"Biutiful"

Barcelona is not so different from Ka’u

I just watched the DVD Biutiful, a film by the Mexican writer/director Inarritu.  It is a movie that explores human wildness - set in the slum edges of sprawling Barcelona and following the last days of a good but troubled man, Uxbal, a father of young children, dying of cancer, caught in the pitiless economic system that is both “normal” and terrifying.  Even for the privileged, the monster of ruin is always lurking just a few footsteps away.  All it takes is a little twist of fate, a short string of bad luck for any of us to fall victim.

At first I was shamed by this movie.  My preoccupation with grass and animals, nature and beauty seem so out-of-touch, so precious compared with with the harsh realities of the urban dispossessed.  Yet -  the traps which entangle Uxbal are derived from our civilization’s abandonment of nature and the true needs of humans: making an honest living being one of those needs.  Not that Uxbal had much of a chance or choice to make an honest living, born a virtual orphan in a mega-city on a planet with a human population in overshoot and a crashing environment.  The movie itself makes this point with shots of beached whales on a bank of televisions that Uxbal passes and smokestacks billowing in the neighborhood where his family lives. All they can do is try to survive.

Lack of work and of money to buy a place to live are the problems that drive the movie.  Simple problems really, and simple to fix, if we could be honest with each other about what needs to be done and just in our dispensation of work and recompense.  There is plenty of work to do done but what our economic system rewards handsomely is not honest work but enterprising exploitation. By our twisted set of values, producing is considered demeaning, and exploitation clever and obligatory.

The problem of making a living are the same in the country and the city, as are the perverse incentives to profit off each other.  The traps that are built into the system and which can engulf a person a little unlucky or unwary are just as unforgiving in the country.  What is more, it is still the country that must subsidize and provide for the existence of the cities. It has always been that way in the cultures that we call civilized, since the time of the Mesopotamian kingdoms, since the ancient kingdoms of China.  To produce the primary materials that the city requires of the countryside in a never-ending stream is a far more demanding way of living than that of the urban dwellers who scavenge on the edges of the urban economy, as the characters in Biutiful do.  If there is ever going to be sustainable civilization on this planet a reconciliation between nature and the city is necessary, and the people of the countryside are the ones that know the language -which is a language of actual bodies working, living, and dying rather than a symbolic language of power and image - in which that reconciliation must be worked out. 

In the end, country or city, what we are  all looking for is the same, as  in the movie’s title: a little bit or, preferably, a lot of beautiful for our children.