FILM OBSERVATION

WRITTEN BY

Caio Mota-Clem 

In Babylon, the first thing you see is movement. A truck stalled on a dirt road. An elephant expressing its feces on its handler, steam rising, and no one reacting accordingly. The situation doesn't stop, it just adapts around the mess; and that feeling never really goes away. When the film cuts to the grand party, the space is already overflowing. There is no clear exit or entrance, bodies stack on top of bodies, panning from one shot of excess to another. People move through the house like liquid, appearing as to slip corners and appear elsewhere. The sequence is framed to be hard to tell where the spectacle ends and the labor begins. Someone is always cleaning; as a character or even a viewer, immersed in the debauchery and excess, it can be difficult to see the person that is always cleaning up something no one wants to look at. The imagery is so explicit it almost stops reading as that. It begins to feel structural, as if that excess is what is required to keep the industry, the image, the spectacle, or the machine running. That is where what Babylon is truly interested in studying emerges: Cinema, in this film, doesn't ask what it takes to make an image. It registers what survives the process of the industry. Throughout the film, people enter the frame full, but don't leave it so. What happens between isn’t necessarily violent, but it is always negative. Labor and work are framed as images, and time becomes nostalgia in this world. Whatever cannot be shaped cleanly enough gets left behind. During the party, a band plays while fights break out inches away. The camera makes sure not to linger on any act for too long. Everything within this opulence competes for attention and nothing fully wins. Somewhere upstairs, a girl overdoses, of course given the people running this, the solution is not to stop the party but to distract it. The elephant is brought back through the front entrance. Everyone looks at the elephant and no one looks at the girl being carried out. The system does not panic, it attempts to reroute. The audience is introduced to Nellie Laroy in an entrance similar to the elephant. Already impossible to ignore. She crashes the party physically, she tears through foliage and she's covered in scratches, moving faster than the space can even accommodate. She enters with the energy of a starlet, speaking before being asked to speak, and claiming a name before it can be given to her. Her confidence doesn't come from a place of permission, but one of certainty and wit. Early on, this works within this industry. It presents the silent era as feeding on chaos. Nellie’s ambition and appetite, aligns with a moment where control hasn't been fully constructed yet. She is the film’s embodiment of motion and aspiration. She doesn't need to be taught how to perform because she is constantly performing, and her alignment with the excess works as fuel. What changes throughout the decades of this film, isn’t her desire. It is her container. As the industry begins forming its unique Hollywood soul, what once was seen as a “star”  is now seen as a liability. Addiction, memory, and debt surface, and these forces begin to cling to Nellie. The system doesn’t destroy Nellie for wanting too much, but for disappearing quietly enough; and interest drops the moment she is illegible. Manny survives by learning the opposite. He learns how to disappear without leaving the industry, his value comes from surrounding what does not show up on screen: timing, coordination. He becomes essential and invisible. His survival throughout the years presented are not framed as victory, but as function. Someone has to hold the system together, even if that someone is not remembered.  When the film moves onto studio sets in the late silent era, the chaos begins to get organized. Outdoor fields packed with sets sit side-by-side, each pretending to be somewhere else. A jungle film inches away from a satire or slapstick, a war scene next to a romance flick. Cameras are rolling at the same time. Music is overlapping and the air feels crowded with intention and art. Yet, sound changes everything. Silence becomes a requirement instead of an accident. Actors are told where to stand, how not to move and when to breathe. The microphone becomes another fear and another boundary, performance stops being instinctual and starts being correct. The scenes filmed with Margot Robbie on set are witty and sharply satirical, incredibly done sequences that respect the difficulty of the time period’s methods as well as the exaggeration the film presents. Nellie struggles most here, not because she lacks talent but because her body doesn't understand stillness. She misses marks, she talks too loud, and laughs at the wrong time; each correction is small and even polite but together they add up to something suffocating. The system doesn't yell at her for being alive, but it asks her to stop being so much. Manny, meanwhile, thrives. He understands the rules immediately— where to stand, how to signal and how to keep the noise out. His usefulness multiplies the quieter he becomes. He doesn't interrupt the image as he protects it. The film frames this as simply observing what kinds of people sound makes necessary.  These scenes are some of the funniest in the film, but the humor never feels detached. A director screaming about silence while chaos unfolds just outside the frame and a crew holding their breath so the image can survive. The absurdity isn't marked, it's documented. Hollywood doesn't look evil here, it looks stressed and overworked, afraid of losing control of the illusion. It just learned how to sharpen. This is the moment where cinema begins to decide what it can keep, what kind of body is fit, and what kind of voice travels, cleanly, and tests what kind of people can survive being recorded forever. Jack Conrad exists longing for the past, from the moment we meet him. When cinema changes shape, from silent films to talkies, he can't follow. Not because he lacks talent, or vision, but because the image does not need to use him any longer.  There is a tenderness in the way the film approaches Jack's movement through the chaos. He knows how to navigate crowds, how to perform charm and generosity, how to soothe crises that are not his, and understands the system of the spectacle intimately. That understanding does not protect him from the industry. The conversation with Elinor St. John, the gossip columnist, cuts through the noise with a certain clarity. She calls herself a cockroach, something that survives long enough to witness everything rot. She tells Jack what the film has been touching on since the start, that cinema remembers images and not people. In fifty years, someone will flicker his face on a screen and feel less alone. Angels and Ghosts last longer. Jack’s death does not arrive with any show. It comes with a feeling of inevitability encompassed by a structural need. A man realizing that his image will outlive him in ways his body no longer can. His suicide does not feel romantic, or empty. It exists within the same contradiction as the rest of the film presents, that the system is brutal, but what it produces still reaches people. The world around these characters does not pause, replacement happens quickly, someone else is shaped and steps into the frame. What matters is not who was inside before, only if something usable remains. The film's attention to craft reinforces this. There are aggressive reds bleeding into the film's images. Sets feel overworked and barely together. The film is led with beautiful production design that emphasizes scale and dedication to accuracy. Cinema is presented as physical, exhausting, and expansive.  The film is shot completely on 35mm film, in partnership with Kodak, to take viewers on a vintage visual journey, as Damien Chazelle seeks a film that feels like a roller coaster filled with vivid characters, spectacle, excess, onto one panoramic canvas. Even the satire does not settle into comfort. The film mocks Hollywood’s pretentiousness while living in its absurd nature. It shows the industry’s cruelty while loving the act of making images; a critique and love letter to Hollywood. These positions are never resolved. They sit amongst one another. Babylon, the ancient city of grandeur, hubris, indulgence, and a civilization dazzled by its opulence and excess. The silent era is reflective of that mythology cleanly. Beauty and inevitability, every empire believes its debauchery will last forever, and every is wrong. There is manipulation everywhere in Babylon, but it rarely announces itself as villainous. It arrives through proximity and through need, through people who want something and people who know how to offer it at a cost. Nellie's father is one of the earliest warnings. He is not monstrous, he's weak and opportunistic; close enough to drain her without asking. We see Hollywood as a place of acceptance, but the industry appears strangely permissive and brutally conditional at the same time. Characters like Lady Fay Zhu exist in a space that feels briefly open and modern, but it's temporary and contingent on usefulness, spectacle and novelty. The film is a frame. This is hypocrisy so much as expiration and what is tolerated as what can still be framed.  Eventually, the frame leads downward, the descent into the Hollywood underworld. The Toby Maguire sequence into Hollywood's "butthole” plays like the industry's subconscious. Everything has a price. Everything is owed. This world is not separate from the dream, but where it goes when it stops being profitable. Nellies death arrives off screen. Yet we have the knowledge of her wandering off, drugged up after Manny's exile. The  reported language is indifferent and the system has already moved on. Jack's death, Elinor's eventual disappearance, and Manny's exile, all feel pre-written. Rise and fall are not arcs here, they’re cycles. Manny is the only one who returns, older now, watching a movie. Sitting in the dark. The montage flickers forward and backward at once. The film survives everyone who touched it, paper fades bodies, vanishes, the screen keeps going, and that continuity is not mercy, but it's real. The ending of the film refuses to stop moving. The film's last scene, a montage on a theater screen being watched by an older Manny, presents images spanning from the first motion pictures ever, to modern cinema and folds back into itself. Early flickers connect with modern illusion, silent frames into digital technology, the evolution of styles, the disappearance of faces, but the persistence of the images. Manny’s crying signals an understanding of the love and endurance of Cinema as an art form, independent of the system that produces it.  Film eats its own history and keeps moving. This is where the film’s love becomes completely unmistakable. Not love for Hollywood, as a manipulative institution, Babylon has no illusions in that regard, but a love for cinema as a continuity. For storytelling, and such that survives even as the system expels the people who make it beautiful. The film critiques spectacle and fully participates in it. It knows it is part of the machine it's exposing. That it failed at the box office almost feels cruelly appropriate, a movie about ambition and collapse becoming another disregarded object within the spectacle society. Yet the film exists, and the screen still flickers as someone will encounter it years from now, completely divorced from context, and feel a connection. What happens on the screen still means something, the film believes. Not because the system is just, but because images endure. Cinema is empty enough to hold everything momentarily, but it spills and replaces. What stays is not memory, it is movement and continuity.