Babylon (2023)

Directed by Damien Chazelle

“That’s LA. They worship everything and they value nothing.” (La La Land, Damien Chazelle)

Babylon is a spiritual continuation of Damien Chazelle’s fascination with Hollywood, after his 2016 hit musical La La Land. The movie transports us into the 1920-s and explores the murky frenzied time of silent film Hollywood, its shift to the talkies, and the joys, excesses and pain of wannabe starlets, established stars and everyone in-between.

Like in La La Land, the score by Justin Hurwitz is a major part of Babylon. Raw jazz, bold brass, tinny percussion and tribal drums and choruses dominate Hurwitz’s version of 1920-s Hollywood to an exhilarating and sometimes terrifying effect. I fully recommend just listening to the soundtrack alone. It will give you a kick of old Hollywood glamour laced with cocaine and various bodily fluids – what a mood to start the day in! DP Linus Sandgren, also one of Chazelle’s a long-time collaborators, created a lush world with blooming flares and searing highlights, capturing every body and landscape in motion. That resulted in an impressionistic image of a world in flux – be it a wild party, a burning desert or a badly-lit deprived underground sex den.

The three main stories that encapsulate the rise and fall of the silent movie era and its stars, as Hollywood painfully transitions into the talkies, begin at a lavish party in a desert mansion owned by studio exec Bob Levine (Flea) of the fictional Kinescope Pictures. (As an aside: casting Flea, of Red Hot Chili Peppers fame, as the proprietor of a party full of literal fornication in Cali, was a genius move!) We’re first introduced to Manny Torres (Diego Calva), a sly assistant with a penchant for problem solving, as he is given the task of transporting an elephant up the hill to the party in a wagon meant for horses. After some auto- and elephant wrangling, he finally arrives and is immediately given shit for being late. As the party gets more and more wild, with the guests getting up to more and more deprived activities, we see Manny managing the guests, stopping overly nosy gossip reporter Elinor St. John from discovering the “powder room”, which is a room filled with mountains of cocaine, as well as getting rid of the body of a young actress who overdosed during a urolagniac act with another actor.

Meanwhile Nellie LaRoy (Margot Robbie), a bold as brass ambitious born-to-be-a-star, tries to crash the party, after literally crashing a stolen car into a statue. Manny eventually helps her get in and, at her request, leads her to the “powder room”, where he inadvertently and forever falls in love with her. In their brief, cocaine-fueled encounter they confide in each other that they both want to be part of something greater – and that something happens to be Hollywood. Where nothing happens for real and you can be anyone you want, reinventing and recreating yourself every single day. After they move into the main house, Manny watches as Nellie dances to the blaring primal sounds of Justin Hurwitz’ soundtrack, weaving in and out of the crowd – feeling at home as the frenzied bacchanal clashes around her.

During Mannie’s and Nellie’s bonding pact, Jack Conrad, the biggest star in the world, arrives at the scene with his wife (Olivia Wilde), who leaves, demanding a divorce, without ever entering the party. Charismatic, suave, at the top of his game, Jack owns the party as soon as he enters, seducing a waitress just by way of existing. As the evening continues, he mostly sits at his table, reveling in the debauchery around him and drinks an ungodly amount of alcohol, hinting at the alcoholism that will plague him until the end of his days. The music swells to a crescendo of brass, drums and tribal vocalizations; the elephant is let out to a chorus of terrified and exciting screams and the entertainment, represented by unappreciated trombonist Sidney Palmer (Jovan Adepo) and exotified Chinese-American cabaret singer Lady Fey Zhou (Li Jun Li), wind down the party at dawn to enjoy themselves just a little at the end of the insanity, before starting all over again next evening.

At dawn, Nellie gets her break as Bob Levine casts her on the spot to replace the actress that overdosed earlier in the evening, and Manny gets his chance as he drives blacked-out Jack Conrad home and earns his respect and a spot on set as his assistant by virtue of being there when Jack wakes up. It’s morning. The sun is shining. Hollywood is waking up. It’s time to go to work.

Title card: Babylon.

This exquisite twenty-minute-long prologue sums up what Babylon is about. A roaring party that always has to end at some point, the cynical nature of execs accepting any depravity, as long as the stars show up on set next morning, the interchangeability of working actresses and their diminished value as either sex-objects or eye candy, the rise and fall of big stars and the upstarts that are trained to take their place. At face value, this should be a straight-up long-winded teary-eyed drama, but Damian Chazelle loves Hollywood and everything it has to offer – the good and the bad. In fact, he loves it so much that he wants to set the record straight – show an unsanitized version of the industry. A picture that includes women behind the camera and black people on set. Chazelle challenges the white-washed notion of Hollywood by contrasting Babylon with Singin’ in the Rain (1952), a wildly successful movie about the transition from silent film to talkies. For him Hollywood is, and always has been, the most magical place on earth; and it is this sincere love that, at first, draws one into the world of the movie.

Only after the 3-hour-epic has ended, did I understand the intention behind this entire movie – it’s a huge “Uhm, well actually…”, treating the audience as dunces to be educated and the characters as lifeless props.

Chazelle explores Hollywood both at the cusp of the most pivotal change in its existence and at the height of the last hurrah of the era that started it all. In the silent era, there were no rules, no previous role models to adhere to. Super-stardom was new and exhilarating, as the world gave the stars everything it had to offer, and having made it to Hollywood must’ve felt like the other side of the rainbow – real and magical at the same time. The irreverence for bodily integrity is beautifully shown, in Jack’s epic shoot with a German director (Spike Jonze). In the Ben Hur-esque epic, we first see the director in a frenzy, because the extras are striking due to the poor working conditions (serious injuries, being fed slop), and because of all of the cameras being broken due to the uncontrolled nature of the fighting scenes. At this point you have to remember (yes, there will be a test) that modern Hollywood is highly unionized because of these bad practices. Despite these horrific conditions, however, Chazelle quickly focuses on the magic of a perfectly wrapped up scene and somehow praises the ludicrous risk-taking involved in the making of silent era movies.

As love makes blind and, in his fervor to educate us, he chooses to approach every aspect of the movie like the aforementioned human rights violations.

Every character is modeled on the stars of that era, their characteristics, obsessions and downfalls. Nellie is inspired by it-girls Clara Bow and Jean Crawford, who both died young and had a tumultuous life in front and behind the camera. Jack is suave matinee silent star John Gilbert incarnate, who lost his career and status as the best paid actor in Hollywood when the talkies came around. Manny is modeled after Rene Cardona, a Cuban immigrant, who made it through the ranks of MGM execs and was heavily involved in the Golden Age of Mexican Cinema. And so, not just the main characters, but every character ends up being an amalgam of real-life persons who contributed to this era of Hollywood - actual stories that were thought forgotten or unimportant before being resurrected in these characters.

But herein lies the crux of the matter. Chazelle lovingly recreates a past era with his characters, and although they feel deeply human, they also uncannily resemble deep fakes - simulacra of actual people. Their stories belong to the countless people referenced for their creation, their motives cobbled together from dead desires and dreams. Instead of using actual people as mere inspirations and imbuing the characters with a rich life of their own, they all feel like puppets being steered down a trodden path; mere vessels for long-forgotten memories. They don’t have any control over their lives, and subsequently there is no meaningful character development to be had.

So, we look on as the times and values change and a Hollywood that was open for upstarts of any upbringing becomes enamored with compelling origin stories and types; “you get a new name that sounds better that your real name, they change your appearance to make you “prettier” and then they give you an origin story to make you interesting and brand you as a type”. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=akaPSGMi03k Be Kind Rewind, 3:00 – 3:18) The parties become “classier”, with predominantly white upper-class tycoons like Willian Hearst controlling what movies get made and the freedom afforded to those who’re different wanes, with morality clauses on the horizon. The Hollywood ecosystem – the musicians, the gossip reporters, the actors – all have to change accordingly, but not everyone survives the change.

Like her real-life counterparts, after failing at making the jump to the talkies, Nellie is forgotten and walks into the night, after racking up a mountain of gambling debt, only getting a tiny epitaph for dying of a drug overdose in the press that used to adore her at the height of her career. Jack, just like John Gilbert, doesn’t make it in the talkies either and dies a violent death, after he feels his star waning and being eviscerated by the press for underperforming. Manny flees Hollywood abandoning his career, after failing to wrangle Nellie into something the shifting values of 1930-s Hollywood demanded. Lady Fey departs for Europe, after being fired by Kinescope for having an inappropriate relationship with Nellie, ringing in a new era for openly LGTBTQ+ industry professionals. The list goes on and on, the movie mourning every loss of talent, every loss of freedom – every loss of life – in the name of progress and unsubtly invites us to mourn with it

Ostensibly Babylon is about the cyclicality of Hollywood and how with every fulfilled dream, there will be a fall and after every high there must be a low. And so, in the epilogue, Manny visits LA once more and goes to the movies, where he sees Singin’ in the Rain (1952), which is considered one of the best musical films ever made. We come full-circle, as we see one-to-one scenes of the characters we just saw suffer, comedically adjusting to the new era and failing. Their humiliation is turned to comedy, their pain into music, their likenesses used and reused in the fabric of Hollywood cinema in a self-aggrandizing spiral of progress, loss, dreams and death. The movie wants us to cry at that moment – I don’t.