From a young age, I never paid much attention to what most of my idols and heroes looked like or where they were from. Superman soared across the sky and Spider-Man swung across New York buildings and their alter-egos just looked like what the child version of myself believed the average person looked like. Part of growing up for me was realizing that I looked different from what I and many of my peers had been conditioned to consider the average. Most average looking pop culture figures did not share that many physical attributes with the little Latino kid that was looking up to them; it did not bother me at a young age since it was just the established norm. This established norm is eroding more and more every year though media continues to take significant strides in representation.

The Tower of Babel is one of the most recognized tales from this little-known book titled the Bible; this tale tells the story of ambitious men and women setting out to build a tower that could reach the heights of God. As a result of this ambition, God cast divine punishment upon these humans by dividing them through the creation of different languages, making it impossible for the builders of this tower to communicate effectively with each other. It is a theological tale condemning ambition and rebellion, which makes it an interesting source of a title for Damien Chazelle’s latest feature film, the ambitious and rebellious historical epic Babylon.