°Overdetermination in Babel
The beloved and I saw Babel a while ago. I spent much of the film with tears running down my face, and I’m still not sure what to make of it. It felt like being caught up in a torrent, which I suppose was the point: the ways in which the War on Terror Reign of Terror (and border policing) so overdetermined each instance in the film that what might otherwise have amounted to an accident or argument spirals into catastrophe.
Indeed, I’m tempted to say that the concept of overdetermination is particularly apt here, in both its Freudian and Althusserian senses.
From Ben Brewster’s glossary in Reading Capital:
Freud used the term to describe (among other things) the representation of dream thoughts in images privileged by their condensation of a number of thoughts in a single image (condensation/Verdichtung), or by the transference of psychic energy from a particularly potent thought to apparently trivial things (displacement/Vershiebung - Verstellung).
Althusser uses the same term to describe the effects of the contradictions in each practice constituting the social formation on the social formation as a whole, and hence back on each practice and each contradiction, defining the pattern of dominance and subordination, antagonism and non-antagonism … [etc]
In any case, I think the film somewhat reverses the biblical story of the Tower of Babel: it does not begin with the myth of a unified humanity (and language), whose heaven-seeking hubris results in God’s punishment, in the form of division and unintelligibility. Rather, the film begins with the existence of borders, and the ways in which certain people move or cannot across those borders, as the conditions which make catastrophe possible.
A quite different perspective at TinyWays, criticising the “classical happy ending” that might derive from identifying with the American and/or Japanese characters. That may well be right, but I suppose that so little did I identify with those characters that I didn’t experience the happy ending. Rather, I walked out feeling a little shattered. The last sequence, or perhaps it’s the last sequence of the film that I can recall, is of the deportation.
I didn’t criticize the ending, on the contrary. Anyway, I put a small comment on tinyways, just to make things clear. But, you are right, the movie was quite shacking in some parts. Especially with the good manipulation of silence-noise.
dikrhaim [January 17, 2007 @ 4:23 pm]