The Tower of Babel

Babel: Gonzalez Iñárritu, 2006

From January 5th

What a dissappointment. It’s a failure both in form and content. Desperate and well-known consequences of a cruel and harsh world, predictable devices and style without substance.

A film must be idiosyncratic, it must set up its own goals and follow them. Critics must acknowledge and recognize this if they wish to formulate an effective critique. This is my perspective when I say this film has failed. It undercuts its dramatic weight by making fickle decisions based on the assumption of its own greatness. In other words, the filmmaker felt his message was so very important that he never really addressed it, instead, he delivered a humanism that is melodramatic and stale. Stale. And incredibily pretentious.

What is meant by “Babel”? In the Biblical story, humans were brought down by their arrogance, not by merciless chance and aleatory suffering. Humanity suffered the wrath of God as a consequence of its own decisions. But this film does not address the human capacity for moral choice, rather, it resorts to victimization and simplification. All of the protagonists are likeable people who make mistakes in a moment of weakness or innocence, but they are really good people at heart. At most the film celebrates the ideas that bad things happen to good people and that we are all interconnected. Its strategy is to show this on the most universal scale it can find, by literally linking the world through a plethora of coincidences in its characters. It is a statement that is so thoroughly shallow that the film ends up becoming very distant and even rather absurd, like an elaborate quid pro quo.

In contrast, in Amores Perros, Iñárritu’s first film, the characters were truly three-dimensional. They were flawed characters capable of good and evil, and they lived in a mixture of free-will and chance. They had to live with both and their connections did not seem so arbirtrary and didactic.

Babel is a film that attempts to address the nature of our age. It tries to position itself at the juncture of current events, being shot on three continents and four countries, in their original languages, with both famous and non professional actors, etc. It wants to be the globalization film, one that captures the human emotion and drama at the heart of the global paradox. But ironically such lofty goal gives way to precisely the kind of gratutious melodrama that is empty of real social analysis. It fails under the weight of its own sense of self-importance, and despite its documentary-style aesthetic its effect is actually similar to that of a Hollywood blockbuster–rather than entertaining with action without substance, it entertains with empty emotions and the excitement of exotic cultures it never really understood.

The film is ultimately counter-productive to its moral ambitions, not only because it misses the point entirely, but also because it takes up so much media space and attention that could actually be used by more meaningful and coherent work about the changing nature of our world society.

Art With an Audience

January 24th.

I just finished talking with an italian Ph.D. student in spanish lilterature. He talked about the necessity for art that deals with human issues, for art to “do something.” I didn’t try to engage his point of view during the conversation, but it did bring me to an interesting question: to what extent can art change its audience? Is it possible to determine this? Can an artist really control the impact of his work? And if an artist wishes to change the ideas and beliefs of his audience, what technique works best? What are the thematic and aesthetic decisions that must be made?

It seems that most answers will oscillate between two possibilites. On the one hand, this artist can choose to make very popular art where “the message” is carried along, with an agreeable presentation of its subject matter and an aesthetic that is accessible and easy to interact with. The essence of this strategy would be that it approaches its audience from pleasure first rather than intellect. This work aims to be enjoyable as entertainment and hopes to communicate its message subtly rather than directly.

The other possibility is to make very confrontational work that puts the message at the head of all its artistics decisions. Thus both the presentation of its subject matter and its aesthetic choices are measured according to the message, and the result is often controversial and intense. This strategy approaches the audience through the intellect first and pleasure last. It often has a strong sense of morality that gives it a feeling of authority and confrontation. This work does not aim to be enjoyed as entertainment but rather wishes to communicate what it considers to be an urgent message.

The first strategy can quickly gain a broad fan base while it risks the loss of its message or substance to the sensuality of its popular attributes. Often enough the audience does not connect beyond the surface, missing entirely the real objectives of the artist. An example of this is Coppola’s first two Godfather films, wherein the second was made with the intention to clarify and push the moral message of the story–precisely because he felt that the audience had stayed at the surface of the first film, engaging with the wonderful story and technique and bypassing its moral content.

On the otherhand, the second strategy risks alienating most audience members while gaining in decency and self-respect because it refuses to compromise its subject matter for the sake of easier entertainment. Work of this nature often takes the most aesthetic risks because, since it measures its decisions on the criteria of the presumed importance of its message, the artist often feels that the more popular aesthetics are outdated or useless for its intentions.

And yet both cases have a high risk of preaching to the choir, of reducing the artisitic experience to whatever it was, aesthetically or ideologically, that excited the viewer before he met up with the work. In other words, that the artwork will not really communicate anything, let alone change anything, since it is giving the audience something that it is already comfortable with in the first place. Thus there is the possibility of a lack of real engagement into a critical thought process.