Babylon and Hollywood Oppression – Laura Turner, The Parmiter School

Originally, “Babylon” was the capital of the Babylonian Empire, which was rich and prosperous during its heyday between the 19th and 15th centuries BC. Over time, through its many occurrences in the Bible, the word has become a word that denotes the pleasant place occupied by those in authority. More recently, around the 1940s, the word was used among Rastafari to refer to the police and other repressive aspects of society.

At Damien Chazelle’s Babylon, he refers to early 1920s Hollywood, when movies couldn’t talk. Many of his heroes call this period in cinema a period of pleasure. Chazelle shoots the scenes of this period with an unbridled, trembling energy, almost fetishizing it. However, the next period, the conversation period, is shown to be reserved, elitist and inept. This is nothing but revisionist history. Chazelle behaves as if there was no discrimination before the advent of sound in cinema, slandering the progress of technology and erasing the struggles of minorities before 1929. Not only that, he ignores the constant development of foreign cinema with the German Expressionist movement and works as an Armadillo ” Potemkin,” who acts as if great cinema can only exist in America.

However, with Manny’s character, he seems to be exploring other visions of “Babylon” and by extension Hollywood. Manny, wonderfully played by Diego Calvo, is the only likeable and interesting character we get to know. We watch him work incredibly hard to get half the recognition that his peers do, both for real love and for the love of movies. However, as he and the film progress, it becomes harder to root for him, but that makes it all the more intriguing. He is so consumed by “white capitalist greed” that he is willing to sacrifice his own morals and his friends’ identities before violating the wishes of those above him, at one point guilt leading his friend to blackface instead of simply changing the lighting. All under the influence of Hollywood and its enormous power.

Babylon is most significant when portraying Hollywood as an oppressive, destructive interpretation of “Babylon.” Another example of this is the character of Lady Fei Zhu, who is charmed by the drawn Li Jun Li, a Chinese-American lesbian who is forced to leave her studio due to rumors surrounding her personal life. She is possibly the most memorable character in the film, or has the potential to be if she was given more than ten minutes of screen time. Her lack of development or focus makes her seem like a token minority character, which is disappointing but not surprising on Chazelle’s part.

I tend to have low expectations for Damien Chazelle. His last two films, La La Land and Whiplash, felt very important and indulgent. He is obsessed with honoring the cruel and inhumane acts that men do for fame, often allowing women to suffer as collateral damage. Babylon doesn’t really break that mold, only characters like Nellie LaRoy contribute to the problem as they suffer. Also, I believe that Chazelle has a very narrow and elitist idea of ​​what art should be and how it should be created, which I believe must account for the lack of variation in his filmography.

The one and maybe the only original idea inside Babylon comes from Douglas Laman’s interpretation. He argues that it is an exploration of the “inevitability of death” and that although the art created by these characters is “eternal,” they mistakenly believe they can now escape their mortality. I like this interpretation because it gives more weight to the montage at the end of the film (which as it stands is clumsy and unnecessary) and speaks to the power of art, even ominously and cynically, showing how, like Babylon, Hollywood is essentially ‘is a place of unhappiness, despite the fact that everything is good in it.

There’s no denying that the fun of Hollywood lies in the movies made there. Chazelle has proclaimed this to his character many times, to the point where I wonder if he’s struggling to believe it himself. Especially because the filmmaking process we are shown, which most closely resembles the one used today, is shown to be painful, torturous, and even murderous. It is unlikely to appeal to moviegoers and is unlikely to inspire love for cinema in the audience. I feel the same way about many modern films that focus exclusively on “movie magic”. If the movie itself isn’t that good or even coherent (what Babylon often not), how is a viewer supposed to fall in love with a movie?

Babylon tries to contrast the hellish, oppressive industry that is Hollywood with the beautiful, liberating process of filmmaking, much like Fredric Fellini 8 ½. It fails on both counts. Instead of depicting the cruel, complex cycle created by this situation, Chazelle pretends that Hollywood was once again like a biblical, pleasant interpretation of “Babylon” before it fell in 1929 like the city it once was. In doing so, he grossly oversimplifies issues like homophobia, racism, and classism, pretending that they only appeared with the fall of this supposed paradise. Somewhere along the way, it loses the focus of the movies that supposedly made it all worth it.