Ensemble stories are always elusive when it comes to interpreting their meaning. Typically, these kinds of stories bring together several separate throughlines with the intention of making some “greater point.” Unfortunately for many, Alejandro Gonzales Inarritu’s Babel is not typical. While compelling and thought-provoking, the film lives up to the confusing nature of its Biblical namesake.
*****SPOILER WARNING********
Personal Thoughts
Before getting into any deep analysis I thought it might help to record my personal opinion of this film. I have to admit, I hated this film while I was watching it. Absolutely despised it. In fact, I even said aloud, “I hate this film.” I’ve never done that before1.
However, as my distance from the film has grown, so has my appreciation for it. For reasons I can’t quite describe yet, I think I really really liked the film. My initial scorn for it came entirely from the thoughtless adults who so easily placed the children under their care in jeopardy. If they hadn’t found those children in the border desert between the United States and Mexico I was fully prepared to crack the DVD in half2.
Thankfully they were rescued, as was my chance at watching a fully intact DVD sometime in the future.
And chances are, I will.
A Complete Story
The impulse for the repeated viewing of a film often comes from the completeness of the story. Because stories offer us something we can’t experience in real life3, we feel the impulse to experience them again and again.
But as will be revealed in my analysis below, I didn’t really feel like there was one complete story in Babel. Futher time may be required then to fully understand why I can’t stop thinking about it.
Dramatica and Ensemble Stories
With that out of the way, let’s turn our attention to the story as presented to us. Babel is clearly an ensemble piece - not your typical Hero’s Journey. As mentioned in the December 2006 Tip of the Month:
The Dramatica software isn’t well suited to working with ensemble stories, but it can be helpful in developing or evaluating them.
So while the software may be difficult to use when writing these kinds of stories, the theory itself still can be used to better understand the author’s original intent. If you are currently writing an ensemble story or would like to learn more about how Dramatica sees these kinds of stories, make sure you follow the link above.
Story Analysis
For the purposes of this analysis, we’ll break off the characters into separate groups. By doing so we can then perhaps decipher what part they played in the larger goal of communicating the author’s message.
Richard and Susan
Richard (Brad Pitt) and his wife Susan (Cate Blanchett) are on vacation in Morocco to “get away from it all.” On a high mountain road, she is mortally shot by an errant bullet, forcing Richard and the people around them to quickly seek out medical attention for her.
This storyline was clearly meant to be the focal point for which all the other throughlines were to revolve around. All the characters in Babel were in some fashion or another affected by the situation in Morocco. By definition, this would be the Objective Story Throughline.
And the intent of this can be found everywhere, even in the various taglines used to sell the film:
- Tragedy is universal
- One shot, many kills
- A single gunshot heard around the world
This last one clearly describes the problematic situation everyone is dealing with. Plainly, Richard (Brad Pitt) and Susan (Cate Blanchett) are stuck in the deserts of Morocco with little to hope of being rescued (OS Throughline: Situation). If they were to be “unstuck” or somehow able to get to a hospital, the problems in the Objective Story would be resolved and the story would be over. And this is, in fact, what finally happens at the end when the Americans are finally given their “happy ending.” 4
Unfortunately, little time is given to exploring either of them or the difficulties between them. We know that the death of their son Sam has much to do with their constant bickering, but we aren’t given enough screen real-estate to really get into it. Likewise, we really don’t delve much into Richard or Susan’s personal problems. Susan obviously has a heightened sense of motherly protection while Richard comes off as impersonal as the remote desert he finds himself in.
To qualify for a Main Character throughline we really need to know a character personally, to really feel empathy for them and to really feel what it is like to be that person. Richard and Susan don’t offer us that, and thus this grouping fails to provide us with a Main Character, Impact Character or Subjective Story throughline.
Amelia, Santiago and the Children
If anything this grouping feels more like a secondary sub-story than any contributing throughline. While directly involved with Richard and Susan’s kids (she’s their nanny), illegal immigrant Amelia’s road trip to her son’s wedding feels like its own story. Whereas the Richard and Susan story could be considered a problematic situation, the trip Amelia (Adriana Barraza) takes to Mexico and back deals mostly with problematic activities. A nice way to connect separate stories in a ensemble piece is to ensure that they reside in the same dramatic domain. These two storylines differ enough as to cause some confusion.
Seen as a separate story then, you would hope that it would be more fully developed than the previous. This proves not to be the case. Amelia’s illegal immigrant status is not revealed until her final scene and her relationship with her nephew Santiago (Gael Garcia Bernal) fizzles out rather quickly.
When we first meet Santiago he seems quite upset with having to drag Richard and Susan’s kids to Mexico; it’s enough to cause uneasy tension between he and his mother…at first. Within minutes on the road however, all is forgotten and Santiago is the great uncle the kids never had. Perhaps continuing the uneasiness between the two would’ve served nicely as a Subjective Story Throughline.
Correspondingly, Santiago’s Impact Character Throughline, while enthralling, is not as well developed as perhaps it could’ve been. Not until they run into the stop at the Border do we fully realize what he is all about. His impulse to floor it and avoid incarcertaion at all costs is as visually exciting as it is thought provoking. What would drive someone to behave like this? The impact of his actions could have been nicely juxtaposed against Amerlia’s willingness to accept things the way they are. But again, Amelia’s throughline is not as personally felt as it should be to qualify for Main Character status. We never get to really know her. That perspective, it seems, appears elsewhere.
Chieko and her Father
Out of all the characters in Babel, it is the story of Chieko (Rinko Kikuchi) that provides us with the closest thing to a Main Character Throughline. Sure, we care deeply about Richard and his wife’s situation, and we’re concerned with the well-being of their children and of Amelia and Santiago’s plight, but it is the intimate look at the life of a deaf girl growing up in Japanese society that we feel the most empathy for.
Through Chieko we get to experience personally what it must feel like to be unable to effectively communicate with the outside world. She wants desperately to be understood - to have someone pay attention to her. The Thematic Issues of Understanding - Instinct, Conditioning, Senses and Interpretation - run rampant through her storyline.
Thematically we see Instinct and Conditioning fight it out against the backdrop of Chieko’s life. Her natural drive to be held and to be sexual (Instinct) battles against the repressed sexuality Japanese society imposes on her (Conditioning). In addition, we get to personally feel what it is like to have one of our Senses completely gone. The sound cuts out as we experience the club scene from her point of view. With our sense of hearing completely gone, the dancing and gyrating bodies look strange and unattainable to us. At the same time we are visually assaulted with flashing lights, smoke screens and streaming lasers. Her senses (and by proxy, ours) are so overwhelmed that she barely makes it out of the club without passing out. And furthermore, these overloaded Senses cloud Chieko’s Interpretation of the young boy’s advances towards her. Because we as an audience have assumed her position, we feel the same shock and confusion when the boy she is interested in starts kissing her best friend.
We understand her pain.
The Chieko storyline perfectly fits the definition of a Main Character Throughline and was vitally important for the success of the film. I do not agree with this assertion:
the Japanese segments belong on the cutting-room floor, as they have only the most tenuous relationship to the interwoven tragedies of the Morocco shooting and the concurrent disaster of dragging the children across the border.
For without these sequences with Chieko, we would have no emotional “in” into the story. Richard and Amelia’s throughlines, while easily sympathetic, never fully reach the point of empathy. We never really feel like we are either of them whereas we get to know Cheiko quite intimately. It’s also the reason why her storyline is often the one most people remember and the one they cherish the most.
It becomes quite discouraging then when we find that there is little time paid towards Chieko’s relationship with her dad or his impact on her. We know that he doesn’t pay much attention to her, but because there are so many other stories to tell we never really get to explore the depths of the problems between them. It is touching when her father goes out to comfort her on the balcony, but without knowing more about him we are left to fill in the blanks ourselves.
What we do know is that he spends a considerable amount of time away from her - allowing her to come and go as she pleases - and that this time away is partly responsible for her behavior. But while his several hunting trips abroad prove detrimental to his daughter, they’re even more devastating for another family altogether.
Yussef and Ahmed
While fascinating in its depiction of the squalor surrounding Moroccan goat farmers, this last grouping of characters ends up being the least developed of them all. It’s a strange approach, especially when you consider that Yussef (Boubker Ait El Caid) and his brother, Ahmed (Said Tarchani) are responsible for the story’s main inequity.
We do learn that Yussef, while having an innate talent for shooting, is undergoing the same kind of budding sexuality that Chieko is going through. Yet while we learn intimately what motivates Chieko, we never fully understand why Yussef feels compelled to relieve himself on a mountaintop or why he sneaks peeks at his naked sister. The only conclusion you can come to is that he does these things because he is poor. Because of this lack of exploration into Yussef’s personal thorughline his actions on screen come off as strangely preverse. Contrast this again with Chieko’s throughline. We see her fully naked yet never feel the unpleasantness we feel watching Yussef.
Like Amelia and her son, the characters of Yussef and Ahmed are treated so dispassionately that only their objective roles in the larger story become apparent. We need to experience Main Characters from within if we are to accept what it is they do. If Chieko had fired the gun into Richard and Susan’s bus, we would’ve understood why. Instead, Yussef’s actions come off as a contrived act of stupidity.
This lack of a Main Character throughline is even stranger in the larger story analysis sense when you realize that Yussef had a perfect Impact Character in his brother Ahmed. Their relationship is so nicely developed that it becomes the closest thing we have to Subjective Story Throughline in this movie.
The conflict between them sings in their arguments over watching their sister shower, firing the rifle, etc. So much so, that we understand fully Yussef’s desire to grab the rifle and protect his brother from the Moroccan police. And because we’ve personally felt what it would be like to be in this relationship, Yussef’s plea at the end breaks our hearts:
- Yussef falls to his knees, hands raised.
- YUSSEF
- I killed the American, I was the only one who shot at you. They did nothing… nothing. Kill me, but save my brother, he did nothing… nothing. Save my brother… he did nothing.
In Conclusion
Ensemble stories can employ one of two storytelling strategies. The first works towards a singular meaning. While there may be several different Main Characters, they all come from the same point of view and therefore can be easily interchanged from one scene to the next.
The second approach tosses away cohesion for the sake of diversity. Different elements of storytelling are butted up against one another in an attempt to create a sort of holisitc meaning that exists outside of the story. With this approach, the audience becomes the authors of their own meaning.
Babel takes the latter approach.
As it stands, we still have a semblance of the four major throughlines:
- Objective Story: Richard and Susan stuck in the Moroccan desert
- Main Character: Chieko struggles with being deaf in modern Japanese society
- Impact Character: Santiago will do anything to avoid capture by the U.S. Border Patrol
- Subjective Story: Two brothers, Yussef and Ahmed, protect each other
While each of these is a nicely developed look at each of the four main perspectives on a problem, they aren’t connected in a singular meaningful way. This is why many have complained about how confusing the film was or why it was a complete waste of their time; an audience is more comfortable with a complete story. Unfortunately for these people, I don’t think that was what Inarritu and screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga were going for.
Babel is an exploration of the difficulties of communication in modern day society. If that is true, then the tagline:
If You Want to Be Understood…Listen
encapsulates perfectly the author’s original intent and offers us a fitting conclusion to this analysis.
Perhaps instead of trying to figure out what it all meant, we should simply allow the film to stand on its own. We should accept Babel for what it is: an exploration of lives disrupted by a singluar tragedy; not one of violence, but one of communication.
By listening intently, perhaps someday we will fully understand the meaning of it all.
Footnotes for this article
- Well, OK, maybe once - while watching Lady in the Water. But Babel is certainly not that bad!↩
- Not an easy task if you’ve ever tried it!↩
- Complete stories offer an audience both a Subjective view and Objective view of reality — at the same time. This CANNOT be experienced in real life. You can take one perspective or the other - not both at once. That’s why stories are so cool.↩
- This was mentioned in the Japanese news broadcast. Interestingly enough, as an American I was quite pleased that I was given this ending. As explained before, it helped quell my anger.↩
11 responses so far ↓
1 Dave Herman // Jun 30, 2007 at 3:38 am
As a happy Dramatica user, I am concerned by this analysis of Babel. I wasn’t confused in the slightest by this film, I have to say. The fact that each these of stories was about characters under duress feeling alienated and powerless due to their inability to communicate freely and intuitively with their surroundings, made perfect intuitive sense to me. But this isn’t what worries me most about the analysis. Neither is it the pretty serious inaccuracies which bother me (e.g., Santiago is Amelia’s nephew, not her son; Guillermo Arriaga is the writer not director Alejandro Inarritu). No, what I find most unsettling is that the analysis is so dogmatic and judgmental.
Instead of examining why this film intrigues, moves, and invites one to view it again, the analysis picks holes in it and condescendingly “explains†that it’s not a “good†film because it doesn’t fit the Dramatica model. If that isn’t ammunition for those who dismiss Dramatica as a “cult,†I don’t know what is.
Watching Babel, I certainly experienced moments of “screenwriter’s wince†at some of the more on-the-nose lines of dialogue, and I didn’t understand why Arriaga fiddled with time by putting Brad Pitt’s side of the conversation with Amelia, which we’d seen from her side early in the film, at the end again. But the amazing acting, together with the thrilling visuals and the beautiful soundtrack drew me into the film emotionally, regardless of these “flaws.†Isn’t that what cinema is all about?
Babel is similar in structure to films like Happiness, Magnolia, Crash, and so on, in which separate, stand-alone stories are interwoven, sometimes loosely connected, but not necessarily. Call it multi-plot, mosaic, whatever (I wouldn’t call it an ensemble film myself). The thing that connects the separate stories is Theme, not the narrative. And it’s perhaps here that Dramatica can offer some useful insights into how Arriaga works his magic.
How about some constructive ideas about how Dramatica can help the writer keep thematic focus across a variety characters? For example, let’s say you’re writing a story (in whatever narrative form you’ve chosen), about characters struggling with the conflict between an increasingly rational society and the need for spirituality. How can Dramatica help the writer develop a cast of characters who all emphasize a different aspect of the overall theme?
Let’s have less dogma and judgmental rejection of innovation, and a more inclusive, curious attitude to what we can learn from scripts that push the envelope.
2 J. Hull // Jun 30, 2007 at 11:17 am
I think you may have misinterpreted my analysis. Never once did I say that Babel was not a “good” film. In fact, I made great efforts to show that, while I hated it at first, over time I have grown to appreciate it more and more. My analysis was by no means a rejection of the film.
To begin, my purpose in writing this analysis was not to show how to write your own ensemble stories. Chris Huntley goes into more detail about that in the Tip of the Month referred to above. One way to create the story you propose (the conflict between a rational society and the need for spirituality) is to decide upon a single Storyform. Once you have that, you can then have your different groups of characters reveal that single storyform, i.e. all the Main Characters will share the same MC Concern, the same MC Issue, the same MC Problem, and so on. In this way your story will have cohesion in its meaning.
I don’t believe Babel took this approach and therefore don’t believe it was working towards a singular meaning.
This is not to say the film was bad at all - I was not passing a personal subjective judgment on it. My analysis was merely an objective look at the story elements that were presented to us.
I agree that one way to create a cohesive ensemble story is to connect them through Theme. As I explained above, while I think the thematic elements in Chieko’s throughline were wonderfully developed they did not appear in Amelia’s storyline or any of the others for that matter. This disconnect between the thematic elements is partly responsible for why many have felt that Chieko’s throughline was completely unnecessary for the film.
As for the innaccuracies, I’ve gone ahead and corrected both. I think it’s telling that I incorrectly identified Santiago as her son. Because there was no intimate first person “I” perspective for Amelia, I had no personal connection with the people around her and thus mistakingly thought Santiago was her son.
I have no excuse for misidentifying the writer. When I wrote my original analysis I thought I remembered reading somewhere that Inarritu was responsible for the screenplay as well. Upon further examination it seems I was partly correct: Inarritu (along with Arriaga) is credited as coming up with the original idea (Source Material). That being said, I was wrong to not credit the screenwriter and have corrected this as well.
The theory of Dramatica is a model of how complete stories work. You don’t have to write a complete story for it to be great. Children of Men was not a complete story and I absolutely loved it. Whether or not you love a film or whether or not it has a profound effect on you has nothing to do with whether or not it fits the Dramatica model.
Personally I feel that complete stories are more effective in communicating their meaning to an audience. While you may not have felt confused, there are several who simply did not like the film. In my analysis I attempted to show why that may be by looking at it through the filter of Dramatica.
3 arijjan verboon // Jul 1, 2007 at 4:10 am
Hi James and Dave,
These are questions I have been pondering too. I don’t have clear answers myself. So please forgive me if I seem to be condescending, it is trough formuating opinions that I try to attain clarity.Jim Argues that Babel doesn’t fit the Dramatica paradigm, and that remark in itself is not condescending, it’s an analysis. The reason I bring it up, is because of the discourse this discourse embedded in. If it doesn’t fit, it can be improved. That conclusion is correct if you assume that the dramatica problem solving model is superior in describing the interaction of agency and causality in the world we live in. There it gets really interesting cause we are talking about the philosophical givens with which we view the world. The current debate about about this matter shifts between Modernists Post Modernists and Actor Network Theorists. My take is dat Babel describes a network. In this worldview both people and technology structure the world and are determined by social and technological structures. If your world model is based upon classical rhetorics to which Dramatica added the four perspectives, then Babel can probably be improved. If you have a post modern world view, Babel describes a network of relations and in doing so describes reality more accurate.We are either a network of flies spiders and trees or a narrative construction. Our narrative identity is a construction, but that is notheoretical abstract but a meaningful nexus. And then the question is, which model is hired? What the discussion gives is awaraness of the social construction of narrative identity without favoring one theory above the other, “Pinocchio” , is one of my favourite stories, so is Musils ” A man without qualities”. The difficulty here is that searching for the GAS in Babel, is a lot like baking cookies: You force the dough trough the cookie clutter and we all know what happens then, the cookie will have a perfect shape. But the opposite will leave us with a chaotic meaningless universe. Is there any argument to this post? Not yet, I am not ready to embrace either form. How those two worldvieuws have to coexist, i don’t have a clue.
ArijJan
4 Chris Huntley // Jul 2, 2007 at 11:39 am
The Dramatica grand argument story (GAS) is a specific form of narrative. It assumes author’s intent (knowing or unknowing) presented as an argument to the audience.
A GAS is one of many types of narratives and narrative structures. It has a western, American linear bias and therefore is suited best for analyzing stories intended for that type of audience. In that context, it seems appropriate to examine Babel using Dramatica since it was critically accepted in “Hollywood.”
The film is beautifully crafted with strong performances universally. I liked the film. It wasn’t my favorite film of 2006 (that goes to Pan’s Labyrinth), but I’m glad I watched it. That’s my personal, non-Dramatica assessment of it.
I think Jim has done a fine analysis of his experience with the movie and the story within. Here are a couple of my thoughts along the line of this discussion:
1. I think the idea of the title “Babel,†is meant to tell us how much conflict arises from miscommunication. I think that is the thematic SUBJECT MATTER, not the thematic argument made in the story. Subject matter is the topic of interest. Theme is what you have to say ABOUT the subject matter and the context within which such meaning holds true.
In each of the segments/locations in Babel, miscommunication makes problems worse but does not seem to be the cause of the problems. The kid shooting the bus/tourist is the source of one problem. The nanny taking the children to Mexico causes another problem. The absent parents and isolation causes trouble for the young, deaf, Japanese woman. However, the film explores how miscommunication leads to greater and greater conflict, whereas understanding seems to be the only release.
While I think Babel is a compelling exploration of the subject matter, I don’t think it is nearly as effective in taking a position on the subject matter. If the writer & director wished to argue their opinion on the matter, I don’t feel it was successful because I don’t know what I’m supposed to think/feel about the subject matter based on the author’s intent. I agree with Jim in that I don’t think the story(s) in the film has enough cohesion to make a particular point.
It’s very possible that the filmmakers did NOT want to tell the audience what to think about the subject matter. If so, they just put lots of pieces out there and ask the audience to make of it what they will. The author(s) then cannot neither take credit nor blame if audience members see diamonds or garbage since the author(s) relinquished control of the story’s meaning.
I don’t know which way the authors of Babel were leaning. I suspect they wanted a little bit of both which is pretty much what I “got” from the film.
– Chris
5 Dave Herman // Jul 2, 2007 at 2:33 pm
I think Chris hits the nail right on the head by saying that the authors of Babel possibly didn’t want to “tell the audience what to think.†Is the Brad Pitt character wrong to behave so aggressively given his desperate situation? Is Amelia behaving irresponsibly when she takes the children with her to Mexico in order not to miss her son’s wedding?
In my opinion the film tries to show how each of the stories are set in motion by simple human fallibility rather than malice. The various characters take risks they perhaps shouldn’t, but they’re only human, so they do. The film doesn’t condemn any of the actions in a moral sense, it just points at what can happen.
This lack of judgment is one of the reasons Babel made an impression on me, precisely because it left me trying to understand the mixed feelings I was left with when the credits rolled. Judging by the level of craftsmanship with which the film was written and directed, I’m assuming this was the intention of the makers.
My initial response to Jim’s analysis was fairly vociferous (and I apologize if I came on too strong) because I don’t see this lack of a clear (moral) position as a shortcoming in Babel. Which is why Chris is correct to point out that Jim’s analysis should be understood within the Dramatica paradigm of a GAS.
If Jim’s point is that in terms of the Dramatica model the script could or should have been more explicit in stating the author’s moral position, then that’s fair enough. However, it still begs the question for me: How can Dramatica as a story theory learn from this kind of movie as well as pick holes in it? After all, the script was nominated for an Oscar and I don’t think it’s too much to say that this was justified?
Actually, the one thing I didn’t like about the film was its title. For me the film has no real connection to the biblical metaphor of the Tower of Babel, in which God punishes humankind for trying to demystify him by replacing their single language with a collection of mutually unintelligible ones. The subject matter of the movie is this: Even seemingly trivial decisions have consequences, and these can turn out to be catastrophic. Perhaps the theme, the moral of the story, what the authors wanted to say ABOUT the subject matter is: Think twice, be aware of your responsibilities, think decisions through?
By the way, in the light of this discussion, I am very curious to know how you would analyze the movie Crash, which uses a similar narrative structure but, in my opinion, takes a very clear moral stand on the subject matter (racial prejudice). Just a thought!
Dave Herman
6 arijjan verboon // Jul 3, 2007 at 6:52 am
Hi Chris,
Long time no hear! That was interesting:-) ArijJan
7 Chris Huntley // Jul 3, 2007 at 9:41 am
Hi to you too, Ari.
8 Lauren // Aug 27, 2007 at 1:45 am
Amelia was not an illegal immigrant, she was just deported in the end because the American government believed she had ‘broken the law’
9 soo // Oct 5, 2007 at 10:39 pm
lauren, amelia WAS an illegal immigrant because they actually SAY she was one and did you not hear when she was trying to explain how she had formed a life in america… like that would take away the fact that she was illegal?
10 Abby // Apr 29, 2008 at 6:43 am
I have a question, what do you think Chieko wrote in the letter to the policeman?
11 Jim // Apr 30, 2008 at 11:18 am
Oh man, it has been so long since I’ve seen this movie I don’t quite remember. Do you think it had something meaningful to add to the story?
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