ABSTRACT
Audiences of Damien Chazelle’s 2017 Oscar winner La La Land were enthralled by the relationship between the jazz pianist Sebastian and aspiring actress Mia in a film that appears to adhere to the romantic Hollywood film genre. However, when the final part of the film projects to five years in the future, audiences see that the romantic leads have not followed a predictable path as they are not together. When Sebastian and Mia unexpectedly see each other again, they imagine their lives together in a counterfactual, what-might-have-been scenario that provides the more conventional (and satisfying) conclusion. Yet this imagined scene is disnarrated (Prince, 1988) as the characters are brought back to their present time and reality. It is also an example of what Borges ([1944] 2000) calls the ‘forked path’, which proposes all texts offer a ‘labyrinth’ of plot options and multiple possibilities creating counterfactual divergences. This chapter explores the concepts and narrative dimensions of counterfactuality, disnarration and the forked path in La La Land’s anti-happy-together ending that subverts expectations.
