‘La La Land’ Gets David Lynch-ified in Creepy Mashup Trailer
Humor me for a moment — is Damien Chazelle‘s old-school romantic musical La La Land really all that far removed from the cinema of David Lynch? Like the avant-melodrama triumph Mulholland Dr., Chazelle’s film is obsessed with the artifice that defines both Los Angeles and the entertainment industry around which it was built. Both films revolve around a pair of people inexorably drawn to one another, linked even as they drift apart due to the vicissitudes of circumstance. Both Lynch and Chazelle are fond of stylistic breaks from reality, exploring a dreamlike or otherwise surreal plane beyond this dimension. Hell, “here’s to the ones who dream” might as well be the mission statement of Lynch’s entire filmography.
So maybe it wasn’t all that much of a stretch for the folks of Cinefix to cut their own La La Land trailer in the style of Twin Peaks creator David Lynch. The material’s all right there — moody shots of characters lurking in partial shadow, de-contextualized lines of dialogue about changing your dreams as you grow, unearthly manipulations of color and sound. (I don’t remember Ryan Gosling speaking any of his lines as Seb backwards, though. That may just be them.)
It’s a clever concept and fits together surprisingly well, with the editors taking full advantage of all the shots of colored curtains that appear in Chazelle‘s film. Add a little audio distortion and ominous humming, and you can make pretty much anything feel “Lynchian” on a surface level.