Hollywood ending
The twin theses of Damien Chazelle's Babylon are that A) something indescribable and precious was lost when filmmaking transitioned to sound in the late 1920s, and the art form is worse off for it; and B) the Hollywood film industry is a brutally exploitative place that gathers emotionally broken people all together so they can do the most possible damage to each other, and as moral humans we should be disgusted by the whole thing, but on the other hand, the end result of this exploitation is The Movies, which maybe doesn't "justify" it, but at least there's something to show for it all. As somebody incredibly sympathetic to both of these claims, who also prefers big out-of-control messes to carefully planned filmmaking-by-committee (and at a wholly indefensible 189 minutes, Babylon is certainly messy, though not actually out-of-control), I'm very close to the ideal theoretical viewer of the film, and so you should probably take most of what I have to say with a grain of salt. For Babylon turned out to be one of the most divisive films of 2022, so my response of "this is so great! How could anybody possibly not love this?" should be taken as an outlier, and my reaction untrustworthy.
But anyway, Babylon is so great. The film adopts a loose narrative structure that consists of two halves and a coda, with very little "story" coursing through any of it, but a great heaving shitload of "plot". The first half in particular is built around a handful of large-scale cross-cutting sequences, which compare the experiences of three very different people all connected by the film industry: the main one of these Manuel Torres (Diego Calva), a Mexican immigrant who starts the film as a procurer for the massive drug-fueled parties held every night somewhere on the sleepy outskirts of Los Angeles, a small city in southern California, and almost by accident stumbles his way up the executive ladder after lucky encounters with the other two. These are both actors: Jack Conrad (Brad Pitt) is one of the young industry's biggest figures, having arrived in L.A. right in time for the birth of Hollywood; and Nellie LeRoy (Margot Robbie), a crude New Jersey transplant with poor control of her appetites and no social graces, and an apparently sociopathic ability to feign every possible emotion on cue, but when she steps in front of a movie camera - something that first happens because she was randomly standing in the line of sight of an executive who needed to find a replacement right now - it falls desperately in love with her and her expressive face. She has it, which makes sense given that she's loosely based on Clara Bow, who had it so much that she was the star of a movie called It in 1927.
That makes her one of several elements in the film based loosely, or directly, on some figure or event from Hollywood in the '20s and '30s - Pitt, for example, is playing a variation on John Gilbert, perhaps the most famous "he couldn't survive the transition to sound" story in the medium's history - and a substantial amount of what Babylon is up to is proving that Chazelle is a big ol' fanboy of classic American cinema, something we already knew from La La Land, but that film has nothing on the sheer quantity of name-dropping, "here's a fun story..." references, and gawking at old-fashioned production practices on display here. This isn't to say that Babylon is a well-researched history lesson: in fact, probably the most "classical Hollywood" thing about it is that Chazelle has discarded truth as needed to get the story where he wanted it to be, outright lied when he felt like, and and otherwise allowed the historical record to serve more as inspiration than a foundation. To take the most innocuous example: there is a sequence of events that happens to Jack Conrad fairly late in the film, in what onscreen text has identified as 1932, and given the evolution of early sound cinema and the industry in those days, I can think of no possible way for it to have actually happened later than 1930 - not much of a difference, but history passed much faster in those days. So why 1932? I think for absolutely no reason other than because Singin' in the Rain premiered in 1952, and Chazelle liked the cleanliness of having that be a gap of precisely 20 years.
That's another one of the things that a substantial amount of Babylon is devoted to (at 189 minutes, it can and does have a substantial amount of a lot of things): it's Chazelle's remake of, homage to, and deconstruction of Singin' in the Rain. With a few other things mixed in: basically, it's like if Singin' in the Rain, Boogie Nights, and Eyes Wide Shut were all the same movie. But Singin' in the Rain gets a lot of references, some of them extremely specific (Robbie wears a costume identical to one Jean Hagen wore in that film), and Babylon's emotional and philosophical climax is set at a screening of the 1952 film, where Chazelle builds a montage summarising the entire history of American motion pictures that turns into a miasma of pure shapeless colors set to "All I Do Is Dream of You", ending his entire massive beast of a film on the sentiment, "yes, movies are the work of awful people telling terrible lies, and Singin' in the Rain tells terrible lies about the exact events you've just spent 189 minutes watching. But also, it's Singin' in the Rain , and thus pure bliss in Technicolor form". And look, if you decide to make a montage summarising all of Hollywood cinema, there is probably no better film to build it around than the single best example of Hollywood filmmaking in existence.
What Babylon is, mostly, is a prurient, celebratory, confused, scandalized, and sad celebration of the notion of Old Hollywood as a place of incomparable possibility and freedom, including the sorts of freedom that end with people dying young of drug overdoses and other horrific things. There's an intriguing thing built into the structure of the film, particularly Tom Cross's fascinatingly choppy editing, where the "Silent" half is full of feverishly busy filmmaking techniques - spinning camera movement, fast cutting, highly mannered and erratic acting, inexplicable tonal changes - that all feel sloppy and chaotic but have also been clearly worked out and executed well, while the "Talkies" half has several baggy scenes that don't go anyplace in particular, generally feels more uncertain where it's going, full of weird dead-ends (including a simply endless sequence with Tobey Maguire as a deranged opium fiend that I think doesn't work at all, though Maguire is kind of electrifying as an anti-charismatic screen presence). I don't think Chazelle is the kind of filmmaker to deliberately wreck half of his movie to make a point, and I also wouldn't cut any of this down, even though I know what I'd cut: Babylon is the kind of movie that requires lots of doodling if it's going to get around to its points, and the weird bagginess is clearly important to the writer-director, and I don't know what the film would be without it. At any rate, there's a precision to the way first half has been assembled that feels celebratory and exciting and kinetic: the big cross-cutting sequence that compares Nellie's undeniable scene-stealing presence on her first movie set, which redefines the film she's making right there in the middle of a shooting day, and the uncontrolled, violent chaos of staging an actual battle if you need to film a battle scene, are the most that the film ever gets drunk on "these are movies!" sentiments, failing even to pretend to be horrified at the brutality befalling the extras in the battle scene. The second half never feels nearly as alive; it is, to use the obvious metaphor, the hangover after the party, the check coming due for all the licentious, libidinous energy of the first part, and it means that the movies, and this movie in particular, can't be as fun because it can be as irresponsible and reckless. And it is irresponsible and reckless, dangerous and demhumanising - the film hides nothing, it practically opens with characters being covered in elephant shit* - but I think it would be misreading the film to claim, as I've seen it done in some defenses of the movie, that Chazelle is making a blanket condemnation of the industry and the time period. This is simply not a film that dislikes silent movies, or regrets that they were made. But it is a film that imagines the fever dream of Los Angeles in the '20s was an unsustainable high, bad people in a bad place at a bad time doing bad things and somehow the result of this was medium-defining artistry. It is primordial anarchy from which the modern medium emerged: more evil and more exciting in equal measure.
The film's best scene neatly embodies this: it's the Babylon version of the "first day of shooting a sound picture" anecdote, in which Nellie has to learn that, with microphones, she has to hit her mark, rather than just feel her way through a scene. As things progress, she gets angry at having to take direction from the sound guy, while the cutting coils up tighter and gets more stressful, especially a motif of shots of Robbie's ankles, increasingly caked in sweat. It's a succinct demonstration of the dehumanising quality of a professional film set, as opposed to the joyful fleshiness of the decidedly unprofessional film sets from the first part, the way that actors are reduced to cattle and art is sacrificed to technology and whatnot, and it's the perfect embodiment of Babylon's whole thing: the longer it goes, the more one feels disgusted and turned off by the whole affair, the more stressed out, the more like this is a lot of bullshit that can't possibly be worth what seems to be such a trivial college comedy. And that's true of so much of the second half of the film, focusing on how what started out as a fun, dangerously unstable place to be turned into a miserable, dehumanising industry. That the movie loses its energy and its drive and its sense of focus is perhaps inevitable - it kind of hates itself, and it hates Los Angeles, where this was all shot, and it hates the way that movies are backbreaking work that exploits human beings with almost indescribable contempt for their humanity. And yet: Singin' in the Rain exists, and it would be worse to be alive if it didn't. Babylon isn't trying to resolve that tension, so much as standing back in awe at that contrast. And it is, indeed, something to be awestruck about.
Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.
If you enjoyed this article, why not support Alternate Ending as a recurring donor through Patreon, or with a one-time donation via Paypal? For just a dollar a month you can contribute to the ongoing health of the site, while also enjoying several fun perks!
*There's an old joke, the gist of which is that a man has to clean up elephant shit at the circus. When asked why he doesn't quit and find a less miserable job that pays better, he replies "what, and leave show business?" I am 100% confident that Chazelle had to be thinking about this when he wrote this opening.
But anyway, Babylon is so great. The film adopts a loose narrative structure that consists of two halves and a coda, with very little "story" coursing through any of it, but a great heaving shitload of "plot". The first half in particular is built around a handful of large-scale cross-cutting sequences, which compare the experiences of three very different people all connected by the film industry: the main one of these Manuel Torres (Diego Calva), a Mexican immigrant who starts the film as a procurer for the massive drug-fueled parties held every night somewhere on the sleepy outskirts of Los Angeles, a small city in southern California, and almost by accident stumbles his way up the executive ladder after lucky encounters with the other two. These are both actors: Jack Conrad (Brad Pitt) is one of the young industry's biggest figures, having arrived in L.A. right in time for the birth of Hollywood; and Nellie LeRoy (Margot Robbie), a crude New Jersey transplant with poor control of her appetites and no social graces, and an apparently sociopathic ability to feign every possible emotion on cue, but when she steps in front of a movie camera - something that first happens because she was randomly standing in the line of sight of an executive who needed to find a replacement right now - it falls desperately in love with her and her expressive face. She has it, which makes sense given that she's loosely based on Clara Bow, who had it so much that she was the star of a movie called It in 1927.
That makes her one of several elements in the film based loosely, or directly, on some figure or event from Hollywood in the '20s and '30s - Pitt, for example, is playing a variation on John Gilbert, perhaps the most famous "he couldn't survive the transition to sound" story in the medium's history - and a substantial amount of what Babylon is up to is proving that Chazelle is a big ol' fanboy of classic American cinema, something we already knew from La La Land, but that film has nothing on the sheer quantity of name-dropping, "here's a fun story..." references, and gawking at old-fashioned production practices on display here. This isn't to say that Babylon is a well-researched history lesson: in fact, probably the most "classical Hollywood" thing about it is that Chazelle has discarded truth as needed to get the story where he wanted it to be, outright lied when he felt like, and and otherwise allowed the historical record to serve more as inspiration than a foundation. To take the most innocuous example: there is a sequence of events that happens to Jack Conrad fairly late in the film, in what onscreen text has identified as 1932, and given the evolution of early sound cinema and the industry in those days, I can think of no possible way for it to have actually happened later than 1930 - not much of a difference, but history passed much faster in those days. So why 1932? I think for absolutely no reason other than because Singin' in the Rain premiered in 1952, and Chazelle liked the cleanliness of having that be a gap of precisely 20 years.
That's another one of the things that a substantial amount of Babylon is devoted to (at 189 minutes, it can and does have a substantial amount of a lot of things): it's Chazelle's remake of, homage to, and deconstruction of Singin' in the Rain. With a few other things mixed in: basically, it's like if Singin' in the Rain, Boogie Nights, and Eyes Wide Shut were all the same movie. But Singin' in the Rain gets a lot of references, some of them extremely specific (Robbie wears a costume identical to one Jean Hagen wore in that film), and Babylon's emotional and philosophical climax is set at a screening of the 1952 film, where Chazelle builds a montage summarising the entire history of American motion pictures that turns into a miasma of pure shapeless colors set to "All I Do Is Dream of You", ending his entire massive beast of a film on the sentiment, "yes, movies are the work of awful people telling terrible lies, and Singin' in the Rain tells terrible lies about the exact events you've just spent 189 minutes watching. But also, it's Singin' in the Rain , and thus pure bliss in Technicolor form". And look, if you decide to make a montage summarising all of Hollywood cinema, there is probably no better film to build it around than the single best example of Hollywood filmmaking in existence.
What Babylon is, mostly, is a prurient, celebratory, confused, scandalized, and sad celebration of the notion of Old Hollywood as a place of incomparable possibility and freedom, including the sorts of freedom that end with people dying young of drug overdoses and other horrific things. There's an intriguing thing built into the structure of the film, particularly Tom Cross's fascinatingly choppy editing, where the "Silent" half is full of feverishly busy filmmaking techniques - spinning camera movement, fast cutting, highly mannered and erratic acting, inexplicable tonal changes - that all feel sloppy and chaotic but have also been clearly worked out and executed well, while the "Talkies" half has several baggy scenes that don't go anyplace in particular, generally feels more uncertain where it's going, full of weird dead-ends (including a simply endless sequence with Tobey Maguire as a deranged opium fiend that I think doesn't work at all, though Maguire is kind of electrifying as an anti-charismatic screen presence). I don't think Chazelle is the kind of filmmaker to deliberately wreck half of his movie to make a point, and I also wouldn't cut any of this down, even though I know what I'd cut: Babylon is the kind of movie that requires lots of doodling if it's going to get around to its points, and the weird bagginess is clearly important to the writer-director, and I don't know what the film would be without it. At any rate, there's a precision to the way first half has been assembled that feels celebratory and exciting and kinetic: the big cross-cutting sequence that compares Nellie's undeniable scene-stealing presence on her first movie set, which redefines the film she's making right there in the middle of a shooting day, and the uncontrolled, violent chaos of staging an actual battle if you need to film a battle scene, are the most that the film ever gets drunk on "these are movies!" sentiments, failing even to pretend to be horrified at the brutality befalling the extras in the battle scene. The second half never feels nearly as alive; it is, to use the obvious metaphor, the hangover after the party, the check coming due for all the licentious, libidinous energy of the first part, and it means that the movies, and this movie in particular, can't be as fun because it can be as irresponsible and reckless. And it is irresponsible and reckless, dangerous and demhumanising - the film hides nothing, it practically opens with characters being covered in elephant shit* - but I think it would be misreading the film to claim, as I've seen it done in some defenses of the movie, that Chazelle is making a blanket condemnation of the industry and the time period. This is simply not a film that dislikes silent movies, or regrets that they were made. But it is a film that imagines the fever dream of Los Angeles in the '20s was an unsustainable high, bad people in a bad place at a bad time doing bad things and somehow the result of this was medium-defining artistry. It is primordial anarchy from which the modern medium emerged: more evil and more exciting in equal measure.
The film's best scene neatly embodies this: it's the Babylon version of the "first day of shooting a sound picture" anecdote, in which Nellie has to learn that, with microphones, she has to hit her mark, rather than just feel her way through a scene. As things progress, she gets angry at having to take direction from the sound guy, while the cutting coils up tighter and gets more stressful, especially a motif of shots of Robbie's ankles, increasingly caked in sweat. It's a succinct demonstration of the dehumanising quality of a professional film set, as opposed to the joyful fleshiness of the decidedly unprofessional film sets from the first part, the way that actors are reduced to cattle and art is sacrificed to technology and whatnot, and it's the perfect embodiment of Babylon's whole thing: the longer it goes, the more one feels disgusted and turned off by the whole affair, the more stressed out, the more like this is a lot of bullshit that can't possibly be worth what seems to be such a trivial college comedy. And that's true of so much of the second half of the film, focusing on how what started out as a fun, dangerously unstable place to be turned into a miserable, dehumanising industry. That the movie loses its energy and its drive and its sense of focus is perhaps inevitable - it kind of hates itself, and it hates Los Angeles, where this was all shot, and it hates the way that movies are backbreaking work that exploits human beings with almost indescribable contempt for their humanity. And yet: Singin' in the Rain exists, and it would be worse to be alive if it didn't. Babylon isn't trying to resolve that tension, so much as standing back in awe at that contrast. And it is, indeed, something to be awestruck about.
Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.
If you enjoyed this article, why not support Alternate Ending as a recurring donor through Patreon, or with a one-time donation via Paypal? For just a dollar a month you can contribute to the ongoing health of the site, while also enjoying several fun perks!
*There's an old joke, the gist of which is that a man has to clean up elephant shit at the circus. When asked why he doesn't quit and find a less miserable job that pays better, he replies "what, and leave show business?" I am 100% confident that Chazelle had to be thinking about this when he wrote this opening.
