Babel, a film directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu, is about the universal language of pain, hope and love where communication goes beyond words or signs. This paper seeks to illustrate how Babel‘s geo-political agenda critiques isolationism, power and privilege in this age of globalisation which promises a “borderless world”.[1] The film harnesses the strength of its argument via ideology and stereotype, both of which will be examined and analysed in the following.
Babel is about an American couple nursing their marital woes over the death of their third child in a holiday in Morocco when the wife Susan is accidentally shot in the shoulder on the tour bus by one of the two goat herder’s sons who is testing the range of a Winchester rifle given by his father to chase away jackals. The Mexican nanny Amelia tending the couple’s children wishes to attend her son’s wedding back in her native land and thus crosses the border illegally with the children when she is unable to locate a replacement to look after them. In Japan, Chieko a deaf-mute schoolgirl still traumatised over her mother’s suicide and frustrated over her father’s (Yasujiro) emotional detachment seeks meaning and gratification by sexually availing herself to men. The common thread in these four narratives is that the rifle is given by Yasujiro, when he is hunting in Morocco, to a guide who then sells it to the goat herder.
The inspiration of the film’s title is the account of the Tower of Babel found in Genesis 11: 1 – 9. Iñárritu speaks of his motive behind Babel:
I wanted to try to capture the whole idea of human communication – its ambitions, its beauty, and its problems – with one word… each one of us has his own different language, but I believe we all share the same spiritual spine.[2]
The Internet and other technological advancements boast of making the world a smaller one but they do not stop chaos – change is the only constant in the world of Babel despite global cultural (American mass media) and linguistic (international lingua franca being English Language) hegemony and homogeneity. Perhaps language is a barrier, rather than a gateway, to mutual understanding. Progress in cyber-telecommunications still leave humans fundamentally paralysed and crippled when articulating thoughts and feelings to one another. We see the ideological theme of isolationism in the film narrative of Chieko being a stranger in her own land. Despite Tokyo’s neon fluorescence, the city’s dense population casts her as a pariah where she hears nobody and nobody can read her sign language. The final scene of a naked Chieko in the embrace of her father against the backdrop of a glossy pulsating nightscape speaks of a metaphor of how vast this reach of loneliness and alienation can be. Emotional distance can be insurmountable despite close physical proximity.
The portrayal of stereotypes in Babel is astute and they help the viewer to discern the intricate repercussions of ignorance and bigotry despite globalisation. Susan, an arrogant and affluent American woman, cleanses her hands with disinfectant salve and pours out ice cubes at a restaurant tent in the African desert because she does not know “what is in it”; on the tour bus, Susan is separated from the strange, exotic Moroccan universe by the glass window – and yet for all her rejection of the Third World, Susan’s survival is solely dependent on the physician in the village of Tazarine to sew her wounds up, albeit without anaesthetic, and the tour guide Anwar’s goodwill and even his grandmother’s hash pipe to sedate Susan after the excruciating surgery. Babel highlights one of the truisms cited by globalisation critics – “colliding worlds are rarely compatible”; the film’s montage likewise illustrates the clash of perspectives and mentalities.[3] Other instances of stereotypes such as Chieko’s heart wrenching desperation leading her to embrace a pop culture lie of exploiting her sexuality to garner attention from members of the opposite gender as well as immigration officials at the American-Mexican border depicted as self-righteous and unfeeling patrol guards further reinforce and exemplify the universality of the human condition. The stereotypical incidents in the film are thoughtfully wrought to enlighten the viewer of things he may have taken for granted – Babel employs common, mundane encounters in life to convey the bizarre chain reaction of the butterfly effect where each wingbeat sends out ripples of agony across continents and cultures, a domino effect of disasters on a global scale. Beyond the fragmentation and disorientation, life in the film echoes a cosmic game of Six Degrees of Separation as the film unravels the fatalistic link between the four disparate stories.[4]
Essentially, the film’s ideological goal is to elucidate America’s conceit and post-September 11 solipsism. The paranoia of the American government turned the life-or-death dilemma of privileged Californian couple Richard and Susan into an international crisis and terrorism scandal. Americans can call their embassy for help and return home to their children. How intentional the irony is when we find out the white children survived in the Mexican desert when found by the police while the Moroccan ones either go to jail or die. Babel also documents America’s brutal immigration regulations for Mexicans – there is suspicion over illegal immigrants while humiliation and contempt for those legitimate ones. The American-Mexican border is drawn alongside “a system of social Apartheid” as embodied by Bush’s inconsistent and hypocritical immigration policy which causes Mexicans crossing the border to face double standards by both governments.[5] Amelia is left to her destiny unprotected by immigration laws in either country – the fact that she has lived with the American couple for 16 years and raised their children means absolutely nothing to the authorities!
In other words, regardless East or West, rich or poor, young or old – we are united in the estrangement of the fall. Babel‘s core theme is that religious, ethnical and cultural prejudices and stereotypes are actually much more powerful obstacles to communication than language itself, and that ideas and misconceptions segregate people more than borders. Hence, whereas on the one hand the promise of globalisation is to abolish divisions within a “borderless world”, on the other hand we see in the film the cinematic figure of the outsider whose existential voyage demands him to cross borders not just political or physical, but inevitably and ultimately internal.[6] Victims of tragedies have no power to overcome their circumstances and predicament, and no knowledge of the consequences of the decisions they make. It is juxtaposed against such a context that Babel appeals to humanity for compassion and empathy, and such an ideology is evidenced by the film’s wailing over victim’s unreciprocated pleas for help by the governments whose deafness is “indifference by design, cruelty by habit.”[7] It is an elaborate metaphor that conflicts and tensions between authorities, which only serve their own interests, often aggravate misunderstandings and exacerbate miscommunications that eventually yield mortal catastrophes. American authorities insist that the shooting was an act of terror yet cannot obtain clearance from defensive Moroccan authorities to send in a helicopter to evacuate Richard and Susan. The Japanese detectives calling on Chieko are following up on a query from Morocco while the Moroccan peasants themselves are ruthlessly abused by their own police. The bureaucratically and sentimentally numb officers of the American-Mexican border patrol and Office of Homeland Security are adequately connected to deport Amelia but are unable to process the touching human elements of the situation.
For an aesthetically monumental, culturally conscious and politically ambitious film such as Babel, it insinuates the damning legacy of globalisation. In the Mesopotamian times when the Tower of Babel was constructed, bricks instead of stones were utilised:
A brick was, therefore, more precious in the sight of the builders than a human being. If a man fell down, and met his death, none took notice of it, but if a brick dropped, they wept, because it would take a year to replace it.[8] [9] [10]
Information technologies are purportedly to overcome cultural and linguistic barriers where the desire for free communication stems from altruistic impulses and it is considered to be the hallmark of globalisation; yet, the above account of the devaluation of human life exposes the brutal reality behind a “borderless world” – information technologies merely monopolise control over power and decision making and these ideologies lead to the devaluation of human life and culture in the name of economic progress.[11] This mirrors the political and bureaucratic confusion that plagues the characters in Babel where governments and authorities embroil the lives of innocent people together with their hidden agendas, resulting in a global communicative nightmare. The intention of globalisation to “foster cooperation and openness” is necessarily contradicted by the film as it uses ideological and stereotypical examples of isolationism, power and privilege to devastate the theory that the needs of all can be efficiently met.[12]
This paper seeks to prove the naivety of globalisation’s aim to establish a “borderless world” through the progress and advancement of information technologies when language is beyond words. Babel comments on the miscommunication between husband and wife, parents and children, brothers, adolescents of opposite sex, authorities and those under them, and even between governments. Ultimately, it is, more often than not, not language that stifles communication and understanding but values and prejudices; what transcends all are really universal human emotions that are mutually comprehensible such as love and hope, without both there will only be pain and despair.
[1] Ruhleder, Karen & Green, Carolyn. “Globalization and the Tower of Babel.” System Sciences, 1993, Proceeding of the Twenty-Sixth Hawaii International Conference on 4, 5 – 8 Jan (1993): 460 – 468.
[2] Levy, Emanuel. Iñárritu on Babel and Brad Pitt. Los Angeles, 2006. http://www.emanuellevy.com/article.php?articleID=2600. (accessed: 24 March, 2007).
[3] Farzanefar, Armin of Qantara: Dialogue with the Islamic World. Speechless in the Age of Globalisation. Bonn, 2007. http://www.qantara.de/webcom/show_article.php/_c-310/_nr-382/_p-1/i.html?PHPSESSID=5. (accessed: 24 March, 2007).
[4] Ridley, Jim of Dallas Observer. Small Talk. Texas, Village Voice Media: 2006. http://www.dallasobserver.com/2006-11-02/film/small-talk/. (accessed: 24 March, 2007).
[5] Farzanefar, Armin.
[6] Krause, Tim of CUNY Graduate Center Advocate. Border Crossings, Intellectual and Literal. New York, 2007. http://www.gcadvocate.org/index.php?action=view&id=105. (accessed: 24 March, 2007).
[7] Valle, Ramón of World Socialist Web Site. Babel: Humanity is not the Prisoner of Fate. Michigan, International Committee of the Fourth International: 2006. http://wsws.org/articles/2006/dec2006/babe-d18.shtml. (accessed: 24 March, 2007).
[8] Kaiser, Walter C. Jr., and Garrett, Duane A., eds. Archaeological Study Bible. Michigan: Zondervan Corporation, 2005.
[9] Ginzberg, Louis. Legends of the Bible. Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication of Society of American, 1956.
[10] Rappoport, Angelo S.. Myth and Legend of Ancient Israel. New York: Ktav Publishing House, 1966.
[11] Ruhleder, Karen & Green, Carolyn.
[12] Cleveland, Harlan. “The Age of People Power.” The Futurist, March/April (1990): 35 – 39.
Recent Comments