Babylon

The Abattoir of Dreams

To call Damien Chazelle’s *Babylon* a "love letter to cinema" is to misunderstand the nature of the letter. It is not a polite correspondence; it is a suicide note scrawled in lipstick and blood on a dressing room mirror. While Chazelle’s previous work, *La La Land*, romanticized the sacrifices made for art, *Babylon* rips back the velvet curtain to reveal the industrial slaughterhouse behind the screen. This is a film about the transition from silent pictures to talkies, yes, but more deeply, it is an elegy for the untamed, feral spirit of early Hollywood before it was sanitized by sound and morality clauses.



From its opening sequence—a thirty-minute, cocaine-fueled bacchanal involving an elephant and every bodily fluid imaginable—Chazelle establishes a visual language of aggressive maximalism. The camera, operated with manic precision by Linus Sandgren, doesn't just observe the scene; it careens through it like a drunk dancer, desperate to keep up with the tempo of Justin Hurwitz’s frenetic, brass-heavy jazz score. This sensory overload serves a narrative purpose: it immerses us in the "wild west" of the 1920s, a time when moviemaking was a chaotic frontier town run by misfits, immigrants, and madmen. Chazelle argues that the magic of the silent era was born precisely from this lack of control, a frenzied alchemy that the rigid technical requirements of sound would soon extinguish.



The tragedy of *Babylon* lies in its characters' collision with obsolescence. We witness this through Nellie LaRoy (a ferocious Margot Robbie), a self-appointed star whose raw, animalistic charisma is perfect for the silent lens but catastrophic for the microphone. The film’s most harrowing sequence is not one of its deaths, but a comedic set-piece turned psychological horror: a simple scene on a soundstage where Nellie must hit a mark to be heard. The suffocation of the technical process—the silence, the heat, the repetition—breaks her spirit. Alongside her is Jack Conrad (Brad Pitt), a matinee idol whose graceful fall captures the melancholic truth that the industry loves the product but despises the producer. He realizes, with heartbreaking clarity, that his time has passed not because he lost his talent, but because the medium itself mutated into something that no longer required him.



Ultimately, *Babylon* is a film about the price of immortality. The polarizing final montage, a kaleidoscope of cinema history that flashes before the eyes of Manny Torres (Diego Calva), is Chazelle’s thesis statement. It suggests that cinema is a parasitic entity: it chews up the Nellies and the Jacks, ruins their lives, and drives them to early graves, only to refine their suffering into flickering images that will last forever. It asks the audience a difficult question: Is the art worth the human wreckage left in its wake? Chazelle seems to scream "No" for three hours, only to whisper a tearful, complicated "Yes" in the final frame. *Babylon* is a messy, sprawling, vital disaster of a film, reflecting the very industry it portrays—cruel, excessive, and undeniably magnificent.