It’s a bold claim, to be sure. But I hold that F. Scott Fitzgerald would have loved La La Land, – and not simply because the movie pays homage to jazz.

Scott Fitzgerald is forever immortalized as one of the greatest American writers since the publication of his most famous work The Great Gatsby. Heralded now as the ‘Great American Novel’, The Great Gatsby is a staple of American education. I remember studying the structure, plot, and symbols of the story in a middle school English class, twice more in two separate high school English classes, and then again in a college seminar.

My opinion remains, perhaps, unpopular. I cannot say I ever particularly connected with, respected, or even liked a single character who filled the pages of my now worn copy of The Great Gatsby. I never understood my Professor’s definition of Gatsby as a hero. Gatsby was a dreamer. He lived a life of utter illusion, and saw the world, not as it was, but as he hoped it to be. To Fitzgerald, who championed this idea of new heroism (and to my Professor) Gatsby’s refusal to accept the truth of the world made him a hero. To me, it made him a coward.

That is until I watched La La Land.

The age gap between The Great Gatsby and La La Land is ten years shy of a century.  Yet despite this, La La Land finally made F. Scott Fitzgerald and his hero ideal click for me.

La La Land depicts the struggles of an ambitious actress named Mia (Emma Stone) and a devoted Jazz musician named Sebastian (Ryan Gosling) as they maneuver the hope-crushing streets of modern-day Los Angeles, fighting for both their dreams and their future together. [SPOILER ALERT] The movie ends as Mia, trailing her husband, turns around and meets eyes with Sebastian one last time over the nostalgic haze of his crowded Jazz club. In the moment, both imagine their life together. Then the music ends, and reality sets in. Both have surpassed their ambition. But it has taken them on diverging paths.

Soon after I watched La La Land for the first time, I read a review that described the underlying message of the movie to be: “in a place of dreams, not every one of them comes true”.  My immediate, almost visceral, response sparked an avalanche of thought that surprisingly enough led straight to Fitzgerald.

The message of La La Land is so much more than “in a place of dreams, not every one of them comes true”, just like The Great Gatsby is about so much more than working hard to achieve wealth and success. La La Land, at heart, depicts the beauty and significance found in having the ability to dream. Mia’s Audition song, played at one of the most climatic parts of the movie, expounds this. The lyrics read out, “Here’s to the ones who dream, foolish as they may seem; Here’s to the hearts that ache, here’s to the mess we make”. Dreaming is not the means to an end – like hope, or ambition. Dreaming is the end.

Mia continues to sing, “A bit of madness is key to give us new colors to see, who knows where it will lead us? And that’s why they need us”. It was in this moment that I finally understood Fitzgerald’s ideal of a hero – a character who lives a life of illusion and endless possibilities. The dreamers, the people with a bit of ‘madness’ are the Gatsby’s of the world. And though they are perhaps a little bit mad, they are necessary to make the world a beautiful place. The ‘they’ in Mia’s song fit into Fitzgerald’s idea of anti-heroes – people who cannot dream and whose world lacks the luster and color and the world of a dreamer would hold.

While watching La La Land I transcended my normal perspective on life and dreams, as the characters did. Although it was hardly realistic, I believed from the movie’s opening number that she, as an admittedly average actress, and him, as a struggling musician, could not only both find success but do so while staying together. I dreamed with them the whole time; I believed in a happy ending.

In this lies why the movie was so effective to me.

I realized as the last number played out that the movie was about to end. Additionally, I realized it was about to end with Mia married to someone else and Sebastian alone. For a moment, the illusion I was under the whole movie came crashing down. But then, right after the montage of what their life together could have looked like, and right after Mia walks out of the club, she turns around. They make eye contact and smile at each other. Is this peaceful, almost feel-good ending possibly realistic? Is it part of the montage still or really happening in the movie? I don’t know for sure. But, as the audience, I am left believing – perhaps dreaming – that it did. My own ability to believe in such endless possibilities and to dream that the world really could be this way is significant to how I walked away from the movie feeling.

I see Mia and Sebastian as tragic, but beautifully so. Their lives are full of passion and color. Just like Jay Gatsby’s. And so, I hold that F. Scott Fitzgerald would have loved not only the heroic characters present in the film, but the power the film carries to transform its audience into dreamers themselves.

I recently spent a Friday evening babysitting two 7-year-old girls. While their parents enjoyed a night out on the town, we settled down on a corner of the plush toy-room carpet to play a bit, before showers and bed. I was granted the distinct honor of handling the girls’ newest doll. Complete with silver-highlights, platform combat boots, metallic lipstick, and a sheer mesh tee, she was a far-cry from the more traditionally styled American Girl dolls I played with in my youth. As opposed to “Molly” or “Josephine”, her name was “Frankie Stein”.

The girls were keen to show off their entire collection of Monster High dolls. I met all of Frankie Stein’s little friends, “Draculaura”, “Clawdeen Wolf”, “Ghoulia Yelps” and “Freak Du Chic”.  They featured skyscraper shoes with casual outfits, monochromatic makeup, and multi-colored hair.

Although the Monster High American fashion doll franchise hit shelves in 2010, many of the styles that were characteristic of the dolls even then are suddenly trending today in the world of high fashion. Fashion icons like the Jenner and Hadid sisters have inspired their fan bases by wearing athletic clothes with high-heels, metallic dark lip looks, and, of course, millennial pink hair. As I sat there playing dolls in a world of make-believe horror with the girls, I wondered if these gorgeous, grotesque dolls had somehow predicted cultural patterns before those of us less inclined to do so had tuned in? Did they somehow reflect subtle shifts in thinking that perhaps existed even a full six years ago?

Of course, as soon as the house was quiet for the night, my inner nerd seized on the grotesque themes these dolls brought to children’s toys. The use of the grotesque is not new to the world of readers and writers of English literature. The works of Edgar Allan Poe, staples of most middle or high school English programs, are marked by the use of mysterious and macabre themes. Renowned 20^th century American short story writer Flannery O’Connor highlighted her own use of the grotesque in short stories that were otherwise placed in safe, convention settings that readers would find familiar. In her piece “Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction” she described writers as “fundamentally seekers and describers of the real” and so, she used subtle elements of horror in her works to reveal the underlying darkness she saw in the world.

The world we live in today is much different than the world of Edgar Allan Poe and Flannery O’Connor. We don’t need to read about startling figures with ugly motives to know that people can be evil and the world can be scary. The very fact that I remember instinctively putting my keychain (that contained a small can of pepper spray) on the couch next to me as the house grew dark that night speaks to the ugly possibilities we’re taught from a young age to expect behind every familiar scene. Dolls that feature such a grotesque nature may seem problematic to some, but we can hardly deny that they are entirely unrealistic.

I recently read a poem entitled “Weapons Discharge Report” by Dan Albergotti in The Best American Poetry 2017. In it, Albergotti describes Officer Darren Wilson pulling his gun on eighteen-year-old Michael Brown and murmuring “…it looks like a demon…” before opening fire. The piece is, perhaps, political by nature – but more importantly it is grotesque by nature. It details the death of a young man. No matter the politics, how could it not be grotesque?

As I read Ablergotti’s poem, I wondered if there is a place for the grotesque in the literature we read today? How is this piece really any different than a news report? How can it avoid blending in with the new horrors we read about every day? Instead of stirring readers up, might it not serve to desensitize us further?

Robert Frost believed, much like Flannery O’Connor, that the role of writers was to pen works that end in a “clarification of life” – that bring readers a dose of reality. He wrote in “The Figure a Poem Makes” that this end is “not necessarily a great clarification” however, but a “momentary stay against confusion”. In this distinction lies the chief justification for the continual use of the grotesque in literature and culture today. The grotesque elements of modern literature, or children’s toys even, may not need to shatter any illusions that the world is a safe place, but they may serve to make us pause. A poem, no matter how rich its language, will never be as vivid as a video of the same event the television may depict. But, it has value yet. And its value extends much further than just being able to shock people by mere ‘use’ of the grotesque.

I believe that literature is able to create a space that takes real life experiences to a realm that news reports and television cannot touch. A poem can be manipulated in a way that films cannot, in way that contributes to their validity rather than discounts it. The unsettling vivid imagery that a piece contains may reflect the images we live with every day, but the stillness – the momentary pause – suddenly impedes us from thinking of an image as just another one. It is suddenly memorable, stark. We suddenly realize how badly we want to live without it.

If even for a moment.