In reference to Walden, E.B. White wrote, “A man reads one book in his life, and this one is mine.” I hope he doesn’t mind me riding on his shoulders when I say a man watches one movie in his life, and this one is mine.

When I watched it for the first time nearly a decade ago, I discovered my soul’s resonant frequency. For that 17-year-old, the first three bars of “Another Day of Sun” were a revelation on the order of Al Jolson’s “You ain’t heard nothing yet” or Dorothy stepping into the technicolor world of Oz. I have to believe that I’d loved and recognized beautiful things before, but I hadn’t opened myself to engage in conversation with them. Hadn’t realized that my life too could be painted in complementary colors.

I bought a keyboard a week later. Over six weeks (piano is difficult and I’m a dim bulb) I memorized “City of Stars” and learned to sing over it. I dragged a high school talent show audience along with me as I butchered every melody and fumbled every chord change. It was one of the happiest days of my life.

It’s been a while since I watched La La Land all the way through. Something about it feels self-indulgent or even narcissistic. To watch it is to step to the side and watch myself, and ten years on I have to wonder if I would always have turned out like this, or if the impressionable teenage me saw a vision of what he could be on the silver screen and consciously or subconsciously aimed to emulate it as closely as possible. During the intermission (this was the in-concert showing), my significant other said, “That’s you. You say that exact same things to me in the same cadence.”

Now, the likely explanation here is that she understands the way to a man’s heart is to compare him to his idols. But I heard and saw it too. I saw Seb’s faux-vintage wardrobe, the way he frictionally complies with the entreaties of pretty girls in sundresses, the stubborn adherence to a dogma of taste that he’d throw away to please the right one of those aforementioned pretty girls.

Writing that down makes me sick. What, was just saying, “He’s literally me,” too on the nose? Well, yes, but that’s unfortunately how it feels in a disquieting way. Where do I end and the movie (or any art I’ve consumed) begin? Is there anything original in here, or am I merely a prism that takes in projector light and refracts it out into weak references and hacked together tabletop RPG sessions?

All that to say the act of fully watching this movie is tantamount to pressing the “existential crisis” button. That wouldn’t be so bad if the ending didn’t give me an embolism. This is a movie about a girl that wants to follow her dreams and a boy that thinks he wants to follow his dreams. He didn’t know until it was too late that he just wanted to fall in love. Without Mia, Sebastian lives underwater. When the curtain falls, he effectively drowns, pushing out one last false smile so that she won’t sink down with him.

And that’s fine. It might be the reason we still talk about this movie at all. Why can’t I shake the feeling that I’m watching my future? The right emotions here are sadness, loss, grief. I feel dread. I have so many projects I want to develop. So many ambitions for what I want to accomplish in my life. The blueprint says they’ll be nothing more than white noise to fill the vacuum left by the actual light of my life. I will continue on automatically, not because of any love or passion or want, but because there’s nothing else.