Babel

In the Garden of Eden humans were in perfect relationship with God and each other. However, humanity’s pride and disobedience led to God casting them out of Eden. Humanity’s struggle to obey God or maintain good relationships with one another is a constant reminder of the cause and results of the Fall.

If the Fall in Genesis 3 encapsulates humanity’s disobedience and relational failure then the Tower of Babel in Genesis 11 reminds us of the continued pride of humanity and the problems caused by the resulting cultural differences.

To punish humanity’s hubris in building a tower, God confused humanity’s primary form of communication and scattered them over the earth.

The director of Amores Perros and 21 Grams, Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu says he chose to name his latest film Babel because the Biblical narrative is “a poignant reminder of how humans have remained painfully divided by superficial barriers and miscomprehensions”.

Despite the top billing of Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett among a cast of foreign actors and non-actors, the Hollywood duo only feature in one of the four plots that are entwined throughout Babel which is reminiscent of last year’s Crash.

Crash gives windows into the lives of a racially and economically diverse group of people whose lives collide with one another in unexpected ways. Inarritu thematically and stylistically picks up where Crash left off. Babel explores how humanity lets superficial and cultural differences separate us from one another while we ultimately share the same sadness and longings, but does so on a global scale.

An American couple who are dealing with the guilt and resentment over the loss of a child are travelling through Morocco. Concurrently, a pair of Moroccan brothers play with their father’s new gun. When one of them tests the gun to see how far it can shoot by aiming it at a tourist bus, a tragic chain of events begins.

Meanwhile the Mexican nanny of the American couple’s two children needs to get back to Mexico for one night to be at her son’s wedding. Unable to find anyone else to care for them she travels across the border with the children but encounters difficulties upon returning to the USA.

Finally, we follow the trials and heartbreak of a deaf Japanese teenager as she fails to receive romantic interest from boys because of her disability. We also see how intimacy issues can be passed down from parent to child as the girl and her father fail to meaningfully connect.
Babel tackles the contradiction that despite living in a world where the latest technologies make it easy to communicate on a global level, the majority of people still feel largely isolated from one another.

Major urban centres are a common example of this. As a journalist I know churches often find those who live in high-density housing to be the most difficult people in the community to reach. It is ironic that the higher the concentration of people, the more likely they are to put up physical and relational barriers guarding themselves against one another. Presumably, the majority of these people still seek intimate, lasting relationships.

Like those in the biblical narrative that Babel alludes to, not one character displays a desire to seek God. The Islamic father of the Moroccan brothers displays a strict morality which seems more disgusted by the fact that one of his sons is spying on his sister while she gets changed than the fact that they are responsible for shooting someone, but no character ever looks to God as the solution to life’s problems.

Inarritu has brilliantly portrayed how loneliness and longing are shared experiences of humans irrespective of our cultural differences. It is true that we all seek to love, be loved and share good relationships with one another. However, if the real Babel story has taught us anything it is that humans need to look to God first if we are to discover the unity we all deep down long for.

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