The opening is a perfect example of the “bursting into song” for which the musical genre is known (and occasionally maligned). Without cause or provocation, characters break out of their ordinary lives and into a heightened state wherein they express feelings of love and longing, happiness and despair. Except for the anti-sentimentalists among us, the musical lifts us out of our humdrum reality, if only for a moment.

Surprisingly, this tendency in musicals stems not from a desire to escape but rather the need to address what is lacking in our lives. This was a central concern of musical films made by Jews, Mexicans, and African Americans in the early days of sound cinema. Ministering to audiences who were dealing with the pains and anxieties of migration, ethnic musicals offered stories about people who burst into song as a way of establishing connections to one another and to their homeland.

In the late 1920s, Hollywood filmmakers routinely built an explanation of the use of song and dance into their films. Stories typically revolved around show business and took place in performance contexts, including the rare Hollywood film that acknowledged the experience of migration, The Jazz Singer (1927). The only time people burst into song without justification was in films about people of color, who were portrayed as naturally prone to singing and dancing (see Hallelujah!, 1929). Ethnic musicals operated within a different logic, one that assumed a cultural affinity with its audience. In these films, made outside of the Hollywood mainstream, ordinary people sing and dance as a matter of course, no special context required. Their characters perform with their audience, rather than for it.

As many already have noted, La La Land does indeed nod to the Hollywood musicals of old, such as An American in Paris (1951) and Singin’ in the Rain (1952) and the French quotations of those films, such as Jacques Demy’s The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964). But the film’s emphasis on migrant characters in search of love, community, and belonging places La La Land squarely within the ethnic traditions that are foundational to the genre.

Characters sing together in Allá en el Rancho Grande (Over on the Big Ranch, 1936).

Take, for example, Allá en el Rancho Grande (Over on the Big Ranch, 1936), the most popular Mexican film of its time. While Hollywood offered a cycle of films about chorus girls and stage door Johnnies (see 42nd Street, 1933; Gold Diggers of 1935; Stage Struck, 1936), director Fernando de Fuentes presented a simple story about Mexican ranch life with folk songs and dances. He quickly found that the film’s biggest audience was among Mexican immigrants living in the United States—they constituted a critical mass that hundreds of movie theatres, large and small, served in cities across the country.

In Los Angeles, the film attracted English-speaking audiences, too, yet elicited back-handed compliments from reviewers in the mainstream press. Variety applauded its efforts, but ultimately declared that it was “not a musical in any sense of the word,” objecting to the “casual way” in which songs and dances entered and exited the story without explanation. So unfamiliar was the reviewer with this approach that he dismissed the film as a rudimentary attempt at the musical. He ended his review by condescending to de Fuentes, advising him to look to Hollywood for “a more thorough lesson.”

Other ethnic musicals similarly departed from the status quo. Clarence Brooks and Harry Gant’s black-cast film, Georgia Rose (1930), surprised audiences and critics by rejecting the stereotypical imagery of “the Negro singing spirituals, eating watermelon and shooting craps,” as one reviewer noted. Instead, Brooks and Gant told a story about a modern black family who leave the South in search of opportunity up North. And as an answer to the assimilationist message of Hollywood’s The Jazz Singer (1927), Joseph Seiden released Mayne Yiddishe Mame (My Jewish Mother, 1930), the first Yiddish sound film. Made for an audience of Jewish immigrants, Mayne Yiddishe Mame demonstrated that while American success was alluring, nothing replaces the sanctity of the family.

In these films, as with Rancho Grande, ethnic filmmakers revealed a new purpose of the genre: to serve the needs and desires of a people for whom migration is a reality. With the coming of the U.S. entry into World War II and the ensuing separation of families, the Hollywood studios realized that changing times necessitated a shift in the musical as well. As MGM producer Arthur Freed recounted in an interview, “Gone were the gigantic production numbers, the trick camera angles, the dances and songs that stopped the plot cold until the last chorine waved her last ostrich feather in the camera’s focus.”

Instead, stories about small-town communities and the endurance of home dominated the genre, epitomized by Meet Me in St. Louis (1944). In Vincente Minnelli’s musical, the lives of the Smith family of St. Louis are disrupted by the prospect of migrating to New York City at the turn of the century. This film resonated deeply with World War II-era audiences and its theme of social unity in the face of change shaped later classics, including The Music Man (1962) and The Sound of Music (1965).

La La Land begins by introducing characters who have already ruptured their lives by leaving home and are striving to make it in a new place. As the opening number shows, these young hopefuls are as diverse as the city in which they live and they are seeking careers in L.A.’s many creative industries. Mia, the main character played by Emma Stone, embodies their journey. She left Boulder City, Nevada in order to become an actress. But making it is an uphill battle, she soon realizes. At her lowest point, she tells her boyfriend Seb (Ryan Gosling), a jazz pianist, “I’m going home.” When he insists that she is home, she responds, “Not anymore.” As these moments suggest, L.A. is full of migrants who enter and exit the city. But these migrations come at a significant cost to the maintenance of relationships, which Mia and Seb soon understand.

As “Another Day of Sun” reveals, the musical allows characters to shift from a state of isolation to one of inclusion. It creates a sense of belonging for both its characters and its audience in the process. Ethnic musicals did this as a matter of course. Often, audiences sang along to songs they already knew—these early musicals typically included a mix of familiar songs and original numbers—effectively transforming the movie theatre into a musical community of its own.

This tradition extended to the Hollywood musical in films like Meet Me in St. Louis, in which the use of folk songs, “Skip to My Lou” and “Meet Me in St. Louis,” fostered a connection between the Smith family and its 1940s audience. Even today, the annual The Sound of Music sing-along at the Hollywood Bowl brings together audiences from all walks of life. They happily sing “Do Re Mi” and “My Favorite Things,” songs that have over the years become part of an American folk heritage. La La Land, like the musicals that precede it, brings people together again and again, from the opening song, to Mia and her roommates in “Someone in the Crowd,” to the impromptu reprise of “City of Stars,” casually sung by Mia and Seb at the piano.

To understand La La Land’s appeal, we might well look to the genre’s long history of speaking to people on the move. The struggle between pursuing dreams and sustaining relationships, leaving home and staying put, is a recurring theme. Delving into the musical’s origins, we find that this was of particular concern to migrant communities. Just like Mia, musical film audiences are searching for a better life.

The post <i>La La Land</i>’s Debt to Ethnic Musicals of Yore appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The brilliant new film musical La La Land is being celebrated as a love letter to Los Angeles. But the darker heart of the movie lies in a brief and devastating critique of Southern California, delivered by the jazz pianist played by Ryan Gosling.

“That’s L.A.,” he tells his lover, an aspiring actress played by Emma Stone. “They worship everything and they value nothing.”

There has been no better recent summary of the California struggle—with the very notable exception of the 2015 novel, The Sellout, whose author Paul Beatty recently became the first American to win the prestigious Man Booker Prize for Fiction.

La La Land and The Sellout seem very different. On the surface, the film, an Oscar favorite, might appear to be a glossy escapist romance about white artists who hang out in Griffith Park. The novel is a taboo-trashing racial satire about an African-American urban farmer of watermelons and artisanal weed who reintroduces segregation to his neglected South L.A. neighborhood, ostensibly in hopes of putting it on the map. (His real agenda is even more deliciously subversive).

But the film and the novel are two of the most thought-provoking and entertaining documents of today’s California. And both are about the same big problem: that for all our celebration of successful game changers in this state, we offer precious little space or support to those who dare to upset our blissful status quo.

The film and the book also make the same provocative argument about how to break through the Golden State’s stacked deck: Don’t be afraid to do things that are totally nuts.

To make an impact here, you must embrace, and express, your inner madman. Both works specifically champion a self-sacrificing craziness, a willingness to surrender yourself and the people you love to focus on making your mark. Here, hitsville and heartbreak are two sides of the same heavy coin.

La La Land makes a straightforward case for crazy. Gosling’s musician is the film’s romantic hero, because of his uncompromising commitment to restoring traditional jazz even though he can’t pay his bills because the rest of the world is abandoning the form. Stone’s frustrated actress only inches closer to the red carpet when she devotes herself, against conventional wisdom, to producing her one-woman play in a theater she can’t afford to rent.

And in the audition scene in which she finally breaks through, she embraces the virtues of craziness in song: “A bit of madness is key to give us new colors to see. Who knows where it will lead us?”

Beatty’s novel similarly suggests that, to smash through the California looking-glass world, the sanest course may be to go right over the edge. The farmer refuses to accept the city of L.A.’s erasure of his minority neighborhood (it’s called Dickens, in one of Beatty’s winking allusions to artists who embraced thorny social themes). And so the farmer fights this fire of systemic discrimination by violating dozens of laws and cultural norms. Most outlandishly, he takes a slave, who helps him segregate the local school, hospital, bus line, and businesses to the advantage of racial minorities. (He puts up signs reading “Colored Only” and “No Whites Allowed” all over Dickens).

Beatty’s satire is so rich and layered—no one is left unskewered, from white supremacists to our first black president—that it’s futile to attempt to convey it in a short column. But I will mention two of the most provocative parts of the politically incorrect plot—how long it takes for anyone outside the community to notice the farmer’s segregation edicts, and how, through the farmer’s loopy and unconstitutional acts, seeds of tolerance and kindness (lower crime, higher test scores, more polite behavior) take root.

“The racism takes them back,” the farmer explains. “Makes them humble. Makes them realize how far we’ve come and, more important, how far we have to go.” And it is only through embracing racism that the farmer makes his impact—and a point. As a judge in the novel remarks, “In attempting to restore his community through reintroducing precepts, namely segregation and slavery, that, given his cultural history, have come to define his community despite the supposed unconstitutionality and nonexistence of these concepts, he’s pointed out a fundamental flaw in how we as Americans claim we see equality.”

The Sellout and La La Land keep the reader and viewer enjoyably engaged and off-guard because they leaven their tough messages with comedy (the movie takes on screenwriting and the Prius, while the novel imagines “the Untouchables” in its caste system as starting with Clipper fans and traffic cops). And both works, for all their high ambition, fall back on some wondrous magical realism as an escape hatch from the difficult tonal and political juggling acts they perform. The La La lovers literally float into the stars through the ceiling of the Griffith Park Observatory, while The Sellout Metro bus becomes a rolling party that ends with the vehicle being driven into the Malibu surf.

The Sellout feels especially current because it breaks political ground, even becoming the first artwork to satirize our state’s fastest-rising representative, Attorney General-turned U.S. Senator-turned-presidential wannabe Kamala Harris. Once the farmer is finally arrested, an unnamed black-and-Asian-American California attorney general shows up in Prada shoes to prosecute him for violations of major civil rights laws, the 13th and 14th amendments, and six of the Ten Commandments.

Both the film and the book wrestle with the conflict between loyalty to one’s dreams and selling out—and in the process point out just how hard it has become to tell the difference between the two. And both get at a painful paradox. We know we must hold onto real people and real things, to be truly human. But in L.A., we learn we must loosen our grip on reality to get noticed, and get ahead. It’s not just lonely at the top; it’s lonely on the whole journey up the California mountain.

In this way, both masterpieces ultimately raise the question of whether making your mark here is worth the cost. It may be that the real winners in this California are those who don’t bother to play the game and navigate the hurdles to ambition—and instead plop themselves down in unfancy places where they can enjoy warm weather and their loved ones in blessed obscurity.

No character in the book or the movie is happier in Beatty’s satirized world than the farmer’s slave, an aging actor named Hominy from the 1950’s TV show Little Rascals who refuses all efforts to free him. Trying to be a star in L.A. is so confounding that he prefers the simplicity of servitude.

“I’m a slave. That’s who I am,” he insists to the farmer. “It’s the role I was born to play.”

After all, if you’re going to live in a place that values nothing, then why fight so hard to be something?

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