Babylon

The Elephant in the Dream Factory

I remember sitting in the theater as the opening minutes of Babylon unspooled, watching a terrified elephant literally defecate onto the lens, and thinking: well, we are certainly not in La La Land anymore. (Damien Chazelle wants to make sure we know it, too.) It's a combative, almost hostile opening. The screen is immediately drenched in sweat, urine, and cocaine.

This is not just provocation for the sake of it, though it sometimes feels that way. It's a statement of physical fact. To make art in 1920s Hollywood, Chazelle argues, you had to be willing to be degraded.

The film functions as a kind of black-hearted crypto-remake of Singin' in the Rain. Both films document the seismic, catastrophic shift from silent pictures to "talkies," but where Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly gave us a cheerful tap-dance over the graves of obsolete stars, Chazelle shows us the bodies. The transition was not just a technological upgrade.

It was a mass extinction event for a specific breed of feral, improvisational artist. Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian noted that the film is "thinking big, aiming big, acting big – but feeling small, and finally ordering us to care about the celluloid magic," and I think that's half right. Chazelle is demanding our reverence, yes, but he's also pointing out the sheer absurdity of worshipping a machine that grinds people into dust.