Babylon: Let’s Talk About That Wild Ending

This article contains spoilers for Babylon. 

Singin’ in the Rain, the classic 1952 musical about Hollywood’s transition from silent films to talkies, is, by all accounts, a joyful romantic comedy. But…what if it wasn’t? What if it was an epic tragedy about the silent film stars who were brutally sacrificed for Hollywood to become what it is today? That’s the twist of Babylon, Damien Chazelle’s coked-up ode to cinema. By the end of the three-hour odyssey, the film feels like a dark prequel to Singin’ In the Rain, culminating in a montage that shows the weird and wild history and future of movies, ranging from the practical horror of the 1929 short Un Chien Andalou, all the way up to the tech spectacle of Avatar. 

But let’s back up for a moment. What was that ending all about? And what was Chazelle ultimately trying to say? Well, aside from the obvious (Movies, now more than ever!), let’s tuck into the layers of Babylon’s frenetic, maximalist ending of total excess and pluck out the plot points that got us here. 

At the start, Babylon is a wild tale about plucky nobodies trying to make it in Hollywood. There’s Manny (Diego Calva), the Mexican dreamer, inspired in part by Rene Cardona, a Cuban immigrant who became a successful writer, director, and producer and helped champion the golden age of Mexican cinema. Then there’s Nellie La Roy (Margot Robbie), an ambitious actress, inspired by Clara Bow, the original “It” girl. Along the way, we meet Jack Conrad (Brad Pitt), a fading silent film star; Lady Fay Zhu (Li Jun Li), an Anna Mae Wong-esque siren; and Sidney Palmer (Jovan Adepo), a Black jazz talent who finds a way onto the silver screen thanks to the advent of movie sound.

Though the film starts in the 1920s, when silent films are booming, the party quickly ends once sound becomes the new frontier. Conrad must navigate what he perceives to be corny new terrain when presented with a choreographed number to the hit song, “Singin’ in the Rain.” La Roy must learn her lines, hit her mark, and speak into the mic, a technical feat that’s never been asked of her before. The mic scene is an expletive-laden homage to a similar scene in Singin’ in the Rain, in which silent film star Lina Lamont fails to speak directly into a planted mic.  

The homage gets even more explicit later on after Manny climbs the ladder to become a studio exec and turns La Roy into his own personal Eliza Doolittle. In spite of her Jersey squawk, he casts in her posh roles, including one that’s a near-replica of Lamont’s, coaching her on how to say her lines and soften her vowels. At that point, if it isn’t already obvious, Babylon is a kind of brutal reimagining of Singin’ in the Rain, this time training the camera on the silent film stars whose careers were tragically cut short. (Chazelle, an Old Hollywood musical obsessive, is an avowed fan of the film, using it as inspiration for his 2016 musical La La Land and getting advice from Gene Kelly’s widow, Patricia Ward Kelly, who let the writer-director look at Kelly’s archived props from the film, as well as read his Singin’ script with handwritten notes.)

There are also other, more subtle references to the 1952 classic, including a scene where Jack Conrad argues with his wife Estelle (Katherine Waterston), a stage actor, because she looks down on movie acting. In Singin’ in the Rain, Don (Gene Kelly) has a similar argument with Kathy (Debbie Reynolds), who sneers that screen actors are “nothing but a shadow on film!” She also decries the diminishing morality of Hollywood. “Wild parties! Swimming pools!” she shouts. She’s like the Victorian child meme, except a single frame from Babylon would be her poison.