The Ending Of Babylon Explained

Contains spoilers for "Babylon."

Damien Chazelle's latest film "Babylon" is the most ambitious entry in his filmography to date. Unlike the singularly driven "Whiplash" or the romantic two-hander "La La Land," "Babylon" is an expansive period piece set at the point in Hollywood's history when the age of silent cinema gave way to the introduction of sound. To best explore this era, Chazelle's script follows a diverse ensemble, each with their own individual, intermittently interconnected arcs.

The core players represent an array of figures at staggered rungs within the industry ecosystem in the latter half of the 1920s. There's Jack Conrad (Brad Pitt), a famous movie star; Nellie LaRoy (Margot Robbie), an up and coming starlet; and Manny Torres (Diego Calva), an outsider who becomes something of a social climber. At the margins of their core trifecta, there's also Sidney Palmer (Jovan Adepo), a jazz trumpeter who becomes a star in his own right, and Lady Fay Zhu (Li Jun Li), a multi-disciplined artist and performer whose sexuality keeps her in the shadows. Jean Smart's Elinor St. John, a sensationalist journalist, observes, documents, and aggrandizes their exploits.

During the day, these disparate artists sweat and bleed for the picture business, grinding out their elaborate make-believe worlds within the limiting technology of the time. But by night, their Dionysian excess matches (if not exceeds) the hard work that precedes it, with extravagantly decadent parties characterized as much by glamour as they are by debauchery and catastrophic indulgence. But when the advent of sound recording alters the very core of moviemaking forever, this magical way of life changes, and the film's epic final act finds some shocking and tragic conclusions for each of its most compelling characters.

One by one, each of our esteemed players begins to crumble in some way, shape or form in this new frontier. The fire and tenacity that made Nellie so alluring in silent films proves too grating for audiences averse to her Jersey girl accent and gauche attitude. Jack, a performer so capable of telegraphing emotion and intrigue through his eyes and his face, sounds goofy to a fault when delivering actual dialogue. But above all else, the morally permissive world everyone had grown accustomed to begins to shift as well. Gone are the elephant parades and graphic sex-laden parties of the film's first act. In their stead, a sanitized and socially stifling new environment forms for upper crust gatherings populated by monied elitists. 

Manny seems to be the only one adaptable enough to roll with the punches, spearheading a rebrand for Nellie to make her more palatable in the sound era after he turns Sidney into a musical star through new movies aimed at Black audiences down south. But the biggest indicator that he will not be able to turn this around for her, as she struggles with financial issues, substance abuse, and gambling, arrives when her big re-debut at a stuffy dinner party implodes.

Nellie, with Elinor by her side, completely melts down, tossing her new posh accent in the trash along with any semblance of her manners, figuratively and literally telling the other guests to go fornicate with themselves.

After a couple of failed talkies, Jack agrees to do a feature story for Elinor, granting her an interview about what the future may hold. But when the magazine is released, the cover presents him as a washed up has-been and executives won't take his calls, leading him to confront her in her office. She seems preternaturally aware of where Jack's mind has been all week, referencing something we see that she wasn't privy to. Elinor asks Jack if he wants to know why audiences were laughing at him on screen in the showing he snuck into incognito. 

Elinor proceeds to explain the sum total of her observed knowledge about the motion picture business, in a stirring monologue that Smart absolutely nails. She highlights the cyclical nature of stardom, the fleeting side of telling stories on the silver screen and the immortality that comes from being burned into celluloid. His time as a bankable star may be done, but whenever someone threads a film of his through a projector, no matter how far into the future, Jack Conrad will live again. And again.

This speech is central to Chazelle's thematic preoccupations with "Babylon," and although it's presented as soothsaying from an esteemed colleague, it feels like she's speaking directly to us all about the enduring truth of cinema — that it cannot be killed in a way that truly matters.

Manny and Nellie are the last two dominoes left to fall. Since the two met in the earliest act of the film, it's been clear that Manny loves Nellie, perhaps more than she's capable of offering in return. Manny has made himself into a successful executive despite all the changes to the business, but his one weakness remains his devotion to a once-promising star who has fallen on extreme hard times. When Nellie arrives at Manny's doorstep begging for help because she's in too deep to some very dangerous people, he has no choice but to try to bail her out one last time. 

Manny turns to The Count (Rory Scovel), a Hollywoodland jack of all trades who does various jobs on set, but is primarily a drug dealer. The Count is able to get the necessary money together and arrange a meeting with James McKay (Tobey Maguire), the crime boss to whom Nellie is in debt. Mirroring the drug deal gone bad from the final act of Paul Thomas Anderson's "Boogie Nights," McKay's eccentricities and dangerous connections create immediate suspense. The tension comes to a head when Manny finds out the money The Count has procured is prop money from the studio, a discovery revealed right as McKay is pitching them terrible movie ideas and forcing them to follow him and his co-horts to what he calls the last real party left in LA.

What follows is a harrowing and darkly comic descent into a multi-level, underground nightclub hidden beneath a tunnel. There are all manner of disquieting and disturbing acts being conducted in the murky background, but it's all presented as a dark twin to the film's earlier parties. When they finally reach the main attraction, it's a masked, Herculean man doing some very strange and uncomfortable things with mice. It is here that McKay discovers the money is fake, and Manny must make his narrow escape with The Count.

It's 1952 and Manny returns to LA, with his wife and their child. They take a look at the doors to the studio he once worked for, and he makes small talk with the Hispanic security guard about how he used to help make movies on the other side of that gate. His family chooses to go back to their hotel, but Manny continues walking the streets, riddled with nostalgia for the life he left behind. He wanders into a theater playing "Singin' in the Rain," a movie that has an important connection to "Babylon," as it covers much the same timespan. Now it's not just sound, but color up on that big screen, and it's a dramatized version of events that mirror those he and his friends survived.

Well, some of them survived. A montage shows the final fates of the rest of our cast — that Nellie died as she lived, to excess, and that Elinor has also passed. But we stay with Manny and the intense emotional reaction he's having to this film, and to the shots of the audience, diverse and enamored by what they see. The film explodes into a montage of the films that would come after, and after, literally moving all the way up through the future of movie history to "Avatar."

Manny may have had to leave the movies behind, but they're always going to be there for him, and the rest of us as well.