Tough love in La La Land and Whiplash

Damien Chazelle earned him­self a hand­some rep­u­ta­tion with his strik­ing break­through fea­ture, Whiplash, which stern­ly implies that tough love is imper­a­tive to achiev­ing artis­tic goals. The mis­chie­vous sug­ges­tion float­ed through­out the film is that JK Sim­mons’ fero­cious taskmas­ter, Fletch­er, may have dubi­ous meth­ods, but it’s pre­cise­ly this which push­es aspir­ing drum­mer Andrew (Miles Teller) to greatness.

While Chazelle’s new film, La La Land, shares a sim­i­lar jazz back­ground, this time the writer/​director looks to be play­ing a far hap­pi­er tune. Whiplash was almost com­i­cal­ly intense when it came to depict­ing Andrew’s ambi­tion, and just about self-aware enough to acknowl­edge it. By con­trast, La La Land has been pro­mot­ed as a feel-good musi­cal revival about the joys of falling in love and fol­low­ing your dreams. The real­i­ty is a lit­tle different.

Both films are struc­tured around the twin pur­suits of art and romance, and in Whiplash it’s clear which one Andrew val­ues more. His music is not just a pas­sion but an obses­sion, lead­ing to late nights rehears­ing alone and bleed­ing hands, bat­tered by infi­nite beats. It’s fair to say love is not on his mind. Nev­er­the­less, ripe with awk­ward­ness he acquires a girl­friend, Nicole (Super­girl​’s Melis­sa Benoist); though it’s clear from the word go that she’s not his pri­or­i­ty. Even on their first date he spends half his time geek­ing out over the café’s jazzy music and pas­sive-aggres­sive­ly ques­tion­ing her lack of ambi­tion com­pared to him.

The scene where Andrew breaks up with Nicole is the most telling expla­na­tion of his per­son­al phi­los­o­phy. Andrew explains with an almost patho­log­i­cal­ly unemo­tion­al calm­ness exact­ly how their rela­tion­ship is going to pan out. He’s going to want to prac­tise drum­ming because he wants to be one of the greats, and she’ll want to spend time with him, and those two things just aren’t com­pat­i­ble in his mind. There are two impli­ca­tions: he loves drum­ming more than her, and roman­tic love can only ever hin­der artis­tic success.

If the car­rot doesn’t work, the stick must be the answer. Andrew sees no ben­e­fit in hav­ing a lov­ing part­ner along­side his musi­cal career; instead the dri­ving whip pro­vid­ed by Fletcher’s abu­sive teach­ing carves out his path to glo­ry. That bleak argu­ment seems to be rein­forced by the film’s cli­max, where Andrew deliv­ers a bravu­ra solo and final­ly trumps Fletcher’s attempts to humil­i­ate him, before the two unite to deliv­er one superb last song. Their abu­sive rela­tion­ship may pro­duce some incred­i­ble music, but it’s hard to argue that Chazelle ful­ly endors­es this message.

Through­out the film he push­es Andrew’s sadism to extreme lengths, most notably in the moment where he crawls out from the wreck­age of a car crash, runs to a band per­for­mance, and still tries to play. That scene can only be read as a con­dem­na­tion of both Fletcher’s meth­ods and Andrew’s insane com­mit­ment to art over more nor­mal things like hav­ing a girl­friend and his own health.

In La La Land, Chazelle explores many of the same ques­tions – name­ly whether artis­tic suc­cess and roman­tic love are ever com­pat­i­ble. Its pro­tag­o­nists, jazz pianist Seb (Ryan Gosling) and actress Mia (Emma Stone), are pur­su­ing the same kind of artis­tic lifestyle as Andrew, but with less naivety. As befits peo­ple 10 years fur­ther down the line, they’re all too aware that real­i­ty must and per­haps should intrude, whether in the form of pay­ing rent or going on a date.

What they man­age where Andrew fails – and what also sug­gests a more mature view­point from Chazelle – is pur­su­ing a cre­ative life and a roman­tic rela­tion­ship at the same time. For a peri­od, their love pro­vides a salve for the rejec­tion in their fledg­ling careers. More cyn­i­cal­ly, in an echo of Whiplash’s main theme, it’s implied that Mia’s even­tu­al suc­cess is down to how Seb pushed her, most notably in the break­through audi­tion she would have oth­er­wise bailed on.

Ulti­mate­ly, art and love come into con­flict again, when Seb choos­es the jazz band whose pop­ulist style he despis­es over sup­port­ing Mia’s more gen­uine pas­sion for her one-woman show. This deci­sion sug­gests that both of them were more in love with their partner’s mutu­al pas­sion than each oth­er; all they real­ly need­ed was some­one to believe in them. The cou­ple recog­nise that their art will always come first and sep­a­rate, but their love affair with show­biz continues.

Seb opens the jazz club he’d always dreamed of, but with­out Mia at his side. She’s found love and suc­cess else­where, now mar­ried with a daugh­ter and a bright movie career. Her hap­py end­ing sug­gests that artis­tic glo­ry and love aren’t as incom­pat­i­ble as it first seemed in Chazelle’s work, but it’s clear which one infat­u­ates him more. Seb and Mia’s romance may be shot with pas­sion and imbued with chem­istry by Stone and Gosling, but it’s the mag­ic of show busi­ness that both they and Chazelle are real­ly in love with.

Every song is lit with a spot­light, a taste of the star­dom both leads hunger for; the very form of a musi­cal allows their deep­est desires to be vocalised in the form of song and dance; and even in those songs, it’s Hol­ly­wood and show­biz that are being lust­ed after, not the oth­er per­son – for exam­ple City of Stars’ ​“City of stars/​Are you shin­ing just for me?/I felt it from the first embrace I shared with you”.

Most telling­ly, Chazelle favours Seb and Mia’s pas­sion for per­form­ing over their artis­tic abil­i­ty, allow­ing endear­ing vocal stum­bles into the songs and hing­ing Mia’s big audi­tion on an impro­vised sto­ry rather than an exam­ple of honed craft. She suc­ceeds not through rig­or­ous train­ing like Whiplash’s Andrew, or even Seb, but through how she turns the emo­tions of her life into art. In that way, her romance with Seb can be seen as sim­ply fuel for her fire, one more expe­ri­ence that she chan­nels in her acting.

Arguably that pas­sion for an abstract art­form over real peo­ple leaves Chazelle’s work feel­ing a lit­tle cold. It’s a claim that could be lev­elled at the mutu­al­ly destruc­tive pair at the heart of Whiplash, but not La La Land. A love for jazz, or act­ing, or cin­e­ma is one which we can all recog­nise. Even if you can’t iden­ti­fy with pur­su­ing an act­ing career, we all have films that we cher­ish and know the real emo­tion­al pow­er they hold. It’s arguably even stronger because it affects every­one who comes into con­tact with that piece of art, not just one per­son. It’s the same rea­son we mourn dead celebri­ties as if we real­ly knew them, because in a way, through their art, we did.

It’s this strange pow­er that Chazelle har­ness­es in La La Land, and it’s the real rea­son why the film is so great. Not only has he cre­at­ed a breath­tak­ing piece of cin­e­ma, he reminds us why we love movies in the first place.