Introduction

What connects two Moroccan boys with a rifle, a Mexican nanny in San Diego, a deaf mute girl in Japan and an American couple on a holiday trip? In the ensemble film Babel, director Alejandro González Iñárritu tells a story of four different lives with four different cultural backgrounds and intertwines them in one gripping story. 

The film starts with two Moroccan boys who obtain a rifle from their father. Because they don’t understand the full consequences of this tool they accidentally shoot an American woman in a tourist bus. The mass media doesn’t broadcasts this as an accident by two herder boys, but as a calculated terrorist attack. Meanwhile in the US the American couples’ babysitter is taking care of the kids. Because the couple can’t get back in time the babysitter decides to take the children to her sons’ wedding in Mexico. The last story takes place in Japan where we follow a deaf girl who is trying to cope with her mothers’ suicide.

 Babel, 2006

 

The Tower of Babel

Babel refers to the biblical story ‘Tower of Babel’ from the old testament. In this story everybody spoke the same language and was united. They started to build a tower that reached to the heavens but because of their arrogance, god caused confusion in their speech which lead to miscommunication. The people stopped building the tower and they where scattered all over the world.

The (Great) Tower of Babel
Artist Pieter Bruegel the Elder
Year c. 1563
Medium oil on panel
Dimensions 114 cm × 155 cm (45 in × 61 in)
Location Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna

From local to global

Perhaps the most apparent theme in the movie Babel is that it ever so silently connects the storylines and the difficulties the characters face expressing their identity. Especially communicating their personal turmoil to the outside world. This is mostly shown through a disconnect in language as well as culture.

In all the storylines there is a deeply rooted fear of ‘others’. In a world where there is a rising threat of terrorism, over-speculation is highly driven by mass media. A shocking, but simple accident like a kid playing with a rifle can easily be seen as a terroristic attack because of the rapid spread of western news. The media, in this case, twists a local event into a global one.

Babel, 2006

 

Castells’ connection

“Information technologies accelerate the production of knowledge and information”
–Manuel Castells

Our society is witness of the technological revolution that made information easily accessible to everyone. Castells names this new type of society the network society. The network society is characterised by 3 fundamental features:

It is informational, since it produces knowledge.
It is global, because there are international connections on an economic and political level.
It is a network, in that it allows the sharing of information.

Castells claims that in this society, place and time are becoming less relevant to social life. This as a result creates new forms of time and space. And in turn these factors make it possible to be in different places at the same time. Alejandro González uses film on a meta-level to use this idea to its full potential. In Babel he utilises editing to form a narrative structure in where he presents the audience with an instantaneous switch of perspective, place and time. Thus rendering place and time obsolete in the sense of narrative. Referring back to Castells, stating that time and space become more and more obsolete in our ever growing network society.

By giving himself the power to switch from main characters and location at any time, Alejandro González shines light on contrasting differences between communicational disconnect and cultural isolation. This is the power of his editing as well as the power of Babel as a film. The narrative structure is shattered, yet connected storylines share deep connections with our network society.

 

Communication

Just because we can interact with people across the world, does that mean we’re really affected by them? Can we really, fully understand others if we speak the same language?

This theme spreads itself across the movie and perhaps the storyline most intimately connected to this is the one settled in Japan. The deaf Japanese girl can’t really speak, so without self-expression she is isolated and lives in her own public sphere with other mutes. In this small social circle she tries to cope with the death of her mother in her own bubble of silent suffering. Alejandro González ties this into the story seamlessly by also cleverly making her plot isolated from the rest of the story arcs. This creates isolation. Not only for the character, but also in a narrative sense as a viewer. Babel is a film about borders and how people can be stuck in a system created by them while, paradoxically, at the same time accidentally being able to influence anything, anywhere, at any time across them.

Most of the conflict portrayed in the film is due to miscommunication and while living under one roof of capitalist networks, we still struggle to understand one another across the world.

The movie is ended by the quote: “If You Want to be Understood... Listen.”.

 

Discussion

The movie Babel has left us with some questions about the functionalization of globalization. As we've seen from the movie Babel is that an interconnected world can minimize time and space but can also cause conflicts in communication. The movie perfectly portrays the different consequences misunderstanding each cultural differences can lead to. So to end this post we would like to start the debate on the following questions:

Is miscommunnication between different cultures something we can and need to prevent? 

Is it even possible to really, fully understand eachother while speaking the same (cultural) language?

What is the value of being aware of other people's perspectives?

Will different traditional cultures and languages still exist in the future or will there be one universal culture? And should we want this?

 

 

 

 

 

 

Written by:

Sara Bastiani
Giulia Stefanelli
Claudia Bruni
Beatrice Gasperini
Tess Steijvers
Michiel Hak
Roos van der Minnen

 

Reference list

http://www.biblestudytools.com/bible-stories/the-tower-of-babel.html

Pieterse, J. N. (2015). Globalization and Culture (Third ed.). Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield.

Manuel Castells (2000). British Journal of Sociology. Volume No. 51 Issue No. 1  pp. 5-24

Babel (2006) directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu