Midweek Update: 'Babylon' and the Anxiety of Damien Chazelle

“It's good to be in something from the ground floor. I came too late for that and I know. But lately, I'm getting the feeling that I came in at the end. The best is over.” - Tony Soprano

Director Damien Chazelle’s new movie, Babylon, will likely land as one of the most divisive of the year among cinephiles. At over three hours, it is a lot of movie, and it’s one that’s practically bursting at all Chazelle is trying to include in a tale about Hollywood’s transition from silent film to sound. While Chazelle did his research, the film doesn’t necessarily purport to be a 100% accurate retelling of its era. However, it’s a movie constantly torn between a dream of what was and the reality of what happened. It’s like a mashup of Kenneth Anger’s Hollywood Babylon, which is a bit more fabulist in its retelling, and Kevin Brownlow’s The Parade’s Gone By, which aims for more accuracy about the era.

Some have bristled at the lack of historical accuracy. In Stephanie Zacharek’s review in Time, she notes that a scene in which Jean Smart’s Hedda Hopper/Louella Parsons analogue, Elinor St. John, gives a hard truth to Brad Pitt’s Jack Gilbert analogue, Jack Conrad, that his time in the spotlight is up, but that he’ll live forever on film. That’s incongruous with the time when no one thought about film preservation or considered movies anything more than an ephemeral entertainment.

But for me, despite all the attention paid to the mid-20s to mid-30s Hollywood that Babylon covers, transporting us to a particular time isn’t the film’s main focus. In his last four films (I haven’t seen his debut, Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench), Chazelle’s conclusions are about what has to be sacrificed for transformation. In Whiplash, drummer Andrew (Miles Teller), basically gives into the devil, the sadistic conductor Fletcher (J.K. Simmons), because they both know that there’s no room for sentiment in art; there is only total commitment and so Andrew loses the father who loves him (Paul Reiser) in exchange for the abusive one who pushes him to greatness. In La La Land, Seb (Ryan Gosling) and Mia (Emma Stone) call their love story quits because they can’t reconcile being together with their artistic goals, and even though they both find the success they longed for, there will always be a part of them that wonders “What if?” In First Man, Neil Armstrong (Gosling) is man surrounded by death—his young daughter, his colleagues, and what his work demands of him—but reaches the heavens, becomes the first man on the moon, and then comes back to find that he’s now separated, literally and figuratively, from his wife (Claire Foy).

Babylon asks what was lost when we gave up the wild, exuberant age of silent film for talkies. In a terrific interview with Mayra E. Gates at RogerEbert.com, Chazelle notes that silent cinema was drastically starting to evolve with movies like Sunrise (1927) and The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928), but the move to sound meant that this kind of cinema never reached its zenith. The intersection between fleeting fame and changing technology is where Babylon truly lives, and also why the film falters in comparison to his previous efforts. As entertaining as the movie can be (and I do love that Chazelle can go from making something as quiet and introspective as First Man to something as loud and exuberant as Babylon), unlike his previous movies, characters aren’t really making choices. People are either analogues or amalgams of real people, and they exist to be swept up into the winds of change. Perhaps Chazelle sees this though a tragic lens and that we know these characters are doomed, but they don’t. And yet even here, no one is doomed because of their own actions, but because of a fickle audience and changing technology, two things they had no control over.

In the same interview, Chazelle shares his apprehensions when talking about the Jack Conrad character:

First off, this is not a particularly novel concept. Hollywood has been telling this story about itself for a while now, arguably as far back as 1932’s What Price Hollywood? (remade several times as A Star Is Born) where there’s only so much room for stars and who rises and falls is somewhat arbitrary, but functions like a scientific law. Second, it’s so bizarre to me that Chazelle of all people wanted to tell this story right now.

In the film’s final scene, its protagonist, Manny Torres (Diego Calva), goes to a movie house and watches Singin’ in the Rain. At first, the movie depresses him, a whitewashed version of the transition from silent films to talkies that doesn’t note all the collateral damage along the way. But eventually the movie wraps him up and then he (and the audience) receive a vision of all the cinema to come, a great and terrible blockbuster culture of massive VFX spectacle that chugs along mercilessly. We see a barrage of movies with so much CGI that human beings cease to matter because just as technology got rid of the workers of the silent era, so too will it remove the artists of today.

I don’t think Chazelle would go so far to say that there were no good movies made after the dawn of talkies (and I don’t think Babylon is saying that either), but his apprehension is clear: what happens when a new phase of Hollywood has no more use for you? Chazelle seems to view himself as a man on the precipice, someone who’s not particularly interested in making blockbuster spectacle (I’m sure there were no shortage of offers to direct the next superhero thing after the success of Whiplash and La La Land), but also knows that a long-term career in Hollywood is far from guaranteed. All of this is compounded by the fact that Chazelle is the youngest Best Director Oscar winner in history, earning the award at only 32.

For Chazelle, he may see himself as someone on the verge of decline. As Mike Ryan points out in his interview with Chazelle for Uproxx, the director went through awards season backlash over La La Land, and First Man met a surprisingly cold reception given the pedigree of its subject matter and filmmaker. Does Chazelle think his time may be up soon? I don’t know, and given the conclusion of Babylon, he doesn’t seem to know either. He’s clear-eyed about Hollywood, but the story he’s telling is about being thrown about by the currents and feeling like you’re about to be dashed upon the rocks at any second. As always, with Chazelle, there’s something bittersweet and melancholy at play—look at what we created but look at what was lost—but the conclusion of Babylon feels more ambivalent.

Part of me feels like that ambivalence is an accurate representation of where we are right now. The reliance on IP and VFX combined with the diminishing monoculture has plenty of film fans wondering what movies will even look like ten years from now. We have a theatrical landscape that cannot hold anything but the biggest blockbusters, and even there, those blockbusters have to be exceptional to warrant anything more than a six-week window at the multiplex. If you’re not interested in making IP-based spectacle, where does that leave you as a filmmaker? Can you even make a name for yourself on streaming when audiences are already overwhelmed by choices? These are big questions, and Chazelle doesn’t have an answer. He leaves us staring into the colorful abyss, wondering what’s next.

What I’m Watching

I’ve been trying to squeeze in a bunch of Christmas movies I’ve never seen before, particularly Christmas horror. Black Christmas messed me up with how scary it was (and its director, Bob Clark, also directed A Christmas Story, which is wild). Silent Night, Deadly Night was silly, but I was surprised that it was deemed so controversial that it needed to be protested. Krampus has its fans, but I was kind of let down by it despite the strong cast and interesting premise.

In other news, I forged ahead on Harry & Meghan, and ultimately it suffers from the same curse of a lot of streaming content—it could have been much shorter but the platform demands quantity. There’s maybe a solid 80-minute documentary in here, but you’ve got a 6-hour docuseries that makes you feel like a pawn in the dumbest media war imaginable. Yes, the monarchy should be abolished. No, I don’t need to be a die-hard fan of a married couple I’ve never met and will never meet to believe that.

What I’m Reading

I hit my reading goal of 50 books in 2022! Half of those books were graphic novels, but it still counts! I’m still planning to read a couple more graphic novels before the year is out to clear a pile that had amassed. If you want to keep up with what I’m currently reading, feel free to follow me on Goodreads.

Shorter reads:

Who Is Rep.-Elect George Santos? His Résumé May Be Largely Fiction. by Grace Ashford and Michael Gold [The New York Times] - New York Republicans fully elected Tom Ripley to Congress. There’s enough malpractice here to go around (Dems for not seizing on this litany of lies, the Times for not publishing before the election), but ultimately it just proves that with intense polarization, once you get past the primary and run in the right district, all you need is an “R” or a “D” by your name.

The Education of CNN’s Chris Licht by James B. Stewart [The New York Times] - I’m not really interested in whether or not Licht’s “succeeds” (by some metrics, his predecessor, Jeff Zucker, “succeeded”, but all he did was try to make news more like sports), but this article is fascinating because it feels like both Licht and Stewart are missing the shifting over the Overton window. To argue that Fox News is “right-wing” and MSNBC is “left-wing” kind of misses how far to the right the window has shifted. It’s not like Chris Hayes gets on at 8pm and shouts, “The proletariat will labor in vain no longer!” Fox News says, “The 2020 election was stolen because Republicans lost,” and MSNBC says, “Well, that’s not true.” What this article fails to answer is what has bedeviled news organizations for years now—how do you embrace different viewpoints when one of those viewpoints has left reality behind? Licht is in a difficult position because media elites refuse to grapple with our current epistemological crisis.

Substack Recommendation

I mourn the loss of the website The Dissolve like I mourn the loss of a friend. It was a film website that was too good for this world, but thankfully, two of its editors—Scott Tobias and Keith Phipps—have a Substack where they’re continuing to produce excellent film criticism. It’s a must-subscribe for any film fan.

What I’m Hearing

Speaking of Babylon, I’m quite enjoying Justin Hurwitz’s score! Give it a listen:

What I’m Playing

I finally jumped back into God of War: Ragnarok, and I would have gone back sooner if people had told me that Richard Schiff plays Odin like he’s a Jewish mafia don.

Speaking of PlayStation games, here are my stats since getting my PS5 earlier this year. I’ve really loved this console, and I’m excited to play more games in 2023.