La La Land is a sweet, colorful, whimsical film about two young, eager, struggling artists. While the film is obviously dazzling, it is also quite difficult to place in the genre cycle simply because the genre remains undetermined. You might think, “it’s obviously a musical,” while others might decide, “it couldn’t be anything other than a drama.” Depending on the genre assigned to the movie, the status of its place in the cycle changes (I’d argue that in a musical genre, the film could be quite revisionist, while in the drama category, it would be classical, but that is a debate for another time). For all intents and purposes, I’d like to propose La La Land is a romance, and it falls into the classical stage of genre theory. Of course, this can be debated on end, but as I tallied tropes this evening, I realized that if nothing else, the film does tell a fine romantic tale.
Side note: I didn’t want to be the only girl in the class and the person who picks a romance to write about, but here I am, and I’m embracing it. In an early scene of the movie, Sebastian (played by Ryan Gosling) asks his sister, “why do you say romantic like it’s a dirty word?” The desire both characters and artists show in this film for majesty and romance makes it hard to see the movie as anything else. It’s romantic, and that is okay.
Anyway, what makes it a classic romance? Well only that it’s the same story as it was yesterday and the day before that and before that... Boy meets girl. Boy dislikes girl because girl does something to upset him, or inconveniences him, or catches him at a bad time. Girl (who has red hair, and a blonde friend, and, you guessed it, a brunette friend) does something cute and leaves her big shot boyfriend for the struggling artist she just met. Boy and girl fall in love… and angelic choirs sing operatic music as the screen fades to black on two words in a darling font: “The End.”
The casting directors picked Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone for goodness sake. That’s classical romance if we ever saw it! Some other classic romance tropes the movie so artfully employs include: the characters first encounter each other at Christmas time (while this isn’t a big theme, Christmas and romance go undeniably hand in hand these days thanks to Hallmark), the characters do a big number together in the beginning of the film about how they are not going to fall in love with each other, and then, of course, they begin to fall in love, they run into each other coincidentally a couple more times (or, who knows, maybe it’s fate… it is a romance after all), they lean in for a kiss at the movies and are rudely interrupted by a glitch in the system, they have an egregious falling out over dinner because the timing is off, they make up over some dramatic event (like a super successful audition). It’s the same story.
Once more, at the end of the film, it’s the same story all over again. When the montage comes up and it basically reprises everything that happened in Mia and Sebastian’s life, except allows them the decent kindness of coordinating, coinciding happily ever afters, it tells the same classic story. And the film doesn’t employ every romantic trope in the book to be ridiculous, or satirical, or unkind. It employs the tactical tropes because they work. Because in a la la land of bliss, ignorance, fantasy, or simply distance from what is real, these tropes make sense. And, in the world of us… in the real space which we all exist, the falling outs, the “I’ll always love you too’s,” the happily ever afters, just not together… they make sense.
While the ending is not something we’d like to see in a romance, it is a tragically refreshing reminder that la la land is exactly that. So, yes, even with an ending that makes viewers’ hearts physically ache, this movie is rightfully found in the classical stage of the genre cycle.
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