Babel

(Warning: I give away some endings to the movie Babel in this entry. If you haven’t seen it, please do! Then we can talk about it!!)

On the way back during our eight hour bus ride from Mexico City we watched the movie Babel. Thoroughly thought provoking. I felt like it had something to say about the things I’ve been thinking about my American-ness and the various travels I’ve made in my life.

In the movie, there are four different story lines involving people of different nationalities (Moroccan, Japanese, Mexican, American) that all revolve around one incident. All of the story lines are potentially tragic and the Americans and Japanese are they only ones that you are sure had a happy ending (maybe not happy, but not completely awful like the others).

I’ve been thinking about the message this movie is trying to convey. One of my American roommates who just left sees in it that all of us, all around the world, no matter what culture we belong, are fundamentally the same: the same heart, mind, soul, and needs. My American director here (who has lived here for two years and studies linguistics) sees in it a message about how deep cultural differences are: it’s not just the language the separates people from two different cultures, it’s a million more differences under the surface only discovered when the really bad things happen. The thought of this frustrates her as someone who studies linguistics and translation….

Also, I think it had something to say either about Western culture or American culture—a critique on how Western culture negatively affects the rest of the world—bringing materials (like the Japanese man’s gun), ideas, influence, etc. that are foreign and just don’t fit in the way the West would think and actually bring about miscommunication to the point of tragedy.

The fact that the Gun from the West started the whole incident, yet the Japanese and American were the ones to come out “okay”—not dead, not deported— raises some questions: What ways do Americans/ Westerners do more harm then they realize? What effects around the world does our actions, travels, attitudes, etc have? (this reminds me of the article about the effects of America’s Farm Bill my cousin just sent me….)

Maybe it also has something to say about “the system.” There are certain systems in society that are so rigid that the result is harshness over empathy and people do things they wouldn’t normally (a very sociological theme): the Moroccan police officers beating their own residents, the border control man freaking out because the system wasn’t being followed. Perhaps it was these systems of society that the Japanese girl felt so left out of or that caused the suicide of her mother---which was the reason why the father got rid of the gun in the first place.

Whoa.

Some related thoughts on culture from a book my dad sent me here: The Silent Language by Edward T. Hall

“Culture is more than mere custom that can be shed or changed like a suit of clothes. The people we were advising kept bumping their heads against an invisible barrier, but they did not know what it was. They knew that what they were up against was a completely different way of organizing life, of thinking, and of conceiving the underlying assumptions about the family and the state, the economic system, and even of mankind….”

“….Most of our difficulties stem from our own ignorance. Honest and sincere people in the field continue to fail to grasp the true significance of the fact that culture controls behavior in deep and persisting ways, many of which are outside of awareness and therefore beyond conscious control of the individual….”