Nitrate & Camphor: Hollywood Homage, or Annotating La La Land
- blueshiftjournal
- Jan 20, 2017
- 6 min read
by ben del vecchio, columnist
ni∙trate /nītrāt/ n. salt, or ester, or nitric acid. the most water-soluble of all salts.
cam∙phor / ˈkamfər/ n. a white, volatile, crystalline substance with a strong smell and bitter taste. when combined with nitrate, creates celluloid; film.
“You’re playing to ninety year olds at the Lighthouse – where are the kids? Where are the young people? How are you gonna be a revolutionary if you’re such a traditionalist?”
~Keith (John Legend) to Sebastian, in La La Land
Freeway fumes leak from tailpipes of traffic-time cars, swirling through a symphonic cacophony of horns and profanity, rising high above a red sea of Los Angeles taillights. And in the midst of this Monday morning migration malaise – someone starts to sing.
Director Damien Chazelle opens his sophomore feature (his first: the percussive Whiplash) with a Wellesian tracking shot, ripped right from classic noir Touch of Evil. But he swaps shadows and cigarettes for sunshine and choreography. This five-minute long take pans down from Southern California blue skies and winds through “Another Day of Sun,” an almost-too-catchy opening musical number that kicks off La La Land with blistering enthusiasm and exceptional technique. It’s an almost overcooked mission statement for Chazelle’s quest to make a film that’s both “traditionalist and revolutionary,” entertainment and art. It's his answer to Keith’s question of how to appeal to the younger generation while not losing your passionate roots.
Chazelle succeeds – he fires us right back to Old Hollywood, where dreams can be achieved; love can be found; and songs, not action sequences, are the best way to escape the world and burrow into the heart.
After a year in which the margins – between movies and films, Hollywood blockbusters and independent productions – seemed only to widen, La La Land plays like a perfect middle-C, combining cinematic panache with whimsical fun. Chazelle does for movies what his Sebastian (Ryan Gosling) does for jazz: he revolutionizes via tradition. La La Land has reignited a dead genre as the first pure movie musical since 1988’s Hairspray, and hopefully sparked a renewed interested in classic cinema as well…
Despite its Hollywood hype (a record-setting seven Golden Globes), La La Land has its critics – and they’re vocal. Recent backlash cited its “unbearably” whitewashed, heterosexual LA; Sebastian’s white-mansplaining-savior complex; an “outdated” depiction of jazz; and solipsism, among other flaws.
In other words: it’s extremely Hollywood.
Some criticisms are well-founded. Others, not so much. We can specifically acknowledge its flaws, but we should also specifically laud its virtues – too few articles have delved into the more impressive aspects of Chazelle’s cinematic time-machine.
La La Land shifts tonal gears and turns on an MGM-minted dime – every beat is a nod to Old Hollywood, every dance sequence a postmodern homage. Accompanied by Chazelle’s Casablancan crescendos, dramatic diminuendos, pastiche pianissimos, and film-fanatic fortes, the film’s runtime is so filled with Hollywood clichés, homages, and nods that it’s almost indulgent. Almost. Ryan Gosling’s Sebastian says of Hollywood: “they worship everything but value nothing.”
Filming on the Warner Bros. lot and finally conducting his movie musical passion project, Chazelle seems to spend every frame of celluloid worshipping his Hollywood influences – citing cinematic scripture while waltzing out the value of art with a heart. Let's talk through his reference-riddled cinematic sermon.
“People will want to go to it because you’re passionate about it, and people love what other people are passionate about – you remind them of what they forgot!”
To start: the obvious. That lamppost. Plastered across La La Land’s marketing campaign is one of Hollywood’s most treasured icons – not Dorothy’s ruby slippers, The Maltese Falcon, or even Indiana Jones’ whip, but Gene Kelly’s Singin' in the Rain streetlamp, his singing shelter from the storm. In La La Land, Sebastian dangles similarly off a lamppost, and Chazelle borrows more than just a cultural landmark from Gene Kelly’s 1952 musical masterpiece. During “Someone in the Crowd,” Mia and her acting cohort croon wistfully about their night out, and she drapes a curtain over her chest in “Moses Supposes” fashion.
When they finally do disembark, they pull their Prius into a montage of city lights and neon signs borrowed from Kelly’s Singin’ meta-movie “Broadway Melody” – in which Kelly pitches a film to Warner Bros., and we, the audience, witness 10+ minutes of what his creation would look like. It’s a stunning digression with popping colors, big dance numbers and – most importantly – no dialogue. La La Land’s epilogue, a fantasy sequence sparked in Mia (Emma Stone)’s imagination is a direct homage to this – a wordless montage that shifts times, places, colors, choreographies, melodies and fantasies. Technically and emotionally the best single sequence of Chazelle’s film, it’s riddled with tidbits for the eagle-eyed cinephile.
Two Americans in Paris against a beautifully painted backdrop.
Chazelle deploys everything from old-fashioned iris shots (above) and transitions to a plane flying across a spinning globe to evoke his storyline – Mia’s fantasies – without words. One particular clip sees Sebastian and Mia stroll down the strand of a Parisian river, a bit that evokes Gene Kelly’s other 1952 musical, An American in Paris. The duo also snuggle up and watch reels of home-made family videos – the life that “could have been” in Mia’s mind. The scene is one of many homages to Alfred Hitchcock’s films – this time referencing his most “Hollywood” film, Rebecca, where Laurence Olivier and Ingrid Bergman (Mia’s favorite actress) similarly view their honeymoon recordings. (More on Hitchcock later.)
La La Land’s climaxes with Mia/Sebastian waltzing to steps made famous by Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, Hollywood’s legendary dancing duo. Gosling and Stone rarely come close to recreating the two-step magic of such screen giants as Kelly/Charisse, Fred/Ginger, or even Garland/Rooney – but the starlight-waltz that closes the film is nothing short of magical. They glide, skip, lift and dip perfectly in time – it’s hard not to get caught up in the romance.
“What a glorious feeling,” indeed.
“She told me a bit of madness is key // to give us new colors to see”
We’ve already mentioned one visual allusion to a Hitchcock//Bergman collaboration, but Mia herself mentions another verbally, citing Notorious – in which Bergman’s heroine goes undercover for the FBI – as a film she’d watch over and over again growing up. Splayed across Mia’s wall is a larger-than-life portrait of the Hollywood icon, a visual pair with a Bergman billboard in Los Angeles sky shown later in the film.
Of course, Bergman’s most famous flick Casablanca is referenced left, right, and center stage. Mia works across from the Bogart and Bergman’s “Paris balcony” on the studio lot, and Mia’s final fantasy montage begins, like Rick’s first glimpse of Ilsa in Casablanca, with a glance, a piano, and a song. In Casablanca, it was “As Time Goes By.” In La La Land, it’s “City of Stars.” You can almost see saloon-owner (“Rick’s Café American”) Rick Blaine in jazz-club proprietor (“Seb’s”) Sebastian’s eyes as he glances Mia across the room: “If you can play it for her, you can play it for me. If she can stand it, I can.” As he tickles the ivories and the melody starts to rise, the house lights dim – except around Mia, her eyes and face shining in the spotlight like Bergman’s once did almost sixty years prior.
It’s Chazelle’s visual allusions, however, that are perhaps his most potent: hanging in Mia’s apartment is a fluorescent green curtain torn right out of Alfred Hitchcock’s masterpiece Vertigo. In one of the most famous (and most disturbing) scenes in film history, Hitchcock uses a neon green curtain as a way to subconsciously convey love, obsession, and fear – it’s rather fitting that Chazelle borrows his décor for Mia and Sebastian’s break-up dinner, an event that confronts all three of Hitchcock’s leitmotifs. There’s a piece waiting to be written on Chazelle’s own choice of color. (My initial readings intimated he associates red with comfort and stability, blue with uncertainty).
With La La Land, he’s made it more clear than ever that he loves learning from the masters, and has taken more than a few trips to the theater to see classic cinema…it seems he couldn’t resist having his characters do the same.
Play it again, Seb!
One of La La’s most memorable scenes sees our duo head to the Realto to see Rebel Without a Cause, starring Hollywood (and American) royalty James Dean. After receiving a call back, Mia explains the role to Sebastian: “It’s like Rebel Without a Cause, sorta…”
Seb quotes Dean: “I got the bullets!” only to discover Mia hasn’t actually seen the film.
“It’s playing at the Realto…you should go – I mean, I could…I could take you…”
An awkward beat.
“Y’know for research,” he stammers.
“Yeah…for research!”
If there’s anything La La Land seems to inspire, it’s not only revisiting some of the classics, but also – like great postmodern directors Tarantino, De Palma, Scorsese, or the Coen Bros. – using them as a foundation for something new.
For now, I’m headed to the theater – refreshed and reinvigorated – y’know… for research.
Nitrate and camphor, the chemical couple that birthed celluloid, play host a thousand times a week, in a thousand cities, in a thousand hearts. Join them. I’ll see you there.
