Week 14: Harvey's Neoliberalism and Babel (2006)

Although neoliberalism is mostly analyzed through the lens of economics, the permeability of reality into art necessitates the analysis of the way that economic and political conceptualizations of the world find themselves leaching into the art that one consumes. The same can be said of digital media as it reflects the director and writer’s larger view of the world. One movie in which this is evident to the viewer is Alejandro González Iñárritu and Guillermo Arriaga’s 2006 film Babel.

Babel follows the interconnected stories of Moroccan brothers Yussef and Ahmed, American husband and wife Richard and Susan, Mexican nanny Amelia and her wards Mike and Debbie, and Japanese father and daughter Yasujiro and Chieko. Though the stories are seemingly disconnected at the surface, they become intertwined as Susan is accidentally shot in the shoulder as a result of the friendly competition between Yussef and Ahmed from a rifle that originally belonged to Yasujiro. As a result of that injury, Debbie and Mike (Richard and Susan’s children) are brought to Mexico for Amelia’s son’s wedding, leading to trauma of their own.

When it comes to the movie’s connection to neoliberalism, the key image of the movie is that of the shared rifle that severely impacts the lives of characters that have little to no preexisting connection to each other. Beyond representing the violence wrought between them all, the rifle demonstrates the connectivity that it created through David Harvey’s historical sense of neoliberalism as a connector between the countries that seek hegemonic domination and those that are dominated. The ripple effect of events through the plot of the movie emphasizes this neoliberal connectivity as well as the small interactions between characters of conflicting governments and the arguments that result. The title itself also furthers this idea as the embodiment of the modern-day biblical Tower of Babel that sought to unite individuals towards domination of the divine with far-reaching consequences, leading to a series of miscommunications. In the end, the ones that have the most to lose are the individual characters rather than the complex world of government power that seek to capitalize on the events of the movie for their own gain, showing the dangers of this conflicting desire for hegemony to a predetermined ideal.