Progress and Absurdity in 'Babylon'

 Damien Chazelle, after his directorial successes ‘Whiplash’ and ‘La La Land’, made his passion project ‘Babylon’ in 2022. The film follows two characters, Manny and Nellie, as they rise to prominence in Hollywood, and Jack Conrad, a silent film star, during the introduction of sound to films. The film is a story of ambition, the damage that progress leaves in its wake, and raises the question of whether the end result is worth it. It was a massive commercial failure and received mixed reviews. Critics tended to either hate it or love it. I fall into the second camp. I want to explore the way the film explores the theme of progress. 

 These themes are exemplified by the story of Jack Conrad. The opening scene of the film is set at one of his parties during the peak of his fame, before the introduction of sound to movies. It is characterised by excess and self-absorption: it includes an elephant, an energetic jazz band, blaring lights, and piles of cocaine. For Jack, and many others at the party, it is a celebration of their fame and success. 

 At this point, Manny is working for Jack. His job is unglamorous and degrading; it includes transporting the elephant up a hill and throwing chickens out of the party. When he asks for work on a movie set, he is told that he doesn’t belong there. It is clear that Manny’s work is integral to the functioning of the high society of actors and producers. Evidently, the success and progress of those at the peak of the movie business necessarily comes with damage it leaves behind. Even when Manny is invited to work for Jack on set, he is the one sent to deal with furious workers on strike, on his own. He is chased around the set by them. During the filming of a scene, one of the extras is killed by a prop, and the producers act as if this is a common occurrence. Symbolically, during the party, the elephant is used to distract the party guests so a (different) dead body can be carried out of the party. 

 Later on, the public’s desire for the exciting and new technology for sound in films leads to the end of the silent film era. Jack eventually realises, after wrestling with the fact, that this means his end as well. He cannot seem to find success in sound, in one scene he looks on as filmgoers laugh at his performance in his latest drama. In a conversation with a journalist, she tells him that no matter what he did, they would have laughed at him. He was in the spotlight during the silent film era, and so when that era dissipates, he must as well. Because of his position years ago, he has no future. This seems illogical and unjust. But Jack comes to realise that it is necessary. Progress relies on destruction. In this case, he takes the damage from the introduction of sound. He continues with life calmly and without resentment, in a tragic acceptance of his own irrelevance to the future. His story ends in an extravagant hotel. After drinks with friends from his past life, he goes upstairs, generously tipping the waiter on the way, before committing suicide. 

There is nothing Jack could have done differently. He was swept up with the rise of silent films and fell with it. In the end, he is discarded by the necessary course of history, with no-one and nothing to blame. He has to struggle with the strength of his emotions against the empty, ambivalent course of progress. It is more important than him, in fact, he was one of the biggest advocates of introducing the technology for sound. This is the absurdity of Jack’s situation. His story during the sound era, for us and for him, resists interpretation. There is nothing he can rationally attribute his emotions to. His loss of societal importance comes with a loss of importance in the story. There is no meaning he can give his situation, he has merely been discarded by history and deprived of importance. He is stuck in a place whether nothing has meaning. He kills himself because he cannot find a solution to this. 

 The absurdity of Jack’s story is exemplified in a different way by the story of Manny and Nellie. They rise to prominence in the film industry just before the technology for sound is introduced, and so don’t fall with it as Jack Conrad does. However, they too struggle with the progression of the industry. They can never truly live up to the standards of progress, and are continually in a space where their value is questioned. The pressures of the film industry and the public eye illustrate this. Nellie is constantly criticised for her voice, lifestyle, and general demeanour. Manny also has to deal with being an immigrant in early 20th-century America. As described earlier, he has to deal with mistreatment in his job in the film industry. In one scene on a set where everyone is using sound technology for the first time, we watch as Nellie (now an actor) and everyone else gradually become more frustrated as something different happens to go wrong each take. By the end, they are all in a primal rage, with one of the producers making threats to anyone who causes something to go wrong. When it does go right, it hasn’t been filmed because the man in the recording booth dies as a result of the heat in it. His appeals to this had been ignored during the scene. What this scene perfectly illustrates, is that Nellie will never be enough in the eyes of progress. Her and Manny are constantly in a state of imbalance. Whatever they choose to do, there is some indeterminate problem with it. They cannot successfully position themselves in society. Progress, since it is constantly moving, cannot carry anyone with it. This leaves people unable to define themselves against it. 

 The result of this is that Manny and Nellie start to lose themselves. Across the film, we see Manny get more and more obsessed with success and functionality, and similarly his moral degradation. Nellie, having always believed that she is a star, finds herself struggling to be one in the industry. Her character is, over time, looked down on in the public eye. She gets too involved in gambling and drugs. This causes trouble for Manny and Nellie. Consequently, by the end of the film, Nellie has died, and Manny has escaped from L.A. 

 It is important that Nellie says that she is a star, because her rapid and seemingly easy rise to fame seem to suggest that she is. However, in the film we have a paradox where she will always be a star, until she won’t. Progress is continually changing our metric of self-judgement. What was her identity is unstable, and must change as society progresses. This is Manny and Nellie’s absurdity. 

 The film rejects question as to whether the progress was worth it. There are two scenes which exemplify this. The first comes at the hour mark in the movie. It comes after pure chaos, with the party scene, all the jobs Manny has been assigned, multiple deaths, and a lot of substance abuse. Then, we see the end result of this. All of this has been leading up to the final shot, both in Jack’s film and Nellie’s film. In Jack’s film, we watch as a butterfly lands on him with the sunset in the distance. In Nellie’s, we watch as a single tear falls from her face. After the relentless chaos of the first hour, these are moments where time seems to stand still, as the music fades out and the shots fill our screens. 

 The second scene comes at the end of the film. Years after Manny has escaped from his past life, he comes back to Hollywood. He decides to watch a film. He watches ’Singin’ in the Rain’, which portrays the struggles with adapting to sound in film that he also experiences. The lives of him and Nellie, captured on film, flash in front of his eyes. At this point, he breaks down crying.

 We cannot say that Manny sees the end-product, the film, as worth it. He has experienced the death of Nellie. He is a fugitive. However, he also cannot say that it wasn’t worth it. Experiencing his own life through the medium of film, years after the fact, shows him the beauty of it, just like how the shots at the hour mark in the film were beautiful. When asked if he misses the silence, before sound in films, Jack Conrad says that it cannot get in the way of progress. 

 This is the absurdity of progress. It is necessary, but it isn’t good in this way. It is inherently destructive, but it isn’t bad in this way. All the suffering the characters in ‘Babylon’ results in a beauty; it is impossible say whether this beauty was worth it or not. Beauty and suffering are entirely different categories. It is beyond evaluation, and beyond interpretation. At any point in our progression as a society, we don’t know where to go. We don’t know whether a particular change will be beneficial or harmful, in fact, the question makes no sense. We don’t have the tools to make that kind of judgement at the time. This is what is, I think, the beauty of cinema is to Damien Chazelle. It operates in a space beyond normative judgements. Perhaps this is why critics as a whole found it so easy to call the film good and bad.