La La Land (2016)

(upbeat music) - Welcome to Love Factually, the podcast that analyzes rom-coms and romantic films using the science of close relationships. We're your hosts, Paul Eastwick and Eli Fengel. Eli, what are we talking about today? Today we're talking about La La Land, Damien Chazelle's 2016 musical throwback starring Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling. Some of the key themes we'll explore today are how much insight we have into our romantic preferences, what effective support looks like in relationships, and whether devotion to our career requires that we compromise in our relationship. - And fair warning, we will be spoiling this movie today. So if you don't wanna know whether listening to a particular piano melody gives you a do-over on your major relationship choices, you should go watch this movie and then come back. - Okay, so Eli, tell us, who are the key characters and couples in this movie? - There are really two major characters in this movie. They are Sebastian Wilder and Mia Dolan. Sebastian or Seb is an uncompromising musician played by the beautiful Ryan Gosling. He's a talented pianist and a monomaniacal jazz enthusiast. He believes that jazz is dying and he's fighting a one-man crusade to save it. Mia is an aspiring actress played by Emma Stone, who is in this film an absolute revelation. She is desperate for her big break and currently making her living as a barista on the Warner Brothers lot. Like Seb, she's passionate about her art, but she's a bit less self-assured and a whole lot less difficult than he is. There are also two notable supporting characters. One is Laura, who is Seb's sister, and she's really sick of his overromantic impracticality. And then there is Keith, played by John Legend. He's an old acquaintance of Seb's back from the school days and he's a leader of a popular and money-making jazz fusion band. All right, those are the chess pieces. Paul, are you ready to give us one minute on how the film moves those chess pieces across the board? - I am ready and start the timer. - On your mark, get set, go. - This movie is helpfully divided into four seasons. So in the winter, Sebastian and Mia seem to be orbiting each other. Mia's trying to make it as an actress. Sebastian as a musician, as we just heard. In the spring, they run into each other a few more times and now the magic starts to unfold. Now Mia has had a boyfriend, that's a guy named Greg, but during a moment of clarity, she leaves a rather insufferable date with Greg and his brother and meets Sebastian at a movie and that sets their relationship in motion. Then in the summer, while she works on her one-woman show, Sebastian reluctantly joins up with a band fronted by Keith, played by John Legend, and by the time fall rolls around, Sebastian's role in the band creates tension in his relationship with Mia. They finally break up when Sebastian misses Mia's show and Mia leaves town feeling like a failure because the show isn't really a draw. Nevertheless, Sebastian persuades Mia to return to LA for one last audition and suffice to say she nails it. They have a heartfelt goodbye she has to Paris for the shoot and then we get the five years later coda, which I'm sure we're gonna talk about where we see two different versions of how their lives could have turned out had they made different choices. - I love it. It could have been a second or two over, but was basically perfect. (laughing) You know, hey Paul, one thing I found sort of amusing and I liked it in your summary as well is they have these four seasons, but it's of course LA, right? So this is like an East Coasters mockery of what seasons in LA actually look like, which is that there is nothing. - Right, when winter appears the first time, it's hilarious. It's like bright and sunny and gorgeous. (laughing) So what's your relationship to this movie exactly? - I mean, I have a great fondness for the movie. One thing that stands out for me about the movie is do you recall what happened with this movie at the Academy Awards? - Yeah, right. This is, I feel like we're contractually obligated to say we also like Moonlight. - Yes, I am a big fan of Moonlight too, but for the listeners who are unfamiliar. - Yeah. - Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty had co-starred 50 years earlier as Bonnie and Clyde and they were presenting the award for best picture at the Academy Awards and the producers gave Beatty the wrong envelope. So he opened it and he paused and she thought he was doing a bit and he showed her the envelope and she read it and said, "La La Land for best picture." And the problem was what that envelope had actually had in it was Emma Stone's victory for best actress, which she had won earlier in the day. And so there were a couple of minutes that passed and they had done all these celebrations and there were, you know, took a couple of minutes and three speeches and then eventually it was like, "No Moonlight, you guys won." And that was the end of La La Land and best picture. It was very awkward. - I know, it's such an ignominious ending for the award season for that. And I think it's ironic too that, you know, Damien Chazelle makes this love letter to LA and then a few years later, he's like, "Actually, I've decided Hollywood is dark and twisted and here's a movie called Babylon." - Oh right, I didn't see Babylon, it was good. - The opposite take, I mean, it's good, but it is not like this movie. - Interesting, it's darker. - Yeah. So what does this movie get right when it comes to the science of close relationships? What do you have? - You know, I think this movie gets a whole lot right. It's almost like they had a good relationship scientist on set with them as they were putting everything together in the writing room. - Seriously, seriously. I wish it had been me. - Yeah, I remember. - Whoever it was did a great job. - Yeah, I mean, I'll get us started, you know. - Sure, sure, sure. - They do a very good job illustrating the importance of social support and how significant others in our lives, often a romantic partner, play a crucial role in the extent to which we have successes in our lives, including career success and you feel that in this movie. And in particular, she writes this one woman play and performs it for him in his bedroom, right, for the first time and he just thinks it's brilliant and he's ecstatic about it and is convinced of its success. And that sort of encouragement is essential for her moving forward. Now it has some downsides, but ultimately it is instrumental in the amount of career success she has. And one of the things that I really like is this movie doesn't shy away from the fact that this sort of emotional support can be tough, right? It basically says, look, you don't sit there and rest on your laurels. If you have a dream, you pursue it. And you may recall in the big fight scene where he cooked her dinner and then they had a big fight. And she basically will not let him rest. Why is it that you're pursuing this career that you don't want? You don't care. Why are you doing this? And she is just pushing and pushing and pushing 'cause she feels he's settling. - That's really interesting. I like to think about social support in the way that people who care a lot about attachment think about social support. So, you know, all kinds of, there's all so much relationships research on social support, as you know, going back decades and decades. But I found it so clarifying when researchers like Brook Feeney and Nancy Collins brought the attachment lens to understand support. So what they do is they sort of put social support into these two buckets called safe haven and secure base. And these are terms that come from attachment theory, which originally, you know, about infants and caregivers. But what they note is that actually many of the ways that romantic partners support each other have a lot of parallels with what happens between young children and their caregivers. So the safe haven idea is where you go to your partner for support when you're feeling down, right? When you're sort of feeling beaten up by the world. The secure base form of support, on the other hand, is the way your partner supports you as you pursue important life goals, right? It sort of encourages you to do more, right? To go further. And I think you see both forms of support in this film depicted really, really well. For most of the middle part of the movie, it's a lot of secure base happening. It's a lot of them being excited about each other's goals and sort of pushing them further, encouraging them further. And basically doing a lot of you got this. And that's exactly what Feeney and Collins talk about when they're thinking about the different kinds of attachment-based support. And I think that's depicted really well here. - Yeah, you know, as I'm listening to you, I'm reminded also, of course, of Shelley Gable's research on capitalization. - Right, right, right, exactly. - Many, many decades of research on social support. Almost all of it was about like, can you be there for me when I need you, when I'm suffering? And Shelley Gable and her colleagues, Harry Reese and others have done a lot of important work, saying, well, yeah, but can you be there for me when things are good? Like when I have this experience and I have an aspiration, who's there to like pop the champagne with me? And you're right, this book is, I'm sorry, the movie is very all in on that sort of social support. - Okay, I had another thing that this movie gets really right about relationships. And this one you forecasted in your intro and it has to do with what people say they want in a partner. And really this couldn't have depicted this process any better. - It's so good. - It's so good, so when Sebastian is talking to his sister and his sister is trying to pitch him on some girl that he's got to call, he says, does she like jazz? And then when Sebastian is hanging out with Mia on the Warner Brothers lot and they're walking around, she has this great bit where she's like, I think I need to tell you this to get it out of the way now. I hate jazz. - Yeah, I wrote it down too. - And it's like, okay, if they've been dating online, that's a deal breaker. He clearly said it very, very clearly. - The door closes. - But what does he do instead? He takes her to a club and he's like, I am going to help you to feel what I feel when I listen to jazz as played by these musicians in this kind of context. I'm gonna tell you about the history of these things. You're gonna see me be passionate about a thing and then it's gonna get you passionate about it. I mean, she says later in the movie, people love what other people are passionate about. And I think that exactly captures the issue. We think we want somebody who comes already pre-packaged sharing our values, but it's more useful to think about the ways that partners share and sculpt each other. And in fact, she really comes to appreciate jazz the way he does so much so that later in the middle part of the movie, when he is enjoying himself playing in the John Legend pop fusion band, she is acting like this is a bit of a betrayal. This isn't what you said you were into and what you got me, yeah, this isn't who you are. And this isn't what you got me excited about, right? So there he is having a good time and she finds it very confusing. So all of this has been mutually constructed over the months that they're together. And again, this idea that like you got to find the person pre-packaged and ready to go with sharing all the same interests. I just think what a depiction of how that is, not how it works. - I loved it every bit as much as you did. In fact, I wrote down a slightly longer version of the conversation that Seb has with his sister early in the movie. And I'm gonna read a bit of it here 'cause she says I have someone for you to meet. He said, I don't want to meet anybody. Does she like jazz? And Laura says, the sister says probably not. And he says, then what are we gonna talk about? And what are we gonna talk about that last line? Is Mia doesn't like jazz. She's very clear about it right from the start. She knocks off a reference to Kenny G within the opening moments there. And they have everything to talk about. The two of them can't stop talking. They just talk and talk and talk. And they're impassioned about all sorts of things. But you're right, never would have made it to step one if this had been like checking people off online dating. - Yeah, exactly. Now I think there's another fascinating component of this as well, which is that we get this sense that Sebastian doesn't think a whole lot of actresses. And of course, as a stereotype and sort of as this vague idea of what he's looking for, I think Mia would also not fit in that dimension too. But he hones in so quickly on, it's not just that she wants to be an actress. She also wants to be a playwright. She has all of these other ambitions and he gets so excited about her ambitions to make it in this world. So again, it's another example of how they're feelings about each other and their preferences and ideas that they come into the relationship with all morph and change as they sort of unfold here. - You know, this conversation about what sort of people, what I actually have something to say to, right? Like what I actually enjoy interacting with. And it leads into another thing that isn't really in relationship science, but just as an aside, I wanted to give some kudos to the film, is their first real date, date-like thing anyway, is at that jazz show. I mean, she says, "I hate jazz." And he already at this point kind of likes her. And he says, "No, you don't hate jazz. "You just don't know jazz. "What are you doing right now?" And she says, "Nothing." And they go to a jazz show and you can feel his just absolute passion for it. And he's able to talk about what they're doing on stage in a way that is completely captivating. I mean, even if you didn't like jazz, you would be absolutely captivated. And the thing I like about that is it's a contrast to what we sometimes call the resume exchange date. - Right. - Right, what is it that we should do? Well, I don't know, how about a cup of coffee? How about a pint of beer? And look, I like those dates as much as the next guy, but what if you did something that involved at least one of you feeling a deep sense of passion about things, something external to the two of you, that the two of you can riff off of and relate and joke about and talk about rather than just, "This is who I am, this is who you are," which is just such a boring way to go on a first date. - Yep, they get it totally right there. What else do you have? - One of the things that stood out to me in this movie was how much these characters are dedicated to their dreams. Sebastian, Mia, these are people who know who they are, they know what they want. And in a pretty uncompromising way, they're gonna do everything they can to try to live out those dreams. And that was really relevant for me because I've been very interested in how our ideas of relationships have changed over time. And in fact, one of the key ideas in a book I wrote some years back on marriage is that the ethos, the ideology of marriage has changed over time, right? You go back a couple hundred years and marriage is very literally about things like food, clothing and shelter. People of course cared that they loved their partner and if the sex was good, that was surely a perquisite, but that wasn't what marriage was about. And then you fast forward a while and starting after 1850 or so and well into the 1950s and beyond, you get this second era of marriage called the love-based era. And now for the first time, people are starting to think that marriage is about the individual fulfillment of the spouses, but it's really primarily about love and affection. And that's still something we care about, but one of the things that was really vivid about the 1960s and well into the, you know, 2024 is even if love is strong, today there's a reluctance to be in a marriage that doesn't feel true, that doesn't feel authentic, that feels like you're not really growing into your real self. And so it wouldn't be shocking these days to hear somebody say like, "Look, John is a wonderful husband and he's a good father and I do love him, but I feel stagnant and I'm not gonna spend the next three years of my life, three decades of my life in a marriage like that." And this ethos, this ideology that like, we're supposed to be living these authentic existences, we're supposed to be growing in a Maslow sort of way toward our self-actualized life. And that's a real theme throughout the movie and throughout the relationship between Seb and Mia is she wants him desperately to be a jazz man, to live an authentic life and be pure and true to his aspirations and he desperately wants her to be one of these playwriting successful actresses. They want those things so desperately for each other that both of them are very reluctant to ask the other to sacrifice for the relationship, to live anything less than their full authentic lives in order to make sure that their relationship lasts. And look, let's cut to the chase and say in the end, the relationship doesn't last as a result. - Right, right. So that's so interesting because I interpreted their demise and the way they start to fall apart in this movie is really interesting and is, I think, again, depicted very well and very realistically. And I interpreted it a little bit differently, not that they were necessarily failing to live up to their authentic selves, but that they had kind of set a number of rules and norms in place for how they supported each other and what they were doing together. And then as those rules and norms started to change, in particular, Sebastian now kind of liking being in this pop band and getting something out of it, putting his club ambitions on the back burner. I mean, I think you're right. The interpretation could go either way. Maybe Mia is upset about that because he doesn't seem as authentic or maybe it's just that the terms of our relationship seem to be changing. And generally speaking, that's going to be upsetting without some really frank discussion. So I'm curious how you weigh those two different possibilities. - Well, I do think they're both there. I do see them. I mean, meanwhile in that conversation, in that fight where she's saying, I thought you didn't like the sort of music you're playing. This is pop music. It's a bastardization of the sort of jazz that you're trying to preserve. And he's saying, wait, I thought this is what you wanted me to do. I'm being responsible and I'm making an income along the way is the fact that they're going to be away from each other for a long time. The actual initial topic of that fight was how long are you going to be on tour exactly? And it's like, well indefinitely. And neither one of them ever really is willing to say, I don't really want a life independent of you or separate from you. And both of them are struggling with it. They both are thinking we're going to be away from each other. And you could imagine with a different ideology of relationship and a different ideology of following your work and living authentically that one or the other of them might have said, I'm going to stop doing what I've been doing and give up some percentage of my dream in order to try to make sure that we're together and this relationship can work. And here I'll pivot just slightly to say one of the things that I find very rewarding about this film and rewarding from this perspective of like living an authentic life and pursuing your career is it's very clear that both of them, both the man and the woman in this particular relationship are every bit as entitled to try to pursue a very high profile, high power career. And that too is new. That is not the way things felt in 1800 if it was even sensible to talk that way and certainly not in 1950. It was understood or even maybe the 1980s and to some degree in many relationships even today, it's understood that when push comes to shove, she's going to make sacrifices for the career if that's needed. In this film, there's absolutely no such assumption. - Well, I'm very glad you brought that up because this does raise another important component of the science of close relationships, which is what is the romantic appeal of ambition? I mean, that is really what we're seeing here. Our two very ambitious people and the romantic appeal as depicted in this film is very clearly the same for both Sebastian and Mia. They are both taken with each other's drive and will to succeed. And when they think the other one is falling down on that goal, then they're disappointed by it. So ambition is an aphrodisiac in this movie and it appears to be doing so similarly for men and women. And guess what? When you measure things properly, that's exactly what you see in real couples and in real attraction settings today. So although it is true that when you ask men and women in the abstract, how much do you care about attributes like ambition in a partner? Women will say they care about that more than men do. It's not a gigantic effect, but it's pretty regularly there. Nevertheless, if you go about it and you look at what people actually like, right? You get away from their ideas about what kind of attributes they like, but instead you look at how much does a person's ambition predict whether you're attracted to them or predict whether you're happy in a relationship with them? Those positive effects, those are gonna be there for men and women and they are not going to differ. The gender difference in that effect is absolutely tiny. We see it here absolutely getting the science exactly correct whether the movie knows it or not. - You are more steeped in this scientific literature than I am, I have a question for you. So we've long been told, I think it's part of received wisdom in our era that men get intimidated when a woman out earns them or is more ambitious than they are. And I've always felt a little weird about that. I've always been surprised that any man would be like, "No, I would like my wife to make less money "for the family," or something like that. And when you're talking about the literature, when you're talking about the literature just now, saying that basically men and women both like ambition, are there exceptions? Is there some, well, men of a certain social class feel particularly threatened by it or a particular ideology? Has anyone looked at that question of, are there some men in some circumstances who really are threatened by high-achieving successful women? - Well, look, of course, just as some men are delighted that their partners are high earner, some men are gonna feel threatened as you describe. And there's good work in sociology that looks at these questions too, because these are folks who are interested in who gets married to whom and which marriages are stable and stuff like that. And the general picture there is that these gender differences are changing and things are changing very fast. So it used to be that when women out-earned their husbands, those couples were more likely to get divorced and that is just not true anymore. And similarly, you see a lot of hand-wringing today about, oh, if women are earning more undergraduate degrees and more advanced degrees than men, all that means that these women's marriage prospects are gonna decline, right? Like these fragile men, they need to be in the limelight at all times, but that's actually just not true. - Oh, interesting. - In fact, these days, if anything, highly educated women are more likely than highly educated men to marry partners without bachelor's degrees. So if you ask me, this is a case where our evolutionary assumptions about what men can handle have infected our ability to see the data clearly, right? Like men like Sebastian are far closer to the norm now. - Fascinating. - Anything else that you wanted to make sure we gave a shout-out for this movie that's got a whole lot right about relationships? Anything else that you wanna flag? - We'll talk about the ending eventually, 'cause I think the ending is a fascinating exercise in another self, it's so fascinating. The last thing I just wanted to note that I think the movie gets right is what happens in that conflict scene that we've danced around a few times. They have this one big fight over dinner. And I think a lot of movies, when it's time to write the fight scene, the writers crack their knuckles and they're like, "What are the most savage burns "that I can put in this paragraph?" And that's fun, and I like that. And that's not what this is. These are people who are trying to restrain themselves. They are trying to hold it in and not unleash until things really get rolling. - Seb does it once. - Yes, he does. Right, when he says, "You're an actress." - No, no, the part that really stuck up for me was when he said something like, maybe you liked it when I was on my ass because you felt better about yourself. - Yeah, right, right, exactly. - That was mean, but I agree with you that for the most part, these are people suffering and trying to treat each other with dignity. - Right, and I think that people who study aggression in relationships are often fond of pointing out there's a lot of aggression in relationships because interdependence is high and there's a lot at stake. But actually, for the most part, romantic partners really don't want to hurt each other. They would prefer not to have conflict and not hurt each other. And I think the buildup in this fight captures that dynamic pretty well. - Yeah, I love that. I have one other tiny thing. I like the fact that the two main characters, Seb and Mia, finally get together or really start flirting. It's not the first time they've encountered each other. - Right, that's right. - They basically had road rage at each other and remembered each other from that. And then they had a second interaction where she was friendly to him, but it was the wrong moment and he was basically dissed her. And then there was a third thing where he's playing in this '80s band, a cover band, and then they really start flirting. And I think that's right too, that yes, these things can feel like they came out of nowhere. That '80s band evening was, I think, several months after the second meeting. I bet they thought almost nothing of each other before. But then when they saw each other, there was a familiarity that was associated between the two of them. So even though they didn't know each other, they had this little history and that made things a lot easier for them to start, moving, transitioning from we're total strangers to there's something potentially here. - Right, and I think that familiarity attraction, it's a good example of what works well. And this leads very well, I think, into what misconceptions about relationships are in the movie. 'Cause I just have one small one. - Yeah, talk to me. - And it is linked to how they get together in the first place. Those examples you just give, these like three pretty random happens dance meetings, kind of elevate the meet cute with no social context at all. And I do feel like it's my job to point out that usually when people are meeting each other, they are doing so through social networks, through people that they know in common. And it isn't too common that people hit it off with strangers. Now, as you pointed out, they're not strangers when they hit it off. They meet each other a few times, but it's like three random occurrences as they keep running into each other. In most modern, urban context, that isn't how it's going to happen. It would be socially mediated in some way, right? It'd be a friend of a friend of his sister, or they'd be at some point-- - The sister, try. - Yeah, yeah, yeah. - She tried, she was like, "I have a girl for you." And he was like, "Nap, not gonna meet her, it doesn't like jazz." - Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, right, right, right. So that right there is really kind of the only thing that I had, the only misconception that I flagged. Did you flag any? - I was also scraping the barrel. I mean, I had a bunch of notes and I was like, "Oh man, I gotta come up with something that they got wrong." So let me just say, I don't think this is a huge one. That said, that like absolutely glorious last 15 minutes or so of the movie. So this is the part where Mia has come back with her husband. They're in LA and they are walking down the sidewalk and they hear some jazz. And then he says, "Hey, let's go hear the jazz." And she figures out, "Whoa, this is called Seb's." And it's literally got the design that she designed for him when they were trying to encourage each other to start their own careers and be ambitious and so forth. And then they sit down and Seb is hosting a show and then he himself starts playing the piano. But there is an i-lock sequence between Mia and Seb that is entirely unmissable. And it's played in the movie, I think, extremely well to lead into something like a 10 minute fantasy of the life they could have had together. And then at the end, you learn, of course, that this is just a fantasy. And Mia is sitting there in the audience as she always was next to her husband. And his reaction to this is like, "I don't know, wanna stay for another one "or do you think we should go?" And I view it as entirely implausible that he would not have noticed that something major, some massive electricity had just passed between his wife and this very, very gorgeous man on stage. And this is something that we don't study as much in the relationship space. - That's really interesting. - Yeah, there's more in the evolutionary space on this idea of mate guarding. That is, we have some antennae out for like, "Huh, it seems like my partner's into someone. "It seems like someone's into my partner." And this guy was monumentally oblivious. - See, that's funny because I would have said it's unrealistic actually for in some ways the exact opposite reason, which is like, obviously they would like, as soon as she saw the sign, she'd be like, "Oh my God, this is my ex-boyfriend's place. "I told you about him, I designed that. "Oh my God, there he is." That's what would actually happen. So I would think it would be something more along those lines. I forgive the movie, I'm glad the movie didn't do that, but that's what people do. - That's interesting. - Yeah, yeah, entirely plausible. - I mean, you think she'd try to play it off and be all secretive and be like, "That's my old boo." - You know, I don't know. But given that she played it off, and given that they basically had lightning eye contact, Sabania did, I think it was not plausible that her husband would have been like, "Well, that was fun, should we stay for another one?" - That's funny. - That's funny. - Are we okay with this? Was there anything in this movie that struck you as odd or that it aged badly, anything like that? - Well, I mean, it's 2016, so it hasn't had as much time to age badly. It's still in whatever the current moral zeitgeist is. It's pretty close to 2016. I was only able to come up with one. Do you want to go first? Did you have anything that you'd want to call it out for? - So I, as I remembered this movie, I thought, is there like a white savior thing going on with Sebastian and Jazz, and it's playing the John Legend character, like he's kind of a sellout? But on this watch, I realized that is really not the message here, that yes, Sebastian is a traditionalist, and yes, the John Legend character is innovating, but it becomes clear that Sebastian's really enjoying this. So I think in the end that the movie thinks that the John Legend character is also kind of right. It isn't like a damning portrayal of where that character is coming from. - No, no, no, it's a debate between those who want to be traditionalists and those who want to innovate. So there's not like, you know, the John Legend character is better or worse than the Ryan Gosling character. It's two different visions. If I had to quibble, it would have been in the same general space. I mean, Jazz is a predominantly black art form. This is a movie predominantly focused on white characters. And you know, Seb is on, I mean, something that I think you could very legitimately call a crusade to preserve the longstanding integrity. So I don't think it's like a contrast to the John Legend character, but you know, there's a vague whiff of white savior, but I'm with you mainly because I found him to be a credible character. So I wasn't troubled by any of this. - Yeah, yeah, I agree. Do you have any good quotes for us? I have a few here that are pretty good. We've tilted at some of them already, but what do you have? - I mean, I have a couple that I kind of liked. We'll see how far we get. So I liked the way late in the movie. So before they kind of break up, before she goes to Paris and it's clear that like, look, you're going to have your life and I'm going to have mine, they have a moment. This is after she's had the audition and it looks like it's going to go well and both of them are having some career success. And she says to him, - What do we do? - I don't think we can do anything. Cause when you get this. - If I get this. - When you get this. You got to give it everything you got. Everything. It's your dream. - What are you going to do? - I got to follow my own plan. Stay here and get my own thing going. - And the reason why I found that so powerful is because I think it really exemplifies what we were talking about earlier, this ideology. And when I say ideology, I don't mean to sound judgmental. We're living within ideologies, whether we want to acknowledge them or not. But this is an ideology that I want to flag as very, very modern and very, very Western, especially American. This idea that like we've got something together. We're in love with each other and they are there. There's no doubt even in this scene that they love each other and feel like this is a rare sort of connection. But the idea that they might sacrifice their careers is kind of unimaginable because it's your dream. You got to give it everything you got cause it's your dream. And if it means you don't get to, you know, be with the woman of your dreams, then so be it. - That's a great example of that. I have one that is in some ways the other side of the coin and that is the support that they're giving to each other early on in the movie. And this is as they're on that date, dates, quote unquote, as they're walking around the Warner Brothers lot. - My last audition was for a teen soap pitched as dangerous minds make the OC. So yeah, shit, I'm in a lawyer. - Cause the world needs more lawyers. - It doesn't mean more actresses. - You're not just an actress. - What do you mean just an actress? - You study yourself. You're a child prodigy playwright. - That is not what I said. - Well, you're too modest to say it, but it's true. So you could just write your own roles, you know, write something that's as interesting as you are. And you don't have to audition for this. - Yeah. - Pishikaka. Look at Louis Armstrong, you know, he could have just played the marching band charts that he was given, but he didn't do it. What did he do? - What did he do? - Well, he made history, didn't he? - Well, I'm gonna stop auditioning and I'm gonna make history instead. - Well, my work is done here. - So those lines right there, they illustrate this secure base idea. They also illustrate another favorite example of ours, the Michelangelo phenomenon, right? He is seeing this idealized version of how she sees herself, right? So she could be just an actress, as she says, but actually she also sees herself as having these other talents, and she can sort of write her own roles, and he is seeing and picking up on that so quickly. So I just liked how the movie was making clear that these important relationship processes, they're happening on, you know, date three. Like as these people are still getting to know each other, you're seeing all of this support and all of this growth. And, you know, anytime that close relationship processes, you see them in attraction settings, I absolutely love that. - You know, that is a really great quote as well. And I don't think I'd noticed that those are just bookends for each other. One's like, you know, 15% of the way into the movie, and one's 15% away from the end of the movie, and they follow from each other. Like he was totally pure from the beginning that you absolutely have to follow your dreams. And what I think the movie takes seriously, especially for a romantic musical, is there's a price that we often pay for following our dreams. And it's beautiful to follow your dreams, but in the end, these two paid a meaningful price. - Okay, so that teased us up nicely into what do we wish we knew? Because I wanna talk about the ending, because I personally think the ending, at least my read of what happens is, it's not that it undermines these bookends that you just talked about, but I do think it makes the case that if with perfect foresight, it would be possible to get any relationship to go in a different direction. So to set up what happens at the end, again, as you mentioned before, she goes into the club with her new husband. And then there is this 10 minute sequence as Mia and Sebastian lock eyes, and we really get a do-over of their relationship, but done in this very Hollywood style. The way life actually works is that one relationship ends, and you get to take those lessons into the next relationship. But what this movie, I think, is asking us to consider is, well, what if you could take those lessons and then redo the relationship you just did? Would you make different choices? And within this montage, we see they do make different choices, right? He doesn't join the John Legend band in this redo. He goes with her to Paris, and you know what? He still pursues his dream, and she still pursues her dream, right? So it was possible, it was tricky, right? They made choices along the way that kinda forced them into these cul-de-sacs that then they couldn't get out of. But what I deeply love about this ending is it gets you to question like, well, would it indeed be possible if you could see how all of these choices were gonna end up? If you'd just gone down this pathway or gone down that pathway, we could have lived our authentic lives, but it just would have required navigating those twists and turns a little bit differently. I put this in the what do we wish we knew category because studying how relationship lessons translate from one relationship to the next are really rare, we don't know a lot about that, and we certainly don't know a lot about, hey, can you take lessons from one relationship and then reapply it in some sort of reboot of that initial relationship that's pretty rare. So that's, I guess, maybe where I come at this from a slightly different space, that the movie isn't damning of the living of the, or sort of asking you to choose between living the authentic life and living with this person, but saying the twists and turns are really challenging and one false step can really doom your ability to do that because of just how chaotic it is. - It depends on why Chazelle included that 10 minute fantasy, alterna history of this relationship. My interpretation was that this was in fact a fantasy, that this was in fact out of reach given who they were and what they aspired to, but I hear you that they're-- - I mean, it is all Hollywoodized, right? I mean, it's a fantasy. - I mean, it's quite possible, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. - Yeah, but you're right, okay, so I had a couple too, I had a couple of these, like what do I wish we knew more of? Let me mention a small one and then a big one. The small one, such a little moment in the movie, and there's so many of these in this movie. This is basically about like memory and relationship. So you may remember, she gets a callback audition, and she goes into the audition and basically they don't take her seriously, it's obvious that she's not gonna get the part and she just has to suck it up and deal with the indignities of being an actress in Hollywood and she's angry and she gets into her car and she drives by and then she sees the Rialto Theater, which is a movie theater that he mentioned and that they've got this date planned for and you witness her facial expression change. The frustration and the anger are gone. The unpleasant emotion associated with what she just endured in that awful callback is gone and instead she's just absentmindedly smiling. And I don't know that much about how circumstances that we encounter in our everyday life influences how we think about our relationship and then how that in turn influences what we do in our relationship. This is like I think a relatively minor one that I don't understand. I don't know much about and I think it matters. - But it's a good one because it happens a bunch of times. There's also this moment of clarity when she hears their song on the radio when she's at the insufferable dinner with her then boyfriend and it's just like, bang, I am done with this. And it is like these little cues that get you to remember something or get you to realize something. And moments like that are still pretty mysterious in the way that we understand relationships. - For me, the big one is, and you're gonna know about this 'cause I've been talking your ear off about it for 20 years, I don't really think we know how flirtation works. - Oh, that's amazing. - At least not in a good way. I mean, that party where they actually hit it off, it's adorable, I mean, they're mocking each other, they're teasing each other, then they have this glorious beautiful dance sequence overlooking LA and-- - Saying they aren't into each other. - The whole thing is like, what about her that I have to have this beautiful view with somebody as awful as you? Like two other people who actually like each other might actually enjoy this beautiful moment, but because it's the two of us, like that sucks. And before then, when he was in the '80s band, she requested, I ran that '80s song, like I walk along the avenue, I never thought that I'd meet a girl like you, and she looks up at him and she's just adorable and she's like, me, she's mouthing me, stop. - It's funny. - And it's like, I don't know what to say other than they are absolutely, especially Mia, they're absolutely crushing it. They are flirting with an A+ game, and I don't think that we as a field really know how that works. - Yeah, it's like almost a little meme, but it works. It's teasing, yeah, it's banter, it's teasing, it's negative, I mean, it's, I don't know, sort of you could hear some like neg elements to it from the pickup artist world, but there's nothing actually caustic about it. It's playful, it's warm. So there are real ways-- - The real way to neg a man is to ask him to play Flocka Seagull. - Flocka Seagulls, that'll do it. - Talk to me, how many stars do you give this movie? So on a one to five star ratings, and we don't do half stars here, so you gotta commit. - Let me count them for you. One, two, three, four, and five. This was a five star film. - I also agree, this is a five star film. Absolutely fantastic. I mean, we haven't talked about the musical sequences, the sequence on the highway, I mean, is just unbelievable. - The cinematography, the costumes, I mean, top to bottom, it is a work of genius. - Yeah, it's a fantastic film, slash, we also like Moonlight a lot. That's also a very good movie. - Yes, we also love Moonlight. - But importantly, how many Rustbolts do you give this movie? So the Rustbolts is named after Eli's advisor, the late great Carol Rustbolt, pioneer of close relationships research, with five stars indicating a near perfect depiction of the nature of close relationships. How many Rustbolts do you give this movie? - You go first, what do you think? - I have been on the fence between four and five Rustbolts, and I think I'm gonna land on five, that the things that it misses are small nitpicks, it's dealing with so many complex elements here, depicting their relationship absolutely beautifully. So I land ultimately five Rustbolts for La La Land. - I would love to count them off again to five Rustbolts, five stars. - Yeah, there it is, we perfectly agree, look at us. - Movie, it's a good day. - Yeah, and great for relationship science. - Yep, yep. - This is a good one, well, that is all we have for today. This is Love Factually, I'm Paul Eastwick, and Eli, I'm excited to see you for the next one. - I look forward to it. The Love Factually podcast is produced and edited by Paul Eastwick and Eli Finkel, featuring music from Andrew Fraker and Sunt. (upbeat music)