{"id":106463,"date":"2015-09-29T13:38:34","date_gmt":"2015-09-29T17:38:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=106463"},"modified":"2025-09-23T11:42:59","modified_gmt":"2025-09-23T15:42:59","slug":"supernatural-season-2-episode-18-hollywood-babylon","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=106463","title":{"rendered":"Supernatural<\/i>: Season 2, Episode 18: \u201cHollywood Babylon\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\nDirected by Philip Sgriccia
\nWritten by Ben Edlund<\/em><\/p>\n

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\nPublished in 1975, Kenneth Anger’s cult book Hollywood Babylon: The Legendary Underground Classic of Hollywood’s Darkest and Best Kept Secrets<\/a>\"\"<\/i> tells the dirty secrets of early Hollywood: scandals, suicides, rape convictions, drugs, murders, unsolved mysteries. Poor Jean Harlow! Why did her second husband shoot himself only two months after their wedding?? (To those under the mistaken impression that Today’s Stars are unbelievably badly-behaved and that somehow Yesterday’s Stars were models of comportment: learn your history. Lana Turner’s life makes Lindsay Lohan’s drunken shenanigans look like child’s play. The only difference between then and now is that back then the studios controlled their stars’ publicity with an iron fist. NOTHING got out. Most scandals were cleaned up and disappeared. Nowadays, stars don’t have that protection. Tom Cruise had a ruthless publicist who strenuously limited access to her star, but then he fired her, and whaddya know, within months he was jumping on Oprah’s couch and bitch-slapping Matt Lauer. Tom Cruise may have always been like that but his iron-fisted publicist never let us see it<\/i>. But in general, stars are not as protected now, so news of their shoplifting, drug-addiction, fender-benders, temper-tantrums get to us. But good Lord, back in the day? Some of the stars’ shit back then went way way beyond multiple DUIs.) The pictures in the book are often gruesome, dead bodies in wrecked rooms. The book is salacious with a breathless tabloid tone. If you’re a movie fan, you have a copy on your shelf. I’ve been carrying mine around since college. I still wonder: Who the hell killed Thelma Todd??<\/p>\n

Every word in Hollywood Babylon<\/i> should be taken with a grain of salt, as should every image in the Supernatural<\/i> episode from which it takes its title.<\/p>\n

Here are the opening paragraphs. It relates.<\/p>\n

\n<\/p>\n

WHITE ELEPHANTS – the God of Hollywood wanted white elephants<\/i>, and white elephants he got – eight of ’em, plaster mammoths perched on mega-mushroom pedestals, lording it over the colossal court of Belshazzar, the pasteboard Babylon built beside the dusty tin-lizzie trail called Sunset Boulevard.<\/p>\n

Griffith – the Movie Director as God – was riding high, high as he’d ever go, over Illusion City, whooshing up a hundred-foot-high elevator camera tower, giant megaphone poised to shout the command to the thousands below, the CAMERA-AH ACTION-N-N! to bring it all alive ….<\/p>\n

Belshazzar’s Feast beneath Egyptian blue skies, spread out under the blazing Southern California morning sun: more than four thousand extras recruited from L.A. paid an unheard-of two dollars a day plus box lunch plus carfare to impersonate Assyrian and Median militiamen, Babylonian dancers, Ethiopians, East Indians, Numidians, eunuchs, ladies-in-waiting to the Princess Beloved, handmaidens of the Babylonian temples, priests of Bel, Nergel, Marduk and Ishtar, slaves, nobles, and subjects of Babylonia.<\/p>\n

Griffith’s Vision of Babylon!<\/i><\/p>\n

A mare’s nest of scaffolding, hanging gardens, chariot-race ramparts and sky-high elephants, a make-believe mirage of Mesopotamia dropped down on the sleepy huddle of mission-style bungalows amid the orange groves that made up 1915 Hollywood, portent of things to come.<\/p>\n

The Purple Epoch has begun.<\/p>\n

And there it stood for years, stranded like some gargantuan dream beside Sunset Boulevard. Long after Griffith’s great leap into the unknown his Sun Play of the Ages, Intolerance<\/i>, had failed; long after Belshazzar’s court had sprouted weeds and its walls had begun to peel and warp in abandoned movie-set disarray; after the Los Angeles Fire Department had condemned it as a fire hazard, still it stood: Griffith’s Babylon, something of a reproach and something of a challenge to the burgeoning movie town – something to surpass, something to live down.<\/p>\n

The shadow of Babylon had fallen over Hollywood, a serpent spell in code cuneiform; scandal was waiting, just out of Billy Bitzer’s camera range.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Phew! You got all that? <\/p>\n

Intolerance<\/i>, which came out in 1916, by the way, is incredible. Even better, unlike Griffith’s Birth of a Nation<\/i>, from 1915, it DOESN’T feature the world being saved by the KKK. Everybody wins! I reviewed it when the restoration played in New York.<\/a> Well worth seeing. I’ll get back to Intolerance<\/i> in a second. I swear it relates. <\/p>\n

(Gentle reminder and a Pep talk to myself since I do tend to go on and on: Part of the fun for me in doing these re-caps is following the tangents in my own mind. And part of the fun is also watching you all do the same, or take what I’ve written and go off on your own tangent. These are the discussion points that interest me. The show’s cinematic panache was one of the hooks for me, how it called to mind noirs, Westerns, screwballs. They play with that explicitly, with black-and-white monster movie episodes, and Looney Tunes episodes and “B” Western episodes. I almost swooned with delight when I saw Jensen Ackles in some out-take on the Season 10 gag reel swagger into the room doing a pretty good John Wayne imitation. (Ahem. I called it.<\/a>) A lot of the commentary that I’ve seen out there on the show in fan forums and elsewhere is purely psychology-based, and I get that. I do. I’m fascinated by that too! It’s rich stuff. But post after post after post about PTSD and codependency and trauma gets a little old and it also creates a filter of “victim” for the characters that I think is not accurate, it’s the wrong filter. I say this as someone who came to the series late, having been drawn in by one of the Destiel fan wars whose decibel-levels reached my ears through osmosis, and my expectation before I watched even one episode is that it would be drowning in Man-Tears and Macho Pain. When “Phantom Traveler” came along and I laughed out loud, I knew I would keep watching. I’m a film critic. I try to write my reviews not as “and then this happened and then that happened” book reports. I try to examine WHY something works – or doesn’t – and how we get the story through visual information. If you only read the Tumblr posts, you’d think Supernatural<\/i> never ever ever was funny. “Hollywood Babylon” presents a challenge on all of these levels, due to the sheer amount of cinematic stuff\/references going on.) <\/p>\n

It should be obvious why Episode 17 of Season 2 was named after Anger’s book. The memory of those studio lots go back a long long time. Many of the studios formed in the early decades of the 20th century are still with us, albeit in other conglomerated forms. For example, Warner Brothers was founded in 1904 as a film-distribution operation (many started that way), and the movie studio was opened in 1918. 20th Century Fox was formed in 1915 (if you believe some stories), and then in 1935 merged with Fox Film (which had actually been formed in 1915). 1915, 1935 … whatever: that studio logo has been around for 100 years. Rather extraordinary, especially in a town that doesn’t respect its history, a town devoted to make-believe, where yesterday may as well be ancient history. The studio Sam and Dean visit also has a long long memory, haunted by a tragic screen starlet of the 1930s. As Anger showed, a lot of deep dark shit went down on those studio lots. <\/p>\n

\nIntolerance<\/i> is four simultaneous stories of religious\/social intolerance throughout history. One unforgettable sequence shows the fall of Babylon (the magnificent set described in the excerpt above).<\/p>\n

Another connection to Supernatural<\/i>: In the Castiel-backstory episode The Man Who Would Be King<\/i>, his “I remember when we crawled out of the surf, I remember the turmoil of ancient times” inner monologue is interspersed with footage from Griffith’s Intolerance<\/i>, the fall of the walls of Babylon. See if you can recognize some of it.<\/p>\n