Even in the platitudinous past tense of “Make America Great Again,” Trump’s red hats told a truth of a kind: Their way forward was back. White fantasies of the past are not innocuous, it turns out they link to discrete economic and political policy. “And one that only makes sense if the rights and privileges you are accorded currently were accorded to you back then, too.” “Meanwhile the dream of time travel-for new presidents, literary journalists, and writers alike-is just that: a dream,” she said. Novelist Zadie Smith spoke recently of white nostalgia while receiving the Welt Literature Prize in Berlin. Quite simply: The past represents liberation for one group, a horror show for another. (For all its gauzy backwards glancing, Chazelle’s film might be subtitled Make Hollywood Great Again.) If seeing Gosling and Stone tap dance in the Hollywood Hills tickles something deep in some viewers, perhaps it’s worth investigating the roots of that feeling and its supposed universality. There lies a profound irony in liberal white folks heading to La La Land to repair after a political season overflowing with the nostalgia of white supremacy. If La La Land holds the power to transport, we might ask where-and importantly when-it takes us. The 2016 election wasn’t a chasm into which the nation fell, it was a time machine into which many white Americans hoped to escape. Meanwhile, 62 percent of black voters thought contemporary life was better. A McClatchy poll on the eve of the election found 56 percent of America’s white population believed life was better in the 1950s, and, according to the same poll, 72 percent of likely Trump voters agreed. However, the politics of the past do not satisfy universally. The film has been hailed by critics and fans alike as a piece of popular art in which to rest for a moment at the close of a punishing year. And on the movie goes, recalling in form and function the 1940s and 1950s aesthetics of Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers and the grand Hollywood musical-a vision of the past reanimated in the present. Her love interest, Ryan Gosling’s resplendent Sebastian, rejects the premise: No amount of nostalgia is too much. Near the middle of Damien Chazelle’s recent movie musical, La La Land, Emma Stone’s character Mia wonders if her proposed one-woman show is too nostalgic.
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