‘Babylon’ questions what it means to be part of something bigger than yourself

By Jake Skubish

Among the elephant defecation, sprawling orgy, exorbitant cocaine ingestion, and erotic musical numbers, the most important part of the extravagant opening sequence to Damian Chazelle’s Old Hollywood opus Babylon takes place in a quiet room away from the mayhem of the party. After a chance encounter between Manny Torres (Diego Calva), a hired hand for the party’s host, and Nellie LaRoy (Margot Robbie), an aspirant movie star who gets into the party with Manny’s assistance, the pair of Hollywood dreamers bond over their future ambitions in the burgeoning world of cinema.

“I always wanted to be part of something bigger,” Manny says. “Something that lasts, that means something.”

Nellie couldn’t agree more with this mindset. “Yes!” She exclaims. “I love that answer!”

Across the party sits Jack Conrad (Brad Pitt), a silent film star atop the Hollywood food chain, comfortably in the position that Manny and Nellie one day hope to find themselves. Jack’s wife Ina (Olivia Wilde) threatens divorce upon their arrival at the party, a loss of no matter to him; For a man so on top of the world, whose very entrance contours the shape of the party’s crowd, another beautiful woman and another hit movie are right around the corner.

Of course, this won’t always be true, and Manny’s aspiration is shown to be foolish: Nothing lasts. The transition from silent films to talkies changes Hollywood and swiftly ushers in the collapse of Conrad’s illustrious career. In explaining to Conrad how the industry could so easily discard him, film critic Elinor St. John (Jean Smart) echoes another one of Manny’s ideas. “You thought this town needed you,” she says. “It’s bigger than you ... There will be a hundred more Jack Conrads.”

St. John reveals the paradox of pursuing Hollywood stardom, or of any desire for eternal greatness: To strive to be part of something bigger than yourself is to pursue something that will never really need you at all. Such is the unfeeling, unending cycle at the core of Babylon. Its characters want to create movie magic, but fail to foresee how that aim will sow their demise.

In this way Babylon operates in the mold of other auteur-driven tragedies set in worlds of vice and opulence — Goodfellas and Boogie Nights are obvious inspirations. And Babylon works to terrific effect for many of the same reasons as those great films. The protagonists’ rise in the first half of the film is boundless fun, and for long stretches the film is an outright comedy that delivers completely on its jokes. (These jokes, while genuinely hilarious, demonstrate the callousness of the industry; the punchline is often that a dead body on set is a routine cost of doing business.) The downfall in the back half of the film is affecting and painful as we watch Manny, Nellie, and the icons of the silent era resist the inevitable.

What makes this arc so moving is how thoroughly we care about these characters. Chazelle particularly excels at forging strong relationships between characters. Even across sporadic encounters the relationship Manny and Nellie have is captivating and heartbreaking, a dalliance between two people unable to recognize what might be best for them until it’s too late to attain it. In her performance as Nellie, Robbie lives up to her character’s self-given surname; it’s a titanic showcase, and Robbie has cemented herself as the king of Hollywood as far as I’m concerned. Calva is quite good in his breakthrough role, confidently holding the screen alongside stars like Robbie and Pitt.

Perhaps even more endearing than the Manny-Nellie relationship is the friendship between Jack and fellow silent film star Lady Fay Zhu (Li Jun Li). With the other women in his life Jack is mocking, condescending, or frustrated that they can’t see that his film acting is “high art.” He and Lady Fay, though, slip into conversations so serene they feel as if they can momentarily bring the surrounding Hollywood chaos to a halt. What they share is an awareness of just how lucky they were to live such miraculous lives, and if they were more satisfied than everyone else it’s because they remembered to enjoy it while they could.

“It was the most magical place in the world, wasn’t it?” Jack asks Lady Fay near the end of the film. It wasn’t, not really — the enterprise was full of labor exploitation and narcotic dependence. But Jack and Lady Fay luxuriated in the era’s excesses, and in doing so made it a magical time. The other possibility is that they must tell themselves it was magical, because if it wasn’t then none of it was worth anything at all.

These characters are less catalysts for Hollywood’s failures than victims of its vicious cycle, and in this way Babylon diverges from the stories of Henry Hill and Dirk Diggler from which Chazelle draws inspiration. Goodfellas and Boogie Nights follow the exploits of downright monsters, people who do immoral things and reap the consequences. The protagonists in Babylon, meanwhile, seek a life filled with exhilaration and creativity and meaning, and yet they still meet tragic ends at the hands of a system that cares little about their dreams.

Critics of Babylon have charged the film as being guilty of indulging in nostalgic romanticization of Hollywood’s origins and overly cynical condemnation of how the industry has changed since those origins. Both assessments are misplaced. Babylon is neither cynical nor hopeful about Hollywood, because it sees Hollywood as a machine that will always be the same. Where Chazelle’s film forms an insightful vantage point is not in examining the Hollywood system but the people within it, and here Chazelle is decidedly hopeful. If not already clear from Whiplash, La La Land, and First Man, Chazelle has a deep appreciation for those striving to accomplish something wonderful despite the potential costs, and that appreciation is the beating heart of Babylon. Chazelle’s film may be laced with cynicism, but it is a cynicism directed only at a system weighing down the people he so deeply believes in.

Babylon is more focused on systems of power than any of Chazelle’s prior films by a wide margin. Whiplash and First Man are about men who spend a good deal of their time alone, narrowly fixed on achieving their goals; In La La Land Chazelle expands the spotlight to two characters, but they ultimately split because they need to spend more time alone, achieving their goals.

In tracing the regression of Hollywood from uninhibited bacchanal to stuffy corporate enterprise, Babylon illuminates the ways in which capitalism takes artistic endeavors and squeezes them until the thrill is gone and the extraction of profit remains. Sure, the heroes of Old Hollywood were degenerate narcissists in search of some cinematic magic that might never have really existed. But they dared to live big, to act with reckless abandon in a manner of living less possible with each passing year in Hollywood. In these characters’ joyous frenzy Chazelle sees something noble, and something lost as the industry marches toward commercialization. “I hate when they put toppings on ice cream,” Nellie remarks to Manny at one point in a non sequitur. “It messes up a good thing.” The thought comes shortly after Nellie has secured Hollywood stardom, and seems to be about more than dessert. They had a beautiful, chaotic thing going back in 1926, didn’t they? Why change that?

I think this is what Jack means when he insists his craft was high art, and why nobody can seem to understand him. He doesn’t really mean the films were great — perpetually drunk on set and never prepared, Jack Conrad didn’t give a damn about the final cut. The high art existed not in the film itself but in how the process of creating it made Jack, and made all of them, feel alive. The high art, Jack seems to know, is found in the making of the thing, not how it turns out.

The only character who manages to recognize the folly of stardom before it destroys him is Sidney Palmer (Jovan Adepo), a trumpet player at many of the parties for Hollywood’s silent film stars. When the industry transitions to sound Palmer’s musical talents become a hot commodity, and he soon finds himself an ascendant movie star. But after a demeaning incident on set, Palmer walks off the set and never looks back. The end of Babylon returns to Palmer as he performs for a small crowd, relishing the opportunity to play a song he used to love before his movie stardom took him sideways. Palmer is the only one of the Old Hollywood protagonists who makes it out intact, because he is the only one who realizes that dehumanization is an unacceptable price to pay for work that will never love you back.

Chazelle ends Babylon with an enigmatic display of cinematic history that will surely divide audiences. While this ending is ostentatious and a little bizarre, Chazelle is fundamentally distilling film down to its basic elements: sound, movement, and color. At a screening of La La Land introduced by Chazelle that I had the privilege of attending in 2018, the director played the 1966 short film All My Life before his own musical. The three-minute film pans along a fence adorned with vibrant flowers against the backdrop of a bright blue sky and the exquisite voice of Ella Fitzgerald. There is no plot, no characters, and no story, and yet it still evokes a powerful sensation. Chazelle’s cinematic mastery is unparalleled because he knows, despite the bombast and extravagance of Babylon, that all the movies really are made of is sound, movement, and color (the sound in Babylon courtesy of a gorgeous score from Justin Hurwitz). Movies only mean something more because we have given something of ourselves in creating them. A fence and a blue sky on their own can be beautiful. But when a person trains a camera on them, it’s cinema.

As Manny witnesses the concluding visual symphony, his expression shifts in a wonderful moment of ambiguity. Manny considers his time in Hollywood, and his look recalls that earlier conversation between Jack and Lady Fay. Did he achieve his goal of being part of something that lasts? Or must Manny tell himself he did to avoid admitting that it would have all gone on the same without him?

I’m not sure which is closer to the truth, and neither does Manny, but perhaps what matters is that he is brought to tears all the same. He was, in the end, a part of something bigger than himself. Whether the movies are a reflection of reality or an instrument of self-delusion, they allow him to give meaning to his own story within this system. Being part of something bigger was unavoidable. What Manny makes of that experience, though, is up to him. And so he sits in a movie theater, allowing a film to assign purpose to a life that perhaps never had any. He is moved not by what is on screen but what the screen makes him feel, what it helps him to recall. To have lived life passionately and fully; there is no higher art than that.