In “On Exactitude in Science,” a 1946 short story from the Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges, a fictional 17th century chronicler describes a guild of cartographers who make ever-bigger maps until, eventually, they create a “Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it.” As tastes change, later generations declare the map “Useless” and leave the great work to wither in the desert sun, where “Animals and Beggars” live within the map’s “Tattered Ruins.” The brief tale manages to probe the nature of inquiry and spoof the history of empire, quite a feat for a piece that’s only a paragraph long.
Watching the films of Alejandro González Iñárritu, the multi-Oscar-winning writer-director behind The Revenant, Birdman, and Babel, can feel like watching both Borges and the cartographers work at the same time. He’s a man who often seems to be attempting to make artwork that’s nearly as big as life itself and fully aware of the impossibility of truly doing so, all of this further complicated by the challenges, again, fully acknowledged within the work, of telling stories about identity and history as one of the few Mexicans given a grand Hollywood stage and the budget to match.
