La-la-wood – Weekend – Kommersant
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At the world box office, from which Russia has been cut off for a year now, Babylon suffers an impressive fiasco – a multi-figured canvas about Hollywood in the 1920s, a new and extremely ambitious film by Damien Chazelle, destroyed by American and European critics. Is it because Chazelle tried to repeat the success of his “La La Land” by simply scaling up the story: the same few touching notes are now played very loudly by an entire symphony orchestra? Or Hollywood no longer rhymes with a dream, which means that the audience is completely uninterested in what rubbish magic is born from, no matter who slept with whom and how much they drank before?
Of all the myths of the 20th century, for a long time we wanted to believe that Hollywood would be the most enduring. Last year’s box office success of the next sequel “Top Gun: Maverick” seems to be indisputable proof of this, the ageless Tom Cruise saved the cinema after the covid disaster, forcing viewers around the world to return to cinemas that had been empty for several years. However, the question of the future of Hollywood as an industry that continuously delivers one American dream after another to the market remains acute.
Philosophers first, then sociologists—already with a solid factual base—explained to Hollywood producers and showrunners that collective dreams, their signature product, would be less and less in demand in a society of endlessly multiplying identities, every day, if not every minute, all more persistently demanding to correct or supplement the narrative about the past. The pronoun “we” and possessive adjectives “our, ours, ours” in 2023 are pure atavism, especially when combined with the word “history”. There is no longer our history, only personal, necessarily politically colored. It is not surprising that in this situation of information deluge, the magic light of the movie screen is closer than ever to being extinguished forever. This is due to decades of hushed up truth, and years of hastily invented lies, today called fakes.
The potential of a fake, even if it is momentary, is undeniable; today it is the main rival of the myth. Feeling the inevitability of this threat, Hollywood, as if defending itself, tries to look in the mirror, remind itself of who it was and what it has become, see a glimpse of its former glory, find new strength, or simply like itself. Love yourself, otherwise no one will love you – says the most popular mantra of our time.
Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019), David Fincher’s Munk (2020) and now Damien Chazelle’s Babylon continue the long, purely self-centered tradition of self-reflection on the brink of the abyss. If a fall into the abyss is inevitable, then at least a lifetime must pass before the eyes of the spectators. If you reopen old wounds or stir up graves, then with respect for the fallen, with rapture for the dead. And most importantly, the revision of the myth cannot be left at the mercy of strangers: no frame, no gluing, otherwise Irving Thalberg’s Hollywood will turn into Ryan Murphy’s Hollywood. But the revision of myths, even by the hands of the most dedicated cinephiles, alas, is punishable. Short meetings with the beautiful eventually turn into long and unbearably painful send-offs.
In Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Daddy’s Movie heroes saved Rosemary’s baby from Easy Riders, giving the 1960s a happy, not bloody, end. However, both Cliff Booth and Rick Dalton had no doubt that this act of good collective will would not change anything in their fate – after all, the time of the cowboys had expired long before midnight struck on the hippie clock. It was a revenge of ghosts with the sole purpose of reminding the rapidly dying youth that the decaying dead also had a great era, that everything is transient. If for every Don Siegel there is a Dennis Hopper, then there is a George Lucas for Hopper, and either Marvel or Netflix for Lucas.
In Mank, the protagonist argued to William Randolph Hearst and Orson Welles that not all roads lead to Hollywood, that there is life across the ocean, and right now (in the courtyard of 1941) it is in terrible danger. And also that cinema is, by its very nature, a collaborative art and directorial egomania in the historical perspective will surely fail. And so it happened, only everyone collapsed – both the system, and the upstarts, and those who, like Mankiewicz, chose the way out through and through. None of Pauline Cale’s opuses, full of hatred for the “author’s theory”, and even more so Fincher’s large-scale action itself – to return their undeservedly forgotten names to screenwriters like Mankiewicz – did not achieve a result. There is no place for other citizens in the Citizen Kane myth.
In Babylon, which persistently refers us to Kenneth Anger’s scandalous 1959 opus—a two-volume list of Hollywood crimes and punishments, from Roscoe Arbuckle’s ruined career to Marilyn’s ruined life—the characters don’t save anyone or prove anything to anyone. Conceived as a nostalgic ode to joy that vanished a hundred years ago, Babylon is more like a sticky nightmare that both the author and the public cannot get rid of. Depicting the industry’s watershed moment, the invention of synchronous sound, this unwieldy three-hour film does not answer the question that begs itself from the first minutes: who is being buried here? Silent cinema, which, according to Chaplin or Godard, was the highest point in the development of the seventh art? Once again, the whole Hollywood myth? Or is a human being a creature that arose as a result of anthropogenesis, but in fact remained just a mammal? Although, in general, the heroes of Chazelle are seen exclusively in the use of alcoholic beverages and drugs.
Fictional adventures of collective characters – Jack Conrad (Brad Pitt), a love-loving star who has become a victim of technological progress, and Nelly Laroy (Margot Robbie), a starlet living life in a casino, and Manny (Diego Calva), a messenger who has become an executive producer— diluted with real figures and reliable facts, so that the viewer gets the impression that he is watching a true story, or at least a film adaptation of roman a clef. In the secondary characters – the semi-mad director Otto von Strassberger or the cabaret artist Lady Fei Zhu – one can easily guess Erich von Stroheim and Anna May Wong, and in the jazz musician Sidney Palmer – Al Jolson. But drawn-out orgies or overly long scenes of chaos from film sets are a myth that Chazelle tries to admire, but in fact openly condemns, turning art history into a “Jumble” with his puritanical, purely didactic interpretation. So much screen time is devoted to excesses in libations and sex that it begins to seem as if it was not time that killed the heroes, but cirrhosis and relativism. This is the view of a modern person who has been taught by social networks to limit himself in everything and draw moralizing conclusions from everything.
Self-criticism in cinema and in the entertainment industry in general was engaged even before Chazelle. In the genre “about ratings, about morals, about damned profession,” many geniuses were noted – from Fellini to Wilder, from Stanley Donen to Sidney Lumet – Chazelle, of course, quotes all of them. Curtseys to “Sunset Boulevard”, “Network”, “8 1/2” and especially “Singing in the Rain” in “Babylon” alternate almost with a comma. But in all of the above films, reflection came literally from the assemblage point, and in Chazelle, 1927 talks to 2023 with exactly the same intonations that Jack Conrad in the key scene for Babylon – with Irving Thalberg, who finally called him back.
“Tell me honestly,” Conrad asks, “is this movie you’re offering me shitty?” “Yes,” Thalberg admits. “Tell me honestly, am I just helping you out, going to replace?” Konrad continues. “Yes,” Thalberg replies. “Then I’ll see you at the set,” Conrad says, and hangs up as if for the last time. Calling Jack Conrad a hundred years later, Damien Chazelle only pretends that there is someone alive on the other end of the line, in fact there are only long drawn-out beeps. So the present pulls the past in order to justify itself for everything around. So Hollywood is left alone with Babylon – that is, with nothing at all.
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