I Like to Watch | Babylon (2022)
It's rare to meet a genius.
The term is overused like hero or trauma or dangerous. To meet a bona fide groundbreaker, a genius in his own right, someone who created something that history has dictated is important scientifically or culturally, is rare.
David Shepherd was one such genius in the world of theater. He co-founded The Compass Players back in the fifties which helped launch a movement that expanded into America's comedy culture unlike anything before it. He was a big thinker and contributed to the comedy scene that dominated decades of theater, television, and film.
In 1997, as someone who co-founded a tiny, ambitious, and adamantly contrarian theater in Chicago (home of The Compass Players and its offshoot The Second City), wandering into a bar after an improvisational comedy show I'd performed in and discovering none other than David freaking Shepherd drinking gin & tonics alone was astounding.
"Excuse me. I don't want to interrupt your night but you're David Shepherd, right?"
He looked up from his drink. His white hair was Einstein-esque in its huge mop. His beard was likewise white and unkempt. Behind his Harry Carey style glasses, his eyes were bright and filled with thought. "Yeah. Who are you?"
"I'm Don. I'm an improviser. I went to Second City. I... uh... I'm a big fan of your work."
"Improviser, huh? OK. Sit down. Join me for a drink. Tell me what you do."
I sat. Ordered a beer. He ordered another G&T. I told him about the weird Off Loop theater I had co-founded. I told him about my four years performing games with ComedySportz. I told him that I had worked for Second City as a producer of some of the stranger projects including a musical performance detailing the story of Fatty Arbuckle and his downfall from the debauchery of early Hollywood that eventually lead to the entire industry cleaning house before the talkies took over.
He told me about his early days with the Compass Players, his philosophies for egalitarian theater in general, his disdain for what Second City had become. We kept ordering drinks and he kept talking. I was enthralled by the time with an authentic artistic legend and tried to ask good questions and then sit back and soak in the wisdom.
At some point, perhaps 90-minutes in, he started to get sort of off the tracks. He had some ideas he wanted to share with me that I might be in a position to help him finance and produce. One of them involved getting hardcore Zionists and radicalized Palestinians to do improvised battles onstage. Another involved homeless people taking LSD and performing for unsuspecting audience members. A third would use actually shock treatment on performers just before they hopped up onstage to see how it affected their improvising.
He went on and on. He continued to order drinks for both of us. Four hours later, he drunkenly begged off, asked to borrow $20 for cab fare, and scratched his name but no contact info on a business card from a local dry cleaners. He handed it to me like it was payment or a relic or just something he found in his jacket and split.
He also left me a $200 tab.
They say that moments are memories and people are lessons. The lesson I learned from David Shepherd was that sometimes genius is just a stone's throw away from bugshit crazy. That meeting a legendary artist can sometimes result in paying for a meandering, long-winded bunch of pseudo intellectual bullshit by someone who has gone completely nuts.
Since coming to Kansas, my mom and I try to see a movie in the theater at least once a week. One of our games is to watch each preview and immediately give a thumbs up (meaning we're definitely going to see it in the theater), a sideways thumb (streaming), or a thumbs down (no chance). My sister comes with us once in awhile and she expressed that I'm an idiot—I go thumbs up for everything. She's not wrong. I am an idiot and I like to watch movies.
Mom and I were both excited to give our thumbs up for Damien Chazelle's epic Babylon. The trailer looked extravagant, funny, and dealt with that same early Hollywood I loved reading about. Margot Robbie, Brad Pitt, drugs, sex, and moviemaking? C'mon! Once it hit the screen, mom read about a lot of elephant shit and perverse sexuality and decided it wasn't for her. Undaunted, when Joe Janes came for Christmas, he and I excitedly went on a Monday afternoon. We both knew it clocked in at 189 minutes but, hell, Endgame was that long and I had three birthdays watching Avatar: The Way of Water and I loved both without even peeing mid-movie (an incredible restraint for a man in his mid-fifties).
Sure enough, there was elephant shit. Right out of the gate. The gag would've been funny but Chazelle let the joke of an elephant dumping shit on the head of a guy trying to push a truck up a hill for a crazy party that included a live elephant run on too long and the joke became just sort of disgusting. Yes, there was a lovely shot of a Fatty Arbuckle type getting pissed on by a starlet and the obligatory shots of a giant sex party (like Caligula with party favors). Anyone bothered by all of that doesn't really want to see a movie about early Hollywood unless it's Singing in the Rain, right?
Except that this film seems to have been conceived when Chazelle was watching the Gene Kelly/Debbie Reynolds classic, accidentally hit the remote and switched to Aronofsky's Requiem for a Dream and he leapt from his chair and said "That's it! What if Gene Kelly was a drunken maniac and Jean Hagen is oversexed, self destructive, and basically a horrible human being? In fact, let's make every character a horrible person, leaving the audience with absolutely no one to connect with? For three hours and nine minutes with no real story but extended scenes that feel like torture. I'm a GENIUS!"
This is a film about Hollywood and the people who made it what it was. The protagonist/observer/narrator is Manny (Diego Calva), who rises from the transporter of the diarrheic elephant to that of a studio executive, and whose only character motivation is an obsession with Nellie LaRoy (Robbie). Nellie claims she is a star despite having no experience and an insatiable lust for mountains of cocaine and fighting a rattlesnake. Manny becomes a personal assistant to the reigning box office idol, Jack Conrad (Brad Pitt), while Nellie gets discovered at the party in the first reel. There are other characters, each sounding exactly one note and then disposed of in a strange, unsatisfying montage of Hollywood types rather than characters designed to forward any sort of action.
About two hours in, I did that thing I almost never do, and checked the time. How much longer is this train wreck? I did mental math and wondered if it was going to get any more interesting and, if not, could I exit and take a fucking nap until Joe was done watching it?
The film is not without some flashes of brilliance. A sequence involving Nellie trying to adapt to filming with sound for the first time (a dark, hostile version of Jean Hagen's "I can't STAN him!" moment), while quite long, is amazing to watch. Conrad, after watching the audience laugh at his Gene Kelly "I love you. I love you. I love you." moment, deciding, instead of a song and dance number, a pistol in his mouth is the appropriate gesture.
There may have been more but Chazelle decided to underscore almost every scene with some version of music from La-La Land. Joe didn't really notice it but once I did, I could hear nothing else (including the dialogue in a few scenes). After an hour of being beaten in the nuts with the same theme from a movie I barely liked, the black trumpet player who has quit the movies because he had to wear blackface so he wouldn’t look lighter skinned under the lights, goes back to jazz in a bar. He announces “I’m going play a song I used to play way back when,” and launches into the same goddamned theme from La-La Land and I had to restrain myself from jumping up and moaning the James Earl Jones/Darth Vader “NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!” from Revenge of the Sith.
The reactions to Babylon seem to be those like me, who would rather get punched in the face than sit through it, and those desperately trying to justify the genius if only to reconcile the time spent being bludgeoned by elephant shit.
When the lights came up, I looked at Joe and flatly stated "I hated that in every way." Joe nodded in agreement and all I wanted to do was to find the cutest, sweetest child in the cineplex and drop kick it into a wall.
At least Chazelle didn't want cab fare.
