Babylon

  Like Hamlet’s dumbshow regicide,  Damien Chazelle opens his Babylon with a miniature of the overall film. An exotic monster (i.e., an elephant) is introduced to the desert that will blossom into Hollywood. When the inadequate civilization of truckage fails, the elephant releases a colossal excretion upon the workers.  

The film proper — so to speak — opens upon a Hollywood orgy of gobsmacking variety and vice. Think Bosch on Cialis. In range, indelicacy and volume that is an equivalent to the elephant’s bestowal of bowel. Despite the party appearance of the bare-chested USC football team, this ain’t the Rose Bowl.

At least two other such dumps ensue. In one, Nellie Laroy — her Wild Child career defunct — kills her pretence to newly cultured elegance with a bestial assault upon a buffet and a heroic upchuck on both carpet and host. Finally, one of the film’s concluding montages is a concentrated survey of global cinema — from Muybridge through Bergman through Brakhage concluding with the soulless proto-graphics of AI. At the latter point one might yearn for the porn.

If the film plot draws on Kenneth Anger’s racy history, Hollywood Babylon, its spirit evokes Blake: “The roads of excess lead to the palace of wisdom.” 

Or not. Here the overriding arcs both of the characters and of the mythic setting find excess in the excess rather than wisdom. When the gambling mogul complains of the new Hollywood’s dullness he takes Mannie into an underworld cave of rat-eating monstrousness that leaves us yearning for the earlier disgust.

We follow the rising arcs of Nellie, Mannie and the jazz musician and the fall of Jack Conrad from drug-addled superstar to pathetically recycled has-been. Nellie self-destructs when her wildness outlasts her childishness. The black musician survives but only by enduring such insults as having to cork-face himself to be as black as his bandmates, at his white masters’ insistence. 

Only Manny survives. He rises steadily but accidentally as random opportunities befall him. He falls in love with — and rescues — Nellie at first sight, then ultimately tries to save her career and her life but she thwarts him. Faced with her assassin, Manny saves himself by abandoning all Hollywood pretence and retreating to essential Mexican. We last see him as a happy NY family man, visiting his Kinescope lot with a young daughter who prefers ice cream and a wife who’s humouring him. 

When Manny weeps at the screening of Singin in the Rain he’s moved both by the memory of the period the film records and his having survived it. His career was boosted by the arrival of sound, as Jack’s was killed by it. The film’s revival revives Manny’s memories of his first great love and her loss. It recalls the energy and excitement of his lost career. But it also validates the gossip columnist’s consolation of Jack. Though his career is finished, she assures him, his image on film provides a kind of immortality few mortals achieve. Not outside cinema, anyway. And what is that worth, in the comic cosmic scheme of things?

The film explores the Babylon-like lost empire that was recreated in the wildness of the Hollywood west and in the American empire it reprtesents. Its dreams, disillusionments and eventual displacement Hollywood came to perpetrate and embody, both in its rise and in its fall. 

        Also, as Kara Hagedorn suggests, Babylon may also be a film of its moment. The orgies are a release from the lockdowns. So, too, the oddball orgy in Glass Onion, supposedly of the hostess's safe "pod," while Dr Fauci appears helpless on a TV screen in the background. Like Triangle of Sadness, Babylon also speaks to the post-Covid awareness of the gap between the fatuous privileged elite and the massive afflicted underclass. Further, the lavish scatology coheres with our renewed sense of our physical nature and limitations, its embarrassment and mortality. Babylon is a film for our time in its excess as much as in its wisdom.