BABEL AND THE CRUELTY OF NEGLECT

BABEL  AND THE CRUELTY OF NEGLECT

My daughter Ione has been with me on Kythnos all of this month, and together we have watched a lot of fine cinema from Poland, South America, Germany, and the USA.  Two nights ago it was the turn of the 2006 film Babel, directed by Alejandro Inarritu. Ione told me she had seen the film seven times, but in my case it was only the third. That said, for the last two days I have been obsessively racking my brains to work out the single most important motif in this potent and challenging  masterpiece. Which is not, I have to stress, intended as some delicate exercise in genteel film criticism. Instead it is someone like me simply asking himself, what one thing is it in this film that keeps me wholly mesmerised from start to finish?

In the end I have decided that it is not the fancy tripartite structure that animates this strange and harrowing film. Instead it is the stereoscopic  tragedy  of a universal item I will call ‘Neglect’, that offers us an uncomfortable mixture of pity and anger as we watch the film unfold. Neglect, that is, whether it  be one individual by another; one marital partner by another; one adjoining country by another; one employer and their dependent  employee; one globally powerful country and another that  for all its wishful thinking is practically powerless.

In Babel there are three conjoining,  curiously linked narratives. Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett  play an unhappy American couple Richard and Susan Jones, on a luxury coach trip through Morocco as they try to get over a family tragedy. Their infant son Sam had died of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome and the aftermath is tearing them apart.  In a Moroccan teashop Susan enigmatically  accuses Richard of having deserted his family (they have young girl and boy twins back home with their nanny) and we never quite learn what she means by this. But soon after this accusation  something monstrous and unbelievable happens. A bullet comes through the coach and hits Susan in the armpit and chest area, and she starts bleeding  badly. The coach rapidly comes to a halt, and with a struggle she is conveyed to a nearby village,  impoverished and primitive, where they wait for help from both the Moroccan authorities and the US embassy. In both cases the delay is endless and a case of poisonous intergovernmental bureaucracy. The US authorities without any investigation routinely describe the shooting as a terrorist incident, something that their  Moroccan counterparts angrily deny.

Before the shooting, we observe a skinny and careworn Moroccan farmer living high in the nearby mountains. He has acquired a shotgun from a neighbour that he gives to his two teenage sons to shoot at jackals which are eating his sheep. The younger boy is a much better shot than his brother a couple of years older. To prove his superior prowess, he says he will hit the coach bus down below that is currently coming round the bend. Sure enough he succeeds, but it is only when his father returns from town, he realises that he has hit an American tourist, and the inaccurate rumour that his father has heard is that she is dead.

Switch now to Tokyo where a deaf-mute Japanese teenage girl  living in a luxury highrise apartment, has a poignantly unsatisfactory relationship with her wealthy father. Her mother recently committed suicide, and as well as grieving over her, she is also awakening to her body and wanting a boyfriend.  She and her deaf mute girlfriends optimistically  go to a shopping mall, and are soon approached by brash boys who take fright when they realise the girls’ embarrassing handicap. Depressed and angry, the girl boldly removes her underwear and flashes her private parts at the boys. Sure enough it changes their attitude, and later all of them, deaf girls and brash boys,  go on a hectic pill popping binge which ends in near catastrophe.

Then we realise an unexpected narrative connection. The Tokyo Dad had once been on a shooting holiday in Morocco and had been so impressed by his local guide he had given him his rifle as a present. The guide in turn had sold it to a neighbour, one of whose sons had unwittingly shot Susan Jones.

Susan by now is in a very bad way in the wretched village, and because there is no doctor the local vet is summoned. Shrieking and protesting she is held down by Richard and the Moroccan tour guide as the vet stitches up the wound minus anaesthetic. The vet has confided in Arabic to the tour guide, who lies to spare Richard’s feelings, that if he doesn’t stitch her she will swiftly bleed to death.

Meanwhile back in the USA, the Jones’s  twins are being looked after by their Mexican nanny, Amelia. In a long distance call from Morocco, Richard had initially allowed her a day off for her only son’s marriage in Mexico. However the arrangements he made have fallen through, added to which the twins’ mother has just been shot and is gravely ill. He commands Amelia to stay put and look after his children, and not go to her son’s wedding. In desperation and when she can find no other babysitter,  Amelia takes the twins with her to the Mexican wedding. The car is driven by a reckless and cynical nephew played by Gael Garcia Bernal. On the return journey, good and drunk, he accelerates away from the suspicious US border police and later abandons his aunt and the gringo kids in the waterless desert on the American side.

Meanwhile two Tokyo detectives, one old, one young, have approached the deaf girl for some information. She assumes it is something to do with her mother’s suicide, but no, they have been contacted by the Moroccan police and are trying to trace the original owner of the gun that shot the American tourist. The serial number is on the rifle and they know that it was her father’s gun was the implement. The girl is mesmerised by the handsome young detective and eventually leaves a message for him at the police station, that he must visit her for some important new information. When he turns up at her flat, he explains he is not investigating her mother’s death, but simply the ownership of the rifle. The girl excuses herself for a moment and then returns stark naked and offers herself to him. Horrified, the young detective shouts angrily at her, and she bursts into a desperate howling grief and despair. This is a really kernel scene in the movie, for the harrowing grief would seem to be about everything that is killing her…her handicap, her loneliness, her dead mother, her sexual frustration, the gulf between her and her father, all of which are well nigh impossible to communicate to the pampered world that can hear and speak.

The US border police eventually find abandoned Amelia and the two American children. As an illegal immigrant she is summarily deported, and advised to be grateful that Richard has declined to press any criminal charges. In the meantime an American helicopter arrives in the desolate Moroccan village and whisks Susan off to a hospital where against the odds her life is saved. The Moroccan police have meanwhile traced the local hunting guide who had sold the gun to his skinny neighbour. Soon they find the suspect himself and his two sons on the run. They shoot the innocent older boy dead, and his younger brother surrenders,  demanding  that he, the culpable one, be shot by them by way of natural justice. The father wild with grief,  also surrenders.

So then. Assuming Neglect is the thing that matters most in this film, who exactly in Babel neglects who?

*Richard Jones neglects Susan Jones when he abandons her to her lonely grief over the infant Sam. Ultimately the shooting and her recovery movingly reconciles them, but it is almost as if something as drastic as that was necessary in the first place

*The Moroccan father neglects his two sons when he entrusts a lethal and unsupervised weapon to two competitive boys, who are after all mere children

*Richard summarily neglects the Mexican nanny Amelia when he tells her she cannot go to her only son’s wedding

*The Mexican nephew neglects his aunt Amelia and ruins her life when he drives off and abandons her and the children

*The US border authorities neglect to understand the truth of things. They accuse Amelia of criminal neglect because she had set off on her own to find help in the waterless desert and had left the twins behind. In fact her desperate searching for help was what had saved their lives, but she was inevitably and in contemporary sociological and existential terms, destined to be made the dispensable fall guy

*The US authorities in Morocco neglect the truth of things when they talk about an act of terrorism. It was in reality a random act by an unsupervised child entrusted with a lethal weapon. Yet the terrorism accusation from the US media persists after the child and his father have been arrested by the Moroccan police

* The mute Japanese girl is neglected by more or less the whole world, and hence the volcanic intensity of her grief in front of the young policeman. Her mother shot herself and left her with a parent who tries but cannot understand her. Her peers and notional allies, young Japanese boys, only stop neglecting her when she flashes her private parts at them. By a false extrapolation she thinks that the kindly young detective will likewise accept her if she offers herself naked. So when he swiftly rejects her, she helplessly sobs her heart out as it seems she hasn’t a single ally in the world.

I could go on with this catalogue of Neglect, but I recommend you watch the film yourself and possibly you will find another and more intriguing way of explaining its phenomenal evocative power.

The reason why I have called Neglect a kind of totemic universal, is because we have all experienced it and have all felt its grievous power. We have all known what it is like to not be heard, and we have all at times felt our incapacity to sympathetically hear another.  Like the young Japanese girl we have all at times felt we are totally alone in the world and incapable of communicating precisely what it feels like. Finally, when things turn truly grim, when we are so to speak shot and bleeding to death, those of us who are citizens of the USA or Western Europe, usually feel we are safer and more protected in the world than those who come from places like Morocco and Mexico. To that extent we pampered ones neglect the many unpampered,  because we take our safety for granted and they unfortunately do not.