“What an awful ending. What did you think?”
“Meh.”
I invited my roommates to rewatch “La La Land” with me in preparation to write this. We got coffee in those festive Starbucks cups, we split a Domino’s pepperoni pizza and we settled into our living room together on Wednesday night.
The problem? My roommates don’t like the ending of “La La Land.”
As the credits rolled, we pushed the coffee table against the wall to play Just Dance — to work off our dinner of Domino’s and Starbucks — and it occurred to me that I don’t often hear people say that they do like the “La La Land” ending. When it first came out, I avoided seeing it in theaters based on the advice a friend gave me:
“The ending is terrible. It’s not worth seeing.”
This is an almost-valid critique. I see where they’re coming from. Given what we know of similar films, the narrative in “La La Land” seems to build up to the ending we all unconsciously expect. Mia and Sebastian end up together, right? I mean, they have to. They’re perfect together.
Are they?
For some viewers, the ending of “La La Land” is confusing on first watch. Like the first watch-through of “Inception,” the picture fades to black and you think, okay, I need to watch that again to understand what’s going on.
And once they do understand those bloomy false reality sequences that roll at the conclusion of the movie, it dawns on them: it wasn’t real. Mia and Sebastian didn’t end up together. What a rip-off.
This ending feels unsatisfying. It doesn’t seem to tie up loose ends in the way we may expect. It’s like if I crocheted a scarf and decided to wear it without sewing in the stray threads of yarn: I walk around a while, and the scarf starts to unravel.
But you don’t have the whole picture. Maybe I was allergic to the yarn I used. Maybe the stitching is just plain ugly. What if that scarf needed to unravel so I could make a better one?
While I trudged through heavy, tedious drafts of my novel for the last few years, I rewrote the ending during every draft. None of the rewrites felt right. I wrapped up all the plot threads I had weaved, but something was missing. Why did my characters’ arcs feel wrong somehow?
I was giving my characters what they wanted. I wasn’t giving them what they needed.
It’s an important distinction. Not for the sake of these fictitious people on the page, but for the real people involved in this project: the readers.
There is something decidedly Christian in the pursuit of providing a protagonist with what she needs by the conclusion of her arc, rather than what she wants. It shows the reader (or viewer) that God provides. When things may not always happen in the precise way you want, God’s plan prevails. He gives you what you need.
Maybe I could apply this philosophy to La La Land too.
Without Mia, Sebastian opens his jazz club. And Mia not only excels in her acting career, but she has a husband and a daughter.
Despite the emotion they show upon running into each other in the jazz club, the small smile the main characters share as Mia leaves is illustrative of my philosophy. They didn’t get want they wanted. But they got what they needed.
“What an awful ending,” my roommate said as the film started to come to an end. “What did you think?”
My other roommate sat up in her seat. “Meh.”
“C’mon,” I said. “It’s a great ending!”
The ending shows how much they want to be together. You see it in the emotion on Sebastian’s face, and the entire what-if-this-had-worked-out flashback that Mia experiences. But maybe they don’t need to be together.
La La Land is available to purchase on Amazon Prime Video.
