This is my year for catching up on my reading and film viewing. This past weekend I watched Breach and Babel for the first time and re-read Adventures of Huckleberry Finn for about the tenth time, for a class. Every reading of Huck Finn brings out another subtlety of the text or a question as a critic. Yes, Jim becomes very flat and stereotypical at the end and yet I cannot forget the deep constraints placed on the character, a 13-14 year old boy who has gotten himself into such a quandary over what is moral that he simply stops thinking about the matter altogether except to wonder what his friend Tom’s motives are. Oddly enough, in spite of my disappointment that Huck wasn’t shaped by Mark Twain in those last eleven chapters to continue reporting the complexities of Jim, his voice still rings true these 123 years later. It is as if in becoming so emotionally confused by his moral dilemma in chapter 31 and rebelliously declaring that he’s willing to “go to hell” to save Jim, he draws back, regresses into a less mature state.
Huck’s emotional confusion makes for a still-powerful narrative position. First-person narrative constraints in novels have a way of allowing the audience a great deal of freedom of thematic interpretation. And what about the films I watched this weekend, ones that I should have seen months ago? The narrative positioning of Breach (2007) is, like in Huck Finn, narrow and focused on a character who encounters a complex human being who is always more than he seems. I listened to the commentary by the director, Billy Ray, and Eric O’Neill, the person on which the viewpoint character is based. O’Neill points out that, yes, like the character “O’Neill” played by Ryan Phillippe, he felt the danger. He felt threatened by Robert Hanssen during the time he was his assistant and helping to build the case against the spy. O’Neill and the character based on him both have self awareness of their narrow view of Hanssen, whose motives for treason remain, even seven years after being arrested and convicted, a mystery. In the face of Hanssen’s seemingly moral behavior and his sincere religious devotion, both O’Neill and his character-self feel confused . . . something like Huck’s confusion over his society’s sincere yet flawed morality, with its enduring blind spot, its dehumanization of Black Folk. The white characters of Huck’s hometown and those at the Phelps plantation are good folk, yet blind to their own paternalistic version of racism.
And was that true of Hanssen? I couldn’t tell, for all I have is the characterization of him by Chris Cooper. If the story of Robert Hanssen had been completely fictional, I could hazard a guess that the character Hanssen is blind to his own hubris, a tragic hubris born of the longing to be appreciated as a brilliant analyst of human nature and brilliant technical specialist by the FBI. But that is Cooper’s and Ray’s rendition of Hanssen as a character. What about Hanssen the man and Mark Twain’s version of White Americana of 1885? Something similar here: both multilayered, with paradoxical motives, values, self understanding, and emotional and spiritual sensitivities.
And the other film of the weekend, Babel (2006)? While it does not flow out of a character-based view, its third-person perspective has similar myopic elements. The characters are not particularly articulate in Babel but neither is the “camera” that “shoots” them. The characters and camera both exhibit the flatness of minimalist texts, with densely textured surfaces taking the place of the articulated inner states of characters or articulated inner states of the three cultures involved: U. S., Mexico, Japan. While O’Neill and Kate Burroughs (Laura Linney) are articulate about their motives, concerns, values, questions, etc. in Breach, the Babel characters played by Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett do not reveal their deep passions, their deep motives, their values. Only when the Pitt character breaks down while on the phone with his son does the director, Alejandro González, offer a glimpse of the inner life of the character: his fear, desire, and pain concerning his wife, who has been shot in Morocco. The Blanchett character remains closed. We do not know the nature of her anger at her husband as they drink Coke, nor do we get a clear message as to why she takes his hand in the bus just before she is shot. The Mexican nanny’s inner life is, likewise, closed, as are the two children she cares for. These three characters never move beyond the stereotypes of powerless, innocent Mexican woman and powerless, innocent children.
The Japanese scenes of Babel offer more complexity of story and character, with the father and police officer characters showing signs of emotional turmoil. But even there, the full nature of their distress is not revealed. The filmic techniques focus only on the clash of “surfaces.” Obviously, both male characters are concerned over the daughter who has discovered her mother’s body shortly after she committed suicide, but both male characters remain inarticulate. The teenaged girl, also, is inarticulate about her feelings. It is obvious she longs for her mother and is angry about her mother’s suicide. She refuses to talk to her dad. It is also obvious that in her lonely state she attempts to attract boys and even the police officer in a sexual way. She has confused sexual touch with comfort. Lucky for her when the officer firmly rejects her sexual advances yet holds her in comfort when she breaks down and cries. Like the American character in Morocco who breaks down while on the phone, the Japanese girl collapses emotionally . . . and the officer and her father, while remaining verbally inarticulate, communicate their care for her. These scenes mirror the scene of the Mexican nanny back in her son’s arms after she has been deported.
In all of these scenes, the depths of the characters’ emotional states are revealed but not explored. The audience is given only a snapshot of sorts of the characters. Babel is finally, I think, peopled by allegorical figures in a story about the failure of communication among cultures and the disturbing effect of U. S. influence on the lives of people in other cultures. The fear of U. S. power is a clear theme throughout. This is especially driven home when the Moroccan father of the child who has inadvertently shot the American woman flees with his two sons. In the confusion of the moment and with pressure coming from the U. S. the Moroccan police officers fire on the father and young sons, killing the elder brother of the accidental child-shootist. I think any American watching such a story unfold would have sympathy for the Moroccan family.
And that position, clearly developed by the filmic viewpoint, takes me back to Huck Finn. Readers of Mark Twain’s novel also feel sympathy for the escaped slave, Jim. Here then is a similarity between Huck Finn and Babel: both explore the paradoxes built into U. S. values, positions, expectations, and sympathies. In Babel I see a portrait of the abusive, blind and nonresponsive power of the U. S. on its own turf, but also its fragility in foreign lands. Always, always, is the very human failure to seek out the basic human facts (and truths) of those outside the parameters of White Americana . . . as well as the very human attempts at goodness and connection. The American man may have insulted the Moroccan man who opened his home to the injured wife by offering money as a “thank you,” but the motive was sincere, as was the goodbye embrace between the two men as the wife is being lifted into a helicopter. Likewise, in Huck Finn I see the “turf” of racism being defended and yet also the sincerely warm human relationship that develops between Huck and Jim.
So was there such a relationship between O’Neill and Hanssen? The fictional characters, yes, maybe a concern one for the other. But the real man in prison and the real man who left the FBI to practice law? I can only know their Breach characters, just as I know the deeply textured, deeply complex elements of my culture, my U. S., but not necessarily the “character” of individuals I meet on its streets.
