The Movie-est Movie about Movie-making

On Babylon, Jafar Panahi's No Bears, and Movies about Movie-making

There’s nothing Hollywood people love more than talking about Hollywood. (See: last week’s Academy Awards broadcast.) Perhaps this explains why a lot of Hollywood gossip has made its way to the silver screen in recent years. Take the story of Player X in Molly’s Game (2017): an unnamed celebrity actor who gets off on seeding and financially ruining his fellow black market poker players. If you’re as obscenely curious as I am, as soon as the credits rolled, you probably caught yourself wondering, “Which celebrity is the mysterious Player X?” A quick search provides the answer: every millennial’s favorite Spiderman, Tobey Maguire. Open this article from The Ringer and you’ll find the names of even more celebrities who made their way into Bloom’s black market poker ring: Leonardo DiCaprio, Ben Affleck, Alex Rodriguez, the Olsen Twins, and so on. Not to mention, the movie is itself an entertainment industry spectacle: adapted and directed by celebrity screenwriter Aaron Sorkin, starring prestigious actors Jessica Chastian as Molly Bloom, Jeremy Strong (increasingly the subject of gossip himself) as Bloom’s first Hollywood boss, Idris Elba as her lawyer, Kevin Costner as her father, and Michael Cera as the notorious Player X. 

So, while the movie isn’t about Hollywood – more like adjacent to it – Molly’s Game is a microcosm of the closed loop ecosystem in which stories about Hollywood become plot material for Hollywood films, which then become fodder for more gossip about Hollywood. The 2022 Academy Award nominees list flattered several films of this variety, from Marilyn Monroe biopic, Blonde, to Steven Spielberg’s autobiographical work, The Fablemans, to Sam Mendes’s celebration of the cinema itself, Empire of Light. But were these films part of a category all their own, Damien Chazelle’s fictionalization of pre-code era Hollywood lore, Babylon, would no doubt win the Oscar for “Most Movie About Movies” during the 2023 broadcast. 

He could have also won this hypothetical category in 2016 for his critical and commercial smash La La Land, which proved, only a few years into his career, that he indeed loved movies more than anyone (or at least until Quentin Tarantino insisted he loved them most in 2019 with Once Upon a Time in Hollywood). Even his first film Whiplash (2014) was a toe-dip into the category, featuring a prominent scene in which Andrew (Miles Teller) – like the protagonist of a Regal Cinemas ad – asks a movie theater concessions stand attendant out for drinks. His relationship with the attendant is the one aspect of Andrew’s life that humanizes him in the greater context of his pathological commitment to jazz drumming. That’s because for Chazelle, the glory of the movie theater always overshadows the struggles his characters endure in their day-to-day lives, whether it’s dodging chairs thrown by “character actor” J.K. Simmons or Emma Stone lamenting the sparse attendance at her one-woman show. In both Whiplash and La La Land the characters obsess over two things: the movies and making it in their chosen professions. Babylon is no different. As Manuel “Manny” Torres (Diego Calva) exclaims early in the film, “I always wanted to be a part of something bigger. Something that lasts, that means something. Something more important than life.” In other words: the movies. 

The film opens with Manny struggling to tow an elephant uphill to a Hollywood mansion with the help of a couple 1920s vehicles (read: not Ford Broncos) when the animal voids its bowels all over him. But that’s ok because he eventually makes it uphill and cleans up just in time to work the drug-fueled Hollywood mansion party where he meets the two people who will change his life: the ambitious young actress Nellie LaRoy (Margot Robbie) and legendary silent film star Jack Conrad (Brad Pitt). 

He meets Nellie over a mound of cocaine then follows her out to the dance floor where she performs some suggestive dance moves in a revealing red dress. But before he gets caught staring, Manny is pulled into a room where an actress has overdosed. Quickly, he masterminds a plan to lead the elephant that shat on him through a crowd of horny socialites, topless women, and jazz musicians so as to provide a distraction for two Hollywood henchmen to carry the actress’s corpse out a back door. In the midst of their debacle Nellie’s red dress catches the eye of a studio executive who orders one of the henchmen to let her know she has been hired to replace the dead actress on a film to be shot the next day. She tells Manny the news of her big break then drives off into the sunrise, leaving him mystified and hopeful in his eighth hour of overtime. But work doesn’t stop for him just yet. 

Next, Manny is tasked with driving a hungover Jack Conrad home. When they arrive at his mansion, Conrad gives Manny his own big break: an opportunity to work on his silent film set that afternoon. Manny accepts, which ushers in the next portion of the movie: cross-cuts between Conrad’s disastrous war movie shoot – featuring a crowd of extras pulled off the streets of Skid Row who literally cut each other open with swords and spears in the course of enacting a medieval battle – and Nellie’s shoot as she tries to nail a single tear take on a saloon set while the stages around her burn to the ground. Both Conrad and Nellie pull off miraculous performances as does Manny who comes to the rescue with a film camera just minutes before the crew loses the daylight necessary for capturing their climactic take. The whole sequence ends with Nellie’s single tear close-up and Conrad’s majestic sunset kiss received through Manny’s awestruck face. He is us, the audience, basking in the glory of a cinematic miracle born from chaos. 

These moments comprise just the first hour of the film during which one can’t help but wonder how much creative license was taken with the realities of the past. According to Chazelle a shocking amount of the events portrayed in the film do have some historical basis including the debaucherous partying and reckless film set safety standards. Really the fiction comes from suggesting that all of these events happened to the same characters over the same twenty four hours, or implying said events were representative of the period as a whole. But that is often what a Hollywood treatment is: hyperbolic history that hand-picks the juiciest bits of research and mines them for all their entertainment value. In case it isn’t clear from the descriptions above, Chazelle is pretty masterful at this. 

Babylon has a relentless energy to it that is a direct result of how Chazelle writes a screenplay and translates that bland document into a thrilling audiovisual experience. One scene in which Nellie LaRoy tries to deliver a monologue in her first sound film without blowing out the mic, missing her mark, or forgetting her lines, is a prime display of how much he can do with a scene that, in lesser hands, could wear on the audience the fourth time the director preemptively yells cut. But in his hands it’s all quite thrilling – or at least until one starts asking questions about what the movie is trying to say about the time period it concerns itself with.

Take the numerous abuses and tragedies that populate the final two hours of the film. As isolated anecdotes they read as an indictment of the era, from a camera operator dying of heat stroke after being forced to sit in an unventilated film booth against his will, to Manny coercing Sidney Palmer (Jovan Adepo), a Black Jazz musician with a minor plot in the film, into darkening his complexion with blackface to contradict a spotlight above him. The same could be said of each protagonist’s fall from grace. The arrival of sound ends Conrad’s silent film career and leads him into a depression from which he never recovers; LaRoy’s fame, gambling debts, and drug use send her spiraling towards an early death; and Manny’s fondness for LaRoy leads him into an altercation with some loan sharks who run him out of town after threatening his life. 

Appropriately, the leader of this loan shark group is played by Tobey Maguire.

Call it a Molly’s Game easter egg: the real life life-wrecker of Hollywood gossip columns playing the life-wrecker in a cinematic retelling of early Hollywood lore. His appearance in the final hour sends the movie off the rails, mostly for the sake of wrapping things up in the most entertaining and tragic way possible. Were the film to end after the Maguire episode, it may have felt like a critical assessment of the pitfalls of that era despite the entertainment value the film extracted from the brutal work conditions of earlier scenes. Perhaps this critical take could have been solidified with a denouement illustrating how the behind-the-scenes history of early Hollywood still has an impact on the way movies are made today. But Chazelle goes a different way with his ending.

Twenty years later, Manny returns to Hollywood and visits a movie theater where they’re screening the ultimate movie-about-movie-making: Singing in the Rain (1952). In interpreting clips of the film through Manny’s gaze, we realize that Chazelle deliberately wrote ideas from Singing in the Rain into the first two hours of Babylon in order to later evoke those same ideas through the relatively sanitized lens of the classic film. Interestingly, the tactic reveals a chasm between history (according to Babylon) and Hollywood’s interpretation of it while simultaneously evoking Manny’s personal connection to the story on screen by reminding us of moments he experienced with Conrad and LaRoy. As composer Justin Hurwitz’s jazz track comes in, the film cuts to a montage of significant moments in film history starting with Eadweard Muybridge’s Horse-in-Motion (1878) then moving forward in time from Un Chien Andalou (1929) to The Wizard of Oz (1939) to Persona (1966) and so forth. But the montage takes a turn following Godard’s famous “End of Cinema” title card from Weekend (1967) after which Chazelle begins layering in film clips whose innovations are no longer a mix of artistic achievements and cinematic innovations, but purely technological accomplishments ranging from unwatchable Tron (1982) computer graphics to James Cameron’s ode-to-CGI Avatar (2009).

The montage reads as a submission to technological innovation, as if motion capture were the defining artistic achievement of cinema in the twenty-first century. Although Chazelle isn’t a user of motion capture himself, the endorsement would make sense given that technical expertise has been the defining feature of his career thus far. It’s how he made it as a precocious young filmmaker and it’s how his characters make it in Whiplash and La La Land. But the film bath images that follow, interspersed with close-ups of Conrad, Manny, and LaRoy saturated in primary colors, complicate the meaning of the montage in another direction. Is the film purist in Chazelle cleansing his palette of the CGI with the elemental nostalgia of celluloid, insisting that technological changes have in many ways ruined cinema? Or is he juxtaposing the images of his own film against those of film history to manufacture a nostalgia for the images we consumed over the past three hours? The abstract nature of the montage eludes any easy explanation, but it doesn’t really matter, because Manny’s reaction to it all tells the audience how it’s supposed to react: tears of joy. Despite everything that happened, he has seen his story on the big screen and that is all that matters. 

The movie never explains where this belief in the innate goodness of filmmaking comes from, but it is taken for granted by all of Chazelle’s characters. As Eleanor (Jean Smart), the gossip columnist of the film, tells Jack Conrad after writing the article that ended his time in the limelight: don’t worry, “in a hundred years, anytime someone throws a frame of yours through a sprocket you will be alive again… Your time today is through but you will spend eternity with angels and ghosts.” It is a very romantic view that temporarily reassures Conrad who thanks her for the new perspective; he can rest easy because he has been captured on celluloid, which is (apparently) a good in itself. As Guy DeBord said in Society of the Spectacle, “That which appears is good; that which is good appears.”

It isn’t a very fair exercise, but let’s juxtapose this perspective on filmmaking to the one on display in No Bears – the best film of 2022 – for the sake of imagining what a better film about filmmaking could look like. No Bears follows the Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi as he directs a film remotely from a small Iranian village while his cast and crew shoot said film just across the Turkish border. It seems like a silly way to direct a movie, but because the Iranian government banned him from traveling abroad in 2010, Panahi has no other choice. 

The villagers are immediately skeptical of his presence, worried he will bring unwanted government eyeballs to the region, but the drama really kicks in the moment he starts taking photos of the villagers. As one old woman tells Panahi when he asks to take her picture: Don’t... Nothing good will come of it. It turns out, she’s right. Later, when a child reports that he witnessed Panahi taking a controversial photograph, Panahi becomes embroiled in a local conflict. The village reaction to the photograph is extreme (farcical at best) as Panahi is harassed about it over-and-over again even after he denies its existence. Meanwhile, across the border, Panahi’s remote film shoot deals with a drama all its own that implicates the director in a separate controversy. Central to all of this drama is Panahi’s status as a filmmaker. Even as he tries his best to stay out of personal affairs, his presence and the camera’s presence stir up dramas in the village and across the border that could not exist without him. Both conflicts reflect the compromised nature of Panahi’s profession back at him even as the subject matter of the film is a plain examination of the oppressive nature of Iranian traditions, gender politics, and state censorship. The film is compelling because he questions these systems of power as rigorously as he questions his own power as a filmmaker through the story. The result is a film worth discussing long after the credits roll, especially as Panahi’s imprisonment, hunger strike, and recent discharge make headlines beside anti-government and anti-hijab protests across Iran. 

There is a real gravity to Panahi’s film that comes with the context of its production and the real world political implications of its subject matter. Not all films need to, or ought to, aspire to that level of art. There is a time and a place for mindless entertainment. It’s called Selling Sunset. But films that reveal the glory of filmmaking as their central motivating belief ought to be criticized for the gratuitous navel-gazing they represent.

Unlike Panahi’s No Bears, the driving vision behind Babylon is a sentimentality for movies no matter the injustices suffered in the course of their realization. We are told that his characters’ obsessions with making it are warranted because a movie is, as Manny says, “Something that lasts, that means something. Something more important than life.” It doesn’t matter what the content of the picture is or what experiences the filmmaker brings to it. That it appears is enough. So, when Babylon shows us the behind-the-scenes realities of its time period, even in hyperbolic fashion, it doesn't do so to critique the culture that enabled those corrupt labor practices. It does so to say, “Gee that was a wild ride, but boy was it worth it in the end!” 

It is curious that the film wasn’t nominated for Best Picture considering how closely Chazelle’s vision aligns with the spirit of that ceremony. Perhaps his final montage was a bit too experimental for Academy voters who did not appreciate seeing vulgar depictions of the institutions they look to for social justice. (This might also explain why the academy overlooked She Said for any nominations.) To Chazelle’s credit, at least he sees how systemic misbehavior is essential to understanding Hollywood as a place. The problem is his film lacks a moral, political, or ethical perspective on any of it, which is the height of privilege in the filmmaking world: to spend millions of dollars on a production that can only appreciate the fact of its own existence.