La La Land and the Literal Hollywood Fairytale

I study fairy tales a lot, not just because of my general research on folklore I conduct in fits and starts when I find the time and motivation to work on Things That Don't Even Come Back Around, not just because it's a great study if you want to analyze how stories are put together, but also because it's just a dang fascinating thing. Saw La La Land today, finally; it's the last 2016 film that was on my list to catch, and... there's 3 films about Hollywood that came out last year, right, this, Hail, Caesar! from the Coen brothers, and Café Society from Woody Allen. And, well the Coen brothers may be (among) the greatest directors of all time, since they're something that everyone can agree is pretty great, but I just want to focus on La La Land and Café Society. Because, they're not the same movie, but they're both adaptations of the same fairy tale.

One of the first things that strikes you when you begin an in-depth research of fairy tales is how, well I don't even know how to put it, how the same-yet-different different fairy tales are. The same elements are all there, just arranged in a different way, and sometimes tales with completely different elements can be telling the same story. Twisted, fractured fairy tales are nothing new, remixing is an intrinsic part of fairy stories. With Persian fairy tales I find this especially striking, but you see the same thing in European folklore as well; is there any real difference between Beauty and the Beast and Hans My Hedgehog? Of course there is, because there's always a difference, but the more you study the more samey everything feels, while at the same time the more the individual details and arrangements of elements call out to you as being unique and worthy of archiving. I find that critics who deride, say, Disney adaptations of fairy tales, and speaking of how violent and scary the "original" fairy tales are, are missing the point entirely, and furthermore I can't really see the impetus behind such things as the Aarne-Thompson classification system, which groups fairy tales by similarity of elements- which elements, if you're paying attention, are in reality entirely arbitrary.

And so when I say that La La Land and Café Society are the same fairy tale, they really are both fairy tales, and they really are the same. Outside of the obvious plot similarity, they're both structured stories from a bygone oral tradition: neither ends when you think it will, going on twists with the story structure itself; both introduce story elements (characters particularly, is what I'm thinking of) at times when you think that all the pieces would have been set up; both have bizarre timeshifts built into the structure, particularly at the end. Would I have noticed had both stories not been about the Hollywood dream? Would I have noticed had the love stories ended with the protagonists not ended up together, and only remeeting years later when it's far too late for this cosmic tragedy in the story structure to be repaired? Would I have noticed had one of Mia's roommates (checking IMDb it's probably Tracy, played by Callie Hernandez) not looked a heck of a lot like Kristen Stewart? I don't know. Replace any of those elements (barring the roommate one,) and it's a different fairy tale.

I recommend maybe renting them, both movies, studying them side-by-side. And then purchasing Hail, Caesar! to own. Because it really is a pretty underrated one, you guys,

So speaking of fairy tales and Kristen Stewart! Beauty and the Beast. I brought the original fairy tale up earlier for some reason, but I'm talking about the movie, the live action one, the Disney one, of this year. When I first saw the original Beauty and the Beast trailer, I thought that Emma Watson at the end there was Kristen Stewart (have I told you this before?). And I love Emma Watson, but how great would Kristen Stewart be in Beauty and the Beast? I mean, then the world would be able to see what I see.