Babel: Analysis

June 28, 2007

Personal Thoughts

Before getting into any deep analysis I thought it might help to record my personal opinion of this film. I have to admit, I hated this film while I was watching it. Absolutely despised it. In fact, I even said aloud, “I hate this film.” I’ve never done that before ((Well, OK, maybe once - while watching Lady in the Water. But Babel is certainly not that bad!)).

However, as my distance from the film has grown, so has my appreciation for it. For reasons I can’t quite describe yet, I think I really really liked the film. My initial scorn for it came entirely from the thoughtless adults who so easily placed the children under their care in jeopardy. If they hadn’t found those children in the border desert between the United States and Mexico I was fully prepared to crack the DVD in half ((Not an easy task if you’ve ever tried it!)).

Thankfully they were rescued, as was my chance at watching a fully intact DVD sometime in the future.

And chances are, I will.

A Complete Story

The impulse for the repeated viewing of a film often comes from the completeness of the story. Because stories offer us something we can’t experience in real life ((Complete stories offer an audience both a Subjective view and Objective view of reality – at the same time. This CANNOT be experienced in real life. You can take one perspective or the other - not both at once. That’s why stories are so cool.)), we feel the impulse to experience them again and again.

But as will be revealed in my analysis below, I didn’t really feel like there was one complete story in Babel. Futher time may be required then to fully understand why I can’t stop thinking about it.

Dramatica and Ensemble Stories

With that out of the way, let’s turn our attention to the story as presented to us. Babel is clearly an ensemble piece - not your typical Hero’s Journey. As mentioned in the December 2006 Tip of the Month:

The Dramatica software isn’t well suited to working with ensemble stories, but it can be helpful in developing or evaluating them.

So while the software may be difficult to use when writing these kinds of stories, the theory itself still can be used to better understand the author’s original intent. If you are currently writing an ensemble story or would like to learn more about how Dramatica sees these kinds of stories, make sure you follow the link above.

Story Analysis

For the purposes of this analysis, we’ll break off the characters into separate groups. By doing so we can then perhaps decipher what part they played in the larger goal of communicating the author’s message.

Richard and Susan

Richard (Brad Pitt) and his wife Susan (Cate Blanchett) are on vacation in Morocco to “get away from it all.” On a high mountain road, she is mortally shot by an errant bullet, forcing Richard and the people around them to quickly seek out medical attention for her.

This storyline was clearly meant to be the focal point for which all the other throughlines were to revolve around. All the characters in Babel were in some fashion or another affected by the situation in Morocco. By definition, this would be the Objective Story Throughline.

And the intent of this can be found everywhere, even in the various taglines used to sell the film:

• Tragedy is universal
• One shot, many kills
• A single gunshot heard around the world

This last one clearly describes the problematic situation everyone is dealing with. Plainly, Richard (Brad Pitt) and Susan (Cate Blanchett) are stuck in the deserts of Morocco with little to hope of being rescued (OS Throughline: Situation). If they were to be “unstuck” or somehow able to get to a hospital, the problems in the Objective Story would be resolved and the story would be over. And this is, in fact, what finally happens at the end when the Americans are finally given their “happy ending.” ((This was mentioned in the Japanese news broadcast. Interestingly enough, as an American I was quite pleased that I was given this ending. As explained before, it helped quell my anger.))

Unfortunately, little time is given to exploring either of them or the difficulties between them. We know that the death of their son Sam has much to do with their constant bickering, but we aren’t given enough screen real-estate to really get into it. Likewise, we really don’t delve much into Richard or Susan’s personal problems. Susan obviously has a heightened sense of motherly protection while Richard comes off as impersonal as the remote desert he finds himself in.

To qualify for a Main Character throughline we really need to know a character personally, to really feel empathy for them and to really feel what it is like to be that person. Richard and Susan don’t offer us that, and thus this grouping fails to provide us with a Main Character, Impact Character or Subjective Story throughline.

Amelia, Santiago and the Children

If anything this grouping feels more like a secondary sub-story than any contributing throughline. While directly involved with Richard and Susan’s kids (she’s their nanny), illegal immigrant Amelia’s road trip to her son’s wedding feels like its own story. Whereas the Richard and Susan story could be considered a problematic situation, the trip Amelia (Adriana Barraza) takes to Mexico and back deals mostly with problematic activities. A nice way to connect separate stories in a ensemble piece is to ensure that they reside in the same dramatic domain. These two storylines differ enough as to cause some confusion.

Seen as a separate story then, you would hope that it would be more fully developed than the previous. This proves not to be the case. Amelia’s illegal immigrant status is not revealed until her final scene and her relationship with her nephew Santiago (Gael Garcia Bernal) fizzles out rather quickly.

When we first meet Santiago he seems quite upset with having to drag Richard and Susan’s kids to Mexico; it’s enough to cause uneasy tension between he and his mother…at first. Within minutes on the road however, all is forgotten and Santiago is the great uncle the kids never had. Perhaps continuing the uneasiness between the two would’ve served nicely as a Subjective Story Throughline.

Correspondingly, Santiago’s Impact Character Throughline, while enthralling, is not as well developed as perhaps it could’ve been. Not until they run into the stop at the Border do we fully realize what he is all about. His impulse to floor it and avoid incarcertaion at all costs is as visually exciting as it is thought provoking. What would drive someone to behave like this? The impact of his actions could have been nicely juxtaposed against Amerlia’s willingness to accept things the way they are. But again, Amelia’s throughline is not as personally felt as it should be to qualify for Main Character status. We never get to really know her. That perspective, it seems, appears elsewhere.

Chieko and her Father

Out of all the characters in Babel, it is the story of Chieko (Rinko Kikuchi) that provides us with the closest thing to a Main Character Throughline. Sure, we care deeply about Richard and his wife’s situation, and we’re concerned with the well-being of their children and of Amelia and Santiago’s plight, but it is the intimate look at the life of a deaf girl growing up in Japanese society that we feel the most empathy for.

Through Chieko we get to experience personally what it must feel like to be unable to effectively communicate with the outside world. She wants desperately to be understood - to have someone pay attention to her. The Thematic Issues of Understanding - Instinct, Conditioning, Senses and Interpretation - run rampant through her storyline.

Thematically we see Instinct and Conditioning fight it out against the backdrop of Chieko’s life. Her natural drive to be held and to be sexual (Instinct) battles against the repressed sexuality Japanese society imposes on her (Conditioning). In addition, we get to personally feel what it is like to have one of our Senses completely gone. The sound cuts out as we experience the club scene from her point of view. With our sense of hearing completely gone, the dancing and gyrating bodies look strange and unattainable to us. At the same time we are visually assaulted with flashing lights, smoke screens and streaming lasers. Her senses (and by proxy, ours) are so overwhelmed that she barely makes it out of the club without passing out. And furthermore, these overloaded Senses cloud Chieko’s Interpretation of the young boy’s advances towards her. Because we as an audience have assumed her position, we feel the same shock and confusion when the boy she is interested in starts kissing her best friend.

We understand her pain.

The Chieko storyline perfectly fits the definition of a Main Character Throughline and was vitally important for the success of the film. I do not agree with this assertion:

the Japanese segments belong on the cutting-room floor, as they have only the most tenuous relationship to the interwoven tragedies of the Morocco shooting and the concurrent disaster of dragging the children across the border.

For without these sequences with Chieko, we would have no emotional “in” into the story. Richard and Amelia’s throughlines, while easily sympathetic, never fully reach the point of empathy. We never really feel like we are either of them whereas we get to know Cheiko quite intimately. It’s also the reason why her storyline is often the one most people remember and the one they cherish the most.

It becomes quite discouraging then when we find that there is little time paid towards Chieko’s relationship with her dad or his impact on her. We know that he doesn’t pay much attention to her, but because there are so many other stories to tell we never really get to explore the depths of the problems between them. It is touching when her father goes out to comfort her on the balcony, but without knowing more about him we are left to fill in the blanks ourselves.

What we do know is that he spends a considerable amount of time away from her - allowing her to come and go as she pleases - and that this time away is partly responsible for her behavior. But while his several hunting trips abroad prove detrimental to his daughter, they’re even more devastating for another family altogether.

Yussef and Ahmed

While fascinating in its depiction of the squalor surrounding Moroccan goat farmers, this last grouping of characters ends up being the least developed of them all. It’s a strange approach, especially when you consider that Yussef (Boubker Ait El Caid) and his brother, Ahmed (Said Tarchani) are responsible for the story’s main inequity.

We do learn that Yussef, while having an innate talent for shooting, is undergoing the same kind of budding sexuality that Chieko is going through. Yet while we learn intimately what motivates Chieko, we never fully understand why Yussef feels compelled to relieve himself on a mountaintop or why he sneaks peeks at his naked sister. The only conclusion you can come to is that he does these things because he is poor. Because of this lack of exploration into Yussef’s personal thorughline his actions on screen come off as strangely preverse. Contrast this again with Chieko’s throughline. We see her fully naked yet never feel the unpleasantness we feel watching Yussef.

Like Amelia and her son, the characters of Yussef and Ahmed are treated so dispassionately that only their objective roles in the larger story become apparent. We need to experience Main Characters from within if we are to accept what it is they do. If Chieko had fired the gun into Richard and Susan’s bus, we would’ve understood why. Instead, Yussef’s actions come off as a contrived act of stupidity.

This lack of a Main Character throughline is even stranger in the larger story analysis sense when you realize that Yussef had a perfect Impact Character in his brother Ahmed. Their relationship is so nicely developed that it becomes the closest thing we have to Subjective Story Throughline in this movie.

The conflict between them sings in their arguments over watching their sister shower, firing the rifle, etc. So much so, that we understand fully Yussef’s desire to grab the rifle and protect his brother from the Moroccan police. And because we’ve personally felt what it would be like to be in this relationship, Yussef’s plea at the end breaks our hearts:

• Yussef falls to his knees, hands raised.
• YUSSEF
• I killed the American, I was the only one who shot at you. They did nothing… nothing. Kill me, but save my brother, he did nothing… nothing. Save my brother… he did nothing.

In Conclusion

Ensemble stories can employ one of two storytelling strategies. The first works towards a singular meaning. While there may be several different Main Characters, they all come from the same point of view and therefore can be easily interchanged from one scene to the next.

The second approach tosses away cohesion for the sake of diversity. Different elements of storytelling are butted up against one another in an attempt to create a sort of holisitc meaning that exists outside of the story. With this approach, the audience becomes the authors of their own meaning.

Babel takes the latter approach.

As it stands, we still have a semblance of the four major throughlines:

• Objective Story: Richard and Susan stuck in the Moroccan desert
• Main Character: Chieko struggles with being deaf in modern Japanese society
• Impact Character: Santiago will do anything to avoid capture by the U.S. Border Patrol
• Subjective Story: Two brothers, Yussef and Ahmed, protect each other

While each of these is a nicely developed look at each of the four main perspectives on a problem, they aren’t connected in a singular meaningful way. This is why many have complained about how confusing the film was or why it was a complete waste of their time; an audience is more comfortable with a complete story. Unfortunately for these people, I don’t think that was what Inarritu and screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga were going for.

Babel is an exploration of the difficulties of communication in modern day society. If that is true, then the tagline:

If You Want to Be Understood…Listen

encapsulates perfectly the author’s original intent and offers us a fitting conclusion to this analysis.

Perhaps instead of trying to figure out what it all meant, we should simply allow the film to stand on its own. We should accept Babel for what it is: an exploration of lives disrupted by a singluar tragedy; not one of violence, but one of communication.

By listening intently, perhaps someday we will fully understand the meaning of it all.