Who survives in babylon?

A friend of mine watched Damien Chazelle's Babylon last week, and it's been on my brain since.

This is a best case scenario, since I have Babylon in the camp of movies that don't fully hang together as a watch, but remain full of ideas to mull over. That's not to say that I dislike it--in fact, I find the first, call it, 45 minutes (up through the "Hello, college!" scene) electric, and its closing 40ish a fantastic nightmare come to life before ending on one of the great movie montages. And it's well-acted enough and lovingly shot throughout, to say nothing of that score. The teensy-weensy challenge is that I'm praising 85 minutes when Babylon clocks in a whooping 3 hours.

Such a length makes sense for what Babylon's doing, though. The movie tracks the rises, falls, and in-betweens of breakout starlet Nellie LaRoy (Margot Robbie), silent movie megawatt Jack Conrad (Brad Pitt), and Manny Torres (Diego Calva)'s ascent from gofer to producer during Hollywood's chaotic transition from silent pictures to talkies across the 1920s and '30s, and Chazelle hits every coke-sweat drenched orgy, evolving film set, and terse interview along the way. This works for the uproarious, intoxicating "It don't get better than this!" debauchery of the first act, but cools as we enter the thinner second act.

On one hand, I think Chazelle struggles in the middle of his movies. La La Land in particular hit a crawl somewhere around "City of Stars" it only shakes out of with an all-timer ending, but on the other hand, Babylon's middle section lethargy makes story sense. All three characters feel the squeeze that the simultaneous introductions of sound and a tighter set of morals bring to Hollywood, and the second act asks them, how do you live after Babylon?

Lately, I've been thinking about how and where I interact online. This isn't a unique thought; as the already feckless dweebs in charge of everything have gotten even shittier, there have been conversations abound about which hills to run to. Does your facebook special interest group or Messenger chat leave for Discord? How do you pivot from Twitter to Bluesky? How do you determine who to give your number out to for texting instead of DMing on Instagram? The internet's communication channels have calcified over the last...call it 12-15 years from a wild west of message boards, blogs, forums, and chatrooms to the same like, half-dozen apps where half of them can be spun out from one account. If you use any of them enough, uprooting that infrastructure, even for sound reasons, isn't without tradeoffs.

For instance, fucking Instagram. It's never been my most used social, but it's quietly become my most useful one in terms of finding out about local shit that I care about, staying up on world news, and I use Stories all the damn time both for posting whatever and as a way to maintain and build friendships with people I meet irl (plus my Stories are, in the long view, a surprisingly accurate transition timeline, but that's for another time). And as I've gone to more local writing events or queer events, those uses have only compounded as it's become my default social for new connections. It's the bitterest irony that at a time where everyone I know is scrambling to build community as far away from Zuck as possible, one of the bastard's landmark acquisitions is where we've found community in the first place. Aint that some shit? What do you do with that?

In Babylon, everyone tries to make it in their own fashion, from Conrad's insistence that he just needs to find the right talking picture to LaRoy's attempts to tamp down before embracing her most abrasive qualities. Torres, for his part, makes jump to jump within the studio to keep his head above water (at the expense of usually pushing off someone else's shoulders to do it). But one too many attempts to bail out LaRoy results in a forced trip to the new Hollywood underground in Act 3, where the bacchanalia from Act 1 has curdled into something far more sinister.

The key, as suggested in both the movie and for existing online, is to pack it up. For social media, the challenge is that there aren't any readymade escape hatches like Paris, the American South, or New York. I like Discord, but I've seen people bounce off its high barrier of entry during every migration there, and Bluesky still feels like going to an RA-sanctioned dormhall event. Ditching 1930s Hollywood leaves you in healthier shape, even if in every sense of the word, it means living "off-screen."

But does Babylon believe that's the better life? Sure, you can flee to New York, but nothing will make you feel as alive as watching Singin' in the Rain or the myriad of films deployed in the movie's closing montage, or remembering the magic of the past landscape. Ultimately, the art is what endures, and for artists, the chance to be immortalized is worth getting shat on by an elephant, developing several addictions, blowing your brains out, or watching a guy eat a rat while you wonder if Tobey Maguire is going to kill you. And those are just the risks in fiction; in real life, Babylon flopped hard and damaged Chazelle's career (on a related note, I don't think I recommend getting life advice from his movies). I'm sympathetic to the ideas, though.

It's hard to live when neither your principles nor the ground beneath you feel certain. This is far from a "why I'm leaving social media" post--in fact, do not ask what the Luka trade did to my Sunday screentime--although I am trying to be more deliberate about where I am, why, and for how long. Honestly, part of why I started this newsletter was just to have somewhere else to think online that wasn't a damn social, and I hope people stick around. We all gotta head somewhere when the party's over.

Thanks to Tj for some Babylon fact-checking.