The other exception worth calling out is something like Adaptation or Moulin Rouge, where the film is a pseudo-autobiographical account of the lead characters' story telling. The exception to this would be something based on a real person, Picasso, Shakespeare, etc. If the audience is able to witness directly something which this fictional character has created, they will be limited by how well the script writer was able to scribe. So what did happen? Or do we break the rules and accept the song into the 'canon' of the narrative's 'reality'? If we do that then surely we must accept everything else, too?Ĭonsider for a moment any film with a writer, artist, or other creative who is at the top of their game. The song was impressive, but - as has been established - we can't take the song as the literal truth of what happened. But she must have done something impressive, because she got the job. But what actually 'happened' in that audition room? If the song wasn't what she actually did in that room, then what did she actually say? Did she deliver a rambling anecdote about her Aunt in Paris living life to the full? Did she wax lyrical about taking creative risks and dreaming big? Somehow that sort of eloquence seems out of character for her. The 'song' is part of the stylised fantasy lens through which we occasionally are invited to look. The 'real' Mia is not actually singing to her prospective employers. If Amelie melts into liquid it's just a reflection of how she feels, or if a photograph talks to someone we know that they're just talking to themselves.īut what about La La Land's audition scene? Mia starts telling her story and transitions into song, and from the lighting change we know that we have entered into the 'alternate reality' of the musical sequence. Amelie has magical realist elements, but these are always so minor that we're never left wondering what 'reality' was behind the fantasy. The non-musical Birdman has magical realist fantasy sequences, but normally drops a little 'clue' as to what the reality of the scene actually is (the taxi scene, for instance). What interests me is the extent to which we can guess the 'reality' behind the fantasy in scenes like these. Real people, obviously, do not ad lib sing to each other spontaneously in perfect synchronicity, so again we temporarily suspend our sense of the 'reality' of the film and accept this alternate reality until we are given some kind of cue that the characters' feet, so to speak, are back on the ground.

When we enter into this type of sequence, rules of physics are temporarily suspended but so are more subtle things: in the song looking over the lights of L.A., even though nothing fantastical happens, we still know that the characters are playing a sort of version of themselves, one where it is usual for them to sing in duet and tapdance and suchlike. So we watch the observatory scene in La La Land and we know that Mia and Sebastian, to the extent that we take them as 'real people', are not actually flying around the cosmos, but their flying represents the emotions they feel leading up to their first kiss. Essentially, the scenes where the viewer is expected to take what they are seeing as symbolic rather than literal and which are usually differentiated from the rest of the narrative by the use of song. 4, The Visionary Impulse: An American Tendency, CAA, JSTOR, 1985.I watched La La Land recently and it got me thinking about the magical realism aspect of the musical genre. 'Magic Realism: Defining the Indefinite.' Art Journal. 'Salman Rushdie on Gabriel García Márquez: 'His world was mine.'' The Telegraph, April 25, 2014. 'Magical Realism: Definitions.' Arizona State University, May 23, 2002, Tempe, AZ. 'Paraspheres: Extending Beyond the Spheres of Literary and Genre Fiction: Fabulist and New Wave Fabulist Stories.' Paperback, Omnidawn Publishing, June 1, 1967. 'Block magic: categorization, creation, and influence of Francesca Lia Block’s Enchanted America.' UBC Theses and Dissertations, The University of British Columbia, 2004. Faris, Duke University Press, January 1995. 'Magical Realism in Spanish American Literature.' Lois Parkinson Zamora (Editor), Wendy B. 'The Buried Giant.' Vintage International, Paperback, Reprint edition, Vintage, January 5, 2016. 2, American Association of Teachers of Spanish and Portuguese, JSTOR, May 1955. 'Magical Realism in Spanish American Fiction.' Hispania, Vol. 'The Origins of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Magic Realism.' The Atlantic, April 17, 2014. 'Our Lives Became Unmanageable.' The Omnidawn Fabulist Fiction Prize, Paperback, Omnidawn, October 4, 2016. 'Review: Kazuo Ishiguro's 'The Buried Giant' defies easy categorization.' The Washington Post, February 24, 2015.

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