Romance, Fairy Tales, and the Ugly Truth of Why I Hated LaLa Land

(Spoilers ahead – if you haven't seen the movie by now, that's kind of on you, but fair warning: I'm about to ruin the ending. Or maybe save you from it. Depends on your perspective.)

So a couple of years ago, my daughter and I were hanging out, and she put on La La Land. I enjoyed the nods to the old musicals. It was a not-quite-cute love story with Ryan Gosling doing that thing where he's charming and slightly insufferable at the same time. Fine. Good. I was on board.

And then the ending happened.

And I absolutely hated it.

Amanda kept telling me, "That's it. That's the end of the movie."

And I was like, "NO! That can't be the end. WTF??"

I think she was quite entertained by how upset I got. She liked the movie, not just because of Ryan Gosling, but because it matched how she sees and has experienced relationships. Her argument to me was simple: "Why are you so upset? They both got the success they wanted."

Which is true. Mia became a big movie star. Sebastian got his little jazz club where he could play exactly the kind of music he wanted. Dreams achieved. Box checked. Roll credits.

So why did it piss me off so much?

The Rant That Wouldn't Die

I didn't really know why. But that didn't stop me from having opinions.

I ranted about how Mia could have gotten in touch with Sebastian when she got back from filming her breakout movie. I got agitated about how quickly she abandoned that relationship and ended up married with a kid, I literally mapped out the timing of that on a napkin once. The fact that both of them got what they wanted seemed completely inconsequential to my arguments. I was upset about their lost connection.

I did understand why she wouldn't have stayed at the club to listen to more music or talk to him at the end. I get how awkward that would have been. And since she was married with a kid, them getting back together wouldn't have been realistic or even a good ending.

But still. Still.

This became one of those movies I'd pull out whenever someone asked about films that pissed me off. It lived rent-free in my head alongside Tenet, which, don't even get me started. (Actually, I already did. That rant lives here.) And also that Hugh Jackman movie Reminiscence - a stupid fucking movie that made me take a lap around the block to calm down.

But during one of these tirades about movies that wronged me, I stopped mid-sentence and thought: Wait. Why did this make me so upset?

I thought about Amanda's point, they both got what they were striving for. Mia even seemed to be in a relationship good enough that she had a kid. Perfect fairy tale ending... except for the love story that wasn't.

So the question became: what does this say about me?

Why did I get so worked up about a movie that most people loved? Why couldn't I just let it go like I do with Paul's terrible sci-fi movies? (His joke to other people is that he gets to watch them as many times as he wants because I never remember them. I say it's because I've been hit in the head a few too many times.)

The Penny Drop

So this morning, I was chatting with Penny, one of my AI collaborators, about how people's expectations create their own distress. The idea is that you create your own pain when you have expectations and reality doesn't meet them. Not because something went terribly wrong or someone failed you, but because the thing or person didn't match the version you'd built in your head.

When you start expecting behaviors based on someone's potential rather than what they've actually said or demonstrated, that's when you enter fantasy land. That's when you start building your own fairy tales.

And then it hit me.

That's exactly what La La Land was showing, reality versus expectation.

The movie shows how pretty things can seem when you're living in the musicals, swept away by new relationship energy, building that fairy tale version of what it will be, what it should be. The dancing, the stars, the "this is it" feeling. The Hollywood soulmate fantasy—mermaids and unicorns and fate and the woo-i-verse basically hand-delivering your person with a ribbon on top.

And then reality hits. Not in some poetic, soft-focus way. In the "cockroaches in the kitchen and the used Kleenex and condoms under the moldy bed" way.

The dreams of being discovered turns into selling your soul to keep the job. The juggling of job versus personal life. Being supportive when things get hard. Making impossible decisions about prioritizing dreams over relationships. That's all hard reality, ugly, difficult, and sometimes hurtful to the people closest to you.

And can we talk about LA for a second? Because this is also peak LA energy. The city where dreams go to die - where the miasma of desperation and disappointment is slick in the smog, poisoning the soul while you sit in traffic trying to convince yourself this is all "part of the journey."

Sebastian's love song at the end? That final sequence where we see the perfect fairy tale relationship, where both of them were there for each other in all the ways they should have been?

It was beautiful, probably even more heart wrenchingly so because it wasn't real and we saw through the whole movie that’s not how life works and that success requires hard choices and sacrifices that suck. It was all the should have beens that never happen.

Critics who didn't like the film pointed out that the musical numbers prioritize stunning visuals over actual relationship development, "the couple's relationship is always secondary to their surroundings." But that’s what Hollywood does and what we have come to expect from relationships, the visuals, the fairy tale, not the actual grit and truth of being in the relationship. And maybe that's part of it. The movie is more interested in the idea of romance than the reality of it.

Which, apparently, I was too.

Paul laughs at how unromantic I am now. I laugh that he loves Hallmark romance movies. (They even make him cry, don't tell him I said that.) I love that about him. I'm even a little jealous that he can still be moved by the fairy tale.

The Pain Bubble

When I made that connection and started explaining my realization to Penny, I started to cry. Like, stupid crying. Sobbing and a bit snotty.

I was taken aback. I'd just popped a pain bubble while talking about a movie.

But then, it wasn't about the movie at all.

Because the capacity to believe in romance, the fairy tale, was taken from me. In my prior relationship, I was promised a fantasy. The dream was torn from me, ripped to shreds, laughed at, thrown into the flames while I watched, then shat upon. And I was left to wallow in the shitty ashes of what those dreams could never be.

I don't think someone is going to love me like they do in fairy tales. I don't think romance where someone sweeps you off your feet actually happens. I don't think that exists for anyone.

What's Real

Don't get me wrong, I love Paul and I know he loves me. But it's real. We have our frictions. We have moments where we get frustrated and annoyed. He leaves his shoes on the living room floor and I trip on them. And I frustrate him when I go bulldog and get stubborn about something dumb. That's life. That's real relationships.

And you know what? That's beautiful.

Maybe it's good that I don't have the fairy tale versions in my head anymore. It means I can truly appreciate what I have: a really good dude who cares about me deeply and supports me without a lot of questions. Do I get annoyed? Sure. Does he? Absolutely. But he willingly accepts my version of crazy and rolls with it. (Did you see the Ducky Revolution?)

So yeah, the pain bubble got popped. I was angry and sad about what I lost.

But maybe losing that fairy tale version of romance was a good thing. It means I can be happy and satisfied with a real relationship that takes effort and gets a little ugly sometimes. Because being able to accept someone for who they are - the good, the bad, the ugly, the uncomfortable - is better than a fairy tale.

Really, all those unpredictable moments that are amazing and beautiful? They beat out anything I could have dreamed up.

Sebastian's final love song was gorgeous. But it was a fantasy. A what-if that never was.

I'd rather have Paul's shoes on the floor and a relationship that's messy and real than a perfect dream that only exists in a five-minute musical sequence at the end of a movie.

And yeah - those frustrating moments? The shoes, the stupid stubborn heel-digging, the little "are you kidding me right now" moments - are part of what makes real life better than fairy tales. Fairy tales ultimately are pretty predictable and boring. Real life is where the adventure is.

Even if that realization made me cry into my coffee like a weirdo.

Wait—I actually went back and watched it again with all this in mind...

The Rewatch Reality Check

So last night Paul and I rewatched the movie because I wanted to see if a new lens changed anything. Like, okay Sharon, you're older, maybe softer, maybe you can chill the fuck out about this ending now. Maybe you can see what everyone else saw.

Nope.

Paul's verdict was basically: it's just flat. Like aggressively flat. And this is a guy who cries at Hallmark movies and loves romance — he wants the feelings, he wants the swoon, he wants the whole damn fairy tale. But he felt nothing for these characters. He actually had to stop the movie during the big fight scene because he was so offended by the lack of emotion and character depth. He was like, "Are they even mad? Do they even care? What is this?"

And then it clicked for me, part of why I was so mad is that the movie teases the deep water but never actually dives in. I tried to explain it to Penny like this: it's like shadows and light rippling on top of a lake. You can see what it's supposed to be, you can feel the promise of it, but you never get to see it from underneath where things are beautiful , strange, hard, and deep.

And that's where the betrayal lives.

Because movies can be these weird little portals. Like magic mirrors. Or a safe way to do emotional surgery. They let you step through with a character and touch feelings you've buried, and sometimes you get to pull something out and finally breathe again. But because these characters were so flat, the movie poked my pain bubble without giving me the depth to actually heal it or release it. The movie poked a bruise and then "Anyway, here's a cute musical number."

Paul read this post and laughed his ass off at my "Paul's terrible sci-fi movies" comment from earlier. He knows they're terrible. He enjoys how terrible they are. And he was ridiculously amused to find out I was secretly jealous of his romantic side. Like, "Wait, YOU? Jealous? Of me crying at Hallmark?" Yes, dude. Yes. Shut up.

(Also on the fairy tale front, can someone explain to me why someone wants to marry a prince? I’ve never really understood that one – ah but we can leave that for another post.)

Onwards and upwards. 💙