| Reading Guide for Week 13 | |
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You can watch the film for this week via various video streaming services, some for a small fee. Babel is a deceptive title, since only the starting point of this film is about miscommunication. That is an easy, superficial theme. You will quickly notice that the film is really about failures of prior knowledge, failures of understanding and self-awareness within situations, and failures of emotional empathy. Those kinds of failures — and the cognitive, psychological, and emotional distances they imply — apply to many elements of modern life, including empire. Everywhere there are distances, as 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 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 be 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. This is a familiar film 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 the way it is in a conventional, predictable Hollywood film. This is not a film about easy redemption; it is much more challenging and much more interesting than that.
I assume you are prepared for profane speech on occasion; there is also some graphic 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 — on scales that the characters did not 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, we are in such a moment right now, when the pandemic/care/economic crisis has long confined us, making it difficult to see larger structures and longer histories (and the terrible price we have been paying for all those, alas). A serious film, or professional journalism, or a history class can help unveil such structures and histories. I personally spent college un-blinding myself, with ever more determination once I realized how 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 six times, and it is still as gripping as ever. I have tried to avoid any spoilers in the above. |