I rented the film Babel on Friday with my mother. It's a curious, jagged movie, and I could see how it wouldn't make sense to some -- maybe most -- people. Its overall theme, however, struck a chord that I have been thinking about most of the weekend.
The film portrays four different countries and scenarios. It follows the effects of one event that takes place in Morocco and inadvertently alters the lives of people halfway around the globe. Among its main characters are a typical American couple (typical, of course, with Brad Pitt being the husband) in the midst of marital discord; two Moroccan boys that accidentally shoot the American wife; the kids of the American couple and their Mexican nanny that takes them to la patria on a roadtrip gone awry; and a Japanese doctor, whose deaf-mute daughter is under some sort of psychosexual trauma. The events are told out of order and all the connections only begin to make sense at the end.
In addition to showing "how we are all connected as humans in some way", though, I think that Babel is really a movie about not listening, and hence, not understanding. Even when speaking the same language, characters hear the others but don't really listen to one another. Even when we, the audience, understand by looking into a closeup of someone's eyes, for instance, in life -- in the movie life and in real life -- we may not really be listening, but rather wanting, begging, hoping, demanding that someone listen to us first. The eyes may be a window to the soul but batting eyelashes 500 times will land one in the optometrist's office nowadays and nothing more.
Everyone wants to be understood first, but taking time to understand others can be slow and painful. Does anyone have the time to do that?
It is somewhat like those conversations that people have often: when one has stopped speaking, he hears the other person while waiting for his next chance to speak. Almost everyone I know has been guilty of it at some point or another, myself most certainly included. There could be many causes. Laziness. Self-indungence. Disinterest. Hurry.
Sometimes, maybe, the inability to listen arises from the pervasive self-interest as a result of pure loneliness. I think lonely people are such each for their own reasons -- just as Tolstoy said, that everybody is unhappy in his own way -- but does loneliness cause selfishness? Is loneliness the ability to listen only to oneself? Are selfish people necessarily lonely deep down?
