
Babylon, director Damien Chazelle’s latest film, a tribute to Hollywood’s sleazy underbelly starring Brad Pitt and Margot Robbie, was plainly intended to upset its audience.
From countless lines of cocaine to a penis pogo stick and a golden shower, elephant dung to orgies – and that’s only in the first 15 minutes – this is not a subtle film.
Many moviegoers may find such scenes repulsive, but Chazelle must be congratulated for going all out in his representation of the excesses and tragedies that occurred during the American film industry’s shift from silent to sound.
This era has been depicted in films before (Hollywood loves nothing more than Hollywood), most famously the classic 1952 MGM musical Singin’ in the Rain.
Although it was undoubtedly a huge inspiration for Oscar-winning writer-director Damien Chazelle, who paid a lighter homage to it and many other classic cinema musicals in La La Land, Babylon is almost the anti-Singin’ in the Rain.
Along with the lovingly referenced struggles of Jean Hagen’s spoiled silent movie star Lina Lamont in that film by Robbie’s starlet Nellie LaRoy here, you can hardly imagine Debbie Reynolds vowing to shove some cocaine into a rather intimate place or Gene Kelly waking from a drunken stupor to head straight to set, before getting completely sozzled again at work.

Babylon revels in the most base aspects of human nature, leading us to Nellie’s insane snake struggle and, later, Tobey Maguire’s terrifyingly ashen-faced and crazed mobster, James McKay.
It may appear absurd – and in the years following the implementation of the Motion Picture Production Code, Hollywood became far more adept at cleaning up after itself, hushed scandals, and staying on the right side of newly-installed censors – but much of it is based on enduring, nearly-100-year-old gossip and urban legend, if not fact.
A lot of this could be interpreted as indulgence, especially in the context of a big, three-hour-plus film, but Babylon will be a major part of the 2023 cinema discussion, and one audience members are unlikely to want to miss out on, even if they don’t personally adore it.
It has already performed poorly in the United States, flopping at the box office, but it has received a number of Golden Globe nominations and won one, for best score.
Chazelle’s years of research, dedication, and passion for his topic, which he has put into Babylon, are also not to be overlooked.
In an interview, actress Jean Smart, who plays prominent Hollywood journalist Elinor St John, alluded to the film’s contentiousness.
After acknowledging that the film’s ‘X-rated’ nature’shocked’ her when she initially read the script, she went on to say, ‘I truly believe, whether you love it or hate it, this movie is going to be required watching in every film school for decades.’
It may be claimed that the film features content centred on shock for the purpose of shock, particularly some stomach-turning projectile vomiting reminiscent of Hot Tub Time Machine.
Some cinema purists may object to leading man Jack Conrad’s (Pitt) suggested take on the classic ‘Frankly, my darling, I don’t give a damn’ line from Gone with the Wind.
You’re also hard to forget what producer Manny Torres (Diego Calva) is subjected to in ‘the Blockhouse’ by the malevolent McKay.
These additions can feel a little deceptive in their sensationalism at times, and they are certain to alienate some viewers, but Babylon is merely living up to its name.
Despite being a place of great cultural and intellectual significance as part of ancient Mesopotamia, Babylon has become synonymous with sin, depravity, and excess as a result of its unfavourable portrayal in the Bible.

The notion of Babylon has already been associated to Hollywood.
Several assertions from Kenneth Anger’s famed scandal-filled ‘exposé’ Hollywood Babylon, first published in 1959 and briefly banned in the United States, are evident inspirations for this Babylon.
Despite the fact that many of the stories have since been denounced or dismissed as distorted or exaggerated versions of reality, they persist, and the film even begins almost immediately with a nod to one of Hollywood’s biggest scandals of the 1920s, involving successful screen comedian Fatty Arbuckle and the death of aspiring actress Virginia Rappe after they partied together.
As a result, it’s clear that Babylon isn’t for the faint of heart. However, Chazelle’s ambition, as well as his dedication to casting a light on the darker side of Hollywood history, is to be appreciated, urging modern-day moviegoers to look into some of this themselves and appreciate how movies got to where they are now.
The writer-director was eager to show the severity of a cutthroat industry that could easily leave its finest stars behind if they couldn’t cut it.
‘Hollywood underwent a series of rapid and at times seemingly cataclysmic changes in the ‘20s, and some people survived, but many didn’t. In today’s terms, we’d call it disruption,’ Chazelle has said of his inspiration for the movie.


‘You look at what these people went through, and it gives you a sense of the human cost that accompanied the kind of ambition that attracted so many people to Los Angeles at that time.’
Chazelle is also cautious not to gloss over the period’s overt prejudice, with Lady Fay Zhu (Li Jun Li), a figure inspired by the pioneering Anna May Wong, fighting to acquire a foothold in Hollywood.
Sidney Palmer (Jovan Adepo), a black jazz trumpeter, is also presented as being beckoned into the spotlight once sound arrives to cinema, only to be humiliated in one of the film’s most uncomfortable but poignant scenes owing to Hollywood’s hesitation to rock the boat in the segregated South.
Babylon is a celebration of how far cinema has come in the last century, with a nod to all those who pioneered in previous decades, such as real-life figure and MGM producer Irving Thalberg (one of few to appear under their real name in the movie, and portrayed by Max Minghella).
The film’s performance in the United States should not dissuade filmgoers from experiencing Babylon’s questionable delights, however polarising they may be.
Babylon is in cinemas now.