Communication and ‘real’ confusion: The film Babel

Abstract

This article focuses on the film, Babel, with a view to teasing out its various semiotic strands, which converge on the question of communication and its diverse perversions. At one level, viewers can identify with its characters without the ‘benefit’ of sophisticated theoretical or hermeneutic horizons. Yet, although the narrative of the film makes ‘perfect’ sense at the level of everyday experience, it is also the case that a theoretically informed, or philosophical, interpretation of this rich cinematic text yields an equally rich harvest of meaning. This could take the form of insight into the paradoxical conditions of inter-human, intercultural communication in a world that has been subjected to the flows as well as the barriers of globalisation. The article aims to uncover some of these conditions through the theoretical lenses of poststructuralist thought, ranging from the work of Derrida on communication and hospitality, and of Lacan on the ‘real’, to that of Ulrich Beck on ‘cosmopolitanism’.