History gone soft: performing the scandalous 1920s in Hollywood Babylon

Abstract

ABSTRACT Adapted (without permission) from Kenneth Anger’s notorious book about early Hollywood scandals, the 1972 sexploitation version of Hollywood Babylon is a quasi-documentary that alternates between public-domain footage from silent-era films and softcore re-enactments of some of Anger’s most lurid anecdotes. The film’s generic reframing of his dubious stories as late-period sexploitation fodder participates in the book’s mission of desacralizing the stars, but its reticence to include unsimulated sex softens the punch of its scandalous subject matter, while inadvertently flaunting Anger’s fictionalization of history. This article argues that the performances in Hollywood Babylon doubly signal the ‘softness’ of both the filmmakers’ depictions of sex and Anger’s Hollywood lore, compounding the book’s thematic linkage of on-screen decadence, off-screen perversion, and movieland failures.