Babylon · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

A sound stage, 1929. The camera has been shut inside a padded box so the microphone won't hear its motor turn. An actress has to hit a mark she can't look down to find, because two steps wrong puts her outside the microphone's small circle of hearing. One take dies on a cough. One on a lamp. One on a sneeze. Then one dies on a misstep that is fatal. The scene is funny for a long stretch and then it stops being funny, and by the end you understand what happened to the movies around 1929 in your body rather than as a fact: an art that had just learned to fly got nailed into a box and told to hold still.

Keep the box. Chazelle builds the whole film out of the difference between what is inside it and what is outside.

Deleuze had a useful way of naming that difference. He called the shot a mobile section: not a rectangle of space but a slice of movement, camera and bodies moving together so that the movement registers a change in the whole world of the film. Linus Sandgren shoots the silent era as mobile section at full throttle, a camera swooping across open desert while productions shoot in raw daylight and the widescreen frame is packed to its edges with incident. The sound stage is the opposite, what Deleuze called the closed set: the frame as a sealed system in which every element is a variable that can destroy you. Chazelle's actual invention here is to make the photography carry the historical argument rather than illustrate it. The camera does not describe the loss of freedom. It undergoes it.

But mobility is not the film's engine. Appetite is.

Deleuze reserved a category for films driven by hunger rather than by decision, the impulse-image, and his cases were Stroheim and Buñuel: filmmakers who set up a furnished social world and then reveal it as a crust over something older. Two terms do the work. The derived milieu is the world as it presents itself, here the backlots and mansions and contracts and columns of an industry. The originary world is what that milieu is the surface of, a zone of raw drives where people stop being agents with goals and become bundles of appetite. Babylon keeps letting the second show through the first. The desert mansion bacchanal is not a party scene; it is the originary world with a band. And when the film descends, late, into a subterranean labyrinth of vice beneath Los Angeles presided over by a cadaverous host, that is not a genre swerve. It is the floor the movie has been standing on the entire time, finally lit.

This is also the best answer to the standard complaint that the film's tone will not hold still. Drives do not observe genre. Comedy and horror are often the same event at two speeds. And naturalism, for Deleuze, always runs downhill, along what he called the line of slope: an irreversible degradation toward exhaustion and death. Babylon's decade-long structure is that slope with a long runway. Every ascent it stages is a setup for entropy. Nellie LaRoy is pure kinetic charisma, ungovernable, and control is exactly what the new medium demands and she cannot supply. The film celebrates its strivers first so that their consumption costs you something.

Two more tools, and these are for watching rather than judging. Deleuze used dividual for a crowd rendered as a single affective unit instead of a collection of persons, which is precisely what Sandgren's long weaving takes do to the party: the bacchanal breathes as one organism, and nobody in it is yet a character. Against that he sets what Deleuze called a dicisign, the camera perceiving someone who is perceiving. Manny is that someone. The staging is deliberately overloaded, bodies and animals and props and simultaneous action jammed edge to edge, so that watching the film means doing what Manny does, hunting the meaningful gesture inside noise. The density is not showing off. It is a training exercise.

Jack Conrad belongs to a different concept. Deleuze described a crystalline structure he found in Visconti, in which an ordered, aristocratic world decomposes from within and its inhabitants grasp what is happening too late to use the knowledge. That is Conrad exactly: wounded, self-aware, obsolete on a timetable he can read but not alter. The debt is explicit. Sunset Boulevard's silent star in gothic decay feeds straight into him.

The other debts are just as specific. The sound-stage sequence is the Dueling Cavalier gag from Singin' in the Rain restaged as a slaughter, the same hidden microphone, the same failing sync, with the laugh replaced by a body. The title and the method come from Intolerance: Griffith's colossal Babylon set, and the cross-cutting between eras that Deleuze treated as the American school's organic montage, are the template for both the mountaintop revels and the final reel's leap across film history. La Dolce Vita supplies the rhythm of nocturnal parties escalating and curdling. The Day of the Locust supplies the grotesque underworld tableaux. 8½ supplies the license to make a film whose subject is the machinery of making films.

The finale is the wager. It collapses a century into a few minutes, cutting the story's emotional climax against the medium's history, and it operates on what Deleuze, taking the idea from Bergson, called the Open: montage does not merely join shots, it determines a whole that keeps changing and never closes. Chazelle's claim is that the Open here is cinema itself, and that no single career is commensurate with it. The people become compost. The art keeps growing. Whether that reads as consolation or as an obscenity is the question the film declines to settle for you, and it is a real question, not a coy one. He shot the argument on 35mm while making it.

Then the irony the film did not plan. Babylon cost tentpole money, was original, was made for adults, underperformed, and is now routinely cited as proof that such pictures cannot be financed. A movie about an industry that consumes its people got consumed. Its thesis acquired a footnote it would rather not have.

Watch it again for the camera. Notice where it is free to move, notice the moment that freedom is taken away, and notice how long Chazelle makes you wait before he gives it back.