Whatever its faults or virtues, Babel seems to me to typify several trends in current cinema.

1) Network Narratives

Variety‘s critics call them criss-crossers, others call them thread structures or interwoven stories. I call them network narratives. In an essay called “Mutual Friends and Chronologies of Chance,” forthcoming in the book Poetics of Cinema, I tried to lay out the conventions of this increasingly common (maybe too common) storytelling strategy.

The central formal principle is that several protagonists are given more or less the same weight as they participate in intertwining plotlines. Usually these lines affect one another to some degree. The characters might be strangers, slight acquaintances, friends, or kinfolk. The film aims to show a larger pattern underlying their individual trajectories.

Several directors have specialized in this structure, from Altman and Claude Lelouch to Iosseliani and Rodrigo Garcia (most recently, Nine Lives). I found over a hundred such films, some going back quite far (e.g., Grand Hotel) but most made since the 1980s. Do they reflect some social Zeitgeist? Are we seeking connections with one another? Nope, I don’t think so. The most proximate and pertinent causes lie elsewhere. (Where? Check out the book!)

Alejandro González Iñárritu has made the network idea a signature element of his films. The first feature, Amores Perros, used a common convention, the traffic accident, to tie together three characters. We follow their story lines leading up to or away from the car crash. 21 Grams had a smaller cast but a more scrambled structure. Now, with Babel, we have something easier to follow than the previous films. But it compensates by filling a broader canvas: action on several continents, themes heavy with significance about what Pico Iyer calls the Global Soul.

We know how to read criss-crossers now, and so directors can push the boundaries on several fronts–more intricate plotting, portentous themes, spatial distance (critics called Babel an “epic”). Yet to keep audiences on track, filmmakers remain committed to the basic conventions as well, such as the notion of chance as hidden fate, or the Chaos idea that the flapping of a butterfly’s wings in Chile can . . .

Lesson 1: Once a formal tradition gets established, artists compete within that, seeking out ways to innovate…within tested boundaries. Fresh narrative strategies push the filmmaker to balance the novelty with familiarity.

2) Trilogies

The arthouse cinema has long traded on the appeal of a series of films, more or less loosely joined. Satayajit Ray had his Apu trilogy, which was at least about the same character, but at about the same period there was Antonioni’s tryptich L’Avventura, La Notte, and L’Eclisse. Not to be outdone, Bergman gave us two trilogies, one on the crisis of faith (Through a Glass Darkly, Winter Light, and The Silence), the other on, perhaps, the failure of human relationships under pressure (Persona, Shame, and Hour of the Wolf). More recently we’ve had Fassbinder’s BRD trilogy and Kiarostami’s threesome centered on the village of Koker.

Labeling a trio of films a trilogy plays an important role in the festival-arthouse market. Art films often lack established stars and don’t belong to clear-cut genres (though most turn out to be melodramas or historical dramas). The big selling point is usually the director, whose body of work promises something of interest. If the body of work falls into neat periods or groupings, then that automatically creates opportunities for long-term funding and “product differentiation” from film to film. This may seem a crass way to talk about what many people regard as personal expressions of artists, but filmmakers who want to keep making films know that funding and festivals rely on marketable components like the stature of the director and her or his broader creative ambitions.

So it’s not surprising that now directors are explicitly conceiving trilogies. Most of the earlier trilogies I mentioned were created ex post facto, by critics recognizing thematic links among works. It’s not clear that Antonioni or Bergman or Kiarostami planned to make trilogies from the start. Often the idea of a trilogy hits the director after the first film (von Trier’s Dogville) or the second. But now directors can launch a trilogy, as Kieslowski did with Blue. Angelopoulos has announced that The Weeping Meadow is the first film in a trilogy that will survey the troubled history of the twentieth century. Lucas Belvaux took the step of simultaneously making three features centered on one batch of characters, calling the overall result, of course, Trilogy.

On the festival circuit filmmakers have to explain themselves to critics, and Iñárritu has understood this well. He tells us that he decided to create a trilogy while making 21 Grams, and he points out how the films are similar (network structure, overlapping time schemes) and different (degrees of linearity, changes in theme). He helps critics and viewers understand his work–at least, in the way he prefers it to be understood.

Lesson 2: Festival cinema discovered the trilogy before Hollywood did (Star Wars, The Godfather, Pirates of the Caribbean), and the three-movie cluster may well be the art movies’ answer to a franchise.

3) Hyperrefined technique

In The Way Hollywood Tells It, I comment on the tendency of contemporary American filmmakers to develop subtle, maybe unnoticeable patterns of technique that run alongside the film’s story. So the three acts of Ron Howard’s The Paper were planned to employ three different sorts of camera movement. The same tendency can be found in independent filmmaking; Darren Aronofsky’s Requiem for a Dream coordinated its color scheme and seasons to mirror the film’s act structure.

Such refinement is especially tempting in network narratives, in which every line of action can be given its signature look. The obvious example is Soderbergh’s Traffic, which flaunts vivid color and texture differences among the plotlines.

Iñárritu has taken this tactic to a new level of complexity, as revealed in an article in the November American Cinematographer (Rachel K. Bosley, “Forging Connections,” AC 87, 11, 36-49). For this project Iñárritu and his cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto distinguished different story threads through color, grain, film stock, film gauge, lab processing, and even aspect ratio. (They shot the Japanese sequences in anamorphic but then extracted a 1.85:1 frame out of them.) For example we’re supposed to register, albeit unconsciously, a shift when the Morocco story, shot in 16mm shifts to 35mm when the helicopter arrives to rescue the wounded wife.

A harsher critic might claim that the ingenuity expended on these minutiae might better have been spent sharpening and deepening the plotlines themselves. But put evaluation aside. I just want to note that this commitment to “visual arcs” and subliminal tonal shifts echoing the drama shows that Hollywood is as committed to an aesthetic of unity as it ever was–maybe even more committed. This is a level of fanatical detail that supreme fussbudgets like Hitchcock, Sternberg, and (outside Hollywood), Ozu never sought to reach.

I also have to wonder: Does anybody register, let alone notice, such hyperrefinements? In my multiplex, and primed by having read the AC article, I could spot almost none of this finesse on the screen. In the release print I saw, all the stories looked pretty much the same, and most images had the consistency of oatmeal. Prieto says that “the grain was the most important visual element of the story” (p. 42). In this respect, he got his wish; grain was about all I could see.

Lesson 3: Those who think that modern Hollywood has entered a mannerist phase can find confirmation in Babel.

Postscript: It would be worthwhile building a symptomatic interpretation of Babel. My hunch is that despite Iñárritu’s claim that the film is about family and personal communication, something else is going on. After all, the drama is fundamentally about how prosperous white people have to suffer because Asian, Mexican, and North African men have guns.

But that’s a whole other blog.

Kristin here–

In the November 6 issue of Newsweek (also online), Devin Gordon comments on the recent trend in franchise series to throw in a prequel covering an earlier period in the main character’s life.  “So-called origin stories—how fill-in-the-blank became fill-in-the-blank.”

At first David and I wondered whether Gordon, like so many film journalists, would go for the easy answer.  There are at least two easy answers in the context of popular films, and especially blockbuster franchise films.  One, their stories reflect something about the current psyche of the nation.  Alternatively, they are symptoms of Hollywood running out of creativity and backbone and going for the tried and true.

The public psyche theory may sound profound at first, but it’s basically a quick way to write a story without knowing much of anything about film history or how the film industry works.  There may be all sorts of reasons why a given kind of movie is made at a certain time.  We all know about genre cycles.  But society is vast and multi-faceted, and it isn’t hard to make any given film seem to “reflect” some aspect of it.  Might the vogue for origins stories mirror a widespread desire to return to a more innocent era before 9/11?  Bingo, you’re got your hook and can make your deadline.  (Don’t get me started on the fact that most big films these days are negotiated, greenlit, planned, and in production for years before they appear, thus presumably reflecting not our own Zeitgeist but one that has come and gone.)

As to Hollywood running out of creativity, there are plenty of people in Tinseltown with great scripts and the desire to make them.  We’re living in an age, though, when the big studios are owned by conglomerates.  More than ever, the studio decision makers and the investors who buy their stocks keep an eye on the bottom line.  Variety’s October 23 front-page story, “Less Dream, More Factory,” is on the layoffs and other cost-cutting measures that the big studios face.  (By the way, we aren’t putting links to stories in Variety.com, since it’s a subscription-only site.)  So the tactics of producers now must be to focus on exploiting the most popular characters and story premises for their tentpole projects.

Gordon recognizes this and puts his finger on a major reason for the vogue for “origin stories.”  The studios have to prolong their most lucrative franchises, which are essentially their owners’ big brands. Yet those franchises can grow formulaic.  One way to renew their energy can be to leap back in time.

Gordon opines, too, that “Ironically, playing it safe financially also provides studios with the cover to take creative chances.”  He points to the fact that Peter Webber, who is directing Young Hannibal, has only the indie hit Girl with a Pearl Earring to his credit.  Similarly, art-house darling Christopher Nolan gave one big franchise a new respectability and audience with Batman Begins and will try to continue to do so with The Dark Knight.

Linking origin stories to the hiring of such filmmakers is perhaps a bit of a stretch.  The new Bond film, Casino Royale, the earliest in the order of Ian Fleming’s original novels, shows a younger agent.  Much of the flashier high-tech props of recent entries in the series are apparently gone, with a grittier feel to the film.  Yet it was directed by Martin Campbell, who also had made an earlier entry, GoldenEye, as well as both the Zorro films.

It’s true that recently Hollywood studios have shown a strange propensity to hire independent or foreign directors to helm entries in franchises.  In the wake of his hit Once Were Warriors, New Zealand’s Lee Tamahori was imported and made Die Another Day and xXx:  State of the Union. Warner Bros. brought in Mexican director Alfonso Cuarón (Y tu mamá también) to make the third Harry Potter film, presumably because many critics had dubbed the first two, by Chris Colombus, too bland.  Perhaps the studios simply see franchises as needing shaking up at intervals.  Yet this is part of a larger trend of indie directors suddenly boosted to blockbuster assignments, as when Doug Liman went from Go to The Bourne Identity and Mr. and Mrs. Smith.

An “origin story” in the sense that Gordon is using the phrase is a type of prequel that jumps back far enough to show the protagonist distinctly younger and different from the way he is in the original film or series.  It then explains how he changed into that protagonist.

Hong Kong filmmakers are adept at prequels of this sort.  God of Gamblers: The Early Years, shows us the source of the protagonist’s lucky ring and his taste for gold-wrapped chocolate, both of which are major motifs in the original God of Gamblers.  The case of A Better Tomorrow is more complicated.  John Woo and Tsui Hark had intended it to be a stand-alone film, and they made the mistake of killing off the most charismatic character.  The film was such a hit, largely on the basis of Chow Yun Fat’s performance as Mark, that A Better Tomorrow II gave Mark a twin brother, Ken, and put Chow back in action.  That film’s success led to a prequel to the first film.  A Better Tomorrow III traces how the Mark character acquired his fighting skills and his signature costume and habits.

Origin stories are not entirely new to Hollywood, either.  As far back as 1974, The Godfather Part II wove in flashbacks to a time well before the first film’s action, tracing Don Corleone’s rise.  In 1979, there was Butch and Sundance: The Early Days.

Origin stories can be thought of as expansions of a basic convention of mainstream storytelling: the flashback to crucial formative moments in a character’s life. In that sense, perhaps the quintessential origin story is Citizen Kane. Today, when everything is potentially franchisable, such an early-days sequence can create a series. The prologue of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade shows young Jones launching upon an adventure that prefigures the man he will become. (In what surely is an inside joke, River Phoenix even acquires Harrison Ford’s chin scar.)  That sequence in turn spawned The Chronicles of Young Indiana Jones TV series (“Before the world discovered Indiana, Indiana discovered the world”) and four cable movies.

As a term, “origin stories” was coined by students of mythology, who use it to refer to various ethnic groups’ accounts of the origin of the world.  In that case, it didn’t have anything to do with what we now call prequels.

Then the term got taken up in discussions of comic books to identify the sort of thing that Gordon is talking about.  Before television, comic books were the ultimate franchise form of the twentieth century.  In comic franchises, particularly those centering on superheroes, a book or short series of books might be devoted to an origin story.  (Dave Carter’s blog has a lengthy entry on comic-book origin stories, giving examples.)  It’s not surprising that one of the main origin films, Batman Begins, came from the comics.

Gordon does not mention another reason why studios might want to continue a franchise by jumping back to the hero’s origins:  actors can age too much to continue a role.  It’s been over 14 years since The Silence of the Lambs, and Anthony Hopkins could probably not be convincing in another turn as Lecter.  Possibly we’ll get a chance to see whether a 60-something (or 70-something at the rate things are going) Harrison Ford can bring audiences in for the on-again-off-again Indiana Jones continuation.  Or actors may exit the franchise, as Jody Foster did before Hannibal.  Or grow up too quickly, as the Harry Potter kids are doing before our eyes.  Or die, as Richard Harris did in the same series, forcing Warners to substitute Michael Gambon as Dumbledore.

But origin stories don’t have these problems.  Just get new actors.  One thing tentpole franchise films have taught us is that, as strongly identified with a character as a star may become, if the character and premises are even stronger, a new actor will be accepted.  It’s happened with Batman, Superman, Bond, and almost did—and could yet–with Spider-Man.

Such stories, however, have their dangers as well.  If the audience is devoted to the character as he (and it’s mostly he so far) is, will they care about seeing him as a very different person?  If Hannibal Lecter is the middle-aged psychopath we love to hate, do we want to learn that he was once a vulnerable, suffering youth?

Kristin here—

Our friend Brian Rose kindly send us a recent article from the Wall Street Journal, Joe Morgenstern’s “Set the DVD Player to ‘Random’” (28 October 2006, p. 10; the WSJ website is by subscription and wouldn’t let me link to the article). In it Morgenstern claims that iPods playing songs in random order, video games offering constant choice, multi-tasking, and all the supposedly distractive aspects of modern life are wrecking movie logic. The latest evidence? A new release called The Onyx Project, an inexpensively produced interactive movie starring David Strathairn that allows its viewer to wander through the narrative in random order.

According to Morgenstern, The Onyx Project is just further indication that “The entire entertainment industry is beset by fragmentation, both economic and perceptual. Kids who used to turn out for movies every weekend now devote themselves to videogaming, instant messaging, MySpacing and YouTubeing, sometimes simultaneously, while movie executives, pacing studio corridors, worry rightly that they no longer understand how kids’ minds work.” (Haven’t studio execs always paced and worried about how to understand spectators’ minds?)

Morgenstern even cites Pauline Kael’s essay, “Are Movies Going to Pieces?” where she cited the “creeping Marienbadism” in modern cinema. If only! Yes, I can just see today’s teenagers lamenting the fact that Last Year at Marienbad is out of print on DVD and searching eBay for it. Morgenstern simultaneously cites Marienbad as having brought fragmentation into the movies and praises such art films as Breathless, L’Avventura, and Caché, as well as sophisticated Hollywood storytelling in The Matrix and The Godfather Part II. But again, if fragmentation is what kids want, why aren’t they watching Caché?

It’s hard to know where to begin.

For a start, the makers of The Onyx Project declare on its website, “But NAVworlds are not movies.” (NAV stands for “Non-Linear Arrayed Video.”) Further, “They are not ‘interactive movies.’” The site compares these NAVworlds, quite logically, to videogames, but there’s a difference: “Video games present worlds. We love video games. But video games are programmed. NAVworlds are written, directed, acted and edited.” It’s a subtle distinction, but the point is, The Onyx Project is probably closer to a game than a movie. The fact that it is available only as a piece of software playable in computers but not in DVD players should be a clue.

But whatever we call The Onyx Project, is it really totally fragmented? Richard Siklos’ more temperate New York Times review, “In This Movie, the Audience Picks the Scene” (2 October 2006) points out that The Onyx Project retains some of the traits of a Hollywood narrative. “One idea behind the venture,” he declares, “is that no two viewers may see the movie unfold in the same way, yet its basic facts, characters and message will permeate the experience.

Sounds like a type of unity to me. Moreover, “The mystery at the center of the story is not revealed until the end.” Suspense and curiosity are maintained, controlled not by the viewer/player but the makers.

Let’s go back to that “The entire entertainment industry is beset by fragmentation” claim. One of the reasons that The Onyx Project is creating a little stir is that it is so atypical. These kinds of experiments in time shifting are often used specifically for mysteries, traditionally the genre where the story starts the latest in the action and then backtracks for the final reveal. Think Memento, The Usual Suspects, or any of the neo-noir follow-ups to Pulp Fiction.

In 1985 when Hollywood attempted to introduce a mild form of forking-paths storytelling into theatrical filmmaking, they chose Clue, not only a mystery but a game. Then viewers simply saw one of three possible endings. Presumably the spectator was supposed to be intrigued by this gimmick and see the film three times. Few proved willing to sit through it even once, and the film flopped. Naturally all three endings were included in the video release, giving the viewer a mild dose of interactivity. Now the technology has caught up to make this approach far more sophisticated and intriguing.

More important, though, is the fact that most movies that young people see in theaters are not fragments or shuffled in challenging ways. Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest may have been too long, but its cause-effect flow wasn’t fragmented, and it has earned over a billion dollars worldwide. Look at the most popular and/or lauded films of the past decade: Titanic, The Lord of the Rings, The Chronicles of Narnia, A Beautiful Mind, Spider-Man, Finding Nemo … the list could go on and on. These films are linear and causally tight for the most part, and when something is unclear, it’s a mistake, not a deliberate strategy. Even The Sixth Sense (another mystery of sorts) is easy to follow, and the twist, though genuinely surprising for most, is not baffling. A truly fragmented narrative is hard to find, in part because these sorts of films appeal to a very broad audience and have to be comprehensible if they are to succeed.

It’s easy to link the coincidence of the invention of gadgets like iPods with the trend toward Memento-like trickiness. As usually happens if one looks closely, though, complex narratives of this sort predate modern forms of interactivity. Even apart from the art cinema (whose main audiences from the end of World War II well into the 1970s and 1980s contained a large number of college students and graduates), there are Hollywood films that play with time in pretty sophisticated ways. In the 1940s there were the films noir, like Double Indemnity and The Locket, the latter with its flashbacks nested like matrioshki dolls. Later on but still in the pre-iPod era, there were playful films like Groundhog Day (1993) and Pleasantville (1998). MTV and the 1970s generation of American auteurs brought up on art cinema probably had more impact on story-telling than the iPod and similar devices have.

Moreover, even in traditional arts where interactivity would seem highly unlikely, one can find occasional works that offer choices. The Choose Your Own Adventure series of children’s books (1979 to the present) include numerous options about how to proceed. (Greg Lord offers an analysis of one of the books.)

Besides all that, the shuffle feature on iPods is usually used for songs, which are short, self-contained artworks. I doubt that people watching old episodes of Moonlighting on their video iPods skip among chapters randomly.

One thing most people tend to forget (if they ever knew it) is that in pre-television days, when movie theaters were a lot fuller than they tend to be now, there were continuous screenings. That meant the times when the screenings would start were not typically given in ads, and people just went to the theater, often standing in line until a seat became available. A lot of people ended up coming in in the middle of the feature and just sat through until they got to that point again. They didn’t seem to be much bothered by the fact that the film was “fragmented” in a random way. (In Storytelling in the New Hollywood I argue that comprehension was aided by a considerable redundancy in the flow of narrative information. David picks up on that idea in The Way Hollywood Tells It.) Notably, among the first theaters to list start times and sell reserved seats were early art houses, presumably because the more challenging films shown there were less easy to grasp unless seen beginning to end.

If The Onyx Project succeeds, it may usher in a new storytelling medium somewhere between films and videogames. If not, it will be the Clue of its day. Either way, most filmmakers in Hollywood and elsewhere will continue to try and make movies with stories that people can easily follow.