Globalism and the films of Alejandro González Iñárritu
by Robert Philbin
[ filmreviews ]
"Babel is the last film that completes my trilogy which began with Amores Perros and 21 Grams. It is a film made up of 4 stories on 3 continents and in 5 languages. As in the two previous films and beyond the implicit political and social commentary that it contains, Babel is a film about the complex relationship between parents and their children. It is also about the borders that not only divide nations and cultures, but the real borderlines that live within ourselves that can only be erased by compassion, something that we have been losing for the last many years and is what drove me during the process of making this film." Alejandro González Iñárritu, 2006
Iñárritu is the major filmmaker of the moment and his widely praised trilogy - Amores Perros, 21 Grams, and Babel - develops a cinematic critique of the interconnected human condition which extends from the heart of the barrio in his native Mexico City to encompass humanity virtually anywhere on the planet. These films, each telescoping the previous in style, theme, and narrative, relate parallel stories which intersect, like life, at some nexus of defeat: an automobile accident, a momentary negligence results in tragedy; a child points a hunting rifle at a distant tour bus, a bullet ripples through many lives, innocent and guilty, around the planet.
Iñárritu's work [1] captures this interconnectedness, this awareness of the accidental existential encounters which unavoidably and empathetically draw us together, informing our sense of humanity in perpetual conflict with the superficial alienation of "the other." We each exist as someone else's "other" and once this is understood, we realize that every "other's" humanity must be accepted before we can fully presume our own. Iñárritu's films communicate something fundamental to this recognition of postmodern global reality. In a world of power politics, imperialistic intrusion everywhere by government and authoritarian entities, a world increasingly driven by acts of terror and war against terror, comprehending human connectedness may well be essential to the ethical future of the planet.
Any incidental act can spin into war, real or imagined, so we need be informed to comprehend propaganda and recognize the interdependency of our existence with others. People, not governments, pay for war, and we do so with our lives and our future. Our children die, our old men and women vanish, and the products of our hard work are deconstructed to dust.
'Globalization' is more than cheap sneakers, off-shore telemarketing and outsourced jobs; it has the potential to become "global progress" when measured against expanding human rights and mutually beneficial economic development, based on respect for international law and human labor. Globalization is possible under a United Nations and a World Court which function democratically, and this is the power of the American Revolution, as a "manifest destiny" with global meaning. Globalization may be the end point of the American Revolution in history, as opposed to the end of history. These possibilities, won in the democratic revolutions of the last two centuries, are liberal forces accelerating change in a world that cannot stand still, particularly in the context of fascist, theocratic, totalitarian, and dictatorial regimes operative today.
At a time when neo-conservative governments, through years of unpopular war, are increasingly distanced from their civil societies, artists like Iñárritu inform superficially divergent cultures - like Mexico and the United States - that we share obvious and common social goals, like the value of work, respect for family, a better future for our children, individual recognition, respect, and social interdependence, regardless of government propaganda against the "other." Iñárritu uses the storyteller's wily craft to narrate the fragile codependency we all share, no matter where we find ourselves geographically, or existentially on the planet. All of this makes the work of Alejandro González Iñárritu particularly intuitive, postmodern, and immediate to contemporary global audiences.
Amores Perros (2001)
"This is nothing new, what I do - Rashomon, sixty years ago, played with structure and time... My father is a great story teller, he starts in the middle and goes back and forth, and that's an entertaining way to tell a story. My aunt tells a linear story, I want to fall asleep, waiting for the end, which I already know... I normally construct my thoughts like that - I jump around a lot." Alejandro González Iñárritu, Cannes interview.
Structure in Iñárritu's films is increasingly inventive and while similar to Quentin Tarantino [2] and Akira Kurosawa, he appears as influenced by Luis Buñuel, Martin Scorsese, Terrence Malick, Michelangelo Antonioni, John Ford, Alfred Hitchcock, to name but a few sources. While Tarantino, for example, works with a linear narrative reshuffled for dramatic affect, Iñárritu, like Kurosawa, narrates multiple story lines pivoting around an existential moment. None of the characters in Amores actually meet, or share perspectives, for example, but in 21 Grams, three narratives overlap accidentally, until the characters converge into one story line, rather more like Shakespeare weaving a tale. With the exception of a phone call and a photograph, the principal characters in the four story lines of Babel never actually interact; however they are linked thematically: disparate people brought together by random accident, and similar human needs, as opposed to Tarantino's time shuffle to reinvent Hollywood genre.
Both filmmakers reorder time, which heightens narrative by forcing the viewer to engage the story nonlinearly; but each is uniquely different in approach to context, structure, theme, character and so forth. Tarantino may be viewed as existential, but his general context is a world of film genre and cinema history; while Iñárritu's context is closer to the "real world" which, like Scorsese at his best, approximates everyday experience we all recognize.
Amores Perros opens, like Reservoir Dogs, in the middle of violently confused action in a speeding car. The seriously wounded Tim Roth character in Dogs is replaced by a seriously wounded Dog in Perros. The pun is obvious and the pace is intense throughout the first of three narratives, cross-cut into the story line which intersect at a random auto accident on the streets of Mexico City. The story lines in Amores are rooted in class and conflict: fighting underclass brothers destroy their family and ultimately themselves over lust and a strange sort of hip hop machismo. Their story ends with the death of one brother in a bank robbery, while the second crashes his car and kills his best friend, escaping a street gang with his wounded fighting dog. There is no easy exit from Iñárritu's mean streets: you either cling to traditions of family loyalty and the responsibilities of relationship, or you gravitate to an existential social system engineered, like the world of Buñuel's Los Olvidados, to grind you down to tragedy.
Meanwhile, in the second story, a giddy middle-class publisher liberates himself from the mundane wife and kids by supplicating himself to an exciting love affair with a successful model, only to end up trapped again in the tedious responsibilities of relationship: the uncontrollably narcissistic model loses her leg (and cover girl career) in the auto accident with the crazy hip hop brother, so the publisher must care for her, or admit he's a vacuous fop. The publisher is a hero in disguise, he liberates her dog 'Richie' from the sub flooring of his rat-infested high rise in Mexico City. "I can afford the apartment," he tells her imploringly. "But I can't afford to fix the floor!"
Interestingly, Iñárritu interjects himself, Hitchcock-like, in the second story sequence as an art director discussing the cover layout of the crappy magazine the hero publishes. Most of this story is set in the lovers' apartment, so the style shifts from Tarantino and Scorsese mean streets, to tightly composed, elegant shots reminiscent of Hitchcock's Rear Window and Bertolucci's interiors in Last Tango in Paris.
The third movement of Amores Perros concerns an intellectual hit man, a former professor and anti-government guerrilla fighter turned murderer, who lives an outcast life with streets dogs in a Mexico City slum. After shooting a politician through a restaurant window at lunch, the hit man is hired by a greedy corporate partner to kill another greedy partner (his own brother) and gradually we discover that his only hope to connect with his estranged daughter is by giving her the blood money he's paid.
The hit man happens to be on the street with his crew of dogs when the hip hop brother crashes into the model's car and he appropriates the brother's wounded fighting dog and nurses it back to health. Of course the fighting dog soon kills the hit man's pack of street dogs, and he has a crisis of conscience, which resolves when he wanders off, in the last shot of the film, with the fighting dog by his side, literally into the sunset, just like an alienated John Wayne character in a classic John Ford western.
The point of Amores Perros appears to be that while everyone is busy pursuing pathetic visions of security and happiness at someone else's expense, everybody also ends up the victim of random chance in a violent existential world that is largely their own creation. The hip hop brother dreams of money made from his fighting dog so he can finance his escape with his brother's pregnant wife to a better life. The publisher has manufactured a beauty queen who will adore him always only to find she loves her dog more than him and she's more difficult to live with than his comfortable wife. And the philosopher-hit man, king of the underworld, disdains money and class, until he realizes he can only connect emotionally with his thoroughly bourgeois daughter through money to sustain her class pretense.
There is a kind of class karma is at work with Iñárritu, traditional relationships - parents and children, and sibling rivalries - all dysfunctional in the context of class-driven modernity. In the parallel motif of dogs - fighting dogs, a pampered pet, an pack of street dogs - symbolic of what their owners cannot be. The hip-hop brother is not the king of the street, the publisher is not the pampered focus of his beautiful model. And the intellectual revolutionary is followed by a pack of stray dogs, not a political movement. Amores Perros is a violent excursion into contemporary Mexico City and the fact that the actors were relatively unknown only enhances its realism and abstracts the American viewer to a position of voyeur. We are watching "the other" murderously at work and at play, but at a distance imposed by the film, so we can observe while safely limiting our emotional investment in the characters or relevant social critique.
So as Iñárritu objectifies his mean streets, he isolates them from the wider world and we (particularly Americans) can accept his point of view and critique, without questioning our role in that "other"culture. What could the United States possibly have to do with this situation in Mexico City? While in Amores, his focus is the perversion of traditional relationships, Iñárritu offers little social or institutional critique of context, which is presumed to be"dysfunctional Mexico."
He moves toward social critique with his next film, 21 Grams.
21 Grams (2003)
"Sometimes I feel that there is no way out, I'm terrified about our human nature - when you have kids you develop more fears and thoughts and questions... I try to exorcise my emotions through films, it my way to be safe, by pretending to have control of a film... The way we are living now and the things that are happening in the world - a pessimist, as Oscar Wilde said, is nothing but a well informed optimist." Alejandro González Iñárritu, Cannes interview.
Iñárritu darkens and localizes the narrative in 21 Grams, deepens the exploration of class structures, focuses on religion as a source of delusion and alienation, and, supported by powerful ensemble performances from Naomi Watts, Benicio Del Toro and Sean Penn, he weaves three intersecting stories which converge in another fatal auto accident. The title implies the religious context for the film: the idea is that at death the human body weighs 21 grams less than when alive. The implication in this unsubstantiated myth is that a "soul" might be quantifiable by science, a delusional belief held by many.
A bottom class born-again alcoholic (Del Toro) struggles to find his deeper humanity through fascist evangelicalism only to discover that he, not the supernatural, actually navigates his pickup truck through life. Meanwhile, a math professor (Penn) with a failing marriage, needs a heart transplant to survive. He gets a new heart and new love in the process, only to lose his moral compass following Watts, Macbeth-like, into a morass of drugs and vengeance. An architect's wife, reformed drug abuser, (Watts) finds salvation in her comfortable middle-class husband and children, but loses them in a random hit and run accident. She finds new love with the math professor, whom she promptly destroys in narcissistic rage, and then gains a second chance at redemption when she discovers she's pregnant to yet another dead man.
21 Grams is one of the most powerfully dramatic American films in recent years and it expands Iñárritu's earlier themes: death occurs by longevity or chance, and we'll never know which. Life is tragic, so we make the best of it, appreciating relationships we have while we have them, looking inward, deeper than money and God: "Life goes on. With, or without God." Del Toro's wife tells him in a moment when, overcome with failure, he tells her his inert life is now completely in God's hands. She needs food for the kids, while he's waiting for Jesus to inform his future. Iñárritu extends too his sense of fundamental dysfunctional relationships - fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, men and women, the result is a fusion of the dramatic with the mundane in a powerful existential film narrative.
There is a wrenching scene in which Del Toro's wife, young daughter and son are joined at the dinner table in the traditional ritual of grace before meals. After the prayer, the son hits the daughter and Del Toro forces the daughter to "turn the other cheek," then orders the boy to hit the child again in a horribly perverse misreading of Christian pacifism.
"Whoever slaps you on the right cheek, turn the other to him also." He says echoing the word of God. "Hit her." He tells his son. Everyone's confused. "Don't be afraid. Hit her!" He orders. The boy does. Then Del Toro smolders a beat, and smacks the young boy on the head and yells at him -"There's no hitting in this house!" He makes his son stand in the corner, and we read in the cowering youth that the damage done is permanent, he is scared forever by this bewildering interaction. To escape life's failures, Del Toro surrenders his will to the "will of God" - the god who knows "when even a single hair moves on your head."
It is the clash of such antagonisms - Watts' angry intellectual pragmatism in deep conflict with Del Toro's suicidal self delusion - that drives 21 Grams. Her obsessive need for vengeance, his compulsion for absolving self-sacrifice, results in the death of the relatively innocent science professor.
Iñárritu's cinematic techniques advance, the stories are more structure, the dull dog motif of Amores become darkly beautiful insert sequences of birds in flight, migrating, scattering, reflecting random, shifting parallels in nature, underscoring mood and plot points throughout the film. A pigeon scurries along an autumnal sidewalk, for example, chased by Watts' two young girls toward the street corner where the viewer already knows tragedy awaits. The three powerful stories integrate into a single narrative with fractured time frames, like a puzzle, the viewer completely assembles by the end of the film.
In 21 Grams the actors are all American, so the audience can't escape the narrative's social implications. We accept this story as our own, the accidents, misplaced faith, the broken lives which surround and existentially overwhelm character: we know we are observing dimensions of ourselves, differing only by degree. Iñárritu's method here is not unlike synthetic cubism in painting. Different aspects of narratives are juxtaposed, creating a context greater than the sum of its parts; which ultimately places the viewer in the position of evaluating ethical considerations throughout the work. It is in discovering self boundaries, the psychological impossibility of reaching too far beyond our limitations without encountering the kind of failure that permanently disables. This is film making on a mission, a high level of social critique quite beyond stylistic and narrative considerations. This sense of interconnectivity and limitation is obvious and, by extension, through great performances and cinema, we too are connected to each "other" as a global audience. There is something tenuous, even fearful in Iñárritu's work, however, particularly in this film: 21 Grams clarifies his thematic premise, and he will push its possibilities even further with his next film, Babel.
Babel (2005)
"Kids sometimes pay the price for all the stupid things that adults do... the border lines within us, which have been taught to us by our governments, our fathers, our religions, our schools, our races, thinking we are superior, inferior, or better - all the stereotypes, all our ideologies, are ruining the world, and within us, they are limiting our ability to interact." Alejandro González Iñárritu, Cannes interview.
Babel expands Iñárritu's exploration of the interconnected world through four stories about broken families in the US, Mexico, Morocco, and Japan. The nexus of the stories is a shooting incident in rural Morocco and, like the earlier films, Babel revolves around relationships - parents, children, siblings in conflict, self delusion and death; but Iñárritu adds another dimension, a critique of power, contrasting how the governments of Morocco, Japan and the United States exercise control over citizens faced with difficulty in an unsympathetic world.
A hunting guide in rural Morocco is given a gun as a gift for his services by a visiting Japanese businessman. The guide trades the rifle to a neighbor for some money and a goat. The neighbor's sons use the gun to protect their goat herd from jackals, then irresponsibly fire it at a distant tourist bus, testing the rifle's range. The bullet wounds an American tourist and triggers an international "terrorist" incident. The American tourists' children are in San Diego under the care of a nurturing nanny, a middle aged Mexican woman, anxious to attend her son's wedding in Mexico. Meanwhile, the Japanese businessman struggles with his deaf-mute daughter as they react to the recent suicide of the girl's mother.
Here's how Iñárritu works government into the tight narrative: After the bus shooting incident, a Moroccan police office, searching for the shooter, comes to the house of the old hunting guide and he begins his interrogation by stomping on the old man's chest. "Tell me where the gun is," he says, "Tell me where the gun is now!' The toothless guide glances off in fear as his elderly wife, obviously harmless, is handcuffed and shoved to the ground. This is how it goes down when third world law enforcement is under pressure. It's all boot heel and give up a name, or take a beating, or worse. Meanwhile, in a rural village, the American tourist (Brad Pitt) shouts down a local cop for not making an ambulance appear out of thin air. "This is your fucked up country," Pitt screams at the passive cop, "we need an ambulance, get me a fucking ambulance now!" A local man, who has helped the American, simply tells him, "there is no ambulance here. We don't have an ambulance."
The rural peasant gets kicked in the chest for no reason, the American tourist can bully local authority with impunity. The reason doesn't even require an explanation to an American audience: one doesn't mean anything, he's a powerless old peasant, a broken man on the edge of the desert; the other is an American tourist with legal rights, one of a bus load of swinish Euro-tourists with dollars to spend, and the power of empires behind them, the kind of power that can bring retaliation to the impolitic. The mere mention in the media that the US Government suggested the bus shooting had terrorist links, is enough to shut down the air space in the area and, incidentally, delay the arrival of a medical helicopter to help the injured woman. Meanwhile in Tokyo, two detectives respectfully approach the businessman, who legally owns the gun used in the "terrorist" shooting, in the luxury of his apartment complex concierge. "We are very sorry to disturb you, " They begin quietly. "If this is bad time, we can come back tomorrow." The cultural contrast delineates the cruel, primitive culture of the rural suppressed poor, against respect for the accomplished and wealthy individual in a highly developed urban society.
Iñárritu's critique extends to the US in the form of a border guard (played with menace by Clifton Collins Jr) and an immigration officer, each one callous, disrespectful, gratuitous demeaning to the harmless middle aged nanny (sensitively portrayed by Adriana Barraza), who is in fact the only nurturing force holding the American family together. The American couple's in-laws and relatives are unable to care for the two children following the shooting. The nanny had been forced by circumstances to take prolonged care of the children, so she takes them with her to her son's wedding in Mexico. When returning, after a night of partying, she is eventually arrested, discovered to be an illegal, and deported to Mexico. The nanny, like the old Moroccan peasant, is powerless and therefore contemptible, subject to whatever abuse the representative of the state feels like dispensing.
Meanwhile, the Japanese businessman (Koji Yakusho) and his deaf-mute daughter (Rinko Kikuchiare) are working through emotional difficulties following the mother's suicide. The girl is emerging from adolescence and conflicted between her own growing suicidal tendencies and intense sexuality, a need to connect and be accepted. Inappropriate sexual behaviour with her dentist and one of the detectives investigating her father is handled sensitively and everyone, particularly the detective, seems allied in guiding her toward normalcy, which indicates a social and cultural functionalism in Tokyo that is nonexistent in Morocco, or along the US-Mexico border. The goat herder father can't cope with the growing sibling rivalry between his two sons, and he turns violent when confronted with incestuous flirtation between his youngest son and his young daughter. He has nowhere to turn except a tradition of paternal violence.
The American couple has lost a child and they have come to Morocco "to be alone" and work through their mutual anger and guilt. They flounder, unable to communicate, until the shooting and the threat of death minimizes their angst. When subjected to the reality of third world medical practices - a simple matter of stitches for a superficial wound - the Americans (Pitt and Cate Blanchett) are panic stricken and demeaning. A local "doctor" sanitizes the needle with a cigarette lighter and an old Moroccan woman offers the wounded Blanchett a hashish pipe to ease her pain. These simple people save her life. All goes well for the Americans and the Japanese characters; but the Mexican nanny is deported, and the Moroccan father watches the police shoot one of his sons, while the other, responsible for his brother's death and all their difficulties, falls to his knees and asks the police to shoot him as well.
The pace and style of Babel varies with each story location. Morocco is all John Ford, big sky and rugged plains, these are struggling people living close to the land for centuries. Each shot is strikingly framed, with close careful camera work around the simple geometric architecture of the goat herder home, reminiscent of Scorsese's precise camera in the beautifully crafted Kundun. Meanwhile Tokyo is all sparkling glass, steel, and white lights - a totally designed and constructed universe, monumental in the night darkness. For all its compressed humanity, Tokyo appears in Iñárritu's camera the epitome of civilization on the planet.
Babel is a beautifully humane film, rich with human kindness, critical of human cruelty, impatient with power and its compulsion to breed confusion. In a recent interview, Iñárritu said this about Babel: "This film is about how the world can impact in our lives everyday, how can we be defined by others - we are what the others influence in us. We are defined by our parents, our brothers - this is about how people and events connect and transform people."
Iñárritu has created a humane and progressive world view with this remarkable trilogy of films. His audience can clarify human perceptions of the world, and enrich an alternative point of view to the propagandized versions of "the other" and "globalization." As the impact of the world view of constantly expanding markets, cheap labor and appropriated resources plays out in the streets of Baghdad and the mountains of Afghanistan, artists like Iñárritu point to a deeper interconnectivity of peoples internationally, which is an indication of future progress.
Iñárritu is saying that while artificial barriers constructed by governments, religions and corporations reduce humanity to a state of babel and confrontation, the existential reality is that people of the world are profoundly interconnected and open to accepting the humanity of "the other." When American children in Babel learn about the lives of Mexico's hard working poor, for example, the social process is reinvigorated, and we are all open to the possibility of a more ethical future. Iñárritu's work is powerfully informed and immediate, essential art in this age of postmodern confusion.
Notes
1 Film is a collaborative art form and every director has a creative team which loosely travels from film to film. Iñárritu's creative group in this trilogy of films includes: cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto, novelist and screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga, composer Gustavo Santaolalla, editor Stephen Mirrione, and production designer Brigitte Broch. His ensemble actors include the always interesting Gael Garcia Bernal, and thewonderful actress, Adriana Barraza, among others. [Back]
2 Critic David Denby, one example, comments: "Arriaga and Iñárritu are experimentalists in form but sorrowful humanists in temperament. From the first, they have been reworking the three-part, asynchronous structure of Pulp Fiction, but without the jokes, the wild profane talk, the gleeful pleasure in life's screwed-upness."
I note only that almost every film is structured in three parts (or acts); "asynchronicity" is a matter or reordering the sequence of the acts, as Pulp Fiction does (ie, screenplay pages 1-30 become pages 60-90, and so forth); while Iñárritu's structural experimentation involves distinct linear narratives which intersect in a singular event. Both structures refract and alter time, but Iñárritu is more "realistic" in the sense that his films are structured more closely to how we actually live our lives, existentially intersecting with other's lives. We encounter perfect strangers, for example, at an auto accident; and in that moment all our lives have somehow led to that moment. We might never otherwise have met; or will ever meet again. Tarantino works with a linear narrative structure reshuffled for dramatic effect (reversing viewer expectation based on genre expectations, or viewing habit) while Iñárritu narrates multiple story lines pivoting around an existential moment when the narratives converge creating a revelation of sorts. Both film makers reorder time in the process, which heightens the relativity of the narrative, but they are completely different in their approach to film writing and structure, theme, character. Tarantino may be viewed as existential, but his context is in some general sense the world of established film genre and, increasingly, as with Kill Bill, cinema and TV history. Iñárritu's context is more "real world" which approximates the viewer's everyday experience. Fundamentally we are comparing escapism and realism, high entertainment, with and against, dramatic art. Tarantino films are hilarious and wonderfully complex comedies; Iñárritu mines the darker, equally complex realm of dramatic realism. [Back]
