‘La La Land,’ ‘Moonlight,’ and privilege
What two pairs of filmmakers have done with their gifts
[UPDATED on February 27 to reflect the Academy Awards outcome]
Among this year’s leading Oscar nominees are two wonderful films called La La Land and Moonlight. One is a dazzling musical, the other an earthy memoir. But each also represents an extraordinary collaboration between two men, who drew from their shared life experiences to put personal visions on screen.
Their contrasting journeys to the Academy Award ceremony, put side by side, tell yet another story — one that puts the dreams of success in the Hollywood Hills and the Miami projects into stark relief.
La La Land: “Being really, really good at what we do”
La La Land’s writer/director, Damien Chazelle, and its composer, Justin Hurwitz, are two straight white men who were exceptionally hard-working and determined, supported by generous parents. Chazelle is a child of professors who attended an excellent public school in Princeton, NJ, where he played drums in their nationally renowned jazz program. Hurwitz is a child of a dancer and a writer who went to an excellent public school in a suburb of Milwaukee.
Their curiosity was enabled by abundant resources at home and from their communities, who took for granted that they deserved the very best education, enrichment, tools, exposure to music and film history that reinforced their place in a respected artistic tradition. “I started composing when I was 10, when my parents bought me a synthesizer and a floppy disc Brother sequencer,” Hurwitz said.
Chazelle’s parents told him he could only pursue filmmaking if he got straight As. Hurwitz chose Harvard over conservatory to “go to school with a more diverse group.” And so two met at my alma mater, and bonded over shared ambitions. Chazelle remembers, “We just had a lot of conversations about how we both wanted to be really, really good at what we do, and what it would take.” (My life resembles theirs in most ways, up until the “ambition” part.)
Their first feature film was an unlikely hit about a perfectionist music teacher and his masochistic student. It won dozens of awards around the world, including four Oscars. Their second film, La La Land — a virtuosic tribute to films Chazelle loved growing up — could plausibly win more Academy Awards than any other film in history. [UPDATE: It did not. It won six, including a Best Director Oscar for Chazelle — the youngest person in history.]
La La Land tells the story of two fit, straight, white artists who apparently scorn collaboration. The actress writes a one-woman show about her own family, and seems to build her own sets and operates her own lights. She is devastated when no one comes, though the only marketing she seems to have done is to put up a poster. The jazz musician disdains playing music that draws crowds. He frequently judges other people’s taste and opinions about music, and appears to be enraged by the diverse ways people enjoy it (while eating tapas, for example).
Their self-involvement is portrayed as artistic purity. But it could be called entitlement. They seem not to appreciate the resources available to them. What are the worst fates these characters suffer? Spoiler alert: she moves back to her mother’s house in comfortable suburbia; he goes on tour with a popular band, headed by the only black character with a speaking role. But don’t worry — all their (implausible) dreams come true in the end, their only sacrifice being their relationship with each other.
Moonlight: “A world they had never seen”
Meanwhile, Moonlight’s writer, Tarell Alvin McCraney, and director, Barry Jenkins, are both black, one gay and one straight. They grew up in the same small Miami housing project, though they never met. Both of their mothers became HIV-positive during the crack epidemic, and Jenkins’ father died when he was 12. Jenkins went to a public school with a 90% black student body that was labeled a “dropout factory.” McCraney was violently bullied in school and still has nightmares about it. Both remember frequent crises due to lack of money — but also swinging on a tree-swing, dancing in the amphitheater, and playing football in the green space between buildings.
A guidance counselor introduced McCraney to a local playwright who mentored him, and he was guided into an acclaimed arts high school where his singular talent and voice could be cultivated — though he could never forget that how starkly his work stood out from his peers’. He remembers an assignment in college where students were asked to write a monologue about their happiest childhood experience. “I was like: ‘O.K., great. Everybody is going to come in with the time Dad took them pony riding.’ I wrote about the time a drug dealer got off his crate and taught me how to ride a bike. And I just remember the kind of shock and awe on people’s faces. It felt like again me putting on exhibition for mostly white privileged people a world they had never seen.”
He wrote the play on which Moonlight is based when his mother died of AIDS, imagining what he would say to her if they had had the chance. He went on to win a MacArthur “genius grant,” and is now the dean of playwriting at Yale Drama School.
Jenkins discovered filmmaking while drifting through at the low-tuition Florida State University, and then spent two years as a writer in L.A. with little drive. While working at Banana Republic, he made his first film for $15,000 — an admired independent romantic comedy which was never distributed. A mutual friend sent him McCraney’s play, which had never been produced, and they met and decided to merge their memories into what became Moonlight. It was released seven years after his first film, and it too became a surprise financial success in art-house cinemas and racked up dozens of major awards. [UPDATE: It won three Oscars, including Best Picture, in an upset that was surprising in a number of ways.]
Despite families and neighborhoods too overwhelmed by poverty, addiction, and disease to invest in their future at anything like the same scale, Jenkins and McCraney brought Moonlight into being. The long odds they faced are echoed in the movie’s story. The young black boy protagonist’s highest aspiration is to survive a school day without being beaten or humiliated. The nicest adult he interacts with is the man who sells crack to his mother. Spoiler alert: he and the people he loves find a fragile redemption through the sharing of a few secret moments of tenderness. It’s hard to imagine a cast of characters less entitled to anything — or in greater need.
“Here’s to the ones who dream”
In 2017, Chazelle, Hurwitz, Jenkins, and McCraney stand together at the summit of their craft. But they did not climb from the same altitude, or have the same gear. I’ll allow others to reflect on how the same system in the same country allowed these two scenarios to take place, while claiming to be a land of opportunity. I am struck, though — now that all four artists are putting their hard-earned talents to full use — by what they have decided to do with them.
La La Land isn’t cynical; Hurwitz genuinely believes its story is “about something larger. It’s about dreaming and wanting to make things and having this yearning to be creative and to be an artist.” And this “larger” story has resonated with a global audience, who have spent $300 million dollars to sing along to the struggles of beautiful white people.
As a white straight male Harvard grad myself — not to mention a devotee of movie musicals and a former aspiring artist — I’m pretty much the person they made this film for. I too believed I was entitled to a great acting career without bothering to build a community of artists, and I may have ranted about people’s taste once or twice.
On the other hand, almost everything in Moonlight was outside of my personal experience. In fact, characters like those in Moonlight’s world — none of whom are white — have rarely been portrayed on screen. Jenkins and McCraney, no less than Chazelle and Hurwitz, wanted their audience to understand what dreaming and yearning meant to them. They too assembled sensual photography, emotional music, and locations loaded with symbolic meaning to to do so.
But they weren’t contributing an entry into an established artistic lineage, like the “movie musical.” They were extending an art form to reach into territories of human experience that have gone undepicted. “This movie was made for anybody who has ever felt ‘other,’ or like they can’t be themselves and be accepted in society,” Jenkins said.
“At some point you’ve got to decide who you wanna be”
Now, it’s a cliché to say that great art comes from great suffering. In fact, it rarely does. Thousands of white male Ivy League graduates go on to be leaders in their fields every year without facing anything like the struggles represented in Moonlight; McCraney and Jenkins’ journeys are virtually unprecedented. But I wonder if great art should understand struggle, or at least acknowledge it.
These filmmakers have dug deeply to tell stories of their choosing. One pair has elaborately recreated the art of the past in order to glorify the sacrifices that the privileged make to they fulfill their fore-ordained potential. The other has put the fear and vulnerability of a hidden community on loving display to help audiences gain empathy for struggles they may have been protected from. And, at the same time, they have celebrated the humanity and persistence of the millions of families who weren’t gifted the resources that Chazelle and Hurwitz and I were.
I’ll admire La La Land and Moonlight equally for being fully realized visions by two unique pairs of artists. But I hope that La La Land’s makers study Moonlight. I hope they note the voluminous opportunities America has lavished on them, and the shockingly few we spare for the communities where the next Jenkins and McCraney now live. And I hope they push themselves to make art that invests in the world as generously as the world invested in them.
Ultimately, these Oscar frontrunners implicate me. I’m a white straight male Harvard grad myself. The public, private, and informal education my community shepherded me into trained me, as it did Chazelle and Hurwitz, to (among other things) adore the Hollywood canon, glamorize grumpy artistic loners, see the big city as my dance floor. To feel the obligation to “be really, really good” at something, or risk squandering the resources I’d been given (deserved?). To see a movie and backstory like La La Land and say, yes, that’s excellence. That’s the Best Picture of the Year.
But Moonlight challenges me to rethink “Best.” My education undoubtedly focused my mind on my own potential; did it also open it to the potential being denied all around us?
My country cultivated my talents without a second thought. Am I using them to widen my own and others’ empathy, or just to reinforce a narrow understanding of success, ambition, and sacrifice?
Am I going to keep asking the city of stars to shine just for me? Or will I dedicate myself to a dream that America can’t seem to make true?
