Dardenne's, Jacob Riis & Lewis Hine:

 ~ Dens of Death,  
                                   Birds of Prey                          

                                                              &   Loving Darkness 

                                                                                                   Better than Life

     As I was looking for a book, I found a documented recollection of realities of immigrants’ life in the late nineteenth-century in New York City portrayed by the former police reporter and photographer Jacob Riis.

    How bold I’d said if I haven’t learnt that he was raised among these people, now objects of his work. As I was going through the pages, exploring through the deploring working and living conditions of “How The Other Half Lives”, I kept assuring myself if there was any place in the world where they could have came from where they may possibly experienced such precarious living conditions as these, yet chosen by their own will.

 

     Perhaps, some of the closest descriptive words that can alive these muted scenes could be these of Gregory Christiano on a research about urbanography for The New York Daily Tribune of about the same time and place:

 “Among the places the most crowded in proportion to their actual size, the worst ventilated, and whose mortality is the greatest at all times, are those subterranean abodes which constitute the subject of our remarks, and which we have denominated – for want of a more appropriate term – Dens, Dens of Death; the term “cellar” not 
                                                   conveying a proper idea of the place when used as a residence. [“CELLAR – A room under a house, used as a repository for provision” Webster]. These dens, or man-made caves of the earth, like the natural caves in former times in Africa, often send forth bands of murderers, who live by thieving alone; and the modern Troglodytes, like their prototypes, after a successful expedition, return to their dark recesses to divide their spoil and plan a new scheme of depredation.

Darkness, therefore, would appear to have been from the earliest times one of exciting causes of crime, and our modern policemen see it is so now. We heard a worthy Alderman once say that plenty of gaslight in the streets would go far to exterminate wickedness of all kinds. Whether darkness be a cause of crime or not, it is certain that murderers, thieves, etc. “love darkness better than light,” and that there is more propriety of deportment found in a good, honest abode above-ground, fully open to the light of day, than in dark under-ground residences and caverns, which in a state of nature are inhabited only by beasts of prey.

But we have not undertaken to consider the relative state of morals of Subterraneans and of the “Upper Ten,” such as live on the surface of the earth; we shall, therefore, pass to the subject of the consideration of the physical effects of living in these damp and stifling abodes of darkness.”

     Isn't it described here what a dungeon is, so to speak?.

     And about decease in dens he adds; “These places are always damp, and are thus a continued source of various inflammatory diseases; indeed the occupants of them are always sick in a never-ending rotation, and demands for medical services are more frequent by the inhabitants of dens, than by such as live on the surface, in proportion to their number. Sickness among the poor is always great and in the damp and badly ventilated abodes we are considering, is more protracted, beside being more fatal, than above ground, so that if life is prolonged it is too frequently an existence of helpless misery.”

   Well, his complete research is rich and exciting but I was moved to ask me more and more the now most obvious question; what kept this immigrant people alive? And I strongly wished someone to enlightened me.

 Another series of photographs, of a more recognizable type of living, about the European immigrant arriving at Elli’s Island and the hardships of living in slum buildings in America of about the same time were portrayed by Lewis Hine of a slight up level on social class; the tenement. All scenes are reminiscent of impressionist paintings as "Boy picking Cotton” and “Shucking Oysters” from the county life are heartbreaking; he still finds beauty in the poor “with hope”.

     Extreme poverty or such a strong need that compels us to move to unfamiliar places that forces us to fight against of all kind of hostilities in order to pursue our dreams can be understood. 

What I think it’s difficult to understand is the acceptance of the miserable soul state that such eager pursuing can often leads us.

In a sense, I think this is exactly what the Dardenne brothers intended to point out when they wrote the Cannes awarded best screenplay 2008 for their latest film Lorna's Silence in Italy better translated to "Lorna's Marriage".   There, gangsters paid to Belgian drug addict Claudy to marry the immigrant Albanian Lorna so she can become an EU citizen for then later divorce him to marry a Russian mobster to become also an EU citizen, for then she can divorce him to marry his Albanian truck driver boyfriend and live for ever after in the for-to-buy snack shop in the EU. End.

It sounds simple and a very good all-winners plan so far. Characters have its own good dream for a better life, they diplomatically agreed and coolly planed to use and sell each other for their own benefit, there’s collecting money out of these playing-with-the-law transactions.

   Fair enough. But well, things get messed up in spite of hardening hearts, I guess, because life wasn’t designed to be lived in a so selfish fashion.

        So, while waiting for the divorce letter, the minute that Lorna gets to her living place she closes every window and lacks herself in her bedroom. Claudy, who looks more like a peaceful predator or like any of the men portrayed in the afored mentioned book sick in a never-ending rotation helpless misery, burning his money-share in drugs, starves for attention and care. Attempting to kick the drug habit he becomes a problem when reaches an edging desperate need. It’s not that he grew affection for her or anything but it’s more that she has what he lacks; a plan, hope, that freshness when she passes by, so healthy and desirable, so alive... and at the same time so selfish, so careless, unsociable and inhuman that at some point you may feel you hate her. She tries to stick to the plan and “helping” is out of the contract (he received €5000 for marry her and will receive the double to divorce her). That will be all.

     In order to speed up the divorce she injures herself to make the case as a violence one.

They live in hell, yes they live in a den. Oh, but theirs it’s a clean 2009 den where minimal furniture and white washed naked walls has nothing to say but that its tenants are not building a home there. Theirs is and interior den where they can’t get out. They force to live a miserable life, victims of themselves. All characters will live a life when they reach their dreams, meanwhile they're just wrecked people that wait to get there.

     Then, out of pity, Lorna offers her help and happens what never should had happened, as expectable.  Lorna's associates kill Claudy with an overdose, not even music for his mourning is heard in the film (although he was very attached to his disc-man). Now gangsters walk in the apartment (“returning to their dark recesses to divide their spoil and plan a new scheme of depredation”?) as if they were owning Lorna’s life and destiny, and going over the diseased’s belongings like vultures on carrion split his personal effects.

        So now, what was the next step? Oh yes... the Russian.
Lorna now in a round table with the gangsters and the Russian hears the instruction for the “meeting settling” arrangements with payed witnesses and everything. But now is Lorna the one who became a problem; out of guilt she believes is pregnant (in spite of negative tests), and at attempting to find out whether the Russian would accept her in this condition or not, he cancels the deal. Furious gangsters and boyfriend redirect Lorna’s money deal back to each other and return her automatically to her homeland Albania. Fugitive, she lives lost, insane and isolated in the woods.

The end.

      Now, I have a question: Where did the plan-for-the-better get spoiled? Wasn't it when the “being human” factor interfered in the equation? What an end, like many immigrants with so good desires that in the way got lost in a maze of selfish wishes for fulfillment. Their inhuman choices show that indeed they loved darkness better than life.

***

        Of course that it's but our dreams what keep us alive under the most unbearable conditions.

But immigrant or not, selfishness is undoubtedly labyrinthic for the human mind.

Babel;

                            ~ Miscommunication at the Clash of Cultures

       Briefly, Babel (2006) by Gonzalez In~arritu is about four stories, four cultures, four lives connected by the trajectory of a bullet meant to kill jackals but that accidentally injures the wife of an american couple that  happens to be working on restoring its marriage through a visit to Morocco.
She’s taken at a nearby village of goat herders where bleeds while awaits for the only ambulance that will never arrive. In the meantime, the town doctor localizes the bullet in the woman's clavicle, removes it and stitches the wound and all, of course, with no anesthesia.

      The incident, mistaken by the media by a terrorist attack, takes the world wide attention.
      In LA, this couple’s little children are in the care of a 10 year-illegal Mexican immigrant housekeeper who, at the time, urges to attend her only son’s wedding in Mexico. At the kid’s parents delay, she decides to cross the border and take them with her for the weekend. At their return from the wedding, as predicted, are detained by the border patrol of American immigration authorities, but they decide to flee from them and cross the frontier carrying the kids through the barren lands.
     The hunt for the rifle’s owner for part of the American authorities begins with the two teenagers that were challenging potshots on a Moroccan cliff, and ends at a lieutenant ex-hunter and recent widower Japanese whose forlorn deaf daughter is mad about her mother’s suicide. She’s mad about it, but mad all the way to her bones... that decides to get the attention of someone, anybody… even the police investigating the case that buzzers her door. She mistakenly assumes he comes to question her about details of her mother’s death.

     Okay, now to entangle this puzzle; the siblings are localized by the Moroccan police and after crossing fire, one dies and the other, after breaking the riffle against a rock, gives himself to the authorities that realize that the incident, indeed, was accidental.

     The American wife gets a helicopter from the American embassy where is taken to a hospital in a more modern city.

    After abandon the kids in the wilderness and being detained again by the desert patrol, the Mexican housekeeper (Adriana Barraza), is finally deported.

      The Japanese girl … well, she’s forgiven.  See the movie.

    What is relevant about this film concerning my research on immigration, diversity, national identity and integration is just this awkward miscommunication that happens when we change contexts as countries and cultures. But this miscommunication is more than bizarre for its consequences, is frustrating, and takes some disturbing turns at crucial points as the film clearly illustrates.

      For example, the American couple travels to inhospitable places with a mind set on American ways as, per say, the mind set to attempt to solve anything with credit cards and calls as long as they are accessible, but who’s not accessible to this ‘modern’ things? So Brad Pitt who, by the way seems to be wanting to clean an extramarital affair, takes his wife to this trip to enjoy the solitude of a Moroccan landscape just to ‘be alone’. She, like most Americans  can’t relax at any given moment; on a shepherds tent asks for an ice-less DietCoke "because who knows what type of water is in it" seeming to be ready to fight for the minimal reason (nevertheless, with this unfaithful man working on merits). Well, she’s shot on the bus and taken to a nearby primitive village where is laid on a rug at the bus translator’s house. And what’s the obvious thing Brad Pitt would do after leaving Cate Blanchett wounded on the floor? Attempt to stop a ban on the route as if he where in Alabama. But the chauffeur, identifying him as an American, does not offer help. Then, he looks for a doctor, but there’s none available. Then, he manages to the only public telephone in town at a store to call an ambulance; there’s one but no one knows where.
Okay, the thing is crazy enough right here.
All town inhabitants want to know what is going on with this frantic American. But the thing gets more interesting when the frustrated husband decides to call the American embassy to find out that they're too busy to give personalized attention to a single tourist. So, getting really mad demands a helicopter! or someone that take them out of this middle age town. Since he’s an American citizen, expects to be attended without reserves in any given part of the world and put into action his full rights. And he is right, but things simply don’t work that way out of the US, but this is something he’ll learn now, under crucial circumstances.

      A crispy contrast is shown when the pair of teenager goat keepers returning from the shooting training walk as casually on Moroccan graves as if they where part of the natural landscape, which tell us that massive deaths are common there. Then, you think why a single American tourist would require more attention than the Moroccan native than, perhaps, had fought for his land or for a political cause, for his country to be free?

Anyhow, Brad Pitt doesn’t care about this, instead, he would do anything to save his wife but impotent by the circumstances, gets really frustrated when the rest of the tourists, suffocated by the heat of high temperatures, left him yelling in the outdoors, throwing stones at them and making a show for the amusement of the gathering shepherds. And we too would get so frustrated in his place, since we’re very much used to this western style of living where no matter the importance, we’ll most likely get what we want, than when we’re out of this in a stressing situation, we just can’t cope with reality. (see the trailer in full screen here)

     This is a situation that all immigrant goes through; when changing contexts, change values and priorities as well; the environment defines our behavior.

     A reverse situation lives the housekeeper when coming back from Mexico and is being detained by the border patrol, and taken to the immigration office to be deported. She, in her mind setting, can’t understand how after taking care of this kids for 10 years is now forbidden of seeing them. I think is crazy enough the fact that she took them out of the country without the parent’s consent to start with, but for her it was a so natural fact just like ‘I’m going right there to my son’s and I’ll come back’. But things don’t work this way out of her country either. After fleeing the immigration agents at the border, she walks with the kids through the desert during all night and all day until almost sundown without water (?!) Isn’t she as crazy, isolated, frustrated and misunderstood as Brad Pitt in Morocco and Chieko, the Japanese?

      So happens with the heartbreaking story of the Japanese girl who after her mother suicide, claims in vain for her father’s attention and like unleashed, looks for it around city boys gathered in crowded Tokyo. Since she is as mute and deaf as a tomb, is as isolated as the other characters in the story; she doesn’t leave town still, can't belong to it as we see in the sequence at the disco where she decodes the loud music just as intelligible dancing laser lights and subtle beats on her body. So, mute, deaf and mad, doesn't really know how to attain things in the real word. Therefore, thinking rather of missing out and being led by her constructed idea of how she thinks things work, she moves awkwardly and out of context. Like the other characters, she has decided to get what she wants and will do as much as Brad Pitt and the housekeeper to get it.

     There’s a conflict of identities throughout the entire film, characters out of their familial places behave incomprehensibly and lost.

      The fact of changing cultures, doesn’t necessarily mean that automatically we will behave according to the hosting social order. And not only takes time to adapt, as we see in the case of the housekeeper, that she never understood the weight of her thinking under the American law in spite of years of residence. She, as the other characters, won’t realize it either until facts can’t be reversed.

        In terms of identities, one of the richest and most impressive scenes of the film is undoubtedly the border crossing to Mexico. (click here to see it in full screen) Where white crosses along the border wall remit us to the white stone graves where the teenager Moroccans walk on in the other part or the world. The rhythmic music, vivid city, religious images and colors show a definite contrast with the American, Moroccan and Japanese lifestyle.

      In the film, the use of color is important since it quickly associates with narrative elements as white is associated with purity and death or any combination of both meanings, as the crosses at the Mexican border, Cate Blanchett’s blouse that will be stained with blood, the Moroccan graves, Chieko’s outfit and the wedding dress.

      Greens that usually resembles life is scarce. In stead the film is rich in a wide hue of brilliant reads that remit us to intense experiences as ecstasy, suffering and blood, as the housekeeper’s festive dress that will wear while crossing the desert, flaring Mexican flags, blood on the Moroccan teenager’s body and in Cate’s neck, as in Japan’s many city lights related to ecstasy, death and suicide as well.

      Desert and earthly colors are associated with shame, solitude and misery, as the Moroccan cliffs and the Mexican desert, Brad’s clothes and the Japanese nude body.

     Blue refers to authority, law and order, like in the border patrol, immigration, the Moroccan police, American detectives and Japanese police.

        But Babel is also a beautiful story of desperation, mercy, purge and redemption where love is only canalized through compassion and forgiveness.

***
     The American couple restores their marriage, the housekeeper recoups the chance of being well with the law by returning to her country, the Moroccan boy that shot the tourists who also had secrets with family members, gives himself to the police, as a way to be in good terms with life and Chieko, receiving compassion from one of the investigators, gets peace with her father's relationship.