Wanderlost

Another bizarre change as I get older is that it takes me longer to get out from under the spell of movies. I've always been a bit susceptible -- show me even a Mamet trailer, and I'll be talking like that for hours -- but lately, the lingering has been more on the order of a day or two.

We saw Babel tonight. I'd heard it was "good, not great," and I suppose I'd agree with that, though I might nudge the needle a bit more in the "great" direction. It was like an elegant short story -- a bit counterintuitive for such a long movie, I know, but I mean it in the sense that every element had a purpose. Never mind that the scope was larger than most films, it was still a grand tale told economically.

The movie's impact has me in a kind of emotional tractor beam that I suspect will last for a while, despite the ministrations of home-delivered ice cream (oh, how I'll miss that) and a nightcap of precious smuggled Oregon pinot noir. On Rotten Tomatoes, the movie did surprisingly badly for being so good. Setting aside the well-deserved snark of David Denby (and the fact that, normally, all Denby's byline means to me is "shoot! No Anthony Lane!"), I gotta ask all these reviewers complaining about the film's fatalism and putative melodrama: have you ever lived in the developing world? Lives are interconnected. Life is that fragile. People don't put warning signs in front of the piranha tank. My decision to go back to Washington has serious repercussions for our trusted (after some initial misgivings...) driver and his whole family, when the only replacement job we can find for him is with an American co-worker who turns out to be astonishingly cupiditous, smiling nicely to us and then forcing absolutely cutthroat terms on him (and them with a dual income!). An indigent widow's random decision to unwind her bandage just then (hopefully) allows her to keep her foot.

I mean, stop me before I start singing New York minute..., but here's the thing: the expat experience, the journey of dislocation, is most noticeable on the first day, or perhaps the first through fourteenth days, the tenure of the average backpacker and the reason why all of them seem to have bought time-shares in the same, solitary threadbare epiphany, which they pass around like their junior-year bong. But it doesn't stop there. You don't just adapt to things and then you're done, even if the cultural adjustment chart does cruelly and misleadingly posit a tortuous journey to Happily Ever After Land. Well, wake up and smell the chai, chart-makers: that's one land you can never, ever get more than a visitor visa for (and, even then, the list of required inoculations is breathtaking).

Being an expat is very different on day 120, and again on day 428, and continues in a lesser vein on day 1300 and even again on day 1301. At or around day 320, or your third country, whichever comes first, you begin to realize, in a deep and disturbing way, the utter contingency of your own safe-as-houses upbringing which, up to this point, has carried the reassuring ring of logical necessity. That home-country road sign, with its soothingly familiar font, the Platonic ideal of "speed limit 35," might easily have been otherwise. Even worse, your country's version is not the original template that all others clumsily ape. In the strangely disquieting decontextualization you start to internalize, all versions are on an equal footing.

Sure, silly example -- though, trust me, it can still freak a person out -- but what about day 482, when you realize that your home country's nannification (Do Not Place Bag Over Head; Caution! Small Parts Are A Choking Hazard; Stay Back From Edge) is the exception and not the rule, globally speaking? That's when you start to grok this movie.

There are larger trends, too; strong tidal currents underneath the day-by-day foam of individual datapoints. I think this is the reason why so many people quite happily live overseas for large blocks of time, and then suddenly -- ahem -- just absolutely, positively, just can't take it a day longer. For me, India bears a large part of that attribution of responsibility, of course, but a nontrivial amount comes from the accumulation of my developing nation expatriatude -- the gradual, constant erosion of the illusion of safety, security, and non-fragility, until the raw nerve of mortality is exposed to the air.

An on-again off-again British friend of mine (who I don't think reads this any longer, but I guess we'll find out), much smarter than me and thus given to gnomic pronouncements, once declared that no one ought to travel. At the time, I dismissed it as part of the 30 percent of stuff that P says that can't possibly be taken seriously (usually, not even by P). Babel's Moroccan scenes resonated with me frighteningly, and not only because they utterly confirmed that the tiny and repellent slice of the country I experienced in Tangiers was not aberrant. It's dangerous out (t)here, and all the more so for those who never get physically injured. I reserve the right to change my mind a year from now -- or, for that matter, tomorrow -- but, for the moment, I'm with P: let us cultivate our garden.