“You Never Heard of Code-Switching, Motherfucker?”
Joseph Kahn did not much care for Damien Chazelle’s La La Land (2016). When the movie opened, he unleashed a sarcastic Twitter storm: “White people will love LA LA LAND…The dance numbers in LA LA LAND feel like Verizon commercials…99% of the couples in LA are interracial, except the one in LA LA LAND, and the white couples at Cinerama Dome watching that white couple…LA LA LAND is exactly like Los Angeles when I got there in 1995. White people swing dancing around coffee shops…I have yet to meet one black person who saw LA LA LAND who didn’t complain about how wack the dancing and singing was.”
Kahn’s spectacular new movie Bodied (which was in postproduction when La La Land was released) can perhaps be thought of as the anti-La La Land. For one thing, is raucously multiracial and multicultural—in sharp contrast to ’s generic whiteness, and its presentation of Ryan Gosling as the white custodian of a 60-year-old African-American art form (’50s cool jazz) that black people themselves (in the person of John Legend) are accused of having forgotten or debased. is about contemporary battle rap, rather than old-school jazz. From its point of view, even LL Cool J is old news (early in the film, LL Cool J is mentioned alongside Dostoyevsky by a university professor who is clearly clueless about what’s happening now). entirely rejects the driving force of : its nostalgia, its longing for a supposedly simpler and better time, and its lament for lost older forms of cultural expression and authority. Kahn simply has no interest in cultural idealization and recuperation. implicitly follows Brecht’s maxim that we should not build on the good old days, but on the bad new ones.
