Babylon: Perdition, Soul-Selling, and Sinnage
Damien Chazelle’s newest film, Babylon (2022), is one of the most exciting films to emerge this past year. It’s loud and abrasive, sexy, witty, and is a movie that feels and looks like a movie. It has been divisive among audiences, critics, and Letterboxd-loving cinephiles, and I adored every minute of its over three-hour runtime. Watching Babylon was like eating Thanksgiving dinner for my soul. Sure, it was too decadent; it’s hard even to comprehend how much I had just consumed in the moment, but looking back, I would do it again at the drop of a hat. Or, dare I say, the bang of a clapper.
Damien Chazelle has described this movie as a “love letter to cinema and a hate letter to Hollywood.” Chazelle and the entire cast’s love for their industry’s roots pulses through the film’s veins. It shows appreciation for every movie that precedes it (I caught major inspiration and homage to Boogie Nights and The Wolf of Wall Street) and offers love to every movie that will postdate it (my gosh, that ending). While Babylon is, in its essence, kind of a “good time at the movies” type of movie, an important message I drew from it was that “movies are bigger than you know and can even comprehend.”
Chazelle feels not only like a director but a student of film. It’s clear through his past films that he has watched and studied the works of the important people who came before him. Babylon is packed with great performances, camera movements worthy of an audible gasp, and symbolism that could be dissected and discoursed for days. As a film student myself, I loved all the tributes and references to movies I study in school, but that felt like the thin layer of icing on top of what this film what a motif of: hell.
Perdition, hell, inferno. It’s the netherworld of Hollywood and the cinematic setting of Babylon. Babylon, over time, has developed into more of a metaphor than an actual place. It’s symbolic of intimidation and authoritarianism for evil and Satan. It’s the encapsulation of hubris; the biblical Book of Revelation seems to correlate it with the Roman Empire and messages about the “Whore of Babylon.” It’s also a symbol of decadence, a sort that connects euphoria and distress. You can lose yourself in the depths of Babylon, and Babylon won’t bat an eye.
One of the most dynamic sequences in the movie is in the first-hour act when we are introduced to the early Hollywood industry as the ensemble cast shoots movies in the California desert. Tons of silent films are being captured, we go from a set at a bar to an intense battle scene, and this 45-minute sequence is edited in a thrilling yet anxiety-riddled way that kept my heart pumping. In the midst of the chaos occurring, a set catches on fire. While this is a funny moment that captures the pure circus of film sets, it acts as a symbol between two distinct entities.
Genesis 19:24 tells how the rain of fire and brimstone ruined the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah. God destroyed these cities because they were notoriously sinful, and God demonstrated how He felt regarding overt evil, but He also established a permanent analogy. After Genesis 19:24, the observation of fire, brimstone, Sodom, or Gomorrah instantly transports a reader into the context of God’s judgment, which in Babylon’s case can be seen as sex, drugs, and other behaviors that are “sinful.” However, such an emotionally rich symbol has trouble fleeing its solemnity. This fiery vision can hinder, rather than advance, its aim. Fire and brimstone describe some of what the underworld is like—but not all of what hell is.
Extreme heat was a continuous part of the film; another notable moment where heat was quite literally tortuous was Nellie’s first day on set for a talking film. The adjustment from silent to talking movies is no easy feat, and Nellie, alongside the rest of the crew’s clumsiness and strain, makes the whole process of shooting a very simple scene take hours. While the team finally finishes a usable take, a man passes out and dies of heat exhaustion in the camera booth. This man wasn’t an important character which further proves the cruelty of Hollywood and Babylon. You are just a pawn in the effervescent battle of creating art.
As mentioned previously, the “Whore of Babylon” is one of the most well-known aspects of God’s eternal city. Also known as “Babylon the Great,” the “Whore of Babylon” is an allegorical female figure and area of evil cited in the Book of Revelation. Her complete designation is worded in Revelation 17 as "Mystery, Babylon the Great, the Mother of Harlots and Abominations of the Earth.” Babylon isn’t Babylon without this female figure, and Nellie Laroy (played by Margot Robbie) takes this role in Chazelle’s fantastical Californian Babylon. What’s interesting about the character of Nellie is that she is more than a “whore.” She’s a talented actress who takes the industry by storm by using her sultry magnetism to get ahead. While at the beginning of the film, it’s easy to pinpoint this character through her sexual disposition, as the movie progresses, her character becomes more complex as she gets into deeper trouble. She becomes a symbol of a false god. Her character arc shows how cynical Chazelle feels about the worship of Hollywood celebrities as if they are godlike, which is why he made Nellie so flawed. She has addiction problems, is impulsive and manipulative with poor decorum, and puts others in bad situations to save herself from her own dreadful and thoughtless decisions. The poster of Babylon puts her in a light where she mimics the ascension of Jesus. Her saga concludes when she is found dead at age 34 after running away from the limelight, the alleged age Jesus died on the cross. But Nellie isn’t perishing for anyone’s sins.
The character who gets hurt the most by Nellie is Manny Torres (played by Diego Calva). Manny is a Mexican immigrant who climbs the latter from gofer to assistant to Jack Conrad (Brad Pitt) to a studio executive. We are introduced to Manny as a hard-working, optimistic young man who is soon thrown into a circus of hedonists and becomes in thrall to Jack and infatuated with Nellie. Jack and Manny act as mirrors of each other. As Jack’s career winds down, Manny’s expedites. But this expedition isn’t positive. As Manny gains more power, he makes selfish decisions in the name of “the industry.” He fires his actress friend, Lady Fay Zhu (Li Jun Li), and forces another former companion, Sidney Palmer (Jovan Adepo), to put on blackface. Manny is constantly making deals with others in the industry, which is representative of selling his soul. As he rises up in his industry, his moral code begins to diminish.
Manny’s succumbing to the seductiveness of Hollywood’s false promises ultimately catches up to him in one of the most shocking (and my personal favorite) sequences of the film. After agreeing to help Nellie out after she made major gambling mistakes, Manny finds himself needing $8,500, fast. Nellie owes money to James McKay (played by Tobey Maguire), whose unsettling presence kicks off the third act of the film. What begins as a handoff scene turns into something extremely demonic. Manny’s meeting with James drops the movie back into the carnality it coddled in the first two acts. But now, the air is pierced with tension, particularly because The Count, who is accompanying Manny at the handoff, and told Manny he has the $8,500, reveals that the cash used to pay James is prop money. James MacKay wants to get into the movie business like any profitable, movie-loving entrepreneur. He pitches some ideas to Manny, who can hardly focus, knowing that the funds are phony. One of his dream projects involves a man who you have to see to believe, and there’s only one spot to witness him in action: “the asshole of Los Angeles.”
James leads his would-be business partners several floors underground; Babylon shows us what James viewed as the last dedicated party spot that references back to the days you see in the very first scenes. Chazelle brings the film back to a time when giant beasts could wander among drugs and sex acts, and liquor flows like water; the trip ends with a frightening man eating a rat in front of a menacing mob. Unfortunately, the prop money is discovered as an imposter by James as moisture leaks onto it. Outraged by this betrayal, James attempts to have Manny and The Count killed. The two barely escape the “asshole of Los Angeles,” pushing their way to the surface and even freeing an alligator in their exit.
This sequence is one of the most unforeseen of the whole film, and this can also be deciphered with a religious lens as Manny travels deeper into the levels of hell with each floor James led him to in the “asshole of Los Angeles.” James represents Satan, and James is the dark mirror to Don Wallach (portrayed by Jeff Garlin), the good-hearted studio executive who discovered Nellie. Both these powerful men serve similar roles in this world, but James lives in a laboriously polluted rendition of the Hollywood engine more similar to its vaudeville-carnival-circus embryones. This serves to illustrate that at the beginning, Manny was headed in a direction that seemed pure, but it’s revealed that Hollywood vacates no survivors from history. Audiences will watch this sequence with horror, and Chazelle is here to remind us that there was a time when the spectacles in the “asshole of Los Angeles” would have stood as crowd-pleasing, humorous amusement. The freakshow culture is where Hollywood grew its roots; working man entertainment. Its principal opposite was the stage for the proletariats, and Babylon reveals the metamorphosis in that directive.
I’ll never forget seeing Chazelle’s second 2016 feature, “La La Land,” in the movie theater. I sat in the first row, and I remember my neck hurting from gazing up at the screen, but I couldn’t look away. I have never been so mesmerized by a film in an auditorium; the neck pain was worth every minute of that beautiful film that I have since seen a dozen times. I have been following Chazelle’s career closely since 2016, and it’s incredible to see his cinematic choices over a wide spectrum of different films. No films are alike, but one can feel his devotion to motion pictures as a cinematic bystander. Babylon’s final montage reminds us of the magic behind movies and encapsulates how La La Land and Babylon made me feel. You truly have to see this film to believe it.
