Babel on

Eric Kufs

Professor Wexler

English 495esm

5 December 2012

The progressive culture of the internet allows most young privileged students feel as if the world is some how on a path towards an eventual global equality.  The lightning quick flashes of information, shooting back and forth from continent to continent, keep us aware of minute by minute changes occurring in most industrialized nations.  When the we watch a revolution in the Middle East documented through cellphone pictures and social networking sites we feel hopeful about the impact of globalization.   Yet, in spite of political revolutions like the "Arab Spring" or pop culture phenomenons like the absurdly popular dance hit, "Gnam Gnam Style", human beings of all nations have not come together to agree upon a universal goal of a shared utopian society.  Instead, as the predominant species wielding the most power over the planet earth, we have opted to remain in a perpetual state of capitalism where certain groups or regions control more of the means of production and/or power of consumption.  More simply, there has been no conscious effort away from a universal societal structure of "the haves and the have nots."  The power of the internet and the freedom of mass communication is a helpful tool but does not steer the world population away from the unbridled capitalism that allows for this type of social and economic inequality.
In a technologically advanced global economy it easy to see the humanity that we all share but quite often difficult to see the unjust disparities between nations and cultures outside of America.  In the film Babel,  directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu and written by Guillermo Arriaga, we are shown four interrelated stories across nations in three distinct areas of the world. In each plot line we see similar displays of family, human sexual desire, and the benevolence of fellowship within all the communities represented.  The socio-economic and political differences are all that stand between the characters and a shared utopian ideal.
The first thing that the people of the United States, Mexico, Morocco, and Japan are concerned with as represented by the characters in the film is not their belief in the free-market but the survival and welfare of their family.  American literary critic and Marxist theorist, Frederic Jameson, in his essay, "The Politics of Utopia" writes, "a politics which wishes to change the system radically will be designated as utopian—with the right-wing undertone that the system (now grasped as the free market) is part of human nature; that any attempt to change it will be accompanied by violence; and that efforts to maintain the changes (against human nature) will require dictatorship" (1).  Whichever economic system the characters move through they all are concerned with their immediate family.  Whether it be Abdullah the goat herder purchasing a rifle to protect his herd from jackyls in order to feed his family, the Mexican nanny, Amelia, taking her employers children across the border from California to be at her son's wedding, or Richard fighting for his wife Susan's life nursing her as she slowly bleeds to death from a gunshot wound, all of the characters are driven by the need to preserve the family they love.  If the greed inherent in the preservation of the global free market is human nature then can't the same be said for this primal drive of preserving the immediate family?  Without addressing what is natural or not we can see the commonalities that exist between the cruelty of these character's international political dilemmas. Abdullah has the harsh police action of Morocco and the international fear of terrorism to blame for an incident that ends in the supposed fatal shooting of his one son and the incarceration of another. The Mexican nanny Amelia, is deported from the U.S., keeping her from the children she had practically raised and from the job that allowed her to make a better living for her own family.  International relations between the U.S. and Moroccan government delay rescue efforts as the American tourist, Susan, bleeds to death with her husband at her side.  Standing in the way of the character's desire to preserve or protect their familial relationships is not human nature but  organized governments, the larger players in the free market.
Outside of the governing bodies  and the cultural boundaries of the world that separate us as one universal human race there is one instinctive facet that plagues all of us in "civilized" societies.   This is the issue of sexuality.   In Babel, characters of different cultures all have different relationships with sexuality but they all share similar desires.  In a suggestion that in a utopian society sexuality would be universally accepted as a common necessary expression, Jameson writes, "In other words sexuality, itself a meaningless biological fact, is in such societies far less invested with all the symbolic meanings with which we modern and sophisticated people endow it"(53).  In the film, Abdullah's younger son, Ahmed, is criticized by his brother for regularly spying on his naked sister as she changes.  A boy in a third world religious culture of the mountains of Morocco is the same as Chieko Wataya, a rebellious, deaf Japanese teenage girl who is sexually frustrated.  Her desires and curiosities lead to sexual provocations that are met with a similar disdain.   But even as we grow older sexual expression is a necessary human process as shown through Amelia's brief interaction with an older gentlemen at her son's wedding.  Sexuality drives all of us and the different societal constructs of the world do not change this fact.  Though as much as the world shares the freedom of sexuality through images of art or pornography however they are discerned, this information does not wholly eliminate the disparate views of a matter that is biologically vital to human beings.