ABSTRACT
Director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu gives us Babel, a film which moves from initial focus on a goat-herder in a poor Moroccan village to two young children looked after by a Mexican nanny in Southern California, to their parents on a Moroccan tour bus, boarded to try to recement strained marital relations after the death of their baby, to widowed father Yasujiro and deaf and mute daughter Chieko in Japan. Such seemingly disconnected individuals and events, are, however, intrinsically connected, whereby the director deftly moves to show how actions in one place and time inextricably affect those in another; Yasujiro, on a hunting expedition in Morocco, gifts his rifle to a guide, who sells it to a Moroccan goat-herder with two young sons for the purpose of shooting jackals; Abdullah’s younger son, Ahmed, uses the rifle to shoot at a random tour bus containing, among others, the American mother and father of two children being taken care of by a Mexican nanny in Southern California, whose subsequently time extended job with the children results in her transporting them across the U.S. Mexican border, setting in motion events linked ultimately to two young children who wander dangerously alone in the blazing, and subsequently dark, desert without food or water. As the pieces of the seemingly unconnected plots are put in dynamic motion with and against one another, we learn of deep and abiding connections between and among seemingly unrelated parts, wherein actions in Japan, a decision to board a plane and go to Morocco with a hunting rifle, determine action in Southern California, as the nanny of the children of the parents in Morocco crosses into Tijuana to attend her son’s wedding. Through both dusty desert and stark surfaces of modernity, the lives of Amerlia, Chieko, Yasujiro, Richard, Susan, Abdullah, Yussef, and Ahmed are relationally produced and forever bound, across language and borders seemingly separate, challenging the image of linguistically and culturally isolated peoples of the tower of Babel in biblical times. While Ahmed might have pulled the trigger and shot Susan, it is the “blank spaces” that determine said action and subsequent repercussion, including an international incident tagged to wider twenty-first-century discourse and practice around “terrorist” activity; activity which is, of course, linked to broader economic and social arrangements.
