BABYLON

A love letter to MOVIES, but also a Suicide Note to Hollywood.

The worst thing I can say about this movie it feels more like an essay than a narrative with forward momentum. The best thing I can say is that there’s a lot in it .

Here’s a draft of the script if you have an hour to spare https://gofile.io/d/48Ft4c.

BABYLON is a lot of things

BABYLON is an ensemble film about Hollywoods transition from Silent movies to ‘Talkies’ , almost like if you asked the crew of Jackass to recreate SINGING IN THE RAIN.

BABYLON is about how a group of people at the top of their industry lost it all when a technological shift destroyed their medium, like BOOGIE NIGHTS.

SINGING IN THE RAIN is an optimistic movie about how the Talkies ejected bad mean actors like the Lina Lamont played by Jena Hagman(with a voice that is only better than her stinky attitude!) out of Hollywood and brought about the good fun movies (in this case Musicals) ,something that only technological advancements could bring to the masses.

The Biblical city of Babylon was struck down for its debauchary towards the Abrahamic God, but maybe those struck down here aren’t quite as guilty , more victim of circumstance? Maybe God doesn't’ strike people down because they sin, maybe he strikes them down because he needs to put on a DAMN GOOD SHOW.

( Of course you don’t want to fail to mention the surface level connection D.W. Griffith’s INTOLERANCE, which one of the four sections of the film is ‘The Fall of Babylon’. I also assume the names comes from the infamous Hollywood Babylon. )

EXT Hollywood 1926

The movies are more JACKASS than High Class. Really fucking weirdos , druggies, and outcasts roam the streets in search of the next buck. Little do they know in their yearning for the Seventh Art to one day be taken seriously , will rein a hell of which not even the most coked out screenwriter could imagine.

Within the first twenty or so minutes of BABYLON you have

1. a POV shot of an elephant popping on somebody trying to stop it from falling down a hill.
2. A Little Person swirls around a giant fake body sized penis and ejects foam like semen into an entire crowd. This soon becomes a pogo-stick .
3. A woman (actress/prostitute/escort ?) gives a golden shower to an obese man.
4. Flea from the Red Hot Chili Peppers , beating the shit out of a person he calls Dough Boy.
5. Paraphilic infantilism by dudes with like 36 abs.
6. An entertainment journalists tries to find the underage women upstairs at the party, and asks if anybody wants to come.
7. Nellie LaRoy ( Margot Robbie),new to Hollywood, the cocaine and heroin room, and vibes with Manny Torres (Diego Calva), a big dreamer staff aide.
8. A Lesbian Cabaret Chinese performer sings ‘My Girl’s Pussy’, with excellent girl on girl action to match it.
9. Jack Conrad (Brad Pitt), famous actor, pays the Caberat to stop his friend George from killing himself by showing interest in him.
10. Using Elephant from 1 as a distraction, Manny and Flea drag the girl from 3 who has overdosed out of the mansion and into a car.
11. Manny then drags Jack Conrad home who gives a rant about the future of cinema, then Jack Falls off his roof into his pool and takes a nap and invites Manny to his shoot.

Not to be Upstaged the rest of the movie has :

1. Black face
2. Manny on horseback firing a gun to break a strike of an angry mob homeless people in the hundreds. from Skid Row who want pay for their work as background actors.
3. A man running into a spear from a movie and dying.
4. A man dying from being trapped in a sound booth.
5. Nellie acting while her actual set is on fire.
6. Nellie using ice cubes to make her boobs look bigger on camera.
7. No less than 5 instances of Projectile Vomiting and popping onto patrons at a very fancy party.
8. Close up urination.
9. A joke where the punchline is a very loud long wet fart in the bathroom.
10. What I can only assume to be the original Juggalos .
11. A snake fight that ends in the fighter passing out
12. A snake fight that ends with the snake attached to a persons neck, and then ends in the lesbian Chinese performer cutting its head off , sucking out the venom, and engaging in a very passionate kiss.
13. A surprise alligator appearance.
14. A geek show where the geek eats the head off the rat (raw of course) .
15. The Colors Red,Blue, and Green rotating for 30 seconds
16. A clip from the 2009 film AVATAR.

So it’s a lot . And I have no idea where to start so I’ll start with Damien Chazelle. And the role of glamour on the screen.

“Every war movie, good or bad, is an anti-war movie”-Steven Spielberg

“There is no such thing as an anti-war film”- François Truffaut

“It’s a directors job to guide the audience”- Alfred Hitchcock

There’s a school of thought that because something is filmed, and it’s put on the big screen, that by definition that glamorizes it. That the size and sound makes a spectacle that keep people invested and watching, and eventually the desire to recreate the very thing they watched. I mean BABYLON opens with a humongous amount of Elephant shit and I kept watching ( though to be honest if I was streaming the movie I’d probably turn it off). When you watch a solider die on film, you see his glory, you see others mourn him, you see what he inspires. You also see the grief, the pain, the blood. Directors like Spielberg, a man who made a movie about the Holocaust, disagree of course. I don’t think that’s a dishonest representation of what goes on, just there’s a reason the grief isn’t so painful they stop making the movies.

I think you can clearly see if the director is trying to say ‘that’s bad’ , but in the same way that Stormtroopers are based off facists, yet are still very cool and we allow young children to dress up like them, nothing is truly so ‘bad’ that it should be removed from the story. That is to say, conflict, trauma, and villains are key cogs in the narrative machinery, and the stories we love wouldn’t be the same or as effective without them.

Alfred Hitchcock was very deterministic when it came to cinema, that if you guide the audience with a deft hand you can elicit the emotions and reactions you want. That context can save guide your message.

Every Chazelle movie thus far has been a movie about war between humanity and glorious achievement, I just really haven’t been sure which side of the war he stood on until now. Since his previous films were more focused on character choices, and BABYLON focuses on industry wide shifts, the conclusion leads me to believe that Chazelle loves the achievements of hard and great things above all else.

The things people love in Damien Chazelle movies slowly kills them, even if it makes them smile. Not a physical death until this movie, but a death of identity, death of love , death of character.

When I called this a Suicide Note to Hollywood, I’m kind of low key worried about Damien Chazelle. I didn’t quite see it at the time but every film he’s ever written and directed is anti-romantic. While arguably every movie Paul Thomas Anderson has ever made is romantic (Besides maybe THERE WILL BE BLOOD).

I think I’m so attached to Paul’s films because they view love as both a healing and destructive enzyme in lonely longing people. These things don’t contradict each other but exist on the same thematic and emotional plane. Love and pain, sometimes one and the same

WHIPLASH says you can’t have connections to people if you want to be a drummer in a jazz band. BOOGIE NIGHTS says even people in the porn industry can find love and family (Another BOOGIE NIGHTS connection, both have a guy shot themselves in the head at a party to signify the end of a film era). GUY AND MADELINE ON A PARK BENCH has breakups and fall outs due to not liking jazz music. PHANTOM THREAD has love conquer all by having the main character continuously being poisoned by his lover. The ideas of Perfectionism,Passion and Capitalism pervade both directors work, but there’s a cynicism in Damiens work that can no longer be ignored.

Summed up his movies

GUY AND MADELINE ON A PARK BENCH → Maybe your focus on your craft may have you not appreciate your lover who doesn’t like jazz.

WHIPLASH -> You got to DO BIG SHIT IF YOU WANNA PLAY HIGH SCHOOL DRUMS BOY. Cut off your relationship with your GF and Father , and man you can play with the best of them.

LA LA LAND → Sometimes the Arts and balancing selling out and providing for your family makes it hard to be in a relationship. They don’t achieve sucess until they break up with one another.

FIRST MAN → This dude can’t even properly grieve his child without getting into math. Neils Wife needs going to the moon to be a good enough reason her daughter died. Her son doesn’t care, he’s too young to understand bullshit. Look at how distant Neil is to his family due to his work. But that’s kind of what it takes to do great things. When they actually land on the moon, there’s no score, no action, just walking on dirt. To some that’s the greatest achievement to human kind, to others that’s just dirt on a big rock. The final scene of the movie he doesn’t speak to his wife, he just touches the glass that separates them, still trying to connect as his work has cut him off.

BABYLON-> Hollywood gonna churn people in and out, People gonna kill themselves over this shit , Hollywood gonna get young people killed by the mob, humiliated racially, TEAR OUT THEIR FUCKING SOULS. The movies are magic though. You can tell he really loves this era because he puts everything in it , which is why it’s bad (hey how long is this essay again?)

Jack Conrad is a man who has been around the block so many times, the only place left to go is over the hill!

Damiens films have continuously upped and upped the ante of the sacrifices needed to become great at something, with the focus on the pain of that sacrifice gaining more and more attention versus the output. He loves to show something as hellish but still ultimately glorifying that thing. The difference here being that Hollywood seems to need to sacrifice ethics and people to achieve greatness, as opposed to his other movies where the main character needs to confront this head on.

Damien perfectionism of every little thing is no clearer than the first shoot with the ten takes and how everything can go wrong. From the mark, to the voice level, to light coming through a door, to your sound guy dying, making great art is hard!

Maybe I’ve changed over the years, but this has gone from kind of inspiring if cautious, to high key terrifying. This of course is after he’s achieved a ton of success , with the apex being of course winning Best Director for LA LA LAND.

SOUND

In many ways sound was the first special effect, when audio equipment was very novel and underdeveloped, the use of smashing fruit, capturing feet clogging in a Folly Booth, and other sounds that couldn’t be captured in the scene and put in post production , was when things were cut outside of the live picture itself.

It makes sense that Jazz is the genre of all his movie scores, beyond the fact he was a jazz musician in High School. He really can’t help himself, there’s like two cutaway dialogue scenes of jazz musicians berating each other for being flat or not practicing enough!

The Scenes themselves seem to de-vlove into jazzy chaotic improvisation, USC football players show up randomly, Alligators emerge from the sewers of LA, things that had a loose form fall into an orgy of chaos. Set pieces literally get set on fire (by accident) while the cameras are rolling . Large scale epic shots of Roman warriors , end with a bum with a spear through his chest and broken camera, which causes the need to steal an ambulance not for the bum, but to get a new camera. This is all happening while Jack is rewriting his part and dialogue the day of.

I may also say that this is a really cool jazz score, with my favorite being “Voodoo Mama” , “Coke Room” , and a best of mash up with “Finale”. The voracious party sound will foretell the horrible fates that happen when things slow down. I love the EDM inspiration at this timestamp.

CHARACTERS

I have always held the depth of characters as more important than plot when it comes to movies, I think the power of the medium is partially the human expression and voice the camera can capture. Very good plots with thin characters are better suited for books. Babylon is very heavy on things happening, but very light on characters actually being lived in. They falter as soon as they have space for self expression in the narrative , and ultimately I think that’s what dooms the movie .

I hate to bring up BOOGIE NIGHTS again, but the breadth that movie gives to it’s characters is what makes the difference . Imagine trying to think of what these characters would die after the movie , I guess just the same things ?

Maybe they couldn’t make it in the Talkie era because they didn’t have much to say ?

As you can tell from the intro, a ton of things happen, just nothing much the characters actually do (Besides Mannys moral decline). More character archetype than a lived in person. When these characters aren’t working or partying, they are a fucking mess.

“…you will dine with angels and ghosts”

“ If you make one great piece of art then a life is worth living”

Jack Conrad is interesting as its Damian first character who is on the outside looking in, as opposed to in the thick of it.

Jack is literally a human prop, a handsome face for the golden screen. When his best friend/producer George dies, the first thing he utters ‘he was the first person to say I have talent’. George is his best friend and Jack still doesn’t really love him, he loves what he represents to Jack– confidence in his status. Jack’s “I love you” scene doesn’t work because he’s a man who has never truly loved a person, only his own fame and power.

Jack has a constant yearning to be taken seriously as an artist, and for the movies to be seen as ‘high art’ . He speaks Italian constantly and poorly, he plays opera (The highest of arts of the day) trying to mimic what the prestige and respect of the medium. The seemingly throw away line “ When I came to Hollywood, there were signs that said ‘No Dogs and No Actors’ I changed that!” , shows how much it meant to him to have acting not be a debacharous medium. In his mind, he’s not like those heroin taking extra junkies, he’s really artist! The Cinema needs to be moved forward for him to really reclaim his sense of identity and power.

His final discussion with Elinor St. John(Jean Smart), where she says his career will fade, but every time somebody watches one of his movies he will be alive again and remembered, is crucial to the ending. When he kills himself, you think that the convo was a pretty bad thing to hear. But the ending of the montage of the future of movies with pictures of Jack spliced in, really leads credence to the idea that this is worth it. I still don’t think his ending is earned, but alas.

“The system built this place”

“You thought that house needed you, that house doesn’t need Jack Conrad more than it needs it’s roaches”

Nellie is a woman built for the time and not a day later, she can act in a Talkie no more than she can say french words at a rich person party. “She has killed our grandmothers and we thank her for it , as common and uncouth she may be , she speaks to us in a language thats as bracing and vital to life”.

Is it any coincidence that the two American cities most renowned as mirages of false promises of prosperity, Los Angeles and Las Vegas, literally sprang out of the desert? Everybody here comes from nothing, Jacks parents were dirt poor and couldn’t afford high art, Nellies dad is a grifter her mom is in a pyschward, Manny doesn’t even talk to his family anymore.

“The movies are more important than life, you can be anything in a movie”.

Manny is a dreamer and natural born producer, getting the last camera in Hollywood in an hour time table while stealing an ambulance, to getting an elephant up a mountain. He falls in love with Nellie because he also understands what it’s like for people to hold you back for how you sound (New Jersey bias is real). Also, because she is very attractive. Also, because they do a bunch of cocaine together.

Manny is a man seduced by movies, is it any wonder that he falls in love after 20 minutes with the future biggest silent movie star of the era? That he will say he’s from Spain not Mexico as he gains more power? That he is completely fooled by Nellies performance saying that they’ll run off to Mexico and get married, using the exact same performance she gave in her first movie? Only when he is at gun point and about to leave Hollywood, does he break fully into his native Spanish yelling ‘ please I’m just a Mexican boy’ as he urinates himself . That this dream belongs to someone who completely gave up his identity multiple times to be in and escape from the Dream Factory is telling. He seems to be at peace with it though.

DARK DESCENT

“Welcome to the asshole of Los Angeles. It’s LA’s last real party.”

• James McKay-

I must note that literally this almost the exact same scene and placed almost dramatically at the exact same spot as this https://youtu.be/bZRzeUrVy1o from BOOGIE NIGHTS . Also cast as the crazy drug dealer is a main character from. SPIDER-MAN 2. Except again Chazelle is much more interested in events over people, so it never has the punch or tension it should .

The drug dealer has a joke when Manny says he’s not used to dealing with drug dealing gangster, ‘Their no worse than movie people’, and it’s true in the way they are explotive here!

I love the descent to the Geek show, it goes from violence, to sex, to geek show. The foundation of Hollywood and all glamorized entertainment is very BASIC, sex drugs and something crazy. It’s somehow better than this but this is the foundation of the history of American cinema. The party at the start of the movie was just in media res of the movies getting bigger and bigger, its crazy foundational shock value exists to this day. Like when Jack is asking the set orchestra to play Chopin as the homeless extras kill each other. The snake scene where they cut off its head and suck the venom is the same as the geek scene. It’s just that the geek has become what stars of old will be, a washed up entertainer looking for their next buck.

Even in the fancy Hearst party, there’s racism , sexual power dynamics of the old over the young, even if it’s buttoned up as high class!

THE LAST MONTAGE

As Manny sits crying in the theater , as the most tragic and heartbreaking time in his life is papered over by song and dance. He is slowly enamored again with what he is seeing. Soon a montage of the clips that were filmed in the movie play ( the three kisses) which then goes to a montage of the history of film and special effects . Starting from THE HORSE IN MOTION, you see flashes of TRON,THE TERMINATOR, THE MATRIX,AVATAR ,a flurry of solid basic colors evoking French New Wave. The future of the medium flashes before his eyes. The Talkies won’t be the last time Tinsletown gets flipped inside out and upside down , Old gods will fall and new gods will rise. The theme songs we’ve heard throughout the film get mashed into one best of song, you can see images of Nellie and Jack peramate the developing film as the basis of all these movies. They may be gone but they are the foundation of all that come after them.

This is bad, as I mentioned above about glamorizing .

THE WOLF OF WALL STREET protrayed finance as both evil , but extremely desirable and sexy . These things can work. Together! This movie protrays Hollywood as something both evil but also extremely good , and it really doesn’t want us to live in the discomfort of this lived reality .

What is BABYLON about:

Babylon fell due to religious idols, like the famous actors and actresses the audiences and masses fall in love with. But they are just as quickly swept aside for the next religion. A girl literally kills herself when Jack gets married for a fifth time.

The old gods died, they were replaced with Gene Kelly and Debbie Reynolds.

The things people love in Damien Chazelle movies slowly kills them, even if it makes them smile. It wasn’t as clear before , but I think he always been saying ‘and that’s a good thing’. Hollywood is a machine that takes people in and spits them out , so the Dream Factory keeps chugging along.

The hell that the system puts people through cannot be ignored, but neither can the great achievement of art it produces, the millions it wows. The blend of low and high art for mass commercial appeal.

Movies have been dying for years, from talkies, to television, to Technicolor, to home video, to CGI , to video games, to 3d pictures,to streaming, to Marvel movies.

The finale says, with this much death around it for so long, maybe they’ll live forever.

They just need some fresh blood to keep the magic going.