YMMV / Babylon (2022)

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• Alternative Character Interpretation:
  • Did Nellie always plan to leave Manny and agreed to run away with him so that he'd stop worrying about her or did she genuinely want to go to Mexico with him but changed her mind later in the car? And did she leave him because she couldn't accept her fall from stardom and the prospect of an ordinary life or because she assumed that James' men would eventually track her down and kill Manny too if she went with him? Either two would be entirely in-character for her.
  • Manny being moved to tears while watching Singin' in the Rain has been interpreted as him being ashamed or disappointed towards Hollywood for making a farcical depiction of the very real and sometimes harrowing experiences he went through, as well as seeing his friends and the woman he loved essentially being reduced to caricatures.
• Award Snub: In spite of the critically-acclaimed score, which was one of the few aspects that just about everyone liked about the film, and it being the favored frontrunner for the Oscar for Best Original Score, it did not win, with that instead going to All Quiet on the Western Front.
• Awesome Music: “Voodoo Mama”, the film's unofficial theme music by Justin Hurwitz, which plays during the opening party scene and in the closing scene during the final montage.
• Broken Base: The copious amount of borderline NC-17 graphic content, especially in the infamous opening party sequence, is either a perfect way of capturing the debauched hedonism of the era it depicts or needless shock value that comes across as Damien Chazelle's attempt at being edgy (it's worth noting that the graphic content is actually toned down from the original script, which was far worse in this regard).
• Complete Monster: James McKay is a deathly pale and creepily amiable mob boss who rules Hollywood's underworld. McKay oversees the "Blockhouse", a nightmarish club of depravity and debauchery where women fight each other to bloody defeat; "circus freaks" are kept in captivity and used for abuse and sex by the guests; and copious amounts of torture and animal cruelty go uninhibited. When Nellie LaRoy is unable to immediately pay her gambling debt to McKay, he threatens her with pouring acid on her genitals and then killing her. Though Nellie's friend Manny tries to pay McKay off, McKay discovers the money is fake, and responds by ordering Manny and two of his allies executed.
• Ending Fatigue: A common complaint is that the film takes too much time to end — there are multiple places where it theoretically could have ended and it just keeps going!
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • Ruth is one of the most popular minor characters for being a competent and capable female director in a time when women didn't get many opportunities, her take-no-shit attitude, and for being played by Damien Chazelle's wife Olivia Hamilton, who gets to show off her surprisingly good acting skills and comedic timing. Her assistant director Max has also received lots of love from the fandom due to P. J. Byrne's chaotic performance and his extremely memorable and hilarious Chewing the Scenery outburst on the set of Nellie's first sound film.
  • Estelle is also very popular for her interesting Slobs Versus Snobs dynamic with Jack, being completely out of her element in the hedonistic world of Hollywood, and for her reactions to the chaos happening around her, which range from simply bewildered to utterly horrified.
• Esoteric Happy Ending: Manny sitting in a theater watching Singin' in the Rain makes him wistful about Hollywood, but the movie makes a very good case that it's an evil system that chews up people like him and his friends before spitting them out. Overlaps with glurge, given that it carries the implication that people's lives being ruined by the business is ultimately okay for the purpose of making cinema.
• Fandom-Specific Plot: The fandom loves to explore Jack and Fay's Odd Friendship, especially since Fay is an extremely popular character and they only interact with each other twice in the film proper. In particular, Fay learning about Jack's death and attending his funeral is an extremely popular fanfiction prompt.
• Fan-Preferred Cut Content: Zora, Sidney's Love Interest from the original 2019 draft of the script, is quite well-liked among those who have read it. Some fans would've liked if she appeared in the actual movie, even if just for a scene or two.
• Friendly Fandoms: The Babylon hive gets along very well with the Barbie fandom, largely due to the shared presence of Margot Robbie in both projects.
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff: The film got a great reception from both critics and audiences that saw it in France, on par with Whiplash, La La Land and First Man, all having scores flirting with 4 out of 5 on average with both critics and audiences on the aggregator website Allociné there.
• Harsher in Hindsight: Considering how many movies from the Silent Era have survived very few of the actors of that time are still remembered.
• He Really Can Act: Tobey Maguire has often been mocked for his attempt at a dark, intimidating performance in Spider-Man 3, so there were naturally a lot of doubts among moviegoers when it was announced he was cast as the villainous gangster James McKay. However, his performance was genuinely menacing and creepy, and it soon became one of the most unanimously acclaimed aspects of the film.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • The character Nellie LaRoy being a No Celebrities Were Harmed version of Clara Bow becomes this when you find out nearly 10 years before Babylon released, a Retraux Silent Film with a very similar name, Return To Babylon, came out and had the real Clara Bow as a character.
  • This wouldn't be the last film featuring a tightly-choreographed and stylized dance scene prominently featuring Margot Robbie, as well as a male character who is hopelessly infatuated with her character but never gets those feelings reciprocated.
• Jerkass Woobie: While Nellie is incredibly self-destructive and arguably brought what happened to her on herself, she was told repeatedly by everyone around her that she'd never amount to anything, it's implied that she didn't have the best upbringing from what we see of both her parents, and overall she just seems to want to prove that she's more than anyone ever expected of her. It's also hard not to feel bad for her given her eventual fate of dying in a hotel room at the age of thirty-four and subsequently fading into obscurity, especially due to how badly she wanted to be a star and how at least some of her misfortune was due to bad luck as she could have easily switched to sound films if she'd just gotten some roles more suited to her talents.
• Just Here for Godzilla: Many are tuning in for Tobey Maguire's second return to acting after Spider-Man: No Way Home.
• Memetic Loser: Sidney tends to get the brunt of jokes from the fandom due to most fans outright forgetting about him since his plotline is Out of Focus for a large part of the runtime and for his lack of a strong connection to most of the other characters, and he's generally regarded as being the least interesting out of all the six leads.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • The Avatar scene^note The end contains a montage of films throughout the decades, from the silent era all the way up to the present day, including a random scene from Avatar. This caught the amusement of a lot of people due to an epic set in 1920s Hollywood containing a reference to Avatar of all things, as well as the release of Babylon a week after Avatar: The Way of Water, leading to jokes about how Babylon is the best movie of 2022 to feature the Na'vi or how Avatar fans are getting spoiled after years of waiting.
  • The ending montage of film history^note  Inspired by it, fans have been making their own clip montages to show off their favorite movies, set to same upbeat score track "Voodoo Mama" as is used in the finale
    • A common variation of the ending montage is to parody it by including some of the silliest and Narmtastic scenes ever put to film, such as Dunkaccino, Emo Peter's dancing in the streets of New York, and Indiana Jones surviving a nuclear blast by hiding in a fridge.
  • The Babylon hive mind^note A small but very devoted fandom for Babylon formed in the weeks following its release, especially on Twitter and Letterboxd, which has led to many jokes that the fans are just a collective Hive Mind. The fandom, in turn, has embraced this and frequently joke about it themselves, with "the Babylon hive" being adopted as a Fan Community Nickname.
    • There are dozens of us! Dozens!^note A common rallying cry that fans use whenever someone brings up the fandom, which serves as a way of poking fun at its relatively small size.
  • Babylon is the new Boogie Nights^note Comparisons to Boogie Nights, another epic movie about the debauched heyday and tragic decline of a particular era in moviemaking history, started pretty much the instant the plot became known. It became a joke, and then a sort of rallying cry, among the Babylon hive.
  • Babylon 2: Jack's Back^note A mock sequel for Babylon, which originates from film news satire account and Fandom VIP Le Cinéphiles. The only plot detail that's agreed upon is that it features a magically revived Jack, and any other absurd element of the plot can be added by anyone.
  • The chicken-fucking scene^note The leaked first draft of the script from 2019 contains a scene where Manny, who is high on mescaline, hallucinates thousands of chickens having sex while he's getting it on with Clara/Nellie in a bathroom. The sheer bizarreness of the scene led it to quickly become infamous among the members of the fandom who'd read the script, with them trying to figure out how such a scene would play onscreen and citing its existence as evidence to the common joke theory that Damien Chazelle wrote the whole script while on drugs.
• Moment of Awesome: Fay has one where she’s the only one who isn’t screaming at Nellie’s snake fight mishap and goes to cut the snake off, suck the poison out of the wound and washes out her mouth afterwards, all while being completely calm.
• Nausea Fuel: There's quite a bit of graphic content in this film…
  • At the beginning of the film, Manny attempts to bring an elephant to the huge party. As he tries driving it up the hill, it poops directly on one of the wranglers. And some poop even hits the camera.
  • During the party, Jane Thornton, played by the very attractive Phoebe Tonkin, gives a heavyset man a golden shower, with some of her urine getting in his mouth.
  • Nellie’s snake bite wound is pretty grisly to look at.
  • Nellie projectile-vomiting on a rug and then in a man's face.
  • The muscular masked man that eats live rats. And him digesting the rats is shown in graphic detail.
  • The amount of times Wilson keeps randomly spitting.
• One-Scene Wonder:
  • Tobey Maguire gives one hell of an impression as the hedonistic mob boss James McKay, with some even comparing his role to Alfred Molina’s scene in Boogie Nights.
  • Spike Jonze as a Large Ham German director is excellent, too.
  • Olivia Wilde has a memorable barely-a-minute cameo as Jack's first onscreen wife Ina, who practically divorces him on the spot and yells at him to get out of the car they're in after she gets fed up with him one too many times.
  • Ruth's assistant director Max only appears in two scenes, but he manages to make the most out of it by his incredibly hilarious and scenery-chewing outburst on the sound film that Nellie is starring in, in what makes for one of the movie's funniest scenes.
• Shipping: The fandom is generally split between Manny/Nellie shippers and Nellie/Fay shippers. Both groups tend to keep to themselves, and while there has been arguments over which one's the better ship, they mostly get along, which is helped by Fay's popularity throughout the whole fandom and many Nellie/Fay shippers liking Manny and Nellie as a platonic pairing and just not as a romantic one. Of course, there are some fans who go the third route and simply support both pairings.
• Signature Scene:
  • The absolutely debauched and chaotic opening party sequence that introduces most of the main characters.
  • The scene of an elephant pooping on a wrangler, shown in graphic and very squicky detail, notable for being the first of many Nausea Fuel moments that the film contains.
  • The scene detailing the disastrous production on the first day of Nellie's first talkie is often cited as being one of the film's most well-remembered scenes due to its utterly chaotic tone, fast pace, and memorable dialogue.
• Slow-Paced Beginning: The film lasts three hours. The first hour contains a lot of events, but all that happens in the story is that Nellie gets her first screen role, and Manny starts working backstage. It might have been possible to move things along a bit faster.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot:
  • As noted by multiple reviews made in the wake of the film's release, the concept of following a starlet as she tries to navigate The Roaring '20s and try to adapt to the changing times (as "talkies" took over silent films) was generally seen as interesting, though it's lost in a haze of other subplots that go nowhere and are functionally dropped by the third act. The film condenses Nellie's career downfall and death while living in poverty to an expositional newspaper clip during a montage near the end. This led reviewers to suggest that the format would have worked better as a miniseries without the trappings of the era (particularly as the opening half-hour party sequence has little to do with the rest of the film, beyond shock value and the set-up for Nellie's arrival on the Hollywood scene).
  • The film's attempt to juggle five different characters with their own storylines and character arcs means that some of them get focused on less than others; Fay, Sidney, and even Jack at some points end up getting shafted in favor of Manny and Nellie's stories, leading to the film having a very disjointed feel, especially since most of the characters and their storylines are barely connected to each other. It's generally agreed that Manny and Nellie should have had the sole focus as co-leads while the other three leads should've been supporting characters.
• Uncertain Audience: While the concept of a "behind-the-scenes" look at Old Hollywood is nothing new (going all the way back to Singin' in the Rain, to say nothing of modern fare), the film takes pains to lean in to discredited stereotypes about the era (namely, that Hollywood parties were filled with debauchery and wanton hedonism), complete with numerous Gross-Up Close-Up moments, that weren't even palatable to many critics, who were evenly split between enjoying the auteur-driven aspects of the film and being completely repulsed by the Nausea Fuel on display. Conversely, the film doesn't take any steps to try to modernize (or skew into Alternate History) elements to make it more palatable to modern audiences, as Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (another starring vehicle for Margot Robbie) famously leaned into. Add to that a bizarre marketing campaign that emphasized the sleaze and debauchery instead of the wistful End of an Era plot the film pivots to, and the fact that it was released on Christmas (a time when audiences, still hungry for content, were skewing towards superhero/fantasy works like Avatar: The Way of Water and Black Panther: Wakanda Forever) meant the film failed to find an audience on either side, leading to a significant underperformance on its opening weekend.
• The Woobie: Jack starts off at the top of his game as one of the world's most famous movie stars, only for it to come slowly crashing down starting with the death of his longtime friend, which deeply affects him and causes him to become much more jaded. Then his popularity begins to steadily decline over the years, and by the time he realizes it, he's become completely disillusioned with Hollywood and wistful towards the height of the silent era before everything went down the drain for him. Finally coming to terms that his career is over and unable to accept it, he calmly and despondently shoots himself in his hotel room. While every one of the main characters gets viciously spat out by the Hollywood Hype Machine, Jack is easily the most tragic of all of them.

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