“I'm deaf, not blind”

Alejandro González Iñárritu’s kaleidoscopic Babel (2006) puts an end to a twist of fates trilogy that previously began with Amores perros/Love ’ s a Bitch (2000) and 21 grammos/21 Grams (2004)¹. Like these, it plays with time to recount stories linked by a terrible incident², i.e, here the unintentional shooting of an American traveller by two Moroccan children. Its title obviously refers to the Genesis episode occurring in the city of Babel: Noah and his sons want to erect a tower to reach the skies but they soon get punished by God who creates different languages dividing human beings. As language is the fundamental source of any interchange, one may conclude from the title that the first topic Babel sets out is related to communication. This essay aims to display how the film deals with this latter theme with reference to, first, the narrative structure and, finally, some audacious film techniques. Since this paper is limited, we will only discuss this issue from a broad perspective.

Babel is “a study of globalisation in which several interconnected stories from around the globe unravel at the same time”³. As a result, the diegesis foregrounds several protagonists belonging to a place, a panel of colours and a language, along with experiencing different sufferings through a butterfly effect plot. In the next lines, we will see how the chain of events refers to communication or rather the lack of it.

Let us examine the narrative structure that correlates this theme from a temporal point of view: Babel presents four stories happening in three places during dissimilar times; Deleyto and Azcora concluded the diegesis occurred “over a five-day spam”⁴: the two stories in Morocco more or less temporarily overlap, then Amelia heads to Mexico after Richard’s call and, finally, Chieko’s scenes take place slightly afterwards⁵. Therefore, the crosscutting editing of Babel builds an artificial simultaneous construction that shifts after Richard’s call that creates an open-ending. In order not to get confused by Babel ’s tricky order, let us go over the main points of the diegesis from the perspective of two axes, widely used in narratology:

illustration not visible in this excerpt

Figure 1 is a schematic representation of Babel ’s diegetic order regardless how they finally are edited. The frames indicate the experience of each set of characters. The vertical axis stands for the progression while the horizontal axis lists a range of diegetic units. One can see that the syntagmatic axis do not happen as expected, i.e. with stories directly following one another, e.g. the story in Japan takes place after the rest. From a paradigmatic view, one can observe the lack of relations between the stories, which corresponds to the spectator’s view during the film. The only exceptions to this point, signalled by the dotted arrow, are probably the adjacent stories in Morocco for one quickly understands their tie after the initial shooting. Figure 1 guides us to conclude that the subnarrative bounds are kept hidden on purpose. Nonetheless, Richard’s phone call (Story in Morocco [a]) allows us to understand all the connections between the four subnarratives. Let us put forward how these connections play out:

illustration not visible in this excerpt

Figure 2: The butterfly effect in Babel

Figure 2 in dicates the diegetic articulation and its strategy. From a chronological approach, it is obvious that the story in Japan influences children’s fate in the story in Morocco [b], due to the gun given there (Elliptical editing about Japan). Even though Richard’s call (Story in Morocco [a]) at the end1 refers to the beginning of the film2, the narrative is not circular; his call only sheds light on the stories frequent fluctuations and the creation of temporal distortion, making one aware of the structures’ sense, as summarized in figure 2.

illustration not visible in this excerpt

1. Richard calls his children, at the end.

illustration not visible in this excerpt

2. Mike receives this call, earlier.

illustration not visible in this excerpt

3. Det. Lt. Kenji Mamiya looks at Chieko’s wall…

illustration not visible in this excerpt

4. …and goes trough a key photo.

illustration not visible in this excerpt

5. Richard talks about children with Hassan…

illustration not visible in this excerpt

6. …and shows him familiar characters.

Other clues were the photo in Chieko’s house [3, 4] (Story in Japan) and Richard’s photo of Mike and Debbie [5, 6] (Story in Morocco [a]). Note that the Japan story begins the snowball effects whereas the Mexico one undergoes the unfair consequences of this large mechanism. Deleyto and Azcora summarize well Babel ’s plot:

The shot […] in Morocco can almost immediately be heard in the United States, where, on an institutional level, it soon resonates with the threat of a terrorist attack, and on a more individual level, it affects a Mexican nanny who finds herself unable to attend her son’s wedding. It can also be heard in Japan, where investigations are directed to finding out whether the weapon used […] came from the black market.⁶

The shot echoing overseas is actually the narrative main thread that links the ignorant individuals. From this extract and from figure 2, one can observe a very clear butterfly effect. It is significant to add it is set up in a montage that shows autonomous short sequences from each subnarrative; the characters’ own time is not considered in order to highlight their connections⁷. Like many multiprotagonist films⁸, Babel emphasizes the random, leading to an impression of fate and vulnerability, additionally; it is worth noting that this narrative is considered postmodern since it is a narrative about narratives⁹. Through its specific storytelling choice, and notwithstanding a complicated linear time, linearity is, however, still present since each story is chronologically told¹⁰. Consequently, this complex time appears representative of the “network society and a world dominated by globalizing forces¹¹ ”.

The analysed temporal structure clearly reveals that Babel compels to disengage from the subnarratives in order to regard them as fragments belonging to a larger group: in fact, it is narrated from a global scale, which continually goes into both immediate connections and infinite divisions.

It is acknowledged that the world is increasingly globalizing nowadays, yet, the gaps between people are widening, just as Babel demonstrates it. Azcora relates this issue to the multiprotagonist genre which has converted into the most fitting patterns to epitomize these worries since it easily depicts the “world as an even-shrinking and increasingly interconnected network”¹². The twenty-first century is supposedly the age of communication due to all technological advancements, however, one can discern communication breakdown as Babel ’s main issue.

[...]

¹ Unknown author, ‘Babel : secrets de tournage’, on AlloCin é . Ne restez pas simple spectateur, unknown release date, <http://www.allocine.fr/film/anecdote_gen_cfilm=20151.html>, retrieved 28 November 2011.

² Celestino Deleyto and María del Mar Azcora, Alejandro Gonz á lez I ñá rritu (Urbana, Chicago, Springfield: University of Illinois Press, 2010), p. 50.

³ Jethro Soutar, ‘Babel’, in Gael Garcia Bernal and the Latin American New Wave: The Story of a Cinematic Movement and Its Leading Man (London: Anova Books, 2008), p.208.

⁴ Celestino Deleyto and María del Mar Azcora, p. 50.

⁵ Ibid., p. 50.

⁶ Ibid., pp. 52-53.

⁷ Ibid., p. 53.

⁸ María del Mar Azcora, The Multi-Protagonist Film, (West Sussex: Blackwell, 2010), p.142.

⁹ James Monaco, How to Read a Film: movies, media, and beyond, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), p.429.

¹⁰ Do note that there is one flash back by the end of the story in Morocco2, however, it does not relate to the time game and only has a dramatic effect.

¹¹ Celestino Deleyto and María del Mar Azcora, p. 56.

¹² María del Mar Azcora, p.128.