Babel Essy
Pain of Loss Imagine yourself without the ability to hear anything, how would your life be compared to how it is now? The deaf are incredible people because they lack the capability of hearing and that can alter the way of communication if they also cannot speak. Even with all these disabilities, they find other ways to communicate using symbols and handwriting. Babel is an award winning movie that displays diversity. They have scenes from Morocco, Japan, Mexico and the United States. Chieko Wataya is one of the main characters in that movie.
She is a deaf Japanese girl who has been issing her sense of hearing since she was a child. In Babel, Chieko shows feelings of helplessness, being inadequate and experiences the loss of control throughout the movie. First off, Chieko is missing her sense of hearing which can lead to her feeling helpless. She experiences something horrifying that no one should, by her finding her mother’s dead body with a bullet straight to her cranium. Having that said, she is left with her with her who is always busy. She feels as if her dad does not pay much attention to her even though he is trying his best.
An inattentive father can cause feelings of neglect and psychological issues in the future if she is left isolated. With her given situation, she becomes a helpless emotional person. It seems as though her disability to speak and hear has driven her life off the edge sanity. Since Chieko is not an average girl, love is hard to find to her. With her dad always working and not giving her enough attention, she seeks attention somewhere else, which is from her friends and men she does not even know. The inability to speak and hear is majorly ffecting her life and it makes her feel nothing other than helpless.
Chieko’s hard life can also make her feel in adequate. While trying to have fun and meeting boys, her friend and her go out to a club called “I-pop. ” During her time there, she is very flirtatious to boys she finds attracting and they give her smiles as a reactions, as if approve of her. Eventually a boy comes and notices her while she plays an arcade game. Girls do not usually play video games, so she could have done this as a call for attention. It took Chieko a while to notice him because she is deaf. The boy is probably wondering if she can even hear him.
When she finally notices him, the boy said hi to her. The only probable is that he did not know that Chieko was deaf and incapable of speaking. When he realizes this about her, he Just walks away from her uninterested. As he is walking away from her, she did not seem surprised as if she was used to those kinds of actions. Her self-esteem must be low due to the fact that she cannot speak or hear. She results in a desperate move to get other guys attention by taking off her underwear and show her private part to other boys. She is willing to do this because she thinks she cannot find love any other way.
She thinks so low of herself that she offers herself as an item to men and nothing else. These impairments of her senses make her feel that she is not good enough for anybody. Chieko’s lack of senses and the events happening in her life has caused her to experience a loss of control. After witnessing her friend kiss the boy she admires, she feels like she is betrayed. It seemed as though the world around her was falling apart because sne stands stil I in a club while people around ner were dancing This is one of the mains causes to lose her self-control.
After she witnesses her friend betray her, Chieko decides to call detective Kenji Mamiya as an act of the loss of self-control. She started telling him a sympathetic story about how her mother died. Chieko lies about her mother’s death saying that she Jumped off the thirty story balcony, but in reality, she had shot herself in the head. That lie is said was possibly the action she was going to do herself as an act of suicide. She mentions this as an attempt to make the detective sorry for her. As the detective is leaving, she tells him to wait and she goes to another room.
When she came back, the detective has a shocked looked on his face to see her being fully naked. Chieko tries to seduce the detective as a final attempt to make herself feel happy, but Mr. Mamiya rejects her knowing that she is too young. She eventually realizes her actionsto him and apologizes for it. The loss of control with her emotions has caused her to do these extreme actions only because of the hard life she is living. In the end, feeling helplessness and inadequate has caused Chieko to lose control f herself.
As she realizes this, her dad comes home to see her at the balcony. She could have thought of Jumping off to make all her pain go away. She cries and hugs him because she knows she is not truly alone, she has her dad by her side. The absence of her senses has makes her life rough. Speech is not the only way of communication, so Chieko should realize that her life could have been worse. She could have been blind and is not able to see anything. Being deaf may be a hard disability in life, but people can work their way around it.
