Film, 2016: Quotes, Thoughts

Among the PC reproaches to Damien Chazelle’s La La Land, the one that stands out for its sheer stupidity was that there are no gay couples in the film which takes place in LA, a city with a strong gay population… How come those PC Leftists who complain about the sub-representation of sexual and ethnic minorities in Hollywood movies never complain about the gross misrepresentation of the lower class majority of workers? It’s OK if workers are invisible, just that we get here and there a gay or lesbian character. — Slavoj Žižek (Source)
To [La La Land director] Chazelle’s credit, for both of them [Mia and Sebastian] luck will play an important role in their successful careers. But this career-wise luck will be combined with the breakdown of their relationship and this is another departure from conventions associated with backstage musicals. The successful career is not combined with an idealised heterosexual romance. If one of the charges pressed repeatedly against Hollywood is that it blissfully disregards labour relations in its portrayal of characters, La La Land dexterously avoids this pitfall by showing how labour relations and aspirations may come at the expense of love and private life. There is significant emphasis on labour conditions throughout the narrative, showing the characters doing all sorts of crappy jobs hoping that one day they will make it. — Angelos Koutsourakis (Source)
In response to Tuesday’s [Academy Award] nominations announcement, Washington Post film critic Ann Hornaday wrote, “It’s clear that, unlike recent years when the red carpet looked lily white, this year’s Oscars will resemble the outside world much more vibrantly.” But this is not true, or true only in a secondary or superficial sense (a greater range of skin tones). For filmmaking truly to “resemble the outside world much more vibrantly,” or simply accurately, is not a racial or ethnic question, but a social one. Films would first of all need to take on, through artistic means, the realities confronted by tens of millions of people: the sharp decline in conditions of life and growing social wretchedness, the bleak future facing young people, the growing and immense danger of war and dictatorship. They would have to reflect life in general “more vibrantly,” and not simply the concerns of self-centered layers of every ethnicity, gender and sexual orientation. More than 40 million people in the US work in the 25 occupations with the largest employment. Those occupations range from clerks and nurses to truck drivers and teachers, sales representatives and carpenters to team assemblers and receptionists. Is the artistic representation of their lives, the exploration of their thoughts and feelings, a worthy undertaking? At present, they are almost totally excluded from filmmaking and art generally. (Source)
But to think of diversity purely in racial and gender terms is not sufficient. Yes, we need more candidates of diversity, but we also need candidates — no matter what race or gender — to be fighters for the working class and stand up to the corporate powers who have so much power over our economic lives. We need all of our candidates to have the courage to stand up to the Koch Brothers, Wall Street, drug companies, insurance companies, oil companies, and fight for working families — not just the top one percent. — Bernie Sanders (Source)
Isn’t the “light escapist romp” and “crowd-pleasing Hollywood confection” La La Land, which shows characters whose choices are limited because their money is limited, more realistic than films such as Moonlight (where poor people seem to have money for everything but drugs) and Manchester By the Sea (where an apartment building factotum can afford to take off work for months without worrying about money)?
I wonder how many of the people who complain about “privileged” people in La La Land are in fact well-to-do, that is, privileged, in a way the financially challenged characters in the film are not. My guess: lots.
Why does talk about diversity begin and end with sex, gender, and race? Isn’t it possible to have a room full of people who represent every gender, sexual orientation, and race lack true diversity? George W. Bush’s cabinet included Latinos, women, and Blacks. Diverse, right? Or was it? Does a struggling plumber have more in common with Bill Gates because his skin is white like Gates’s, or with a plumber whose skin happens to be black?
This diversity we’ve been talking about is a diversity of experience. But what about a diversity of ideas? Ideas of all kinds. As the man said (sort of), “Let a thousand flowers bloom.” Or a hundred thousand, a million, a billion… Or 7,489,381,257 (as of Wednesday, March 8, 2017, 9:43AM Pacific Time.)