Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Babylon
2022 · Damien Chazelle · Babylon on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 3 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Watch the camera weave through the opening party without stopping. (camera)
Linus Sandgren threads long, near-continuous takes through the crowd at the desert mansion, treating hundreds of bodies as one heaving organism. Nobody is a character yet. The frame is packed to its edges.
Payoff: Movement rather than dialogue is doing the introductions, and you are being trained to hunt for a face inside noise. In the reading: dividual. A crowd rendered as one feeling unit is what the reading calls the dividual, and the long take is what makes it one.
Look at how much is happening at the edges of each frame. (staging)
Florencia Martin and Mary Zophres crowd every shot with bodies, animals, props, and simultaneous action. Manny is usually the person inside the shot scanning all of it, trying to find the thing that matters.
Payoff: The density is a training exercise. You end up watching the way Manny watches, sorting signal out of chaos.
Notice when the camera stops moving on the sound stage. (camera)
It gets shut inside a padded box so the microphone cannot hear its motor turn. Actors hit marks they are not allowed to look down for. Takes fail on a cough, a lamp, a sneeze.
Payoff: Chazelle makes the photography carry the history. The camera does not describe a loss of freedom. It undergoes one.
Listen for Hurwitz's brass theme returning across the whole film. (sound)
Justin Hurwitz's propulsive jazz runs under parties, shoots, and arguments alike, loud enough to blur into the crowd noise. Then early sound recording demands total quiet, and the film takes the music away.
Payoff: The score behaves like a character with its own appetite. Notice which scenes it is not allowed into.
Watch Robbie's body. She almost never holds still. (performance)
Nellie cries on command, dances past exhaustion, and throws herself at whatever is in reach. Pitt plays Conrad the opposite way, wounded and controlled, a man reading his own timetable.
Payoff: One performer runs on instinct, the other on craft. The new technology has a preference, and you can see it arriving.
Once you have seen it
Watch the descent beneath Los Angeles and what fills those rooms. (staging)
Chazelle drops the film into a subterranean labyrinth of vice with a cadaverous host presiding. It plays as horror, and every detail in it rhymes with the mansion party that opened the picture.
Payoff: This is the floor the film has been standing on the whole time, finally lit. In the reading: originary-world. The reading calls this the originary world: a zone of raw appetite that the studios, contracts, and mansions were only a crust over.
Track how each career peaks, then track what comes after. (structure)
Chazelle celebrates every striver before he spends them. Across a decade the film stages ascent after ascent, and not one of the falls reverses. The direction is set from the first party onward.
Payoff: The film builds your affection for these people so that their consumption costs you something when the industry moves on. In the reading: entropy / degradation. The reading calls this a line of slope: an irreversible run downhill toward exhaustion, with every rise built as its setup.
Count the films you recognize in the closing montage. (cutting)
Tom Cross cuts a century of cinema into a few minutes against the story's last emotional beat. Clips, pastiches, and colors from pictures made decades later pile up with no explanation offered.
Payoff: Chazelle's claim is that no single career measures against the art it fed. Whether that consoles you is left open.
Carry this in: Watch the camera. Notice where it moves freely, when that freedom is taken away, and how long before it comes back.