More Babble Please:
Foreign Languages in Recent Films

April 3, 2007

A few nights ago Emily and I watched Babel.. a film that wraps us into a story that travels to three continents and involves us in four distinct cultures. The film was reliant on subtitles for the Moroccan Arabic, Japanese, and Spanish portions of the film.. letting us fend for ourselves when it came to Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett.

Reading the Moroccan Arabic subtitles it struck me how understandable everything was.. here we were in the Moroccan rîf in some stone hut and, if properly subtitled, we have no problem understanding the human beings on the screen. I once wondered about this kind of people while riding in a bus or shared service across the Moroccan countryside. I looked out the window and saw kids herding animals in the mountains.. one sitting in the shade staring straight ahead. What were those kids thinking? What were their hopes? What was the lens through which they understood what is around them? Those are depressing questions because it is immensely difficult to enter into a world whose cognitive terms are so obviously different.

For the makers of Babel there is no real difficulty here. People live in different ways.. stone huts in Morocco, high-rise apartments in Tokyo, small towns in Mexico.. and consequently they have different comfort levels with respect to hygiene and food preparation.. but if you get past these superficial differences people can be easily understood. At no point do the subtitles present us with concepts or ways of seeing the world that are not immediately graspable.

So what do I expect? I would like to see portrayals of people who perceive their world through unique cognitive lenses. That means allowing religious assumptions to have an active role in the thought processes of characters. It also means being willing to sort out surprising varieties of social or ethnic commitments. It would mean upping the "babble" quotient to the point that characters really seemed different.. acted on a different set of assumptions. But this would mean taking culture seriously.. and that is something I don't believe Hollywood is willing or able to do.

I would make the same charge against the films of Mel Gibson. Both Apocalypto and The Passion of Christ used subtitles to create a sense of cultural authenticity. But for all the time spent on the correct language (Mayan or Aramaic) there is no effort to separate the world of these ancient people from our own cognitive world. People from widely separate cultures turn out to be a lot like us..

Perhaps I was wrong all those years ago to look out the window at kids herding animals and feel dejected about the possibility of knowing them. I just needed to watch Babel and I would have gotten their world! Maybe the problem is in the title of the film.. "Babel" instead of "Babble".. The myth of the tower of Babel in Genesis tells of human beings being separated by language. Reading this account one could come to believe that all we need are subtitles underneath our every word.. then human difference would be solved. But that story was far too simple an account of human difference.. subtitles are not enough.