‘Babylon’ Is About a Vibe Shift
“Your time is up. There is no why.”
When Babylon starts, it doesn’t know the party is almost over. The first act’s literal party — a boozy, druggy bacchanalia of dancing and fucking and spotlights and overdoses and elephants to distract from the overdoses — has only just began. Manny (Diego Calva) wants to make movies, but he’s stuck assisting the assistant to a studio executive. Nellie (Margot Robbie) has already declared herself a star, but is impatiently waiting for Hollywood to recognize her charm. A writer and cabaret singer (Li Jun Li) teases out a sexy show, a black trumpet player named Sidney Palmer (Jovan Adepo) is teased by his bandmates, a trade magazine Rita Skeeter (Jean Smart) pries for secrets. Jack Conrad, a silent film star (Brad Pitt), fucks a waitress, and wakes up hungover the next morning eager to wax poetic about the film industry, bemoaning the boring costume pictures1 he’s slotted into.
The parties themselves, as written, are sort of broad and nonspecific. The scale of them is lush, but it’s not partying-as-a lifestyle or partying as a spiritual practice, not partying as imbued with any real emotionality. It’s partying as an agenda item. The movie really flexes itself the next morning, when these two Hollywood hopefuls make it onto a set. Chazelle’s camera jumps at his primary interest: the movies. A few hundred extras revolt, a grip gets impaled by a flag pole, they’re losing the light, an executive gears up for a creative-commerce battle, and can they get Gloria Swanson in this? Even though it’s not a lead role? Manny watches all of this in a trance: Moviemaking, it turns out, is a messy, frenzied endeavor. He loves it all the more. In front of a different camera, on a different shoot, Nellie’s pulse is jump started by the director calling “action.” She doesn’t pop into character, she clicks into another register of living: she flirts and fawns and cries on command. She’s every bit the star she introduces herself as.
Last February, Allison Davis wrote about an impending vibe shift for New York Magazine. The term was coined in the weekly newsletter of a trend-forecasting consultant named Sean Monahan, but Allison explained it in terms I could understand: “A vibe shift is the catchy but sort of too-cool term Monahan uses for a relatively simple idea: In the culture, sometimes things change, and a once-dominant social wavelength starts to feel dated,” Allison wrote. Just as important: “Not everyone survives a vibe shift. The ones still clinging to authenticity and fairy lights are the ones who crystallized in their hipsterdom while the culture moved on.”
Hollywood, in Babylon, is literally changing: there’s sound now, and the microphones and dialogue that goes along with it. The old movie stars are losing their sheen. Outside, in the culture, the tide is turning towards a heterosexual, stuffy puritanism. Society pages have replaced trades; fun and debauchery don’t rule. This new world, these strict rules: Babylon is a movie about trying to ride a vibe shift, and then being overtaken by it.
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