Ever since Whiplash took everybody by surprise and set Damien Chazelle up for a career of perceived failure and endless hatred from the chattering class the minute after he got nominated for a Best Picture Oscar at the ripe young age of 29, it’s become harder not to notice that Chazelle almost exclusively makes movies about the intersection of achievement and, well, love and how unachievable it is to serve those two masters at once. That first film, of course, is about allowing yourself to be fully erased by the pursuit of musical mastery, but this current runs through La La Land and First Man as well – you’ll never find that love that truly means something if you want to be great, with the rest of your days being haunted by the question of “what if,” and your technical achievements, no matter how great and epoch-defining, will only do so much to heal the void in your heart. What I mean to say by this is that Chazelle is cognizant of his fortune and of his eventual fate, having already suffered enough embarrassment in one two-month period back in 2017 to rightly scare the hell out of making another feature ever again. The darkness and depression at the heart of First Man seemed to be a response to the slightness of La La Land, a glittering technical tribute to the Freed unit and Jacques Demy that was as pleasant as it was empty, and that approach satisfied no one (both sides of the political aisle hated it for different reasons, with the lack of a gung-ho Americanism alienating conservatives and the tone repelling anyone else on the compass). But unlike that film, Babylon, his latest work, is a kind of contradiction: It’s “Come at me, bro” offered to the world at large, finding Chazelle indulging every single last impulse that landed him in thinkpiece purgatory over the last decade while also pursuing that same line of though in a much more overtly personal fashion. See, Babylon is about failure as much as it is about the changing landscape of Hollywood at the tail end of the Silent Era, and coming to terms with one’s own eventual irrelevance as someone who worked in service of an artform, rather than as a commander of it.
If you’re the spoiler-phobic type, turn around after this paragraph. In short: Babylon is a lot like Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate in several ways: Its length, ambitions, and probable reception. It’s likely to test your patience, given that it’s three hours of near-constant action, either with its goofball comedy, broad theatrics, or anarchic sense of history. On the other hand, it’s a good time that curdles ultimately into something quite meaningful in depicting the ferocious fall of its leads, and I think it might have edged out First Man as my favorite film of Chazelle’s. Whether it is successful (unlikely, but whatever), quickly forgotten about (more likely), or winds up in the Criterion Collection in 40 years much like Cimino’s United Artists-killing opus as a forgotten masterpiece (wholly my opinion here) is entirely up to you, and I encourage you to take the plunge.
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Plenty of folks have already made various comparisons to Paul Thomas Anderson’s Boogie Nights, as they’re both vaguely Altman-esque tableaus, stacked to the gills with colorful characters in a rich aesthetic setting, with a similarly added tinge of Scorsese-style madness at each film’s core, but I’d also argue that the films share similar theses about the nature of art and commerce. Both deal with the chaos and pretension of making trash art that is only perceived as trash (remember: Movies did not receive First Amendment protections until well after the film’s time period, and were viewed much as one might view a video game today – there might be one or two people making “art,” but everyone else is here for the money), and the figures that pop up to take advantage of the opportunity for self-gratifying and self-enriching reasons. It’s also because they see all these other morons who have been given oodles of cash, and like the formerly poor who hit the jackpot, they spend it unwisely, but often in very fun and cinematic ways. The two here who make it are Manny (Diego Calva), a Mexican-American immigrant who starts out as a day laborer and security man hired to patrol the crazy and near-satanic revelries of the elite but finds himself working his way up the ladder into the studio system thanks to his friendship with star Jack Conrad (Brad Pitt), and Nellie (Margot Robbie), a poor girl with oodles of charisma who crashes into the Hollywood scene like the comet that killed off the dinosaurs. Their meeting at one of Conrad’s parties is full of the normal kind of “Movies are magical!” talk you’d hear in something like Sam Mendes’ Empire of Light, but there’s a genuine tinge of cynicism here that offsets any feeling of treacle. After all, they’re doing lines of coke assembled from mounds stacked high enough to make Tony Montana sweat while they do so in the midst of the utter chaos of the party going on upstairs – a slapstick cavalcade full of zany vigor, jazz age theatrics, and ample, fleshy pleasure that makes up most of the first thirty minutes of the film.
Such is the nature of the beast. Babylon‘s title alludes, in part, to Kenneth Anger’s Hollywood Babylon, a collection of too-hot-for-tabloids rumors – some with a kernel of truth to them, others wholly invented but yet feel true – that has long been the bane of film historians. They’re sick of debunking rumors about Clara Bow fucking a young John Wayne and his teammates on the USC Football Team and so on, but Anger’s main target remains the kind of folks who desperately want to cling to a particular vision of the business’s history but cannot look away when something like it is published. It was fed to their ancestors by nervous studio PR scared of Catholic-League pickets and even more government intervention, and it is now, if not history itself, a cheery compliment to it. The image is horrifyingly powerful, overwhelming any number of realities in favor of a kind of blissful dream that is so consuming in its totality that we will do anything to preserve it when it suits us. But Anger’s work is founded upon provocation – his very existence as a queer avant-garde filmmaker in ’40s America or as a rogue boundary-pusher shooting near Spahn Ranch in Manson’s heyday almost made that a guarantee – and Hollywood Babylon seeks to remind us that these lies, presented to us as speculation masquerading as truth, are just as real as the ones issued from the typewriters of MGM’s publicity department. Both seek to entertain, but Anger at least acknowledges his audience as skeptics capable of critical thought rather than docile minds with wallets at the ready. In re-reading Hollywood Babylon since I saw Chazelle’s, I’ve found fun and loving allusions to Anger’s work, refracted into his text as if it were being glimpsed through an old window pane. The much-maligned opening, in which Manny struggles along with another day laborer to bring a shit-filled elephant to Conrad’s gaudy party and get rained on in the process, echoes the opening of Anger’s text, which begins with a florid description of the “white elephants” acting as pillars in the Babylon set of Griffith’s Intolerance. That locale would hang around in LA for twenty-odd years after filming like a fading tattoo done following a late-night bender, a memory of good times and mistakes obscured by haze, simply waiting to be annihilated years later when one seeks to maintain some sort of propriety.
See, that’s the crux of Chazelle’s argument here: Sync-sound rewrote the language of cinema in inherently limiting ways, and placed control of the art form fully in the hands of the producer at a particularly economically-fraught time for the entire nation. Silent movies, while never inexpensive, were at least enterprises that allowed for indulgence and creativity provided you could get the film in on time and on-budget. The money flowed like water, thanks to easy credit and audience demand, and this enabled that same bacchanalia that Chazelle so richly depicts in his party scenes, sensory playgrounds for the youthful nouveau rich who looked to snort and suck anything they could provided they could get to set the next morning with some reasonable amount of cognizance. Of course, these energies fed off each other but were not wedded to them: Keep in mind that the folks we see at the parties here are the stars and producers, not the nuts-and-bolts peons that we call “directors” or “cinematographers” nowadays. But with the advent of sound – the ultimate raising-of-the-bar in terms of technological gimmicks, which has never once been equaled in tectonic performance no matter how much beauty color processing or computer graphics brought to the images that unspooled in front of successive audiences on ballooning screens of various styles – that creativity was now at the mercy of a fickle new process. The joyous yet brutal chaos Chazelle documents on the desert backlots, where a fire or dead extra can only do so much to stop shooting, gives way to a pressure-cooker silence inside a hotbox soundstage, silent and sterile and oftentimes just as fatal. It is an eternal trade-off one must make in order to chase modernity: the bad things may go, but new ones will subsequently take their place.
This was, in truth, the last moment that folks like Manny and Nellie could squeak into the system without having a preassigned and codified role granted to them by executives, and with the kind of opportunities that, even now with our diversity and inclusion initiatives, feel off-limits unless one has a certain amount of pre-established financial stability and other privileges. If there’s one thing Chazelle misses about that era, it’s the ease in which one could simply go out into the desert and find themselves on a set – the open-air bonanzas saw studio PR-women who just so happened to know Proust back in the good old days shooting the shit with alkies pulled off of skid row, armed with swords by the prop department and costumed in chainmail – which was almost immediately sealed off from the world the minute one needed quiet. I don’t see this as a thinly-veiled humblebrag, either: Instead, it feels more like Chazelle has become aware of the kind of luck he’s been given, deservedly or not, and is openly lamenting the fact that the Hollywood system refuses to open its doors to more, and that when it does, at least in the post-sound era, it comes with a hefty price. Such is the plight of trumpeter, who is plucked from obscurity and starts headlining films for black audiences after he tells the ascendant Manny, now a producer, to point the cameras at the band rather than an assembled group of stars singing “Singin’ in the Rain.” However, he cannot, no matter his newfound wealth or talent or even the physical reality of his skin color, appear to be lighter-skinned than he is in lieu of offending Southern censors who believe he might be in a mixed-race band, and abandons the studio lot after a final insult. He, as opposed to most of the main ensemble, is comfortable returning to the honest pursuit of his craft, settling for mere pennies for freedom and, more importantly, honesty. He’s able to eat and have a roof over his head and play his trumpet, having walked away from the riches once the cruelty of their origins was revealed to him, and that’s as close to pure living as he could want.
On the other hand, our leads are desperate to hold on to what little they have, even as their grasp on power loosens. They know poverty, and as most would in their circumstances, they strive to stay out of it for as long as possible. Unlike the new generation of stars and behind-the-scenes faces, they are not rich enough to fully insulate themselves from the world they came from or to abandon it: Nellie carries around her father, played by Eric Roberts, as a repository of her hatred and her guilt, financing his dumb schemes to open diners and drunkenly trying to bait him into fighting snakes, and Manny’s ceaseless ambition, which got him to the top in the first place, becomes an equally fierce determination to keep his head above water. He has adopted the language of the studio fixer – fists and back alley deals – but is not untouchable enough to avoid trouble when it comes, given that he can’t simply call home or ask the right kind of favors. The crowd that Hollywood’s elite caters to is now comprised of old money lechers and their younger or prune-faced wives, who one must both be a person of taste and “character” in order to satisfy, and they’re not going to pick up the phone to help a low-level producer pay off his beloved star’s gambling debt. They, as represented on the lot by the studio heads and government officials, were the primary enforcers of the Hays Code at its core, who demanded accountability and moral edifice to ensure their profit, no matter what backward form this morality might have manifested itself as. But while they were merely content with having actors as conversational window dressing at their parties and the receipts rolling in, darker forms of money were slouching towards Jericho looking for an in. Perhaps that’s what Chazelle should have titled the film, after all: A wall of sound did bring down the physical walls of Jericho, and a change came brought about by Joshua and his trumpets.
I’ve heard Babylon referred to as a kind of “death of cinema” movie, an Irish wake thrown by filmmakers who, shaken by the pandemic-era retreat to streaming, decided to make odes to ol’ Hollywood and the art deco theaters or multiplexes they spent their youth in. If any scene in Babylon actually represents the nihilism that underwrites that ethos – a sort of boomer-style “death-of-self-as-end-of-universe” solipsism – it’s in our descent into the “Asshole of Los Angeles” that Tobey Maguire, playing a sunken-eyed and strung-out echo of Alfred Molina in Boogie Nights, takes our lead to. It’s a terrifically frightening scene, in which we descend into a gimp-mask-clad hell of Tod Browning freaks engaged in all sorts of hideous acts with Spider-Man as our Virgil. He’s promising them the future as he leads them deeper and deeper into the dungeon, shouting about how audiences want this sort of shit, as we wander past nude old folks from an Ari Aster picture and leashed crocodiles bathed in red light. But it’s at the end that we get Chazelle’s idea of a “boot on a human face, forever, a herald of things to come performing for a hooting and hollering crowd. Maguire cheers and throws fake hundred-dollar bills at the stage, as our protagonist watches the idol of the future – in reality, a heavily-muscled “ubermensch” clad in a mask – eats rats plucked from a small cage, bones horrifically crunching beneath his molars. Perhaps Chazelle could have made this more obvious if a giant rat was eating small costumed men as if they were edible action figures, but one figures he’s already straining the limits of the audience’s disbelief.
Yet I think the film’s ending offers a comfortable rejoinder to that sense of hopelessness. Despite there being plenty of spoilers already in this article, I’m going to do my best to preserve what’s to come for you in the final twenty minutes or so of the film because I think it has to be experienced, albeit with a bit of context provided beforehand. I fundamentally see Chazelle as the kind of filmmaker who embodies the old Wilde quote from The Ballad of Reading Gaol about how “each man kills the thing he loves/the kindest with a knife.” He, to be very clear, adores movies, and while many would read that in a more literal way – “literally killing cinema heh heh” or whatever – those final minutes come across as him realizing that his own ambition, to be remembered in the annals of cinematic history as something other than the “guy whose movie lost out to Moonlight after an actor forgot their reading glasses” is at odds with that love. Unless you’re fortunate, even if you have all the privilege in the world and are even able to buy yourself an honorary award, your name will wind up like Pia Zadora’s – a factoid remembered exclusively by those in need of a gift card or their bar tab picked up by the emcee at pub trivia.
And what Babylon is ultimately about is acceptance: That irrelevance and finding one’s place within the rich pageant of cinematic history in an ego-free way is the only possible way to participate; you contributed how you could, and the fact that we’re able to go see weekly spectacles every Friday nearly 140 years after the invention of a technology that many wrote off as a soon-to-fade gimmick and also be able to consider it “art” is your reward. It’s put most plainly when Jean Smart, playing a Hedda Hopper type, tells Pitt’s Conrad that his time is up, but that he’s traded fame for a form of immortality in the process. To paraphrase Crowley (whom Anger is so fond of), every man and every woman may be a star, but many of the glimmering bulbs that appear in our skies each night come from long-dead ones. Yet the light still remains, reaching us across the eons to remind us of the paradox of our significance: We mean little to these cosmic bodies, but everything to one another, even to people we’ll never meet and who may never know our names.