Students do not thrive under abuse, and the notion that an abstract “greatness” will protect anyone against mistreatment is equally ludicrous. It should go without saying that this is absurd. The ultimate message of Whiplash is this: the harder you push someone, the crueler you are, the better they will become - at least, if they are “great.” Andrew is fixated on becoming “one of the greats,” and Fletcher is correspondingly driven by his desire to produce a student who will one day join the ranks of Charlie Parker and Buddy Rich, using this desire to justify his sadistic style of pedagogy. As a result, while not textually erotic, music in Whiplash functions less as a rarefied cultural phenomenon and more as a physically primal - and connotatively sexual - act. The world of the conservatory, and consequently the world of the film itself, is crudely masculine and fundamentally homosocial. What unfolds is a study in bad pedagogy: Fletcher is abusive both verbally (“If you deliberately sabotage my band, I will fuck you like a pig”) and physically (he throws a chair at Andrew’s head and repeatedly slaps him to get him on tempo). Simmons) to be alternate drummer in the school’s elite studio band. Early in the film, he is selected by the tyrannical Terence Fletcher (J. Andrew (Miles Teller) is a first-year student at the fictional Shaffer Conservatory, studying the drums. While La La Land is bright and colorful, Whiplash is dark and deliberately punishing to watch. It is initially jarring to consider La La Land and Whiplash as works by the same filmmaker stylistically, if not thematically, they could not be less similar. Chazelle’s vision of art, from Guy and Madeline to Whiplash to La La Land, is variously masochistic, obsessive, self-righteous, and aggressively male. But if he is trying to say something about what art is and the role that it plays in the artist’s life, his message is cloudy, contradictory, and often perturbing. In La La Land, Chazelle broadens his focus on artists to include actors and, for the first time, offers a woman the same artistic ideals as his perpetually male musicians. Music is the guiding force in their lives, often to the detriment of their interpersonal relationships. All of these characters, in one way or another, are fixated on their craft and on the culture of jazz. Chazelle, who once had ambitions of becoming a jazz drummer, has instead pursued the subject on film: Guy and Madeline features a trumpeter Whiplash, a drummer La La Land, a pianist. (The film features two break-up scenes the fact that neither of them takes the form of a ballad suggests the narrative was constructed around music, not by it.)Īs confectionary and slight as La La Land may be, it is nevertheless an illuminating addition to Chazelle’s growing oeuvre of movies about musicians. One wonders, then: Why were they cast in the first place? The practical explanation is obvious - they are movie stars - but in that case, why is La La Land a musical at all? Most of the story is told outside of its musical numbers, which are peppered in to add flavor but don’t drive the engine of the plot. Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling are charming presences, but they are not accomplished singers, and Stone can’t dance. Although it’s a more polished musical than Guy and Madeline - Chazelle’s senior thesis film at Harvard - La La Land still feels like an amateur affair. When they initially meet, they hate each other, of course then they fall in love - also, of course.Ĭhazelle experiments with one visual trick and then the next, from a zero-gravity dance sequence in the Griffith Observatory that takes the characters into space to a dream ballet at the film’s conclusion that evokes An American in Paris. Neither has been particularly successful, but they are both dreamers: Mia dreams of acting in movies, Sebastian of owning a jazz club to preserve the “real” jazz of years past. Its story is simple: Sebastian (Ryan Gosling) is a crabby jazz pianist with a restaurant gig playing Christmas standards Mia (Emma Stone) works at the coffee shop on the Warner Brothers studio lot while auditioning for parts in bad television shows. Unlike Guy and Madeline, a shaggy, nouvelle vague–inspired musical, or Whiplash, a dark tale of a twisted student-teacher relationship, La La Land is in all ways a sunny film, and one that wants badly to please. LA LA LAND is the latest in a series of jazz movies by Damien Chazelle, the wunderkind director of Whiplash (2014) and Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench (2009).
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