Writer Unboxed

You missed me, admit it. But I’ve been busy digging out from a snowstorm that stole our power for 12 hours and recovering from some blasted croupy-cough thing. When the lights finally came back, I learned about the tragedy at Virginia Tech. Ironically, the feeling foremost in my mind and today’s blog post focus are the same: compassion.

I finally watched Babel this weekend. I’d been reluctant to after hearing blah reports about the film from others, and then the Netflix cover started gathering dust; I had to either see it or return it unseen–something I hate doing. I reminded myself that Babel garnered some impressive nods and made myself watch it. I’m glad I did.

Babel is a thinking movie; you’ll be mulling over plot points and characterizations for days. And you’ll be wondering how screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga and director Alejandro González Iñárritu did it–how they made you care about their characters: Moroccan children who shoot at a tourist bus; a mute-deaf Japanese girl who tries to get her dentist to feel her up; an icy American wife whose behavior toward her husband seems borderline-cruel; an illegal-alien nanny who takes two children into Mexico without their parents’ consent and later leaves them alone, scared, dehydrated in the desert.

How the creators did it isn’t such a mystery though; they succeeded by making their jaded characters fully textured, real-seeming, and far more than the sum of their bad-karma moments. It’s something Hollywood seems particularly good at, making us love the anti-hero. Maybe it’s because a good actor can communicate layers of complex meaning with a single glance. The actors of Babel were certainly of the finest caliber, and by film’s end I was loving nearly all the characters, despite their appallingly poor judgment and neuroses.

A little more about the film’s basis: Babel’s title is derived from the mythological tower of Babel, referenced in the bible as a tower built to try to reach heaven. According to Wikipedia:

The attempt to build the Tower of Babel had angered God who, in his anger, made each person involved speak a different language which ultimately halted the project and scattered and disconnected the people across the planet.

Arriaga and Iñárritu together built on this to showcase the importance of communication, highlighting what can happen when we don’t listen to one another–across cultures and lifestyles, in decaying marriages–and how important it is to reach for compassion in times of crisis. Creating characters you can feel compassion for is important, whether you’re talking a Hollywood hit or a NYT’s best seller, because it’s that emotion that hooks viewers and readers into following the journey; and compassion between characters, between webby storylines, creates an even stickier hook. I know I cared more about the characters once they came to care about each other.

Bottom line: This film is a study in the deep hook that comes when you evolve compassion. The result is a kind of suspense that has nothing to do with Hitchcock and everything to do with an edge-of-seat concern for tolerance and understanding. Babel’s creators evoked this in viewers and demanded it of its characters: care about your fellow man, your wife, your husband, your brother. Listen, the film asks us–if you want to be understood, then listen. Was it easy to watch? No. It was disturbingly human. But I’m glad to have seen it. In the words of Todd Gilchrist: (Babel is) guaranteed to be quite possibly the most rewarding movie you will ever be reluctant to see.

Write on, all.

Therese Walsh co-founded Writer Unboxed in 2006. Her debut novel, The Last Will of Moira Leahy, sold to Random House in a two-book deal in 2008, was named one of January Magazine’s Best Books of 2009, and was a Target Breakout Book in 2010. She's never been published with a lit magazine, but LOST's Carlton Cuse liked her haiku best on Twitter, and that made her pretty happy.

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