Just an allusion to confusion?

By the end of Brad Pitt’s latest release I had to keep my eyes shut to stop from throwing up. No, no . . . not from the story. It was that careening cinematography that gets me every time. Seriously, they should put sickness bags on the seatbacks!

Nauseous as I was, I stuck it out until the credits rolled and then wove my way out of the theatre in a rather confused state. My confusion stemmed not from the nausea, nor the plotline, which has seven languages and tells stories of groups of strangers from different countries whose lives actually overlap. My confusion was about the title. Why Babel? Is it just an allusion to confusion?

I wondered if our sacred book had not been hijacked yet again. And, as one who traded her precious pennies for a few magic beans of entertainment, I can admit I’ve been had. Thankfully though, our God redeems our experiences, no matter how mundane, and from those pitiful few beans gave me a beanstalk that reached to the foot of his throne.

What do I mean? I came straight home and got into the Word! (The nausea, by the way, subsided somewhere along the highway.) There I was reminded that Babel is about a righteous, loving Father who scattered his children because they were disobedient and proud. Instead of dispersing, they were conglomerating; instead of worshipping God, they were worshipping themselves.

As such, any honest allusion to Babel should invoke that truth, the why-it-happened factor. The punishment – a diversity of languages – is incidental to the original story, not central, and certainly not harmful to body, mind, or soul. Nor is linguistic confusion the root cause of sin, as the moviemakers seem to imply. Biblically speaking, the brokenness and depravity acted out in the movie have nothing to do with the legacy of Babel. We need to jump back eight chapters in Genesis to get to the why-factor of that!

“Confusion” would have been a better title for this movie – more honest, certainly more respectful. After all, its tag line is “If you want to be understood . . . listen.” Hmm . . .

Laura Thomas attends Gracepoint Community Fellowship in Surrey, B.C.

See a review of Babel at Christianity Today’s site on movies. The movie stars Cate Blanchett and Brad Pitt in one of its interconnected stories, as a vacationing couple caught in a shooting incident, and is rated R.