was better in the 1950s because America was segregated, since the movie is a throw back to the musicals of the 1950’s.

This is absurd. George Michael, Toyota Prius, Soft Cell, cell phones and other elements featured in the film didn’t existed in the 1950s. This is not a political movie by any stretch of imagination.

La La Land is about being dedicated to art and the sacrifice that is required in pursuit of that dream. To interpret it as promoting racism is using unbelievably convoluted logic? Do we criticize Apollo 13 because none of the astronauts were black?

Over at MTV News, Ira Madison III claims: “If you’re gonna make a film about an artist staying true to the roots of jazz against the odds, you’d think that artist would be black.”

So the claim goes, Sebastian wants to save jazz, but that is not acceptable because he is white. According to this line of reasoning, Chet Baker, Buddy Rich and countless other white jazz musicians should be wiped from the history of jazz merely because as they happen to be caucasian.

There have been numerous other criticisms about the paucity of black leads (er, John Legend?), homosexual leads, and misguided accusations of intellectual snobbery.  But once again, this is not a movie that explores the themes being questioned.

The backlash against La La Land exactly accounts for why so much of mainstream America hates the two Coasts. Why does every show, every movie, every cartoon have to have a homosexual, a minority, or a disenfranchised character?