This isn’t new. Movies about rising, talented, artistic people have been around since the medium began. As far back as The Jazz Singer, the first motion picture with sound, Hollywood’s been interested in stories about about people trying to achieve fame for their art. Films about the creative process like 8 ½, Barton Fink, and Adaptation are often critically acclaimed for their surreal take on the early development of a film. But in recent years, movies focussed on the struggle of aspiring artists have been if not more prevalent, more noticeably well done. Movies like Birdman, Frances Ha, Whiplash, Chico and Rita, Limitless, and Inside Llewyn Davis have come out in the last few years, all depicting the struggle creative people have to find success. And what separates those and the films of this year from what came before is that they do so with a bleak honesty not often touched upon. That is, that failure is par for the course, and that dreams of fame or even sustainability may not or more accurately, will probably not come true.
Classic Hollywood films did the struggling artist story a lot; but the main difference was films like All About Eve, A Star is Born, and Singin’ in the Rain always portrayed talented people as being rewarded. As good as those films were there was never much of a struggle, and it was always clear that by the end, the plucky protagonist be she Judy Garland, Debbie Reynolds, or whoever else, will have achieved their dream. This trope has even made its way into more recent films like The Artist in homage to that classic cinema. But that plot isn’t usually truthful. We see in La La Land that Emma Stone’s Mia and Ryan Gosling’s Sebastian are very talented, but on the road to success they have to take a lot of rejection.
The opening number of La La Land features a hundred aspiring artists to give a sense of the quantity of people vying for the same dream; and follows it up throughout the film with Mia going to countless auditions, giving good auditions, but just not good enough. At one, she barely gets through a sentence of her script when she’s dismissed.
In Don’t Think Twice, the cast of the Commune are competing against dozens of other comedy troupes and performers in New York for a performing or writing job on the Saturday Night Live stand-in. The film even shows that many of these people don’t even like the show, but it’s their only option to catch a big break or even earn respectable money for doing what they love.
La La Land director Damian Chazelle’s previous film Whiplash is about a young jazz musician enduring verbal, psychological, and even physical abuse from his teacher, so determined is he to achieve fame for his music. The Coen Brothers’ Inside Llewyn Davis, though arguably more about a musician’s resistance to compromise rather than his inability to be successful, shows a long journey in vain to meet a manager for a big break. Frances Ha details a young woman re-evaluating her dancing career among other things in light of an inability to get by on her own with merely that for work. Though these movies have very different directions, atmospheres, and characters, they all drive home a similar almost pessimistic theme. Either you won’t make it big as an artist or you’ll lose something along the way. It would seem that these are anti-creative messages. Why strive for artistic success if it looks like only a faint hope?
I think these struggling artist films are being made to reiterate something I heavily emphasized in my La La Land review: passion; that you’ve got to have passion for your art in order to succeed in it. All artistic disciplines look easier to succeed in than they are. It’s a hard road making a living in a creative field. In fact many really creative people never manage to achieve their ambitions. But it’s that passion that’s important, and the films that pinpoint that are better for it. Does Llewyn Davis give up on folk music after F. Murray Abraham rejects his audition? No, he goes back to Greenwich Village and continues performing gigs when he can get them. When she doesn’t make it in the dance ensemble, Frances Ha doesn’t apply for a more secure job; she finds contentment as close to that world as she can as a choreographer and dance instructor. You’ll find the same kind of messages in La La Land and Don’t Think Twice and no doubt in movies yet to come; that is that you shouldn’t chase such dreams for fame and fortune unless you’d be happy making that art without.
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