My Art Experience

During the first and only time I watched the movie Babel, I was sleeping over at my friend's house. He had already seen the movie and recommended it to me before promptly falling asleep within the first ten minutes.  During this time in my life, I was dedicating significant time to college applications and I was worrying a bit about the whole process, but I was doing well in school and I was still able to create and spend free time in ways that were making me enjoy my senior year.  My life was relatively easy and I only had a few major things that I was focusing on.

Babel is a movie based on the main premise that our lives are interconnected.  Things we do in our own lives can easily affect that of others, and this is what this movie is all about.  In short, the movie interlocks 4 very different cultures in a well-crafted, suspenseful story that evokes emotion.  We learn about the lives of 4 very different groups and their complicated relationships to each other, unbeknownst to them.  The story is very complex, and their lives converge tragically at the end.

This movie impacted me because it made me view humanity and the world differently.  Although the ending was sad, it made me feel warm inside when I realized that people all around the world are really not that different.  We all have our own struggles and mistakes, and people in radically different cultures can easily be sharing in these experiences and life events without you ever knowing.

Lastly, the director did an amazing job of weaving all of the stories together and developing the plot at a good pace.  An American couple was vacationing on a tour bus in Morocco when the wife was accidentally shot by the son of a Moroccan farmer, testing the range on his new rifle.  The Director was able to weave in information about the events transpiring in Morocco while he was telling the story about what was happening in America and Japan in the meantime and how they were all connected.  Through news reports on TVs carefully placed in the backgrounds of many of the better shots of the movie, the audience was constantly updated about the events that were transpiring in Morocco, sometimes receiving inaccurate, presumptive news that served to make the story more complex, interesting and suspenseful.  At one point, we were told that the American wife was killed by Moroccan terrorists, but in the end the story didn't exactly pan out this way.  All in all, I believe that this was a meaningful, beautifully-crafted story that affected me by giving me a broader understanding of the world as a whole and the lives of people in it.