| Film Guide for Week 15 | |
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Babel is a deceptive title for this film, since only the starting point of this film is about miscommunication. That is an important but relatively easy theme. You will quickly notice that the film is really about failures of prior knowledge, failures of self-awareness within situations, and failures of cultural understanding and emotional empathy. Those kinds of failures — and the epistemological, psychological, and emotional distances they imply — apply to many elements of modern life, including empire. Everywhere there are distances, which in this film are then smashed together. The film features three interwoven vignettes set mainly in Morocco, Mexico, and Japan. But American empire is also very present, in multiple ways. The film is not about American empire, but that is why I purposefully chose it, since American empire lurks throughout the world, unavoidably in the background and sometimes in the foreground for everyone in the world.
The film will start out slowly, immersing you in settings and atmospheres, and in intimate relationships and emotional distances. It should quickly become obvious why it does so, since most of the film will be structured around unexpected, sudden, catastrophic disruptions. Be patient; those disruptions have to be set up by starting-point distances. This is a familiar filmic device. The film will not explain things, which is why you have to watch and listen closely. It is not a conventional Hollywood film devoted to constant explanation of the action as it is happening, often with clumsy dialogue by a secondary character whose entire role is devoted to such inane explanation. Again, be patient. Like real people, the characters in this film struggle with self-understanding and self-expression, never mind mutual communication and mutual understanding. There are many bad decisions, and there is much folly, which are/is not redeemed in the same tedious way as in a conventional, predictable Hollywood film. This is not a film about redemption; it is much more challenging and much more interesting than that.
I assume you are prepared for profane talk on occasion; there is also some graphic interpersonal violence, some sad sexuality, and some frank nudity.
I remember seeing this director’s first major film, Amores Perros (2000), in the theatre long ago, as an important step in my own education in film. That film, too, had Gael Garcia Bernal, one of the great actors of the 21st century. That film, too, featured interwoven stories connected by very sudden, spiraling disruptions — in ways and on scales that the characters do not fully recognize. The impact of disruption hits so immediately and so closely, that it is hard to see the larger connections and structures, never mind the longer histories. Indeed, that is one of the themes of the director’s films — what one can see/grasp/understand, versus what one cannot see/grasp/understand. A serious film, or professional journalism, or a history class can help in the process of unveiling such connections, structures, and histories. I personally spent college un-blinding myself, with ever more and more determination once I realized how terribly blinded I had been ... like Suzy Hansen in our early reading for this class. I hope you enjoy the film. I myself have watched it at least eight times now, and it is still as gripping as ever. (I have tried to avoid any spoilers in the above.) |