I watched Babel last night and I really liked it! I was ready to hate it at the beginning when it seemed to me that the movie makers were setting Morocco up to look like a lifeless, cultureless place where people lack morals. It seemed that they were setting this image up in contrast to an image of America where children are sweet and innocent in a culture that is full of life and vibrancy.
In fact, I think they were setting it up in this way, and intentionally so. The abrupt shift away from Morocco to a focus on a deaf-mute Japanese girl named Chieko brought out the importance that the film makers placed on perspective. It took a while for Chieko’s character to fully reveal the importance of perspective, but I thought it was most clearly brought out in the scene where she visits a dance club.
The film makers keep shifting between her perspective, wherein there is no sound and a third person perspective with sound.
The exploration of perspective through Chieko’s character really brought out for me the differences between the experiences of Brad Pitt’s character, Richard, and the British man in the tan jacket.
Richard is dealing with a life threatening situation to his wife and this is bringing him into contact with some of the local people. Trust relationships are slowly being built up on the basis of this crisis.
The British man, by contrast, is an outsider to the situation and is building no trust relationships with the locals. Unlike Richard, he has no one to act as a translator for him and he is left with only his preconceptions. To him, the situation is that he is on a bus and there has been a shooting; he remembers an incident when all the tourists on a bus in Egypt were killed and he is using that paralell as a model for his decision making.
He can’t read the expressions of the people watching him, and he can’t understand the language they speak, which combined with his decision making model based on the Egypt terrorist attacks makes him assume the worst.
So to go back to the beginning. Morocco really is an empty place for Richard and his wife Susan. Something has happened between those two that has disrupted their trust relationship, which has in turn has created a big problem at home. As such, Richard attempts to run away from the problem by going to a place he considers devoid of anything familiar to try to get back to basics and rebuild his trust relationship with his wife. These reasons for coming to Morocco shape his experience there.
The experience of leaving “home” and going to “somewhere else” is mirrored in the character of Aunt Amelia, who, 16 years prior, left her home to come to America. During those 16 years, she built up a new life for herself in her “somewhere else” and that “somewhere else” became “home.” Her reasons for going elsewhere differed drastically from Richards and her experience diverged accordingly.
With this set up, Babel becomes a movie that is unapologetically presenting subjective realities in four different countries: Morocco, America, Mexico, and Japan.
The presented reality of Morocco is tied to Richard’s perception, the presented reality of America is tied to Aunt Amelia’s perception, the presented reality of Mexico is tied to the preception of Richard and Susan’s children, Debbie and Mike, and the presented reality of Japan is tied to the perception of Chieko.
I thought that these subjective realities were a nice change of pace from the usual attempt in this kind of movie to present an objective reality.
What I really liked about this movie was that it didn’t stop at just presenting subjective realities, but rather also attempted to place that subjective reality into the context of objective reality.
By objective reality, I guess I mean the actions of the police. I am calling it objective reality because the movie set these actions up to suggest that both at the Mexico/America border and in Morocco, the police were acting strictly according to protocol. In Japan, the police also acted strictly according to protocol, but in Japan, the film makers presented us with a commentary on those protocols in the face of Kenji, the kind hearted Japanese police officer who ends up comforting Chieko.
By avoiding the sense that any of the police officers are corrupt, the movie offers their actions up as a silohuette of the regimes that rule each country. I didn’t get any sort of sense of the true nature of these regimes, but through the various characters’ interaction with the silohuette of the regime, I got a good idea of relationship between citizen and state in each country.
Mexico had by far the most stand-offish relationship between citizen and state presented in the movie, as police presence was entirely absent in Mexico. This relationship was followed by shown in Japan where police were an unobtrusive presence in everyday life, but there was a great deal of wariness of falling on the wrong side of the police. Next came the relationship found in Morocco wherein the police were intrusive and demanding. The relationship that involved the most interaction between the state and citizen was shown in America wherein the police did everything possible to protect their citizens from harm while casually disregarding the humanity of all non-citizens in pursuit of that goal.
Has anyone else seen the movie recently? Did you like it? Hate it? Do you agree with my reaction to it? Or do you think I am way off base?
