Sunday Review: Babel

Dysfunctional world

By Morris Dean

[The reviewer is on vacation. His review below appeared originally on August 18, 2007.]

Thursday night [August 16, 2007] we finally watched the movie Babel (2006: Alejandro González Iñárritu) [From the Internet Movie Database: "Tragedy strikes a married couple – played by Brad Pitt & Cate Blanchett – on vacation in the Moroccan desert, touching off an interlocking story involving four different families.]

I'm lucky, but I could be toast....

This morning, one of those rare occasions when I had toast for breakfast, I fumbled a piece and it landed butter-side-down on the floor. Then, a few minutes later, a section of my kiwi fruit jumped off the cutting board. One of those days?, I vaguely wondered.
    Of course, the day is still young and it might yet be "one of those days" (I could even die today or suffer a horrible accident), but I still feel lucky that things will generally go my way. As Bill said in his comment on yesterday's post, my luck [usually] far exceeds my embarrassment.

Karen Pryor's 2009 book, Reaching the Animal Mind, has to be one of the most eye-opening, inspirational books I've ever read. The opening of Chapter 12, "Intention":

Gerry Martone was working for the U.S. Peace Corps when he ran into a particularly dangerous situation. Gerry was assigned to a country in Africa where the political situation was becoming highly unsettled. During a sudden and bloody uprising he and some other aid workers, inadvisedly walking through the capital city, are captured by a band of militants and hauled away in a truck.
    This is not a good thing. No one is really in charge of these rebel soldiers, and there are no rules. Aid workers and other innocent bystanders in similar situations in other countries have been held for ransom, killed out of hand, or beaten and tortured and then killed for no known reason. The natural reaction of the hostages is anger and panic. Gerry's coworkers start crying, arguing that they are harmless noncombatants, and pleading for release. That natural response emphasizes their victim status. It also emphasizes the captor status of the bunch of guys in the front of the truck, who are already exhilarated, drunk, stoned, and a bit out of control.
    Gerry takes a different tack. He thanks his captors whenever they do something that is, even in the smallest way, a comfort to the hostages. He thanks them for driving smoothly through a sharp turn. He thanks them when they pass the water jug to the back. He says a thank-you for their letting the captives sit down rather than keeping them standing. As they drive through ferocious scenes of looting, fires, and wreckage, he praises and thanks the militants for having picked them up in the first place, thus protecting both the aid workers and themselves from these dangerous conditions.
    What happens? Instead of taking their captives away for malicious purposes, the renegade soldiers deliver them to the safe house of another aid worker on the outskirts of town. Then the soldiers post a guard around the house all night to keep the house safe from other armed militants. A change in the captives' own behavior led to a corresponding change in the other group's behavior, from that of predators to that of protectors.
    Crying and pleading are emotional expressions of submissiveness. Bullying and aggression are emotional expressions of dominance. We share these feelings and these kinds of social displays not just with the primates but with lots of mammals and some birds. No wonder it feels natural; it is. No wonder stopping and thinking and then deliberately doing something else feels contrived, artificial, even morally wrong.
    But using reinforcement isn't really about changing the behavior of others; it's about changing what you do yourself. And while on the surface that may seem artificial, changing your own behavior by intention is a fundamental act of survival in the natural world. [pp. 213-214]

Too embarrassing

When my wife noticed yesterday that I had emptied my wallet of its contents to let everything dry out, I told her it would be too embarrassing to tell her why.
    "You dropped it in the toilet!?"
    I replied with cunning, "I told you it would be too embarrassing to tell you."

I was fortunate that she thought I'd confirmed her toilet hypothesis, for what actually happened would have been far more embarrassing to talk about. I had left my wallet on the roof of my car Saturday afternoon and it had lain in 0.42 inches of rainfall that afternoon and night.
    I know precisely how much rain it had withstood, for I finally figured out that I must have left the wallet on top of my car at Lowe's Home Improvement Center before going home and installing our new rain gauge....
    Possibly even more embarrassing is that this was far from the first time I'd left something on top of my car, although it was the first time I'd left a wallet containing cash and IDs and credit cards....

I am so lucky that I have never removed the front-rack wind baffle that my daughter had on her Honda Accord before it passed to me about fifteen years ago. That wind baffle is great for keeping things from blowing off the top!

Movie review: "Babel"

Thursday night we finally watched the movie "Babel" (2006: Alejandro González Iñárritu). Wow, what a profound film, utterly engrossing. Its 135 minutes seemed only about as long as Woody Allen's perfect 87. Director Iñárritu seems to be saying that however compartmentalized and divergent peoples may be by their languages, cultures, and belief systems, they are nevertheless extremely interdependent, at least in the sense that a random act in one place can have huge consequences for individuals in others.

My first thought on the title, relative to the Biblical Tower of Babel, was that it's intended ironically, showing that contrary to the non-communication implied by the story in Chapter 11 of Genesis, everyone is nevertheless very closely linked. But if the title was meant ironically, I'm not sure that it works, for the "link" portrayed in "Babel" is rather dysfunctional, and the point of the Genesis story seems to be that the divisions among people prevent them from coming together constructively. On that reading, it appears that the movie's title isn't ironic at all but rather functions as a label to describe our dysfunctional world, in which the primary connection among disparate people is destructive, tragic.

My friend Ed commented that he

enjoyed the movie, but the odds of that many things happening, because of one rifle...well, I feel the writer entertained us, but in order to do so, we had to believe in the improbable....I was entertained, but not enlightened.

Ed made me realize that I'd been assuming that because the particular matrix depicted in the movie seemed so plausible, then "that sort of thing" must be happening "all of the time." I'm still inclined to think so, but I'd feel more confident of it if I could think of some examples.

I wonder whether an incident that my manager at IBM told me about almost forty years ago might qualify. He was commuting to work by train one morning when the train struck a section of rail that was lying on the track and the end of the rail swung up, smashed through a window, and decapitated the woman sitting in front of him. (My manager had barely recovered his composure by the time he described the incident.)

All that's needed for an "international" connection of the sort used in "Babel" would be for the workman presumably responsible for the rail's lying on the track to have been an immigrant and to have just received horrible news from back home (maybe somewhere in Asia or Africa or South America) that distracted him...the way a phone call early in "Babel" sets in motion the Mexican sequences of the film. If you who are reading this can supply other possible examples, please be so kind as to tell me about them in a comment.

Another thing that struck me about the story told by "Babel" is the crucial role that Iñárritu seems to assign to human stupidity. The father's handing the aforementioned rifle to his children to go shoot jackals with. The young Mexican (played by Gael García Bernal's) irresponsibility in trying to drive the children back to San Diego. That young Japanese girl's perilously wanton sexual behavior, utterly naive as to the provocation she was offering. Indeed, the arrogant stupidity of the American tourists blithely assuming—apparently because they're Americans—that they're impervious to mischance. I too have behaved stupidly and can only wonder at how narrowly I may have escaped much more unforgiving consequences than the ones I actually experienced.
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Note: an excerpt from this review can be seen at IMDb.com's entry for "Babel." The Internet Movie Database welcomes reviews, so you might consider sharing there your own reactions to movies you watch...IMDb.com even lets you edit your review after you've posted it.