On Babylon (2022), the Blockhouse, Spectacle and Violence
Damien Chazelle’s 2022 Babylon is a boom-time meditation on spectacle and violence.
On first blush Babylon is a sort of epic overview of the gilded age of pre-Hays Code silent films. Decadent in the extreme, the film follows the fortunes of four characters as they rise to fame. The brash stars, wild parties, and cowboy vision of California, invite us to revel in the roaring twenties with full enthusiasm.
There’s an interpretive microcosm though, through the figure of James McKay (Tobey Maguire) — resident drug kingpin of Los Angeles. Our encounter with him reworlds the film and inverts our unreflective enjoyment.
Manny Torres (Diego Calva), a parvenu Studio Executive and one of the principal fortune seekers, visits McKay to settle a gambling debt racked up by his muse and fellow traveller Nellie LaRoy (Margot Robbie).
After consuming a cocktail of ether and alcohol, the group heads “just over the hill” to a site called “the Blockhouse” to meet “the world’s most fearless warrior” at “LA’s last real party.”
After a lost-highway driving montage, they arrive at the mouth of a seemingly abandoned mine—the “asshole of Los Angeles.”
Passing through the entrance, we find a sort of Dante’s Inferno of sadism and animal cruelty—Joseph Merrick chained to the walls, naked writhing men in bondage, children in cages, and an alligator chained deep underground.
McKay beckons Manny deeper, with the promise of entertainment and fortune: “this town has gotten so repressed, this is the only place you can have any real fun” — “wait till we see this guy. I think we can make millions together.”
What do we find?
A rat-eating Moloch king.
The dissonance of the scene is that as viewers, we’re unsure how to assess McKay’s aesthetic sensibilities. Is he as a miss-calibrated psychopath — Taxi Driver’s Travis Bickle inviting Betsy to a pornographic cinema — or a visionary? Does McKay correctly assess our appetites for a Boschean hell, or are his neutrons misfiring?
The fact is that the entirety of Babylon up to this point, has been a spectacle of sadism and animal cruelty and we’ve been loving it.
The opening scene is an elephant en route to a decadent party, scared literally shitless by the lurching and precarious attempts to drive it up and over a hill. At the party, we bear witness to the human-animal of the first time actresses, overdosed and exported, to be dumped at some emergency room.
The chaotic field of Kinescope film production is a surface of hyper-cruelty: the battlefield at rest shows a path of dead horses and a film-extra impaled. Manny’s rite of passage into the world of film making is to mount a horse and bust an incipient union of skid-row junkies. During a lull in the action, the bourgeois film critic asks an actor if he’s married, for him only to reply that ‘I had a wife, but she died’ — hinting at either a death of misery in the armpit of Los Angeles, or maybe just as plausibly, some production accident in front of the lens.
Even in the transition to ‘talkies’ the conditions of production have their casualties—the camera man in the sound box, or the suicide of our leading man.
All of the cruelty is a product of the unfeeling velocity of the call of power. The sun is setting, there are dollars to be made, and unless we can cow these junkies, we aren’t going to make them. The cavalier directors, the power brokering studio executives, do what needs to be done, and we the audience delight in their total freedom.
Back again to McKay—he seems placed here to remind us that the spectacle of sadism we’ve witnessed in the Blockhouse is the spectacle of sadism we’ve been delighting in for the preceding two hours and thirty minutes.
Paired with the closing montage of the history of cinema from Muybridge to the present day, we’re called to project the recognition of spectacle and violence forward and backward in time—whether to the present, in OpenAI powered content-moderation sweatshops, or before film to London bear-pits, or the age of gladiators.
I’m particularly fascinated by the convergence of ‘shot on iPhone’ content production, ‘democratized’ distribution, and content aggregators (Twitter) that have delivered a peerless spectacle of snuff content via the war in Ukraine.
The forces of the Hays code might have tempered the overt pageant of suffering for a few years, but as McKay reminds us, it’s the violence that’s the star.