Damien Chazelle’s Hollywood ‘Babylon’

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Old Hollywood painted a golden picture of the transition from silent to talking films with Singing in the Rain (1952). It’s a wonderful movie, one of the best musicals ever, but it’s a poor history lesson for glossing over the morbid side of the setting’s time and place.

Damien Chazelle’s Babylon takes place during that same turning point in cinema history while also drawing from the spirit of Kenneth Anger’s scurrilous 1959 expose, Hollywood Babylon. Anger was determined to strip away the glitter to reveal the rot, the saturnalia suspected by American moralizers in the 1920 and ‘30s but fastidiously covered up by Hollywood’s public relations machine.

Chazelle’s Babylon has it both ways, presenting the alluring dream world as well as the dark underside. His theme of artistic aspirations and stone-walled obstacles echoes his earlier films such as Whiplash (2014) and La La Land (2016).

To enjoy Babylon, one must look past a few things. Put the popcorn aside for that Colorado River of excrement shooting from an elephant’s anus, that golden shower in the backroom of a Hollywood party and an impossible stream of human vomit (along with the stream of profanities that would sound excessive in 2022, much less 1927). And while often historically grounded, Babylon flirts with anachronism. Among other things, the talented Black jazz band entertaining the largely white Hollywood crowd sometimes sounds closer to Morphine than Louis Armstrong.

Had someone told Chazelle to cut Babylon’s most unnecessarily explicit moments, five minutes might have been shaved from the film’s Erich von Stroheim-esque three-hour-plus running time. But bear with: there is much to admire here, especially if you are a cineaste or fan of early Hollywood. Who but a film buff would understand the dangerous scene when a sadistic criminal is paid off with prop money?

Star-crossed Couple

Babylon’s protagonists are a star-crossed couple: hardworking Mexican American Manny Torres (Diego Calva), looking for a break in Hollywood; and the flighty Nellie LaRoy (Margot Robbie), looking for stardom. Brad Pitt plays Jack Conrad, a leading man in silent movies whose career fades in the early ‘30s, with ironic self-assurance. Conrad embodies the antinomies within many Hollywood figures then and now, praising movies for their ability to touch the hearts of everyday people while dreaming of turning the medium into art. A movie set, he tells Manny, is “is the most magical place in the world.”

Babylon is a film made for theaters. The party inside a Hollywood producer’s cavernous castle, a farrago of dark-hued decadence, will look cramped on small screens. And what a party! Not only do the champagne and gin rickeys flow (during Prohibition), but heroin is also on hand and the cocaine is piled into snowy white mountains, high enough to lift the entire population of LA into the air. When a starlet overdoses, Manny’s cleverness enables the producer to smuggle the unconscious actress through the crowd unobserved. It’s his first break in the industry.

The scene at the studio’s backlot spoofs the carnival atmosphere of silent film productions; its exaggerations make an impression. Manny discovers that a dozen different movies are being filmed simultaneously on a field bleached by desert dust, each one oblivious to the racket going on next door because background noise is inaudible in a silent picture. There are careless injuries among the hordes of extras charging with medieval weapons as a mad, Germanic director shouts into a megaphone. “We roll! We roll! We’re losing the light!” he insists as the sun begins to sink. A prominent gossip columnist looks on at the bedlam from a hillside, sipping from a wine glass and dictating florid prose to her typist.

The advent of talkies presents Chazelle with the opportunity for another unforgettable scene. The sound stage is intolerably hot. The ticking of a watch, much less the spinning blades of a fan, could obliterate the dialogue. Nellie must memorize her lines and speak only in places where microphones are concealed. Her squeaky Jersey accent jars. Because the cumbersome sound camera makes a whirring noise when operating, the cinematographer sits with the camera inside a stifling hot enclosure—and dies of heart failure as a result.

The screenplay’s many sidelights partially excuse the film’s length. Among them is the dilemma Manny presents to the Black trumpet player, Sidney Palmer (Jovan Adepo). Because his complexion is lighter than his bandmates, Manny tells him to apply the burnt cork of blackface to make him darker—otherwise, the band might be mistaken for “mixed race” and the film will be banned in many Southern states.

In the enigmatic closing sequence, a flurry of impressions that bring Stanley Kubrick to mind, Fin de Cinema flashes across the screen before succumbing to a barrage of digital images. Is Chazelle delivering a subliminal warning about the medium he so obviously loves?