Chaos, Cinema, and the Cost of the Dream: Babylon
Unlike the contemporary Hollywood period pieces, Babylon became an insatiable, bewitching creature that demanded to be experienced in the theater. Not just to see it but to experience it. It was an endless fever dream. Damien Chazelle, after all, has had the opportunity to deal with heartbreak in La La Land and obsession in Whiplash, and after all of that, turned to the early Hollywood. It was time to get all the sweet bounty of that unregulated vice. This, after all, the rise and the rot of the unregulated Hollywood.
Audiences were prepared for the most extravagant of spectacles. Carnival-like giant set pieces were maniacally constructed with a wild, frenetic energy, Hollywood in all of its chaotic decadence was on the brink of collapse. Jazz-influenced and centered music were the background for the sequences of cowboy cinema and for the scenes where Robbie’s laughter was in slow motion, and, Calva and Pitt were symmetrically and ridiculously glamorous. Pit’s romantic classicism was there for the jazz-age collapse. “Hollywood had it coming,” one tagline said in all its understated liberalism. Chazelle was not there to venerate the unfolding Golden cinema of American cinema. It was an intoxicated Hollywood autopsy.
When Dreams Collide with Decay
Babylon narrates the story of ambition and disillusionment during Hollywood’s transition from silent films to talkies. However, underneath the cocaine-dusted parties and trumpet solos, the film is a raw meditation on obsession — on the lengths to which people will go to be a part of a dream that ultimately devours them.
Margot Robbie’s Nellie LaRoy is the film’s beating heart: a wild, self-made starlet who breaks into the industry driven by sheer will. She is unpredictable, crude, and magnetic, and she is fully aware that the fame will not last. In many ways, Nellie was a reflection of Robbie herself during the time of shooting the film. Having just starred in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood and Birds of Prey, she was cementing her identity as both star and producer, balancing the dual pressures of being desired and being in control, a constant game of opposites.
Interviews and others have noted how Robbie built a relationship with Nellie as “each of the women who’s perceived as too much,” and the emotional nuances of the film surfaces as a world with all the excesses stands as punitive against it at the same time. For Nellie’s destitution, addiction, and eventual erasure, it becomes less of a personal collapse, but more on the ritual of the system’s self-devouring derriere.
Jack Conrad, played by Brad Pitt, represents the quintessential figure of old Hollywood. He devenir une star du cinéma de la période du cinéma silencieux, of fading charm, and a touch of deep sorrow. He, of all people, should knows that their charm has a time of expiration. In Hollywood, Jack’s role resonates with the sad and charming reality of aging as he Pitt himself has become more and more old while he has graciously reserved all of his charm. Jack’s fading charm should send hauntingly resonating and sad messages as they age, fading towards his mirror of time.
The Rhythm of Madness
The director sets the tone from the opening party sequence — a dizzying, extravagant performance of jazz, confetti, elephants, and excess. This is not nostalgia, it is delirium. Chazelle, who is known for his obsession with rhythm, directs Babylon as a symphony of chaos. His camera does not watch; it lunges, spins, and breathes. Each scene is alive — almost, it appears, too alive, as though the film itself is intoxicated with the subject matter.
However, the visual mania does not come without consequences. Chazelle’s complete ambition and vision for the film caused production to stretch itself to the breaking points. There were 700 extras who were reported to have danced for twelve-hour shifts during heat waves on the California sets. The enormous opening party scene took two weeks to film, with live music, real pyrotechnics, and, largely, without CGI. Chazelle’s reliance on practicals to film the scene authentically captured the effect of sweat and motion, during the exuberant party action set, fabricated exhaustion for the crew, but the film acquired an unmistakable pulse.
Even the infamous “elephant scene” was not filmed using CGI. The production team had to convince the troupe to work with real elephants, which was chaotic to plan. Yet, the madness of the film was rooted in something real. “You can’t fake chaos,” Chazelle later said, and, indeed, the camera’s panic, the terrifying noise, and the stench of ambition and fear were all there and felt painfully real.
The Sound of Transition.
A film about the end of the silent era, Babylon focuses on a period of stasis in the life of a transformative artist. The ending signifies the end of the period in which the film was made. The characters and musicians who ruled with the silverscreen became mere spectators as the sound technology was introduced. The once-revered artists became disposable to the very audience who adored them.
Nellie, once a Hollywood icon, faces the heartbreaking struggle of failing to adjust to the new ‘talkies’. Her captivating presence, characterized by raw, chaotic energy in silent films, becomes a liability against the backdrop of a more refined, demure cinematic world. A baffling, frustrating, humiliating, and unmistakably tragic scene in the film illustrates this perfectly. In a soundproof box, the artist struggles to perform a ‘talkie’ scene while other takes are ruined by an audience capturing the ‘silence’. Silent films are a world of refined chaos, while the artist self-destructs in a world of tragic demure chaos built around her.
Here, the jazz-infused score by Justin Hurwitz, described as pulsating between a celebration and a funeral, captures the emotional center of the film. The trumpets lead in a joyful, celebratory rhythm only to shift to one of mourning. As in Chazelle’s previous work, the music is not a secondary element, it is a key part of the narrative. The trumpet that announces Nellie’s arrival is the same one that echoes as her image fades, suggesting that the melody of ‘fame’ is a haunting one and ends in a minor key.
Between Myth and Memory
Babylon, for all its noise and excess, remains deeply introspective. It ponders the question, “What does it mean to belong to something as ephemeral as cinema?” Diego Calva’s character, Manny Torres, is our lens — a Mexican immigrant pursuing the American film dream, only to confront the reality that the dream is a brutal machine, chewing and spitting out idealists, and it’s Manny’s wide-eyed wonder that eventually succumbs to moral exhaustion.
Calva, on the periphery of Hollywood and with little experience, interpreted the role as, “both an introduction and a warning.” Much like Manny, he was a novice, stepping into a universe of hall-of-famers, and attempting to find his place among the legends. His scenes with Pitt and Robbie aren’t just acting; there is a genuine feeling of a collision between stardom of the past and present, and of the future.
In the concluding sequence, the film crosses the montage with the tears of Manny, and implies that despite the individuals losing succumbing to the tide of history the collective dream of cinema is immortal. It’s both a love letter and an eulogy to cinema, a testament to its enduring magic. He references the bittersweet fantasy ending of La La Land, but with the illusion being darker — Hollywood is heaven and hell.
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