"Your time today is through, but you'll spend eternity with angels and ghosts."
Babylon (2022) dir. Damien Chazelle
It’s Sunday morning, which means I’ve just woken up from my weekly scheduled rewatch of Damien Chazelle’s fifth feature as director with one of my best friends, Verona, for what we’ve come to dub ‘Babylon Saturday’. We created ‘Babylon Saturday’ for ourselves so that we could pretend that we possess any shared ounce of self-control when it comes to this movie. We’ve watched it together now eight times, though a few of those were before the weekly tradition, and also the cause of forcing ourselves to put a week-long buffer between revisits. Saturday is the only day we are allowed to watch Babylon, but watching it on Saturday isn’t a requirement. That being said, we haven’t missed one yet.
I’ve run out of unique thoughts that aren’t just building on previous thoughts from previous watchthroughs, but that takes nothing away from the magic of this movie, to me. Over the years, plenty of films have been made about film, about people who love film, by people who love film, and all of those related themes that always draw me in like a moth to a flame. Babylon has its unique pieces, sure, but it did not reinvent the wheel thematically, and I’m very open to admitting that. The obvious tributes to the real stars and big players of the 30s in Hollywood without being explicit portrayals do give Babylon a fun edge up over similar Hollywood ahistorical (or even revisionist) movies — Tarantino’s 2019 ‘Once Upon a Time in Hollywood’ always comes to mind as the most obvious comparison. Something that Once Upon a Time in Hollywood lacks that Babylon clearly sets out to deliver is the pointed, almost obsessive look at the deep, heartache-inducing love for movies that the fans of movies all universally have. I can’t pretend to understand the love and passion that artists and lovers of other mediums have for them, nor can I compare the levels of passion to one another in any kind of ranking system because ‘different’ and ‘more / less’ are totally separate ways to explain them. The transformative and transportative power that film has is so unique to itself, even among other forms of fiction and storytelling, and not only did Babylon understand that, but it made it the main underlying theme of it’s entire runtime (a whopping three hours and ten minutes, for those who hadn’t heard the news / complaints).
I don’t like to make a habit of assuming or accusing that people who don’t like a movie just didn’t ‘get’ it, but when I watch movies like The Devil Wears Prada and learn, even briefly, and even on such a surface level, about how deep and passionate the love of fashion as art is, or when I watch something like Uncut Gems and understand gambling addiction, or The Wolf of Wall Street and experience the raw obsession with the science and theater of modern finance - it almost makes me a little bitter to know that people walk away from pieces of work like Babylon and feel very little. Maybe it’s just because every one of my little niche interests is hit on the head in this movie - it feels so deeply catered to me personally that I struggle to see how anyone wouldn’t enjoy it. That’s my own downfall when it comes to trying to discuss some of my favorite movies, and is also sort of the point of this entire newsletter, really. Babylon had a third act that had serious-minded critics referring to it as the scariest horror of 2022 - which was objectively the best year for horror in recent memory, so that carries some weight - a stacked cast of some of the last remaining movie stars, a larger-than-life backdrop where LA plays itself, focus on filmmaking and the history of film, as well as my favorite easter egg: One of my favorite actors playing one of my favorite historical figures. That was a coincidence that had me go into an almost solipsistic fit, convinced that I had somehow come up with this movie myself and was maybe lying in a coma bed somewhere while all of my synapses fired off this particular movie in my mind.
To say that Babylon was mismarketed would imply that it had any semblance of marketing at all. There was minimal physical advertising done and almost no online presence - a trailer allegedly screened a couple of times only a month before the film’s domestic wide release and the official Twitter account for the movie offered two nearly identical teasers, both of which focused mainly on the iconic first-act party scene which implied that Babylon would be another Luhrmannesque excuse for big band music and sweeping wide shots of fun but wholly unoriginal debauchery. My experience with movie trailers and how they should be designed comes exclusively from my multi-decade long work in staring out of the car window while listening to a song on my headphones and picturing the corresponding movie scenes to go along with the lyrics, so it’s hard for me to actually pinpoint what they should have done better, here, but what they came up with did not do justice to Babylon’s heart wrenching back and forth between quiet intimacy and chaos.
That very juxtaposition is what's so perfectly brand-consistent to this story, thematically and emotionally transitioning between the eras of silent film and sound pictures. The actual use of silence throughout the movie makes me stop and hold my breath every time - from the first time that I sat almost entirely alone in a movie theater to watch it until even last night, watching it on my tiny phone screen through picture-in-picture with my text messages open in another tab. Margot Robbie’s Nellie LaRoy (theorized to be inspired by a mix of Mabel Normand and Clara Bow) sits in a dead silent theater while watching the first screening of her first role, only relaxing at the first sign of life from the audience - a single laugh that erupts across the room - and when you see the scene for the first time, so do you. I’m always appreciative of any movie that can not only make you empathize with what you’re watching but truly place you there, and torture you the same way they’re torturing the characters. In the beginning of act three, Diego Calva’s Manny stands in exhausted, shocked silence while Nellie sobs to him in the foyer of his house for help, and in a brief moment of silence he pictures how happy and alive she was on the first night that they met, before the silence is broken when she catches her breath to continue crying. Silence is its own character in this film, and it represents the way things used to be as well as the calm before the storm of change itself. After his sound picture debut, Brad Pitt’s Jack Conrad (so very obviously John Gilbert) sits in an interview with Jean Smart’s Elinor St. John (a very obvious Louella Parsons) and seems to be in good spirits despite the poor reception of his newest film. While asking him if he preferred the old way the industry worked - the industry he was the king of - St. John asks specifically, “Do you miss the silence?”
To circle back on what I said early on about how this movie fits in to the category of ‘by movies lovers for movie lovers, about movie lovers’, there’s not a moment wasted over the course of Babylon’s runtime that isn’t used to showcase just how clearly Chazelle obsesses over them. An early Letterboxd review that has long vanished once said that his previous film, La La Land was a love letter to Hollywood and Babylon was a suicide note, but despite how dark Babylon becomes, I find myself disagreeing. We’re shown over and over again how the film industry will chew people up and spit them back out but this movie isn’t about that, it’s about a group of people who will continually pick themselves back up and go running headfirst back into those same jaws for another shot because nothing is more important than the movies, if you ask the people who love them. In fact, each character seems to have a specific uncrossable line that will be the only thing that will stop them from trying again, and in more than one case, that line has to be death itself. After Manny and Nellie first meet and realize their shared love of movies, he excitedly (and manically - they are doing a mountain of coke in this scene) proclaims “It’s something more important than life.” Nellie agrees, having referred to them as an escape from reality. Something that all three of the main leads (Jack, Manny, and Nellie) all have in common is that not only do they want to be a part of the making of movies for their own enjoyment, but because they genuinely believe that what they’re doing is going to improve the lives of others. Later in the movie, Jack is actually able to back this feeling up with material evidence during a fight with his wife, recalling his own childhood and the importance of being able to go to the movies. This concept is one of the reasons I always felt that I had to grit my teeth through the accusations of Babylon being a revisionist take on early Hollywood. It is historical dramatic fiction, sort of, the characters are legal loophole combinations of real people and their real stories, but when you watch the movie for yourself, it becomes difficult not to see it instead as a good-faith amalgamation of the history designed to apply philosophical meaning where they may really have been none at the time.
It’s impossible to tell any story about any kind of artists and their obsession with and love for their work without touching on the idea of legacy and immortality. As Jack Conrad sits down a second time with Elinor St. John and berates her for being a critic who never creates, she compares Hollywood to a house fire and points out that she’ll outlive him - sort of mentally, emotionally - because she knows she isn’t needed and is at peace with it, and his own mistake in thinking he was needed would ruin him. She does, kindly and hauntingly, soften the blow by telling him that because of his work, he would never really be gone, and that someone born in eras long after his death would be able “to know [him], like a friend”. It felt like the perfect concluding note about Babylon as a whole - and it was true. I was sitting in a theater staring up at a screen with tears in my eyes thinking that I knew these characters personally and was getting to actually experience one of my own personal favorite eras of Hollywood that we are irreversibly removed from in 2023. The movie doesn’t conclude there, though. It goes on for a final act to phase these characters out in one way or another, whether from life, Hollywood as a location, or Hollywood as a concept. That is a considerably more harrowing and effective end to the story. The cycle continues. There have been a hundred Jack Conrads, there will be a hundred more. Hollywood still hasn’t sunk into the Pacific Ocean, yet.
I get why people didn’t like this movie. While the #BABYLONHIVE aren’t a large enough group to have saved this movie from box office death, the people who love this movie do love it with a severity that leaves little room for anyone to feel comfortable expressing that they don’t feel too strongly about it one way or another. From experience I can say that just that energy alone from audiences can be enough to turn me off of giving something a fair chance once in a while. I wouldn’t go as far as some edgier critics would and claim that there was some kind of conspiracy surrounding this movie being ‘too real’ for Hollywood execs and being the sort of art to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable or whatever - but I will say its a little dirtier than what can usually pass for Oscar-fodder. It’s rough around the edges in a way that was clearly intentional but maybe didn’t quite stick the authentic landing it was going for. The miniature horror movie of a third act did this movie no favors in terms of being digestible for casual viewers and undoubtedly irritated and confused more refined audiences. The previously aforementioned first act party scene opens with Jane Thornton (played by Phoebe Tonkin), an underaged actress slash femdom, apparently, ‘celebrating’ her first movie role with an older man by snorting cocaine and giving him a golden shower and calling him her piggy. This follows a scene only a few minutes earlier in which two men are defecated on by an elephant, complete with a clear shot of said elephant’s asshole. Would you believe it? That’s not the only diarrhea joke in the movie. There’s bodily fluids. There’s outright gore. There’s lesbians! Truly, something to upset every crowd will pop up at least once during this movie. If this movie had done better, I probably wouldn’t get to be the person to show it to most of my friends for the first time. I wouldn’t have had multiple theater experiences where I was one of ten maximum people at the screening. I’d probably have to read way more nauseatingly surface-level takes about how ‘this is the side of Hollywood that the corporate studio execs don’t want you to see’. Instead, I got to have my mind completely blown and felt so intimately seen and then enjoy sitting and contemplating in significant silence.
If you’re one of the people who enjoyed Babylon, I suggest Martin Turnbull’s written works - The Heart of The Lion is my favorite, a historical fiction novel about Irving Thalberg’s life. I’m also reading his Garden of Allah series about a trio of original characters living in the famous hotel during the golden era of Hollywood.