La La Land and Sacrifice

[Man with a Mustache]

**La La Land Spoilers**

Re: http://theboard.byu.edu/questions/89711/

Not sure if Auto Surf visits the Board Board, but I'd be interested to know her (or others') thoughts.

It seems to me that the flashback scene in La La Land at the end is one of three things. Either (1) Emma Stone's character is wondering if she had to give up ol' what's-his-name-piano-player in order to get her break and she's imagining that she could have kept him around, gone to France, and been in roughly the same place as she found her real-life self. Or (2) it's what's-his-name-piano-player's imagination wondering about if he had gone with her to France how he still would have been a musician and could have started a club when they got back. Or (3) this is the movie showing us what would have happened if they had just stuck it out with each other. In any of these cases, it seems like at least one takeaway is that these people thought that they had to give each other up to pursue their professional dreams but it turns out that they would have been able to achieve them anyway and the net result is that they achieved their dreams at the needless cost of a good relationship. It seems to me that one message could be that some of the sacrifices we make in this life are actually ones that were not required of us but things that we thought we had to give up because we were too afraid/selfish/ignorant/whatever to make it all work. I can certainly identify things I gave up in my life that fit into that box.

Thoughts?

[mic0]

at the needless cost of a good relationship

Their relationship was not good. They didn't understand each other and Gosling didn't even try particularly, he was too caught up in his own thing.

It seems to me that one message could be that some of the sacrifices we make in this life are actually ones that were not required of us but things that we thought we had to give up because we were too afraid/selfish/ignorant/whatever to make it all work.

Agreed on that part, though. They both thought things had to be one way and weren't able to see the other possibilities until they had a lot of time to reflect.

I thought the ending really redeemed the story because their relationship seemed pretty awful to me. Also I didn't particularly like this movie in part because everyone kept calling it a musical but it is not by any means a typical musical, only has a few songs, mostly just repeated one song, and Gosling can't sing. (But in other part because I didn't like the story or the pacing.)