At a recent reunion of high school friends, a polite but impassioned debate arose over La La Land and Whiplash, two movies directed by Damien Chazelle. La La Land is about an L.A. romance between Mia and Sebastian, who push each other in their separate crafts of acting and jazz until their artistic careers split them on divergent paths. Whiplash also features a prolific jazz player, Andrew, who comes under the authority of the verbally—and occasionally physically—abusive band director Fletcher. He rejects Fletcher’s cruelty, only to later cave to it and embody his own musical fury in a climactic final performance. The source of contention was that neither film has a “happy” ending, which was viscerally repellent to several of my friends. However, most would agree that the movies also do not have entirely unhappy endings. At the end of La La Land, we see Mia and Sebastian enjoying stardom in the areas of the arts they cherish, while Andrew’s drum solo at the end of Whiplash is an act of terrifying musical greatness. The modern watcher, like my high school friends and myself, is torn between celebrating the achievement of these characters’ “dreams” and an itching discontent about where Mia, Sebastian, and Andrew end up. In order to clear up this confusion, I suggest returning to the old masters: specifically, Aristotle speaks on the nature of endings of plays, a close cousin of movies, in his Poetics. I argue that by examining La La Land and Whiplash through the lens of Aristotle’s discussion of Greek tragedy, we can understand the true import of their endings and fully appreciate the significance of our discontent.

Assigning tragic status to La La Land and Whiplash might appear initially counterintuitive; after all, the ending scenes are somewhat ambiguous. We see that both Mia and Sebastian have achieved their respective dreams of career success, and Mia has even settled down with someone else. We see that Andrew has achieved a dazzling musical intensity. How do we know to view these endings as tragic? In order to draw this conclusion, we must examine the endings using the qualifications that Aristotle sets forth in his Poetics.

First, both films showcase a complex action. According to Aristotle, “A complex action is one … [which] is accompanied by such Reversal, or by Recognition, or by both”¹, a reversal being “a change by which the action veers round to its opposite.”² For example, in Sophocles’ famous tragedy Antigone, King Creon of Thebes condemns the titular character to death for defying his royal orders and burying her disgraced brother; he hopes that in doing so, he will reinforce his own power as king. In reality, the murder of Antigone creates disastrous instability as the gods express outrage at her killing through natural disasters, calling the true weight of Creon’s authority into question. Thus, Creon’s actions create the opposite outcomes that he intended or expected and qualify as a reversal, suggesting that this is the complex action which is common to most tragedies.

In this sense, the endings of both La La Land and Whiplash are reversals; they flip what the characters expected or intended to be the result of their actions. As Mia is headed to her final audition, it is in a moment of healing and resolution in her relationship with Sebastian. We share her hesitancy in believing that she will really get this role and cannot help but assume that whatever the outcome will be, Mia will be accompanied by Sebastian— who drove all the way to Boulder City, Nevada to find her after she left Los Angeles. However, the opposite ensues; Mia lands the role and then immediately splits from Sebastian. It is a dramatic break from all that we, alongside the characters, anticipated. Likewise, when Andrew walks back onto the stage at the JVC Jazz Festival after being publicly humiliated by Fletcher, he is trying to shame Fletcher by taking control of the band and playing a song, Caravan, that Fletcher is unprepared for. Andrew’s intention is revenge, but as he utilizes music as a thing of rage and cruelty, he is paradoxically united with Fletcher in their musical fury. While he expected to hurt Fletcher, he actually drew closer to him through joining their musical passions. Thus, both La La Land and Whiplash climactically exemplify tragic complex actions.

Additionally, Aristotle claims that the tragic plot “ought to be so constructed that … he who hears the tale told will thrill with horror and melt to pity at what takes place.”³ In other words, the ending ought to have a haunting, emotionally devastating effect on the viewer. This, is undeniably true in both films. Anybody who has seen the ending of La La Land “melts with pity”; the final montage crafts the blissful future we were expecting for Mia and Sebastian, crescendoing into a joyful glimpse into a happy family life— before a slow, ultimately crushing decrescendo which finds Mia and Sebastian separate in the dark jazz bar, stuck in the reality that they have chosen. The final look between Mia and Sebastian before she exits the bar arouses aching, profound pity and regret in the viewer. Regardless of whether you believe that Mia and Sebastian have ended up in a good place overall, something deep within you wants their relationship to work out. Whiplash similarly causes its audience to “thrill with horror”; how could you not when confronted with the cacophony of sound and whirlwind of motion juxtaposed with shots of beads of sweat on Andrew’s brow and of drops of blood on his drum set? The tiny details within such intimate shots reveal the suffering and exertion of Andrew amid his vast triumph; we very much feel that this endeavor has finally broken him. The rage of his character is almost unbearable, and we fear where it will take him. The viewer can generally sense that what is going on is somehow very wrong, a sense relayed through our emotions.

In a similar vein, Aristotle describes the tragic hero, one “who is not eminently good and just, yet whose misfortune is brought about not by vice or depravity, but by some error or frailty.”[^4] Although the disastrous ending of a tragedy might tempt us to pinpoint a true villain as the cause of despair, tragic characters are brought down by weakness rather than by immorality. In both La La Land and Whiplash, the tragic fault is not a vice but rather a weakness. Mia and Sebastian’s weakness was a lack of faith in their relationship and a flagging will to keep it up. They decide that it would not be possible to pursue their careers and their relationship, and yet in the final montage we see a version of reality in which they are able to do both. Mia and Sebastian merely lacked the courage or imagination to pursue this track, bound by their tragic weakness. Andrew’s weakness, meanwhile, is a caving to the brutal tactics of Fletcher which make music into a thing of rage and adverse passion. In his final solo, we realize that he can no longer resist Fletcher’s manipulation. Thus, our central characters are irresolute rather than villainous.

All of these tragic criteria combine and culminate in a direct human cost— although Aristotle does not speak to it directly in his Poetics, we can clearly trace it through many of the best Greek tragedies. In Sophocles’ Antigone, for example, the tragic actions are marked by a severing of interpersonal relationships. Antigone cuts herself off from her sister Ismene by deciding to bury their brother, since Ismene refuses to put her life on the line and defy the king’s orders. King Creon likewise forsakes his relationship with both Antigone and his son Haemon, who is betrothed to Antigone, by deciding to put Antigone to death. The tragic errors in La La Land and Whiplash are also characterized by the cutting off of relationships. Mia and Sebastian cut off their relationship to each other in their tragic error of pursuing career over love, and Andrew walks right out of his father’s loving embrace, leaving him dumbfounded and tearful, in his tragic error of going back onto stage at the JVC Jazz Festival. The lack of deep, well-developed relationships at the end of the films suggests that the endings are tragic rather than otherwise.

Thus, the endings of La La Land and Whiplash fit well into the tragic mold laid out by Aristotle; when Aristotle claims that “the change of fortune should be not from bad to good, but, reversely, from good to bad,” we must believe him.⁵ However, this is where our discussion of Greek tragedy becomes most interesting. Because although, as Aristotle says, the endings of tragedies are decidedly bad, Greek tragedy presents much more nuanced deliberations and decisions which lead up to those endings. In these tragedies, the main character is not choosing a bad thing in their weakness; rather, they are choosing a good that is not actually the highest good. For example, in Antigone, King Creon correctly thinks that human law is good but fails to realize that it is not as good as divine law. In this sense, the weakness of the hero in their tragic error is really a weakness in judgement.

This is the same in La La Land and Whiplash. Mia and Sebastian’s careers are not a bad thing; however, they are not as good as the relationship that they had. Andrew’s pursuit of musical greatness is not a bad thing; it only becomes bad when it is mistakenly placed above his relationship with his father and is used as a form of revenge. Mia, Sebastian, and Andrew all choose things that they correctly see as good. Their folly is a blindness to the bigger picture and higher callings.

And yet, the modern viewer instinctively feels what a terribly difficult, perhaps impossible decision these characters are confronted with. With true brilliance, Chazelle harnesses light, color, and sound to bring the dreams that his characters pursue to life. We see the swirling, smiling figures of Hollywood high society and hear the raw, impeccably interwoven sounds of the jazz Andrew seeks to create. Towards the end of the movie, we agonize over which path the characters might take— and suddenly, we realize that we ourselves have entered into their decision. Chazelle’s integration of us into the lives of his characters is so complete that we no longer view their tragic decision from an objective stance; we ourselves stumble on the verge of the tragic errors that Mia, Sebastian, and Andrew face. Like them, we falter in ordering the goods that they face; we, too, err in our judgement of artistic greatness and fame being better than the goodness of meaningful relationships. But is this inner conflict one of Chazelle’s creation—or is he merely giving shape to a conflict that already exists within us? I argue the latter. Chazelle’s harnessing of the tragic medium allows us to uncover our own weakness of judgement alongside his characters through the inner struggle we ourselves face upon witnessing his endings. The itch we’re left with as the credits roll is a good one, since it makes us think—not only about the director’s aims and the artistic mode, but also about our own tragic flaws which have been hauntingly unveiled.

N o t e s

1. Aristotle, Poetics, trans. S. H. Butcher (Internet Classics Archive, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1994–2009), classics.mit.edu, Book X.

2. Aristotle, Poetics, Book XI.

3. Aristotle, Poetics, Book XIV.

4. Aristotle, Poetics, Book XIII.

5. Aristotle, Poetics, Book XIII.