Babel Elucidated
by: bamf 1 year, 8 months, 1 day, 17 hours, 58 minutes ago
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In ancient Babylon a Tower was built. God felt the men whom attempted to reach the heaven were evil and defiant and he/she was not going to have them knocking on the door for some sugar. So in the deities wisdom God confused the languages of the builders and made it impossible for the tower to be completed. Their defiance led to them being scattered across the globe and a world separated by race and language was born.
Babel is a film that attempts to show what God has created for thine forgotten loved.
Senor Bamf her rematerializing from the void..
Upon relocation to California I quickly looked for work. I interviewed at many financial institutions and all were impressed with my resume; but the one question that always came up was,
“Do you speak Spanish?”
No I do not. It limited greatly the places I could work and probably cut me out of a few extra pesos an hour but I still received many offers. Finally, I settled on a branch in Garden Grove California. I’m going through a little culture shock right now, but not how you might think. Instead of being sent to an area predominantly Spanish speaking, I was sent to a branch where 90% of the customers are of Asian decent. Specifically from Vietnam and Korea. My job has been a challenge and on top of picking up some Spanish, which I’m told I have a “white” accent by the way. I’m picking up some basic Korean salutations and Vietnamese is coming up next. With this massive language barrier my job has turned into basic hand signals and broad smiles on my part. My day-to-day experience at work is a microcosm of what the film Babel seeks to illustrate. And it does this with brilliance.
A married couple on vacation in the Moroccan desert face a terrific circumstance when the mans wife is struck by a snipers bullet. They find themselves in utter desolation surrounded by a third world setting in which they have a lone interpreter to decipher what they need. His wife is bleeding, they are cut off from the world, the best doctor is a veterinarian and time is running out. This sparks six different families stories across the world and although they know not of each other, they are all interlocked together.
Director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu has really created a visceral experience for the viewer. In the film you are shown how similar we are all to each other. And although you may not know the language that is spoken, it’s easy to understand when someone is hurt, aroused or in despair. In fact Babel is full of very intense scenes involving joy and pain. Some scenes hurt to watch. Brad Pitt is very underplayed in this and his performance reminded me of his work in 12 Monkeys. Not the crazy bit, he’s just not the sex symbol you are accustomed to. His work is revealing and exposed. His reactions to his situation with his wife (Cate Blanchett was great) illuminate the true nature of love in its finest form.
Loves nature was explored in another way through the Husband and Wife’s nanny Amelia. She needs to get to Mexico to see her son married but has no place to put the couple’s kids. So she brings them with her across the border escorted by the show stealing Santiago played by The Science Of Sleeps Gael Garcia Bernal exposing the two white children to a world they have never seen. Amelia’s decisions as an adult at the end are a great juxtaposition to the choices of the children at the beginning. I’m not sure what the message is from the filmmakers regarding her. She is the commonalty of the arch, an illegal from Mexico who has lived many years in the United States. For her choices she is deported and barred from the country indefinitely. Illegal immigration is given a face in the film and although I sympathized with her situation it gives a very good look at what this country will face in the coming years. Who will be let in? Who will we kick out? What are people coming here to do and who is hiring them to do it? The most important thought you could come away with is that no choice we make towards the illegal immigration in the US is going to be easy nor will it be definitively right for all situations. We have a mess that is compounding its self.
My favorite character in Babel is the lonely Chieko. There is a scene where she, a deaf Japanese woman enters a club called J-Pop in Japan. Following her adventure really grounded the film for me. She was the tie that brought together all the other stories and she never speaks one word. Chieko has a specific mission in the film and by the time she arrives at J-Pop you are certain she will succeed. This dance club scene was stunning, the camera switches between the club atmosphere and Chieko’s first person view, as she understands it. The track that plays is a 70’s pop song sang in Japanese but when you hear it you know exactly what it was and I’m pretty sure your ass would start to shake. But she cannot understand any of it and in her isolation begins to find her own rhythm among the crowd. It was mesmerizing.
This film has international appeal and that has a great deal to do with Chieko. She is the vessel that brings us all together in such a pure and innocent way. She illustrates how in this world full of ones and zeroes, multi national news conglomerates, coke, Pepsi, analog and digital we are all separated from one another by our own perceptions. And how we perceive ones religion, language, culture and social class are ubiquitous in their nature and are what globally separates us from one another. We are all so similar though. The glue that binds all our civilizations together is the fact that we are all alone, deaf and naked searching to be understood by someone, anyone. The tagline for the film puts it better then I could. If you want to be understood, listen..