La La Land

Did they win or lose in the end? I'm sure on first watch I thought they lost. Clearly they still feel something for one another -- lingering look at the end, Sebastian plays their melody, Mia replays the fantasy -- so they must be discontent with their current lives. They wouldn't revert to that melody and that fantasy if they were over each other and happy now. Right? At the time, I'd only seriously loved one person. I couldn't really imagine being content while the last relationship lingered. It needed to stop lingering before I could win in the end. But between La La Land viewings I learned that was false. People can love multiple people, especially in different forms, and emotions can return in sharp pulses that don't need to upset your entire life strategy. Mia's strategy is her career, husband, and child, presumably. Sebastian's is his club. Each is successful by that strategy. A sharp pulse of nostalgia, bittersweetness, even regret, needn't invalidate that strategy. It merely illuminates the necessary cost of living, the price of love and loss. They aren't over one another in the sense of total emotional desert. They're over one another (probably, I think the movie says) in the sense that they accepted the sacrifice of the relationship for their other dreams' sake. I remember feeling like Sebastian wasn't quite over it though... I was acutely biased at the time, but he also initiates the reconnect with his song, and he doesn't make a move to sever it like she does by leaving. But he does smile. Maybe he's just accepted she'll inevitably go, and smiling at the inevitable is better than crying. Or maybe he's over it in the sense of acknowledging that relationship is incompatible with his jazz club dream. Or at least it was! while she was in Paris. Maybe it isn't incompatible anymore. Anyway, I feel sorrier for Sebastian, part by bias, part because he does less to announce the end than she does. Yet his dream is the jazz club, and her going to Paris wasn't compatible. Maybe he's over it. She certainly tries to be. Maybe she's not, but anyway it isn't impossible like I previously thought. I thought it was impossible for them to be over it based on their behavior and based on my misperception that loving twice is incoherent. A body leaves a hole; another body fills a part of it, and can add much more; the hole may never be filled entirely, yet you can feel okay, and anyway life isn't about entirely filling every hole. Life never promises completion. Life swiss-cheeses you like Sonny Corleone, to different degrees depending on the person, and most people can mostly recover. Most people still live with those wounds though. Some wounds are irreversible, like Frodo's shoulder. That's okay. We can still find full life. Life needn't be perfect and painless. Pain is part of life. Mia and Sebastian are haunted by their relationship, at least in this sharp pulse, perhaps more often. That doesn't mean they made mistakes, that doesn't mean they should abandon their present lives, as I previously believed. Maybe they just live with the pain.

When I first saw this movie, I didn't know how to live with pain.