What makes for a good story? Reflections on the 2006 film Babel

This morning I'm contemplating what makes for a good story. Sometimes we say that we want our stories to be "real," but I'm not sure that we really mean it. Ordinarily a story has a beginning, a middle, and an end. There are some characters who are the "good guys," and other characters who are the villains. Usually the action climaxes, and the

conflict is brought to some sort of resolution. If it's for the good, then we have a happy ending. If the ending is more complicated but nevertheless fitting, then perhaps we have a sad-but-cathartic tragedy. At least, that's the way most stories work.

These thoughts arise from last night's viewing of the 2006 film Babel (starring Brad Pitt, Cate Blanchett, inter alia), which happens to be available on Netflix right now. It's a movie that, with its four loosely interrelated plot lines, is fascinating for its defiance of many of our common expectations.

In the first plot line, a goatherd in a remote, mountainous area of Morocco acquires a high-powered rifle for his two sons to shoot at coyotes with. But the boys play with the rifle while guarding the goats, taking pot shots at vehicles traversing the road a mile or more in the distance. In the second plot line, a husband and wife on vacation in Morocco are aboard a tour bus that happens to be on that very road, and, additionally, the wife happens to be in the path of one of the bullets that the goatherd's boys are discharging from that very high-powered rifle.

When the couple is delayed in returning to the States, the Mexican nanny in charge of their children decides to bring them across the border so that she can attend her son's wedding. But on their return trip, the nanny's driver is questioned by the border authorities and ends up panicking. So he floors it, and ends up leaving the nanny and the two children in the middle of the desert.

In the fourth and final plot line, a deaf-mute teen in Japan prevents the authorities from questioning her father, thinking that he is somehow in trouble for a serious crime and worrying that he will be sent to jail. In reality, they simply want to question him because a high-powered rifle registered in his name was used in the shooting of an American woman in Morocco. It turns out that he had gifted the rifle to his Moroccan guide following a successful hunting expedition. The guide, in turn, had sold it to the goatherd whose sons ended up accidentally shooting the American woman.

Babel is fascinating, first of all, because there are neither heroes nor villains. The couple's marriage is on the rocks, and they're not entirely likable. While the Mexican nanny may likable, she makes a series of eminently poor decisions. The Moroccan boys do something that is horribly, horribly irresponsible at the very beginning. There is catharsis in some of the tragedies that follow-- the nanny's frantic pleading with border control that they need to hunt for the children, for example, and the husband's frantic attempts to save his wife, and the goatherd's desperate attempt to flee with his boys as the authorities closed in. But no single character is central enough to gain "traction" in all four plot lines. There simply is no satisfactory resolution to the "whole."

Which is surely the whole point of the movie. Its title, after all, is Babel. It's a fitting title, first of all, because of the miscellany of languages that the various characters use. But it's also fitting because of the incoherent "babble" of the film's structureless narrative. The film merely "tells" what happens without seeking to interpret it. Really, the only interpretation in the film is the decision to present four narratives that happen to be loosely interrelated. Even then, they're not all related to each other except second, or even third-hand. The film is masterfully devoid of all overarching interpretation. There are no truly good guys, no truly bad guys. There is no single climax, and no fully satisfying resolution. Which is all true to real life.

So my thoughts today are about why it is that we expect more out of a story than we expect from real life. Why do we want there to be good guys and bad guys when the people in our own lives are generally more mixed-bags? Why do we want the satisfaction, as Aristotle so astutely noted, of a beginning, a middle, and an end, even if that end is tragic?

I think it has to do with human nature. We need patterns, and we desire to make sense of the data of our complicated lives. Why does something play out the way it did? What does it all mean? Tellers of tales help us to detect the patterns. The character traits they choose to highlight help us to choose the side of the good. Story-tellers share things from a perspective, so that we see things through the eyes of a certain character, or a certain side. The same thing happens in history, by the way. Right now I'm covering the Punic Wars in a class I'm teaching. I find it valuable to point out that Punic means Carthaginian, and using the term implies that the Carthaginians were the aggressors in the epic conflict between Carthage and Rome. I think that the Carthaginians, for their part, would have angrily retorted that they were the Roman Wars, not the Punic Wars.

The question is whether traditional story-telling is truer to real life in limiting the perspective and exaggerating traits to highlight the patterns, or whether doing so is a betrayal of the truth. I'd tentatively argue that if a story-teller is true to his art, it's the former; if he's not, then it's propaganda. But in either case, story-telling is more like painting a picture than snapping a photograph. It is by its very nature interpretation, and while it may necessarily betray some of the facts through the selectivity of what is included and what is omitted, that very selectivity leads to a finished product clear enough to expose the patterns hidden below the surface of our lives.

I have no idea whether the makers of this film were thinking theologically. But obviously the title Babel evokes the Tower of Babel. I think that more was at stake at Babel than a mere "confusion of speech," as Genesis puts it. Rather, it is God's deliberate confusion of a false narrative. The only true narrative is the overarching narrative of Christ's redemptive sacrifice, which gives meaning and purpose to our lives. Yet, when a human story-teller tells his story and captures something of the triumph of good over evil, I think that he participates in that overarching narrative.

So you can call me a traditionalist. I like a good story, and in my mind this includes having a beginning, a middle, and an end, as well as heroes who, though imperfect, are clearly good. Which isn't to say that I don't appreciate attempts to be different. Babel is a strange movie. But it's also fascinating!