Hollywood as Modern mythos: and if it is true that films have their own language, and if the language of the Myth is the Symbol, Babel by Damien Chazelle can perhaps be better understood through the analysis of his symbols.
di Amedeo Legnani
Catholics have the Vatican. Muslims Mecca. The Communists, Moscow. Women, Paris. But for men and women of all nations, of all beliefs, of all latitudes, a city was born after a quarter of a century, more fascinating and more universal than all the sanctuaries. It's called Hollywood. Hollywood! Here, dreams and smiles, passion, thrills and tears are created, destined for the entire earth. Faces and feelings are constructed that serve as a measure, ideal or drug for millions of human beings. And new heroes are formed every year due to the illusion of crowds and peoples.
Joseph Kessel
Introduction: TheEmail of Hollywood
Among the films released in recent years, few have divided the public and industry circles like the American blockbuster Damien Chazelle, born in 1985. Maybe for the duration of the exhibitions which exceeds three hours, whether for the explicit scenes, one cannot leave indifferent from the experience of watching this film. Snubbed by the awards associations and resulting in a commercial flop, yet, we are convinced, destined to emerge as one of the bravest American films for many years now, even going so far as to define it as the definitive meta-cinematographic work (unlike the detached anthropological study by François Truffaut in Night effect [1975] and the revisionist fable of Once upon a time in Hollywood by Tarantino [2020]): never has the Dream Factory been told with such visceral love and hate as by the young director of Providence.
The error can come from considering Babel a "historical" film (the criticism of the screenwriter and director Paul Schrader makes one smile in this regard for its historical inaccuracy [1]): more than the perfect formula [2] by David Thompson, can be better understood by referring, in addition to the famous and controversial essay by Kenneth Angel [3], a clear point of reference right from the title, also to the mythographic essays by Mircea Eliade and Joseph Campbell: a film mythological. Therefore Chazelle's work appears closer in essence to the great mythical narratives of ancient civilizations than a modern historiographical narrative: the more Bacchae of Euripides who Annals of Tacitus. After all, already Eliade, in his essay The myths of the modern world, he observed with a visionary gaze:
We will not insist on the mythological precedents of most of the shows [...]: they all have in common the characteristic of taking place in a "concentrated time" of great intensity, a residue or substitute for magical-religious time. «Concentrated time» is also the specific dimension of theater and cinema. Even without taking into account the ritual origins and mythological structure of drama and film, the important fact remains that these two types of spectacle use a very different time from the "profane duration", a temporal rhythm concentrated and broken at the same time which, beyond any aesthetic implication, provokes a profound resonance in the spectator.
[4]
The time coordinates of the plot (Hollywood, between 1926 and 1932, passing through some of the most significant events in its history, such as the transition to sound and the censorship of the Hays Code, disappear, to arrive at a timeless dimension (theillo tempore dear to Eliade) and transcendent in the powerful ending: from this perspective, all the explicit typically postmodern citationism that pervades the film takes on a value beyond mere referentiality (unlike Tarantino, with whom he shares two of the protagonist actors), for return to its primary archetypal and ideal essence.
Hollywood like myth Modern, therefore: and if it is true that films have their own language, and if the language of the Myth is the Symbol, Chazelle's film can perhaps be better understood through the analysis of its symbols.
The Hero and his Lady
In the vast array of characters around which the film's epic revolves we can distinguish two fundamental couples who constitute the main narrative arcs of the plot: Manuel Torres/Nellie Le Roy and Jack Conrad/Elinor St.John. Two divergent, but mirror-image, events.
In nellie (Margot Robbie) and Elinor St. John (Jean Smart), we find the dual aspects, Dionysian and Apollonian, of the Woman embodied, and the same 'initiatory' function for the male protagonists. In addition to the assonance in the names, it is significant to note that at the beginning both appear with red hair.
Nellie embodies the Bacchante [5], the amorality of early Hollywood, free and uninhibited, but also devoted to inexorable self-destruction: the ambitious girl of humble origins who longs for a future as a movie star immediately becomes the Queen (The Roy/The King) of bacchanal which opens the film (later we will delve deeper into the importance of the dei element parties takes on in the architecture of the story, together with the element of Music), the object of feral but at the same time disturbing desires. In one scene she will say of herself: «They messed me up, everyone messed me up [...] because I upset them, and I like to upset them. […] And when it's all over I disappear with my dancing ass into the night» [6].
Elinor, whose surname refers to that Saint John who prophesied the ruin of corrupt Babylon [sic!], however, the journalist who builds and demolishes the fame of stars, represents the Apollonian and oracular dimension: apparently cynical and detached, it will however be her to reveal the sad truth to Jack, now on his way out: «The fact is that you thought you were indispensable. Well, you're not».
In Jack Conrad (Brad Pitt) we find the figure of the Old King, the Civilizing Hero («Before I arrived, in Los Angeles on every door it was written: “Dogs and actors not allowed”. With me all this has changed"), naively convinced of the inevitability of progress, but destined to be destroyed by the same world he had helped to create. But at the same time, together with his disciple-heir Manny, he is the one who truly understands the potential of Cinema as an Art superior to mere economic interest, a true Faithful of Love, even if with a disastrous married life (see Ibn'Arabi). However, it will be his friend-enemy Elinor who will give him the final initiation which will consecrate him to transcendence in eternity, and to the confirmation of his Faith: «And one day those films will leave their hiding places and all their ghosts will dine together; they will live adventures, in the jungle or in war, together. […] Be grateful for this. Your time is now up, but you will live forever, along with the angels and ghosts."
In this light, Jack's final suicide takes on a new aspect, as the inevitable condition for his apotheosis, instead of a slow decline into increasingly mediocre productions, caput mortuum of the star he was: the king is dead, long live the king!
Manny Torres (Diego Calva, nomen omen, considering that in Spanish 'torres' means 'The towers', and therefore predestined to dazzling rises and ruinous falls), whose climb up the Hollywood hierarchies begins after Jack takes him under his wing (becoming almost a father figure, a mentor), as he sees in the Cinema «something bigger, something important, something that lasts», not a simple industry: and for this reason he will have to face tests that will allow him to become part of that world he dreamed of so much. However, his desperate love for Nellie, his Muse, unattainable and unstoppable, will lead him to give in to the lure of power of the Studios and to sell his soul, going so far as to deny his own identity in order to conform to the standards of the new financial elite and to the middle-class WASP morality who are gradually taking power: as far as he is concerned, his redemption can only take place following a symbolic descent into Hell and a subsequent wandering.
The Party, the Music and the City
A relevant element in the plot is the use of parties, which become an opportunity for the director to tell the moments of transition in history, to show the changes in Hollywood society; However, it is significant to point out that each of these scenes is associated with the figure of one or more symbolic animals [7], of an increasingly degrading and dark nature:
- The Bacchanal (1926): the debut of Nellie and Jack's Kingdom; central event of the festival is the appearance in the room of an ELEPHANT (it is interesting to note that for some traditions the animal was indicated as the mount of the god Dionysus) in an environment governed by orgiastic promiscuity and where common social divisions disappear [8], and which may correspond to what historians, perhaps more far-sighted than they themselves are aware of, define as the Golden Age of Cinema, parallel to that narrated by Hesiod;
- Arrival of talkies (1927): we witness the rise of a new bourgeois class (Jack's new wife, educated and worldly); the fall of Jack and Nellie begins (both will prove inadequate for the innovations introduced by sound in the star system); SNAKE finds himself fighting with Nellie (the reference to the iconography of the Johannine Apocalypse is almost too explicit); we are in the Silver Age:
- 1932: the industrial-capitalist bourgeoisie has become the new ruling class in Hollywood, introducing a new morality that comes to regiment the creativity of artists: this will be consolidated with the introduction of Hays Code [9]; from this perspective, actors are exploited as commodities, almost like new slaves. This hypocritical environment can only correspond to the destructive reaction of Nellie's primordial vitalism, even if it is only a fur coat made from a dead RABBIT that pays the price. Finally, here is the entry into the Bronze Age: where matter and the economy dominate;
- the party in the Bunker: in the middle of the desert, located in a bunker whose descending (and degrading) structure can only recall the circles of Dante's Inferno, where the people of Los Angeles can give vent to all the perversions repressed by the new prevailing moralism, on the bottom of which there is a CROCODILE (see the figure of the 'soul-devourer' Ammit in Egyptian mythology [10] and Níðhöggr for Norse mythology) and a MAN-BEAST with many faces who feeds on live animals, who terribly closely resembles the image of Lucifer described by Dante in the thirty-third canto of the Inferno, of which he also shares the sidereal nature ( McKay refers to him as a “real star”). Il Kali Yuga, the Iron Age also devoured the Dream… [11]
In all of this, the one who reigns supreme is Music, obviously jazz [12], a true feature of the director (composed by the long-time companion, the prize Oscar Justin Hurwitz); in this regard, it is significant that one of the main points of the plot is linked to the arrival of the film in cinemas The Jazz singer (The Jazz Singer, 1927), the first sound film in history, as if to further reiterate the fact that Hollywood was born in the name of the god of ecstatic intoxication (but also the creator and tutelary deity of dramatic art, let's not forget!): all art tends towards Music, Pitt's character will say at a certain point.
Counteracting the evanescence of the music, lies the physicality of an expanding city, still not distinct from the desert that surrounds it: in this regard, the desert becomes a place dedicated to Vision (the sets of the numerous silent films shot at the same time, in an almost dreamlike, mirage-like atmosphere) and the Nightmare (Jack McKay's bunker); a Cathedral in the desert, the Factory that promises wonders, wealth and glory, but which soon reveals itself a Babylon devoted to a bloodthirsty Moloch; it is no coincidence that during the film we witness real 'human sacrifices', where the lives and dignity of his own servants are sacrificed: among the most powerful scenes of the entire film is the one in which the black trumpeter Sidney Palmer (Jovan Adepo) is forced to blackface [13] to be able to shoot a scene with a band of darker-skinned musicians, to avoid the impression of a 'multiracial band'; or all those who are left behind by the inexorable march of progress, all who fuel the very mechanisms and opulence of Industry: the Show Must Go On…
The Ecstasy of the Silver Screen
Finally, let's return to our hero Manny: in yet another desperate attempt to 'save the damsel in distress' from the clutches of the ruthless gangster Jack McKay (a slimy and diabolical Tobey Maguire), he faces a real catabasis in the most rotten underbelly of Los Angeles . Managing to escape, he nevertheless emerges almost annihilated and deprived of everything, therefore forced to flee, unlike the musician Palmer and the dialogist Fai Zhu, who choose escape as a way of salvation.
Finally, Manny will return to Hollywood after years of exile (like a new Parzifal) after that common and anonymous life from which he himself fled at the beginning, and for the first time since then, he reluctantly enters a cinema where they happen to be showing exactly that Singin' In The Rain by Stanley Donen [1952], a masterpiece of meta-cinema par excellence (the song, it should be noted, also marked the moment in which Manny's fall begins, the beginning of his corruption). After yet another pan on the faces of the spectators in ecstatic adoration in front of the big screen, we see Manny struck by an epiphany in the moment in which he recognizes his own experience reproduced on the screen, rediscovers his past and his identity. We thus return to the bacchanal with which it all began, from which a hallucinating overview unfolds that traces the history of Cinema from Silent Film to Computer Graphics, beyond its essence and its Becoming: the temporal progression collapses into an Eternal Present, and also further, transcending the Form and the Image up to the Elements that constitute the very Structure of the Dream: from the three-color trinity of Technicolor to Black and White, finally arriving at primary non-dualism of the light of the projector and the darkness of the room, the very principle of cinema.
It's here, “together with angels and ghosts”, that Manny finds his former companions and his Muse. The last scene shows him smiling, finally redeemed and at peace.
NOTES
[1] However, we refer you to reading his important essay about Paul Schrader The transcendent in cinema, Donzelli, 2002.
[2] Reference to David Thompson's essay The perfect formula. A Hollywood Story (The Whole Equation. A History of Hollywood, 2004), Milan, Adelphi, 2022
[3] Kenneth Anger, Hollywood Babylon (Hollywood Babylon, 1975), Milan, Adelphi, 2021
[4] Mircea Eliade, The myths of the modern worldin Myths, Dreams and Mysteries, Turin, Lindau, 2007, p. 30 (my italics)
[5] From this perspective, Nellie can also be seen as the Scarlet Whore of the Apocalypse
[6] Cf. Bacchae, vv. 45-50
[7] For the symbolic meaning of the animals mentioned, see the entries 'Elephant', 'Snake', 'Crocodile', 'Rat' in: The Archive for Research of the Archetypal Symbolism, The Book of Symbols, Taschen 2011; Juan Eduardo Cirliot, Dictionary of symbols, Adelphi, 2021, Hans Biedermann, Encyclopedia of Symbols, Garzanti, 1991, JC Cooper, Dictionary of mythological and symbolic animals, Neri Pozza, 1997
[8] For an in-depth analysis of the religious-political meaning of bacchanalia, see Gabriella D'Onofrio, Bacchanalia: religion and politics in Ancient Rome, Giunti, 2001 and Basilio Perri, Livio, History of the Bacchanals, Simple, 2019
[9] The Hays Code o Production Code, formally formulated in 1930 but applied since 1934, was a set of guidelines issued by the MPPDA (Motion Pictures Producers and Distributors of America, Association of American Producers and Distributors) which regulated what could be "morally acceptable" to be shown in films or the themes that could be treated, including topics such as prostitution, drugs or homosexuality, but also censorship of erotic scenes and verbal vulgarity. The Hays Code was officially abolished in 1968.
[10] See Boris De Rachewiltz, The Book of the Dead of the Ancient Egyptians, Mediterranee, 1982
[11] Compare the scenes described with Hesiod's description of the four ages of the world in The Works and Days, vv. 109-201
[12] For the influence of the Dionysian in jazz music, in addition to the seminal insights of Nietzsche in The birth of the tragedy, we recommend the interesting essay by Carmine Migliore The Dionysian and the Apollonian in jazz music, Book Sprint Editions, 2020
[13] the practice of blackface consisted of dyeing the faces of white actors with black make-up to make them play black characters (most of the time grotesquely stereotyped), widespread in the theater with the Minstrel Show, and in the cinema until the 1950s, as black people she was not allowed on stage.
