Tom Guarriello explores bad luck through the 2006 film Babel, where a stray bullet fired by two Moroccan boys accidentally hits Cate Blanchett. He asks how skeptics of luck explain random tragedies like soldiers dying in Iraq, and invites viewers to consider what really happened beyond calling it bad luck.
Hi, it's Tom Guarriello. This is the time of the year when the Oscar nominations are out, and we like to go see all the films that have been nominated for Best Picture, just so we, you know, sort of are in there knowing which ones we would pick. And, you know, because it a bit more of a personal interest for us to do that. So the other night we went to see Babel. Now, if you haven't seen Babel and you don't want to know anything about Babel, now's the time to shut off this video because I wanted to talk about Babel, um, in regard to a video that I made about a month ago. In fact, I made the video that The Day After Christmas. And that video was a video response to a video made by Bonnie, Experiments in Honesty, in which, by the title of Does Luck Exist? Now, if you're interested in that video, I'll put a clip over here, a clip not a clip, I'll put a link over here to the clip. And in that video I talked about how, you know, I think that no matter what we say about being rational and so on, that luck kind of plays a part somewhere in our thinking. It has a deep mythological and mythic kind of character. And so luck has some, I think, has some, some element always there in our psyches. I got a lot of responses and a couple of video responses, and, and the, the interesting thing to me about the video responses and the responses that I got in the comments was that most people were talking about, about not believing in luck But they were talking about good luck. In other words, that when good things happen to them or to others, that their belief was that this was earned, that, you know, people had worked hard and prepared themselves for opportunities, and that, you know, opportunities came along. Nobody really talked about where opportunities came from. Opportunities themselves, I I think there's just another, another word for luck. But anyway, uh, it was all about good luck. So yeah, I thought that was interesting. They just kind of put it in the back of my mind, you know, off, you know, you go doing other things. And now here it is, a little over a month later, and we go see Babel. Now Babel for me is a movie about bad luck. Kate Blanchett and Brad Pitt are on a bus driving through the Moroccan hills and deserts. Desolate. Morocco. Desolate. On a hillside several kilometers away, are two young boys, probably, oh, I don't know, maybe 13 and 10, 11. And these two boys have, are carrying a rifle that their father has just bought to protect his goat herd. And from jackals. And so the boys are out practicing shooting, and they're lamenting the fact that the bullets don't seem to go very far. And, you know, long story short, one of them takes a shot, a very long shot, and as luck would have it, the shot hits Cate Blanchett in the neck. Now the whole movie is about that event in some ways or another, and it's, it's an extraordinary movie because it takes place on 3 different continents: in Morocco, uh, in San Diego, and in Tokyo. And all of the stories Again, if you don't want spoilers, you should— all the stories are interconnected and interwoven. But the fact that this bullet hit Cate Blanchett in the neck after being fired by this young boy, I couldn't think of any other way to describe that event but incredibly bad luck. And I was trying to think about what would the people who said that they don't believe in luck say about that event? Would they say— I don't know what they would say. I mean, you know, I'm sure there's all— I mean, there's a lot of rational kinds of notions that can be piled on top of the event, but at bottom, I don't think anything describes it any better than the two words "bad luck." So, I'm just interested in your thoughts about bad luck. And, you know, not to be too dark about this, but, you know, we have service personnel, troops being killed every day. In Iraq, who's killed and who's not, is often, it seems to me, simply a matter of bad luck. And so I guess, you know, I'm again, I'm interested in in thoughts about how else you might think about events like this, except for just using that simple phrase, "It was just bad luck." So thanks. Take care. Bye-bye.
