1996, the best year in movie history, pt. 82: Babe

This is a tale about an unprejudiced heart, and how it changed our valley forever.

My grandpa liked this movie.

I do, too. I always did.

It was the first movie I ever rooted for at Oscar-time, in 1996. It shoulda won! But since when do “talking animal” movies win? Jim Henson could have made Maus with Roman Polanski or Steven Spielberg and it still wouldn’t have won Best Picture, not even with a lead performance by Adrien Brody (or Tom Hanks, or Daniel Day-Lewis …).

Ah, well. We can bestow humbler laurels upon Babe.

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To begin with: this is the best “talking animal” movie, physically speaking. The sheep, the duck, and Babe the Pig himself are especially convincing. They move their mouths, but they also talk with their bodies. You understand them at a glance, even when they’re silent. They’re always emoting – twitching with nervous energy – like George C. Scott or Toby Jones.

And they’re not always comical; they have range. What is sadder than this sheep?

Then, scenically, there’s what I think of as the “Kennedy Miller” look. KM is the Australian company responsible for the Mad Maxes and John Duigan’s two great pastoral movies, The Year My Voice Broke and its sequel, Flirting. Babe is KM’s most famous export.

The specific visual quality I have in mind has less to do with Babe’s immediate setting – a cutesy farm, the kind on supermarket packaging – than with skies, weather, and natural light. The KM signature shot is of mist rising over hills at dawn, or of clouds hanging over hills in the afternoon.

“A thing of beauty is a joy forever.”

Indeed, because this is such a joyful movie – with the feel-good ending of a sports flick, to boot – it’s easy to overlook its harshness. For it is harsh. Harshness is more overt in the sequel, Babe: Pig in the City; but the first movie has plenty.

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Perhaps the clearest way to indicate the harshness of some of the movie’s currents is to trace those same currents elsewhere.

Babe is as non-kosher as can be. Even so, he’s a kindred spirit to Isaac Bashevis Singer’s creation, Gimpel the Fool.

Like Gimpel, Babe is an innocent soul,

reliable, beyond suspicion, and – above all – extremely gullible.

But what really couples Gimpel and Babe is that each of them – gullible from birth – comes to accept rather than overcome this condition. This is a consequence of a deliberate, principled refusal to condemn others.

The pig promised himself that he would never think badly of any creature ever again.

Which is radical. What kind of protagonist would actually live this way? Only a creature ripe for exploitation.

To view the problem a little differently, consider: Does Singer approve of Gimpel?

I’m inclined to think that he does. But then I myself, with my pacifist leanings, am likely to confuse a willingness to be treated as a doormat for a kind of heroism.

Singer’s tale drips with irony. Arguably, much of it lands on Gimpel. Lovable as Gimpel is, just about everything goes wrong for him.

He dies a beggar’s death, pining for the afterlife:

No doubt the world is entirely an imaginary world, but it is only once removed from the true world. At the door of the hovel where I lie, there stands the plank on which the dead are taken away. The gravedigger Jew has his spade ready. The grave waits and the worms are hungry; the shrouds are prepared – I carry them in my beggar’s sack. Another schnorrer [beggar, sponger] is waiting to inherit my bed of straw. When the time comes I will go joyfully. Whatever may be there, it will be real, without complication, without ridicule, without deception. God be praised: there even Gimpel cannot be deceived.

Which is paralleled in Babe:

There was a time not so long ago when pigs were afforded no respect, except by other pigs; they lived their whole lives in a cruel and sunless world. In those days pigs believed that the sooner they grew large and fat, the sooner they’d be taken into Pig Paradise, a place so wonderful that no pig had ever thought to come back.

Babe himself, through his good fortune and actions – he learns, by talking to sheep, to herd them – will escape the knife. But pigs generally do not. This is driven home to Babe by a cruel and jealous cat:

[Cat:] “You know, I probably shouldn’t say this, but I’m not sure if you realize how much the other animals are laughing at you for this sheepdog business.”

[Babe:] “Why would they do that?”

“Well, they say that you’ve forgotten that you’re a pig. Isn’t that silly? And they even said that you don’t know what pigs are for.”

“What do you mean, ‘what pigs are for’?”

“You know, why pigs are here.”

“Why are any of us here?”

“Well, the cow’s here to be milked, the dogs are here to help … with the sheep, and I’m here to be beautiful and affectionate. …”

“Yes?”

“The fact is that pigs don’t have a purpose. Just like, ducks don’t have a purpose. … Why do the Bosses keep ducks? To eat them. So why do the Bosses keep a pig? The fact is that animals that don’t seem to have a purpose really do have a purpose. The Bosses have to eat. It’s probably the most noble purpose of all, when you come to think about it.”

“They eat pigs?”

“Pork, they call it. Or bacon. They only call them pigs when they’re alive.”

“But, uh, I’m a sheep pig.”

“[They’re] just playing a little game with you. Believe me, sooner or later, every pig gets eaten. That’s the way the world works. Oh, I haven’t upset you, have I?”

This plunges Babe into despair. But is he sad for himself, or for his race? Does he really expect to be killed – and, even if he does, is that the main cause of his grief, given the expectation of Pig Paradise?

Or does he grieve that his kind is of no value to his Boss – whom he loves – beyond providing material for the crudest exploitation?

Answering these questions requires attending to what lifts Babe from his depression. The farmer (James Cromwell) – strong, silent, singularly inarticulate – nurses him, and brings himself to sing to him:

If I had words

To make a day for you

I’d sing you a morning golden and true

I would make this day last for all time

And fill the night deep in moonshine

That is: If I could tell you, Pig, I’d tell you that your life is dear to me, that you are dear to me alive, alive forever.

That’ll do, Pig

he tells Babe in the end. Well done, good and faithful servant.

For Babe, words worth living for. Babe, the innocent one, as innocent as a babe, his Boss’s dear babe.

What did your mother call you, dear?

a sheepdog asks him.

She called us all “Babe.”

We are all babes; all others are our parents. Babe obtains two adoptive mothers, natural enemies to one another: this sheepdog; and Ma, a sheep.

This is a tale about an unprejudiced heart, and how it changed our valley forever.

It all hangs together, you see.

Have a blessed new year.