There is always some madness in love; but there is always some reason in madness — Nietzsche

In a Chazelle world, there are two single-minded individuals and when they intersect, sparks fly; sometimes from fireworks, sometimes from swords clashing. This intersection in Whiplash can best be represented by a clenched fist; in La La, by a parting kiss.

The nature of the clash in each film is a byproduct of a deeper question: why do they dream so intensely? What fuels Andrew to pursue his dream with such purpose? He surrenders a social life, romance, friends and even family all because “I want to be great… I want to be one of the greats.” Mia, too, has a single-minded determination. Throughout the movie, she is rejected numerous times for roles. Since she has lived in L.A. for six years, we can assume she has been rejected hundreds if not thousands of times. Yet she has not surrendered.

Most of us do not have this absorbing passion. For millennia, poets have been attempting to understand the causes of this special energy that resides in some above average livers of life. The romantic poet William Blake postulated the cause to be a complete inability to restrain their passion. “Those who restrain desire,” he said, “do so because theirs is weak enough to be restrained.” His answer is that some people, like a powerful horse breaking free of its confines, merely cannot be bridled. It is nature.

Edgar Allan Poe has a similar view to Chazelle’s. From “Alone” by Poe:

From childhood’s hour I have not been

As others were — I have not seen

As others saw — I could not bring

My passions from a common spring —

From the same source I have not taken

My sorrow — I could not awaken

My heart to joy at the same tone —

And all I lov’d — I lov’d alone.

This view is reflected in both Whiplash and La La. Andrew and Mia and Sebastian and Fletcher are all outsiders. Andrew is disliked by his family and his classmates. Though Mia’s superficial friends seem to like her, in the “Someone In The Crowd” sequence, she is clearly isolated and disconnected from her friends; Sebastian gets fired and even the waitress ridicules him when he begins to play Christmas music. Fletcher is tolerated but silently despised by his fellow teachers; the principal was itching to find students to get Fletcher fired. As he puts it “They just didn’t get what I was doing there.”

They are the loners, whose passions do not come from a common spring. Again, the audition song provides a clue to Chazelle’s view: “I trace it all back to then / her and the snow and the Seine.”

While the primary protagonist of each film has a clear track from childhood joy to adult passion, their unwavering Knights do not. Mia can trace her passion for acting to her aunt and the library where they had watched old movies. Andrew’s passion is less prevalent, but still present. After he is expelled from school, he watches a home video of himself as a child playing the drums. The immensity of what he has lost brings him to tears. For the idealistic Fletcher, there is no youthful joy. He is simply pursuing the dream of having one student become the next Charlie Parker. We are never clear as to the root of his desire. For him, every action is designed to push a student beyond what’s normally expected in the mad hope that he will push one to greatness. Despite pushing a student, Sean Casey, to suicide, Fletcher does not cease his methods. This is irrational passion in the extreme. Though Sebastian does not have this cruel streak in him, he, nevertheless, ignores all of reality to pursue his dream of opening a jazz club and reviving traditional jazz. As the character Keith, played by John Legend, points out, “How are you going to be a revolutionary if you’re such a traditionalist? You’re holding on to the past, but jazz is about the future.” Keith is right. Sebastian hears and sees what he wants to and not what is occurring around him. Both Fletcher and Sebastian are irrationally passionate. They pursue their dreams in a “Damn the torpedoes” sort of way. There are no reasons for their dreams. Unlike Mia and Andrew, for Sebastian and Fletcher, “Theirs not to reason why/Theirs but to do and die.”

Another Poe poem may shed light on the seeming enigma that is these two blind idealists. They are the gallant knight in the poem “Eldorado” — irrationally and blindly pursuing the magic lost kingdom of gold. Of course, Chazelle has one critical alteration to Poe’s Knight: Fletcher and Sebastian, with heavy costs, do enter Eldorado. (I suggest reading the poem aloud)

Both Whiplash and La La illustrate the consequences of the irrational pursuit of an ideal. Sebastian ends up alone and Fletcher is responsible for a suicide. There are numerous real life examples of this error. Greg Mortenson was a man passionate about spreading literacy in the Middle East. He believed that the Kyrgyz, a tribe in Afghanistan, desired a school to be built for their children. But the Kyrgyz were goat herders and the parents valued goats more than books. Mortenson raised western money and built a beautiful school for the children. No children came. Greg held tight to his fantasy, which ruined and defamed him. Yet his ideal of teaching children to read was a noble one. He was simply too preoccupied with his own conception of how this should be accomplished that he missed how it could be accomplished. After Greg left Afghanistan, another organization simply sent tutors out into the fields where the children herded goats and taught them to read.

Mia from La La and Andrew from Whiplash reflect dreamers in the real world. For example, a young boy living in Salt Lake City in the fifties first heard the words “when you wish upon a star, makes no difference who you are,” while sitting too close to his television. Every Sunday at 7:00PM the boy would watch Walt Disney’s show “The Wonderful World of Magic.” And every week the magician who created Fantasia and Mickey Mouse would demystify how it was all done. The boy fell in love. He later fell in love with the science behind making magic. In the seventies the boy explored science and art by creating a digital image of his hand on a computer — the very first one. In the eighties he teamed up with a Disney animator who had been recently fired. And in 1995 they released the first feature length film done completely on a computer: Toy Story. The young boy was Ed Catmull, founder and President of Pixar Animations, and the ex-Disney animator, John Lasseter. Catmull, like Mia, could “trace it all back to then.”