Shows about Shows: References in ‘La La Land’ and ‘The Sopranos’
With the exception of the Western, the musical and the mob movie are probably the two oldest and most established genres in American cinema. In all of these cases this is partly down to the thematic variety available in those genres as well as the way they combine both a crowd-pleasing and highbrow sensibility. While the popularity of the film musical looks to have declined somewhat over the past two decades, and all other genres in general are under threat from the widespread popularity of superhero franchise filmmaking, both musicals and mob movies have histories too long to fully recount here.
In ‘The Sopranos’ (1999–2007) the characters all know this and recognise that they live in a world where their profession is one of the most glamorous in American filmmaking. And they are obsessed with it. Perhaps the most important scene in the entire show occurs in the second episode of the first season. Tony Soprano (James Gandolfini) is in the upstairs room of his club with his associates Paulie (Tony Sirico), Silvio (Steven van Zandt), Christopher Moltisanti (Michael Imperioli) and Big Pussy (Vincent Pastore), counting their money. In the background is a television set playing a programme where a US Attorney and Vincent Rizzo are being interviewed about their history with the mob.
In a three minute sequence, these four gangsters sit around and talk shop, alternating that with shouted criticisms and abuse at the television. The history of the mob and its weight in popular culture hang heavy over the show: its characters are very consciously acting out the mob stories they’ve seen in popular culture.
The list of references to famous moments from mob movie history in the show is so long and well documented elsewhere that there is little point in me recounting them here. Often the references are on the level of the cast and so are ‘out of universe’ in the sense of not being explicable to the cast. Famously, there are 28 actors who have appeared in both ‘The Sopranos’ and ‘Goodfellas’, most notably Lorraine Braco, who starred as the moll Karen Hill in the latter and the psychiatrist Dr. Melfi in the former. Dominic Chianese, who appears as the snivelling but sympathetic Junior Corrado in ‘The Sopranos’, also appeared in the pivotal role of Johnny Ola in ‘The Godfather Part II’. Other references to the ‘Godfather’ trilogy are also peppered throughout, probably most on the nose when Tony buys a bottle of orange juice just before he is ambushed in an attempted hit.
At a certain point, of course, these kinds of references become indistinguishable from nostalgia, from a sense that there is little to be said that isn’t a reminder of what has been said before. This is very pronounced in ‘La La Land’ (2016), where a thick layer of this nostalgia is lacquered over a story about the power and wonder of the movies, thereby guaranteeing a certain level of awards contention.
The film opens on its most bravura and funny scene, where a diverse range of beautiful people wearing primary colours burst out of their skeuomorphic sedan cars in the middle of a traffic jam and leap into the film’s first musical number. “It’s another day of sun,” they sing in the chorus line, before popping back into their cars and driving off as the legend “Winter” appears on screen. It’s funny, it’s light and, most importantly for this essay, a direct reference to a whole generation of primary-coloured Hollywood musicals that we all know and love. It is beautiful, undeniably one of the most beautiful single scenes in recent American cinema. But none of it is Chazelle’s: the score, the art deco font of the legend, the costuming and set design, is all a deliberate reference. Even the joke about the weather and traffic in Los Angeles could have been lifted out of any film set in Los Angeles in the past six decades.
Chazelle is such a confident and aggressive (in a good way) filmmaker that you almost forget about this and are convinced that you’re watching something new. But eventually all the references become a bit overpowering. Ryan Gosling’s Sebastian swings from a lamppost (like in ‘Singin’ in the Rain’), Emma Stone’s Mia wears pastel coloured retro dresses and blouses (like in ‘Umbrellas of Cherbourg’) and occasionally walks around with balloons (like in ‘Funny Face’). At some point you realise that the film is so busy reminding you of other, older, things that it’s not really saying anything. For example, we learn what Mia wants (to become an actress) but we never really learn why, even if Stone imbues the role with a greater level of depth and sensitivity than the script necessarily demands. Sebastian’s great dream is to preserve older, more classical, forms of jazz from innovation but the real challenge that poses, and what sacrifices might be required, are never explored. John Legend has an enjoyable cameo as a pop star friend of Sebastian’s who sells out for short-term popularity, which offers us the obvious alternative to Sebastian’s pursuit of a purer but less lucrative sound. But, then again, Legend’s band is deliberately awful and so the question is left uninterrogated in any depth.
And this is the problem with being so indebted to the past: in the end it can be smothering.
‘The Sopranos’ manages to escape this bind by making the references so self-conscious: Paulie drives a car that plays the ‘Godfather’ theme as its horn; Christopher wants to write a mob screenplay based on his own experiences; Silvio is constantly asked to pull out his Al Pacino impression; the crew steal a truckload of new ‘Godfather’ DVDs so they can watch it together. While these characters are constantly acting out revivified versions of mob movies and shows that came before they also, unlike the characters in ‘La La Land’, know they are and take great pleasure in doing so.
And ultimately, this becomes the point of the show. The characters have been reduced to acting out a facsimile of what they saw in the films, which were themselves a facsimile of the real thing they were based on. This impression of an impression reminds us, if a little pretentiously, of Jean Beaudrillard’s observation that the events of the Gulf War and the edited simulacra beamed into people’s homes were two different things. As members of the Soprano crew beat up business owners to extract protection money from them while not providing any actual protection in return, the original purpose of the mafia (as an, admittedly crude and violent, substitute for insurance and police protection for communities who couldn’t obtain them through other means) turns into a thuggishness that, we know deep down, was all it ever was in the first place. The ultimate hollowness of this is then played out in the characters, until one by one they are all dead or reduced. The sudden ending — a cut to black in a restaurant — is a symbol that the story doesn’t end neatly, it simply grinds on inexorably.
The big difference between this and what we see in ‘La La Land’ is that the characters in ‘The Sopranos’ are aware of their predicament and, to an extent, love it. Mia and Sebastian seem to be unaware of the cliches of their lives and, in the end, that’s the reason they can’t break out of it. And it’s why, ultimately, ‘La La Land’ is nice but doesn’t really mean anything while ‘The Sopranos’ does.
