the making of an american artist

Rating: 6/10 (24 December 2019)

While presenting the audience with spectacular sceneries, La La Land instills American ideology in them. Enclosing a cliché chick flick with the form of musical, La La Land, just like its predecessor Whiplash, is essentially about the director Chazelle's perception of the making of an artist.
According to what Chazelle has implies in La La Land, if you want to become an artist in modern America, you have to 1. be talented; 2. chase your dreams; 3. wait to be discovered by discerning art people; 4. enjoy your success as a bourgeois, now that you got everything you wanted. During this process you will be lonely much of the time. Few people in your life would you get along with. They all talk about parties, world politics and business, the things you do not quite care. Art is the only thing you are passionate about. In La La Land, neon lights always surround the leads. Their art, their dream and their love are elevated and glorified through the whole film. Even the whole universe serves as the background for this love. As their lives are filled with philistines, we witness two artist wannabes against the world.
What Chazelle has understood as the making of an artist is fundamentally a clumsy fusion of the myth of great artists and the age-long American dream. In the former talent always triumphs, though the artists are never properly appreciated by their contemporaries. Consider the cases of van Gogh, who cut his whole ear off, and Gauguin, who, according to Maugham, left home for an island to draw inspiration. In the latter hard work is always rewarded well. Chazelle uncritically absorbs the two ways of making an artist, ignoring all logistical loopholes. After all, life and arts are among the few things that could not be made successful simply through hard work.
Convinced by the concept of American dream, Chazelle is an American patriot at heart. He sets his film in Los Angeles, and he alludes to the distinct American classics -- jazz, musicals, and Rebel Without a Cause. As well as elevating the two young artists, Chazelle is also elevating these American cultural icons he loves. The problem is the film implies a problematic understanding of high art, pop culture and sociopolitical context. By making fun of vulgar people, Chazelle categorically dismisses any value of pop hits. But jazz was a treasure for suffering African American people. Musicals appealed to a wide range of audience for its hedonistic qualities. Rebel Without a Cause is a hymn of discontented youths who struggle to find larger significance for their mundane lives. None of these seem to qualify as the kind of high art Chazelle emulates in this film, and Chazelle, a Harvard graduate, fails to understand the campy nature of James Dean's performance that makes Rebel Without a Cause a cult classic of all time. In the end, La La Land is just another film about self-absorbed art people set in Los Angeles. The more it strives for a status of classic, the more it reveals its propagandist nature.