by Lowell Bliss
This is an excerpt from an unpublished manuscript entitled “Climate Dreaming”, an excerpt from Chapter Two, “La La Land and the Nature of Dreams.”
If the theme of the movie musical La La Land is about the pursuit of one’s dreams, then the opening scene could not be more antithetical. Everyone is in a traffic jam on a Los Angeles freeway. They are literally going nowhere. If you are someone who never takes off your climate glasses, you certainly took note that one of the main characters is driving a Prius, but I bet you could also almost smell the ozone from the exhaust of a thousand idling engines.
At least they are all pointing in the same direction. And at least each car radio is tuned to music channels, not talk radio—music, the language of dreams. And at least one woman is using the delay to rehearse her dreams and is bold enough to share them in public. All the music converges on her melody line and soon the whole freeway is singing, “Climb these hills/ I’m reaching for the heights/ and chasing all the lights that shine.”
Society-wide dreams are possible
La La Land was released in 2016 and is the creative work of writer/director Damien Chazelle and composer Justin Hurwitz. It tells the story of Sebastian, a jazz musician played by Ryan Gosling, and Mia, an aspiring actress played by Emma Stone, who meet up in a modern day Los Angeles which according to the movie has lost none of its romance since the days of Bogart and Bacall.
The first truth that La La Land demonstrates is that there is such a thing as communal dreams. Whole groups of unrelated people can suddenly share the same dream. It’s comically unbelievable if you would wish to step back and parodize it, but it happens in every musical and we not only willingly believe it, we delight in it. On the screen, we might see a street full of pedestrians. Many of them are strangers to each other. Cabbies and butchers, society dames and bankers are just walking along and then suddenly, they break out in song, they harmonize, they dance in a shared choreography. The set might even shift behind them and open up onto something fantastical. The scene might close as quickly as it does in La La Land with the slamming of car doors and the honking of horns, but the dream was real, it was shared, and it had its effect: it advanced the plot line.
When a musical number is shared by just two characters, like say by Seb and Mia, then the director is communicating that some sort of alignment is happening, maybe even what the poets call love or what the mystics call “the unitive way.” During the planetarium scene, Seb and Mia start out dancing no differently than what they had done in a previous number. Seb might be fantasizing that their dancing could render them lighter than air, but when he decides to lift Mia up as if to test the possibility, she responds and even takes over. Soon they are waltzing across the galaxy. She is not in his dream; he is not in hers. They are sharing this dream together. The same is true of the climactic moment. Five years later, Mia is in the audience when Seb sits down at the piano. It is an allusion to Humphrey Bogart’s famous line-- “Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine”--and we should realize they are already living in the shared dream known as Casablanca. Eternal love is possible even if the Lauren Bacall character must leave with Victor Lazlo and the Humphrey Bogart character must walk into the mist with his new pal Louie. “Welcome to Seb’s,” Seb says, and then plays for Mia the composition he has been working on his entire life. From the music emerges a new shared and alternative reality.
In order to understand that there can be such things as communal dreams (or group dreams, or societal dreams), we don’t need to explicate the writing of Chazelle nor analyze the lyrics of Hurwitz and company. It’s enough to say simply that any movie is an example of a group dream. I was late to La La Land, missing it in the theaters. I watched it on Netflix. More than that, I watched it alone. My family had driven down to New York City for the weekend where, for their mom’s birthday, my daughters had bought her tickets to a Broadway show. Musicals, and the type of movies lionized in La La Land, are not meant to be watched alone. We gather in a common space at a designated time. There are people on all four sides of us, and perhaps one special person right next to us whose fingers creep questioningly toward our hand. The lights dim, but we are still aware of human sounds nearby, some of which may be spurring us on, others perhaps annoying us, but always they keep us connected. The dark lights simulate sleep, and the bright oversized screen at the front of the theater is an unmistakable promise: prepare to dream.
Summer, Sunday nights
We’d sink into our seats
Right as they dimmed out all the lights
A Technicolor world
Made out of music and machine
It called me to be on that screen
And live inside each scene.
These dreams, while entering through our own individual photoreceptors and while interpreted through our own unique psyches, are nonetheless—and this is the point—group dreams. For one two-hour block of time, everyone in that theater is having the same dream. And if the movie is a box office smash, as La La Land was, then a whole nation or a whole planet of moviegoers can share the dream. If the movie becomes iconic, as Casablanca has, then the dream is shared across generations, and even works its way, meta-style, into the dreams of characters like Seb and Mia.
An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore’s documentary, when it first came out in 2006 was a global dream about climate change, although most of us remember it as a nightmare. Certainly by 2006, we had Roger Revelle’s charts, we had James Hansen’s testimony, we had Bill McKibben’s book The End of Nature, but Gore gave us images and narrative. You may have forgotten the opening scene. Here’s Gore’s narration:
You look at that river gently flowing by. You notice the leaves rustling with the wind. You hear the birds; you hear the tree frogs. In the distance you hear a cow. You feel the grass. The mud gives a little bit on the river bank. It’s quiet; it’s peaceful. And all of a sudden, it’s a gear shift inside you. And it’s like taking a deep breath and going, “Oh yeah, I forgot about this.”
Eight sentences in and already the audience is mesmerized. We are in a dreamlike state. And then next, like Seb grasping Mia’s hand, Gore steps us up into the galaxy. The next scene is the photograph known as “Earthrise,” the photo taken by Apollo 8 astronauts on Christmas Eve of all days! Gore narrates:
And they lost radio contact when they went around to the dark side of the moon and there was inevitably some suspense. Then when they came back in radio contact they looked up and snapped this picture and it became known as Earth Rise. And that one picture exploded in the consciousness of the human kind. It led to dramatic changes. Within 18 months of this picture the modern environmental movement had begun.
A single photograph becomes a global dream. A single documentary does the same thing. Group dreams are possible, and the argument of this entire book is that a new group dream for a positive climate future is necessary, and you can contribute to it, but only if you are willing to exercise leadership as a dream weaver.
Society-wide dreams require someone exercising leadership
The second thing that La La Land teaches us is that group dreams require leadership. They don’t happen spontaneously. A young woman must be brave enough to step out of her car and establish the theme and melody line for all the stranded motorists. In an early scene, Mia and Seb are walking around the Warner Bros. lot. She is discouraged by her failed auditions. “Should have been a lawyer,” she sighs.
“Because the world needs more lawyers,” Seb rejoins sarcastically.
“It doesn’t need more actresses.”
Understanding how wrong she is becomes Mia’s unique character trajectory. The world does need more actresses, so long as they are actresses like her aunt, the kind who jump barefoot into the Seine, the kind who take young nieces under their care. The world needs more actresses so long as those actresses are willing to lead us in shared dreams. At Mia’s big audition, as she sings “Here’s to the ones who dream. . .,” she finally realizes:
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
So bring on the rebels
The ripples from pebbles
The painters, and poets, and plays
Bring them on! Does the world of the Paris Agreement need more lawyers? No, it needs more painters, and poets, and plays. Prior to 2006, Al Gore was more lawyer than he was actor. One year later he wins an Academy Award for his dream leadership. Admittedly, it was the leadership of producers Laurie Bender and Lawrence Bender and director Davis Guggenheim who crafted Gore’s slide show poetically, but where would we be if Al Gore—who had never been known to stray too far from his head—had not found his heart, if he had not been willing to vulnerably tell stories of his Tennessee childhood, the loss of his sister to tobacco, or the loss of his dreams to George W. Bush?
Martin Luther King stood before 250,000 people and declared, “I have a dream.” He used the first person singular pronoun, but if it wasn’t leadership he was exercising, then a person standing on the edge of the Reflecting Pool might have simply murmured, “Yes, Reverend, you do, and I congratulate you on its beauty.” Instead this listener likely responded, “Yes, we do. We do have a dream; I was afraid we didn’t.”
And when this happens, when we allow freedom to ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, “Free at last! free at last! thank God Almighty, we are free at last!”
We didn’t join hands, as much as have them joined together by a remarkable leader: Dr. King with his words and imagery grabbing one wrist, grabbing another’s, and joining warring hands together. And it’s clear on the video of the March on Washington, and based on the black church experience of call-and-response, that though Rev. King may have started out alone saying “Free at last!” the crowd was together with him and each other by the end: “Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last,” the mighty crowd called out.
Shared dreams require someone to exercise leadership, and we may be tempted to lament that dream weavers of Martin Luther King’s or Al Gore’s or Emma Stone’s or Pope Francis’s caliber are in short supply. That is where you and I often make a mistake that is fatal to progress on the climate challenge. I am a certified teacher of the Kansas Leadership Center framework, and two of the five Principles we expound are: “Leadership is an activity; not a position” and “Anyone can lead any time anywhere.” It’s true of the story of An Inconvenient Truth. Here was a man who all his life was immersed in positional leadership: senator’s son, congressman, senator himself, Vice President of the United States. And yet, Al Gore won his share in a Nobel Peace Prize for work done after having famously been elbowed out of positional leadership. It was his wife who exercised leadership by saying to him in his grief, “Why don’t you dust off your old slideshow?” In La La Land, there are any number of positional leaders: the boss who fires Seb for not playing Christmas tunes, the band leaders (including John Legend’s character) who insist on Seb’s conformity, the coffee shop manager who doesn’t care if Mia has scheduled an audition. But the movie is also replete with anyone leading anytime anywhere—and most of these acts of leadership have nothing to do with telling someone else what to do. Seb’s sister tries that early on, and Seb just tosses her suggestion—a phone number of someone to call—onto the floor. Most of the other acts of leadership, by contrast, build a shared dream. For example, in the scene where Mia returns to her house after a particularly disappointing audition, her roommates want Mia to join them at a party. She begs off. “I’ve got to work,” she says. They don’t force a dress on Mia nor drag her out to the car. Instead, they spin a dream for Mia to share in:
Someone in the crowd could be the one you need to know
The someone who could lift you off the ground
Someone in the crowd could take you where you wanna go
By the end, Mia isn’t simply going along with them; she’s driving the car. A shared dream for a positive climate future is possible, but it is going to require numerous acts of leadership by numerous unsuspecting leaders.