Christian Ethics and the Movies
Globalism- Babel (2006) Reviewed by David A. Thomas, Assoc. Prof. of Rhetoric Emeritus University of Richmond
Babel is the most global movie of the year. Nominated for awards by dozens of industry associations, including the Oscars and the Golden Globes, it polarized viewers into those who love it and those who hate it. It baffled those who expected a formula thriller. Limited space here hinders any attempt to clarify all of its separate but interrelated story lines in Morocco, Mexico, and Japan. If you saw the movie and it puzzled you, you are not alone. It is not the movie`s fault. The connections are all there, but you have to pay close attention. It is a thinking person`s film, a challenging movie. It is absorbing, even entertaining, because of the cinematography, outstanding acting, and the brilliant writing and directing by its team of top Mexican artists. It might also be the year`s movie you most want to discuss in a coffeehouse afterwards.
About the plot, briefly: the catalyst for everything else in the movie is an incident that occurs during a vacation trip by an American couple (Richard and Susan, played by a matured Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett). Their marriage is under severe strain because they have just lost a baby to SIDS. As they ride a tour bus through the Moroccan desert, out of nowhere Susan is hit and seriously hurt by a gunshot through the window.
From that point, Babel lives up to the theme suggested by its title: what to do in a crisis situation where there are overwhelming language and cultural obstacles? At first, no one knows what has happened. Most of the riders are fellow Americans, but the driver and tour guide are Moroccans who have no idea what to do. Who shot her? Was it a deliberate attack? How can Susan be attended to? They decide that medical help is the most urgent priority. The bus leaves the main road to drop Richard and Susan off in the nearest village, where Richard is appalled by the lack of any treatment facilities. He`s panicked by his inability to communicate with anyone on the scene.
Seeing Susan on the verge of dying, he blurts out the threat: If you leave, I`ll kill you! I`ll kill you! But leave them there, they do, and for the moment, so must we. The American embassy makes a pussy-footed diplomatic non-action. American officials assume there are terrorists behind the attack, and they hesitate to send any quick response teams from the capitol city into what may turn out to be hostile territory. The hours pass.
But who did shoot her? That brings us to sub-plot number 1: the poverty-ridden rural Moroccan family up in the hills, where the father has just bought a high-powered rifle from a friend to kill the jackals that attack his little flock of goats. The family consists of the parents and three middle-school aged kids, two boys and a girl. The father hands the rifle over to the two boys, tells them to kill some jackals, and he sends them off.
They play with the gun as if it were a toy, taking wild pot shots at nearby boulders (which they miss by a mile). One boy has a better idea of how the gun ought to work. He spies the bus on the distant highway below, and squeezes off a round in its direction.
Meanwhile, sub-plot 2, back in Susan and Richard`s million-dollar home in San Diego. Their two kids are left in the care of their longtime, though undocumented, Mexican nanny. Since Susan and Richard are away, the nanny yields to the temptation to make a quick trip back into Mexico for her son`s wedding. Wait, what about the kids? Leave them with a friend. But the friend can`t, today. So, just take them along.
The same sub-plot continues: cut to the next morning after the party ends. It`s just before dawn, and the nephew is roaring drunk on the trip back. Nanny is an illegal alien, and she`s got two American kids with her in the car with no documents. They try to re-enter the U. S. through the customs checkpoint. When the customs officers notice something wrong with this picture, they try to question the nephew, who acts like a loudmouth drunk behind the wheel. The nephew panics and accelerates through the checkpoint. In the ensuing chase, he dumps Nanny and the two kids in a dark hiding place out in the brushy Southern California desert. Promising to return soon to pick them up when the coast is clear, guess what? He doesn`t. Another "Oops!"
Return to Morocco and the main plot. Richard and Susan are still stranded. Good detective work locates the herder and recovers the rifle. It is traced by its serial number to its original owner, a wealthy Japanese businessman.
Sub-plot 3: Cut to Tokyo for a glimpse of the businessman`s teenage daughter and her group of friends. Outwardly, the girl is just a normal high schooler, a volleyball player who loves to hang out with the team in a teen club, drink Cokes, and flirt with the boys-or go to a rave club and experiment with drugs a little. Below the surface, she is deeply troubled by her mother`s recent suicide. Did I mention? She`s stone deaf. In a few of her scenes, the sound track is OFF, indicating her viewpoint. Soon a young, attractive Japanese detective comes calling at Dad`s 10th floor condo to investigate how his rifle came to be involved in a shooting in Morocco. This sad, lonely girl thinks maybe the young man might become her friend, so she strips for him. It is not an erotic moment. The man is mortified. Her action is pathetic, inducing our pity, because it is more associated with her own suicidal depression than it is with any sexual attraction. Thankfully, the detective acts like the responsible grown-up he is.
Christian Ethics and Babel. Forget about trying to track the plot as a coherent three-act story. Babel has a structure like last year`s Crash, but not quite its uplifting redemption. Babel is about the scene, and how it dominates the characters. That scene is chaos. Think globalism. Babel is a picture about Babel, without being an obvious allegory. In the biblical story, men tried to become as God by building a tower to heaven, but God prevented them by confounding their languages so they could not communicate. The message of this international screenwriter/director team is similar to the Bible`s.
As viewers of a Hollywood film, we expect the final reel to reveal a quick denouement stemming from a moral decision by the protagonist that will lead to a happy ending. Too often, that is how we think of God, as Someone who views the messes we get ourselves into and Someone who magically turns us towards wise choices and bold actions so we can set things right with our world. The nearest Babel gets to this result is that, at long last, a Red Cross helicopter arrives to take Susan and Richard back to civilization and modern medicine.
We must leave Morocco, as the opening scene`s bus tour did, taking a quick look at a quaint but beautiful bit of scenery out of our windows, and then moving on to the next attraction. Nothing happens to resolve the problems of subsistence Moslem herders living in remote desert communities, or the illegals working as our domestic helpers, or the rich teenagers dancing to Western disco music, adrift in Tokyo. Richard and Susan are closer.
The most visible lesson is one that critics and viewers never mention: the yawning chasm between the haves and the have-nots. Though it is right there in plain sight, we don`t see it because we don`t speak the same languages. Since language is embedded in culture, being monolingual means that we fail to grasp just how differently other language groups view the world than we do. This blind spot applies to any of the myriad collisions between cultures (and within sub-cultures) that now butt against each other in what Tom Friedman calls our "Flat World." If anything in Babel is pictured clearly, it is that unbridgeable abyss between nations, between rich and poor, between parents and children, and even between husbands and wives
