CERTAIN times call for a bit of feel-good and nostalgia. They almost require it. If the critical reaction to La La Land is anything to go by, the year that has brought Donald Trump into the White House has found its film, its great, escapist sigh of relief.
Not everyone may feel that way about it. Some like Geoff Nelson, writing in Paste, object to the film's “unbearable whiteness”. But clearly the uplifting charm of Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone tap-dancing, singing and exuding couple-chemistry, is what many are yearning for.
That La La Land should emerge a frontrunner for this year’s Oscars says a lot not just about our need now for this pleasure, but about where we were already heading even before Donald Trump had been elected. It’s a reminder of how caught in looking backwards we already are.
On one level, a bit of calming down and soothing is what we need right now. Most of us are overdosing on the harsh realities of current politics and world events. Hence it’s no surprise that many are greeting with open arms this 1950s musical throwback, a romance styled with old-school glamour but set in the LA of the present day.
John Patterson, reviewing La La Land in The Guardian, described his pleasure: “Best of all, this was the only time for me since November 8 that I was successfully able to shut out all thoughts of Trump-World for over two hours, to forget about it utterly.” Neither Anna Karenina nor a two-month binge on Netflix had had a similar effect on him. “But La La Land,” he wrote, “if only for a while, quite rid me of anger, cynicism and anxiety. It made me happy, and it made me cry. For that kindness, I give it best picture.”
There is, of course, nothing so terrible about watching a film to make yourself feel good. We like to do this in difficult times. It says a lot that the musical had its golden age, the years of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, during the Great Depression.
Nor is there necessarily anything wrong with nostalgia – except when you consider the fact that it may be contributing to the current mess we’re in. Here, in Britain, as in the United States, pining for the past, for a time when our countries were “great”, has flavoured politics over the last few years. So too our culture. Think of Strictly Come Dancing, The Great British Bake Off, Stranger Things, Call The Midwife, and it’s clear that popular culture, on both sides of the Atlantic, is caught in a dream of another time: less complicated, simpler, purer, slower, gentler.
La La Land, writes American film critic Nick Pinterton , “doesn’t want to bridge the last 60-odd years so much as pretend they never happened, to return to an imagined Eden of old-fashioned razzle-dazzle and audience innocence.”
These films and television series were, of course, developed long before Brexit or Trump, so if this longing is a feature in both culture and politics, then that’s because it’s part of a wider zeitgeist, arguably one that has been with us since the 2008 crash.
Nostalgia is, of course, nothing new. We’ve often looked to the past in difficult times. Many of the films of the 1970s – another period of political and economic crisis and political protest, from Grease through to American Graffiti, were themselves throwbacks to the 1950s. Singin' In The Rain itself was a piece of nostalgia for the end of the silent film era. Nostalgia runs through history like a thread, all of us looking backwards for comfort, yet somehow knowing at the same time that that cosy world was never real.
So even as we lose ourselves to La La Land, we have to remember that nostalgia is not a helpful feeling to hold onto: not when, in the UK, the dominant rhetoric in politics evokes a time when things were simpler, when there were fewer immigrants, more grammar schools, fewer women in the workplace, more jobs, fewer people who couldn’t speak English, when Britain was great. What makes us crave a film like La La Land so much is the febrile politics of the day. That is, in part, what makes us seek it out as refuge. We want to escape and be happy. Yet, ironically, it is also part of that same climate of looking back, the same pining for a lost golden age.
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