ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the discourse of film as universal language in relation to the narrative figure of the network. I contend that D. W. Griffith’s Intolerance (2016) constitutes an illustrious precursor of the global network narrative genre. This analysis is then substantiated by my reading of Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Babel (2006), a film that bears remarkable resemblance with Intolerance in its formulation of universality via a multinarrative textual design and focus on suffering as the lingua franca of humanity. The chapter closes with a consideration of Eduardo Williams’s The Human Surge (2016), a film in which totalising ideas of humanity and globality are also mapped on to a networked narrative configuration. Here, however, miserabilism plays no part and the network is broadened into a wider web that includes the physical Earth itself.
