The nightmarish underside of the dream factory: how Babylon captures Hollywood in the 1920s

By Jennifer Frost, Associate Professor, University of Auckland

In his latest film, Babylon, director Damien Chazelle presents a very different vision of the home of America’s motion picture industry than he did in his Oscar-winning 2016 film, La La Land.

Instead of a romantic, wistful homage to the dream of Hollywood stardom and success, Babylon reveals the nightmarish underside of the dream factory in the 1920s. In telling the rise-and-(mostly)-fall stories of a group of striving movie celebrities against the backdrop of social, cultural and technological change in the new, modern,…

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