Babel

We caught the movie "Babel" last night. It's been rattling around in the back of my mind all day, and in that sense I think it succeeds. For those of you who don't know, it is a story of 4 interconnecting histories which take place in four very different locales: south-of-the border Mexico, high-tech Japan, a small desert community in Morocco, and sunny San Diego. As my guests Becca and Jean don't know French, I thought it would be safe to go to a "V.O." (version originale) showing of the movie. Perhaps not the best choice: although they were able to understand every word that Brad Pitt (who, incidentally, looks positively old in this movie) spoke, I neglected to realize that the Arabic, Japanese, and Spanish that is spoken is rendered intelligible by French subtitles, not English ones. Oops...

The name of the movie, I'm pretty sure, is a reference to the biblical story of The Tower of Babel, in the Book of Genesis. In the story, the residents of the ancient city of Babylon decide to unite together to build a tower so high that it will be able to reach the heavens. Angered by their foolish pride, God prevents the project from being achieved by somehow causing everybody involved in the project to speak a different language, such that they cannot understand one another. The story is often used as a biblical explanation as to why there are different languages and perhaps even different races, and it's relevant to the movie, where a chain of unfortunate events are set into motion, in large part due to difficulties in communication between different cultures. It also brings up a question that I've been wrestling with all year long as I devote a significant amount of energy towards learning a new language: would the world be better off if everybody just spoke the same language? I certainly won't attempt to answer that question here, which is at this stage is mostly a theoretical one, but it is interesting to think about.

French Vocab for the Day: the word for "to babble" in French in "gazouiller".