I watched Damien Chazelle’s Babylon in an empty theater. The only other person came in late and as I left, three hours later, I glanced at him. An older man. Alone. Staring at the rolling credits as the clock struct midnight. I’m pretty sure I was seeing myself in a few decades. And now I regret not asking, “Whaddya think?”
I had trouble falling asleep that night. Probably due to a headache. Or maybe I was trying too hard to figure out why the movie didn’t work, or maybe because I crossed paths with my future self. What could I have learned from him about my future decades of going to the movies alone? Could he have enlightened me as to my future opinion of Damien Chazelle’s Babylon? (I’m still not sure. The best I’ve come up with is: One step above an entertaining mess.) Maybe he’d say, “Stop trying to have an opinion and just have an opinion.” Or maybe he’s still piecing together a judgment for himself. Which means I never will. I’d rather not think about Babylon any more than I have to.
At the end of the film, Manny returns to LA in 1952 and watches Singin’ in the Rain. He falls asleep. During Singin’ in the Rain? What a loser. Let’s suppose he awakens to find his future self in the seat next to him. Would he ask himself, “What did I miss?” Would his future self chide him for falling asleep during a film that mirrors his experience at the center of Hollywood’s Big Bang? (Part of me wishes that my future self would have chided me for eating a whole bag of peanut M&Ms.) Or would Manny simply ignore his double? Would he say, “Hey, what are all these flashing colors?” But let’s be honest and ask the real question: What would Manny say after watching Babylon?
That’s an interesting question, but how do I change the subject?
Who would’ve guessed that Babylon would bomb at the box office? A lot of people. It’s baffling that the executives at Paramount thought this was a profitable idea. The days of Chazelle’s La La Land are over. Americans don’t give a shit how many boobs are in Babylon if they can smell Hollywood. And Babylon smells like suntan lotion and car exhaust. Both are forms of grease. Metaphorically. I’ve never been to LA.
Why do I feel compelled to go on about a 189-minute celebration of early Hollywood that I saw in an empty theater with an elderly version of myself? Margot Robbie and Diego Calva thanked me for seeing the movie “in a packed theater, the way it was meant to be seen.” A stack of free promotional posters sits in the lobby five months later. Is this what they are calling the death of cinema?
I found the answer to these questions after watching a different film, a 58-minute caustic mockumentary of filmmaking gone awry. A film I’ve been wanting to write about, but keep mentioning Chazelle’s Babylon. I’m referring to Gaspar Noe’s Lux Æterna, a film that was released into about 3326 fewer theaters than Babylon that same year.
Cinema’s dead, right?
That’s what they keep telling me. But no one has ever specifically referenced Lux Æterna. Allow me: We now have definitive proof that what started with Damien Chazelle’s Big Bang has come to an epileptic end, a film with a finale that physically cannot be watched. I watched it. And I can confirm: it's over.
Gaspar Noe, in classic Noe fashion, depicts a chaotic film set meltdown. Is anything more a signifier of cinema’s demise than that? A film not getting made? And maybe it’s not even worth mentioning that the film within the film will not be completed either. Lux Æterna itself was barely made. The first day of the five-day shoot was scrapped. “The shooting of the movie started so quickly that I was totally unprepared,” says Noe in an interview with The Playlist. And it also may not be worth mentioning that Lux Æterna was shot “in a film studio that was closing down.”
The end is near.
That’s not to say that Babylon has a lack a chaotic film set sequences. t has dozens. But the majority of those movies are not left incomplete. Presumably. And even as production moves indoors to accommodate sound, the pictures are still finished. Although in a desperate attempts to capture their first scene filmed on a sound stage, I bet those characters did feel that they were witnessing the end. But history moved on.
Lux Æterna doesn’t move on.
The film ends with giant LED screens malfunctioning and pulsing light. Has everyone escaped from the set? Or have they simply ceased to exist? Hard to say. I wasn’t able to ask my future self because I was watching at home.
And then the credits strobe. Credits that are impossible to read. I tried. This renders the film uncredited. An uncredited film should also signify the death of cinema, correct? The final credit sequence in the history of cinema slipping into the void.
Speaking of death, near the start of the film, Beatrice Dalle speaks with Charlotte Gainsbourg about the ecstasy of burning at the stake onscreen. Death is pleasure onscreen. Later during the strobing finale, Gainsbourg’s the sole remaining talent on set. She can’t free herself from the stake she’s tied to. And as those LEDs strobe, before those unintelligible credits roll, Gainsbourg finds pleasure inside the pandemonium. Not unlike Otto Von Strassberger a.k.a. Erich Von Stroheim a.k.a. Spike Jonze leaping in joy as he captures the final shot of a climactic battle sequence against the setting sun. (It’s safe to assume that Manny shares in his ecstasy.) How did I get back to Babylon?
I watched Lux Æterna in my living room one afternoon with the curtains drawn. I had to open them when the strobes started, so I’m not sure I could’ve weathered it in a theater. According to The Outtake’s James Witherspoon, during the strobe sequence, “vision begins to fade away at the edges as consciousness—or at least some form of consciousness—slips away from under the viewer’s feet.”
He goes on: “[Cinema] pitching forward into subconscious space, its deistic face looms forward from the primordial ooze for a moment that simultaneously feels like an eternity.”
I’ll skip ahead.
“...as elementally terrifying and beautiful as the splitting of the atom.”
Or the big bang.
See what I’m saying? Noe screened 15 minutes of doctored Cecil B. DeMille clips at the 2020 L’Etrange Festival before showing Lux Æterna. He called it The Art of Filmmaking. Therefore, Noe starts us in 1927 with burning witches in DeMille’s silent picture The King of Kings. And ends with the audience, as Witherspoon describes, “falling through some strange, psychedelic void untethered from reality.” This is the only logical endpoint of filmmaking.
Cinema dies in chaotic bliss, yet paradoxically, will live on, per the film’s title “eternal light.” This isn’t unlike the philosophy found in Damien Chazelle’s Babylon: we’re mortal, but onscreen we’ll live forever.
Who would’ve thought that these two films would end on a supremely optimistic note? Am I the only doomsayer in this theater? How many silent films are lost? According to The Film Foundation, “Film archivists have estimated that half of all American films made before 1950 and more than 90 percent of films made before 1929 are lost forever.” And even if some are available, no one will be watching Brad Pitt’s Jack Conrad a.k.a. John Gilbert in the 2020s. Have you seen a John Gilbert film? I haven’t. I bet Damien Chazelle has. Well, has he really?
Nowadays new films are lost to the digital void. You’ll live on in the eternal light of the Netflix catalogue, but no one will know who you are. I don’t think I’m keeping anybody alive by going to the theater alone on $5 dollar Tuesdays. Except my future self.