What is a decadent film? Browsing the webs, it seems no one can quite agree. For some internauts it’s the conspicuous consumption of Marie Antoinette (2006) or The Wolf of Wall Street (2013), or Liza Minnelli exclaiming “Divine decadence!” as she waggles her green fingernails in Cabaret (1972). Other netizens cite the etiolated vampirism of The Hunger (1983) or Only Lovers Left Alive (2013). But current frontrunner in the “decadent cinema” stakes has to be Damien Chazelle’s Babylon (2022), set in the hedonist world of 1920s Hollywood.
Amid all the frankly rather exhausting sex, drugs and debauchery, you could be forgiven for forgetting it was also a decade of astonishing creativity. The glimpses of the filmmaking process in Chazelle’s film are so shambolic it’s hard to see how anything got made at all, let alone masterpieces like Erich von Stroheim’s Greed (1924), King Vidor’s The Crowd (1928), FW Murnau’s Sunrise (1927) or the work of Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin – all of which hold up today. The visual and narrative innovation of 1920s filmmaking ground to a halt only when the introduction of talkies imposed restraints on actors and camera movement.
But I’ll wager today’s idea of The Roaring Twenties is coloured less by the films produced in that decade and more by later productions that used it as a setting, making even the dissipation seem perversely glamorous. Singin’ in the Rain was filmed in 1952 but is set in 1927, the year of The Jazz Singer, and its plot turns on the transition from silents to talkies, with all the attendant problems, particularly a screen diva with such a jarring voice she has to be dubbed. Babylon’s extensive homages to Singin’ in the Rain end up backfiring when you find yourself wishing you were watching the 1952 film instead.
At least Singing’ in the Rain doesn’t make the mistake of the last two big screen adaptations of F Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, both of which get drunk on their own period detail. This quintessential 1920s novel has been adapted four times, though the first film, made only two years after the book’s 1925 publication, is presumed lost. Despite sterling work from Leonardo DiCaprio in the title role, Baz Luhrmann’s 2013 glitter-bomb gets bogged down in dreary voice-over, which pedantically spells out everything we can already see for ourselves.
Jack Clayton’s 1974 version made more of a pop cultural impact at the time, though it also feels like an advert for The Jazz Age – all champagne cocktails and jumping into fountains. At the time of its release you could barely move for lavish fashion spreads featuring cloche hats and dropped waistlines. I don’t recall any of my friends adopting the look – we were in the middle of swapping loon pants for 1950s-style drainpipes – though, inspired by a concurrent viewing of Pandora’s Box (1929), I did get my hair cut in a Louise Brooks bob.
But you can’t have Gatsby-esque partying without booze, and you can’t have booze during Prohibition without organised crime, bootlegging and speakeasies. So another fixture of films set during the 1920s – and even hovering in the background story of The Great Gatsby – is gangsters, from The Roaring Twenties (1939) to Some Like It Hot (1959), in which the St Valentine’s Day Massacre kicks off the plot, to Bugsy Malone (1976) and The Cotton Club (1984).
If we are living in decadent times, it’s in the literal sense of decaying, not the faded glamour of the 1920s
And here we are, one hundred years later, in the middle of a decade one would be hard pressed to call “roaring”. Whimpering, perhaps, or gasping for breath. Where is that Hollywood debauchery now? If it exists, which it surely does, it takes place behind locked doors, except for sporadic eruptions of moral turpitude into the public arena such as the Depp vs Heard fiasco, or “cancellations” of Kevin Spacey or Gina Carano for unsavoury behaviour or political views. Meanwhile, the yellow press is outraged by Gwyneth Paltrow’s vagina candles, or by Harrison Ford, chairman of a global conservation group, flying one of his private planes up the coast for a cheeseburger.
As for today’s gangsters, well, we all know who they are, except instead of doing the public a service by supplying it with illegal alcohol, they’re raking in millions, if not billions, by approving software that not only doesn’t work properly but gets its unwitting users arrested, or flogging not-fit-for-purpose PPE during a pandemic, or finding offshore loopholes to avoid paying taxes. Al Capone would be green with envy.
But if we really are living in decadent times, it’s decadence in the literal sense of declining or decaying, rather than evoking faded glamour or the Symbolist movement of the 1890s. All the films cited in my first paragraph are illustrations of decadence rather than embodiments of it. But for the true decline of an art form, we need look no further than Hollywood’s current policy of recycling, regurgitation and green-screened superheroes up the wazoo, all churned out by CEOs so obsessed with profits at the expensive of creativity they’re either unaware they’re milking their sources dry, or – more likely – they just don’t give a fig.
Anne Billson is a film critic, novelist and photographer
