Children of Men

Dan Dinello

• Publisher: Auteur
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781999334031
• Topic: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Subtopic: Películas y vídeos

A mirror of tomorrow, Alfonso Cuarón's visionary Children of Men (2006) was released to good reviews and poor box office but is now regarded by many as a twenty-first-century masterpiece. Its propulsive story dramatizes a dystopian future when an infertile humanity hurtles toward extinction and an African refugee holds the key to its survival. Cuarón creates a documentary of the near future when Britain's totalitarian government hunts down and cages refugees like animals as the world descends into violent chaos. In the midst of xenophobia and power abuses that have led to a permanent state of emergency, Children of Men inspires with a story of hope and political resistance. Dan Dinello explicates Children of Men's politically progressive significance in the context of today's rise of authoritarianism and white nationalism. Though topical at the time, the film now feels as if it's been torn from today's headlines. Examining the film from ideological, psychological, and philosophical perspectives, the book explores the film's connection to post-9/11 apocalyptic narratives, its evolutionary twist to the nativity story, its warning about the rise of neofascism, and its visual uniqueness as science fiction, delving into the film's gritty hyper-realistic style and the innovative filmic techniques developed by director Cuarón and his cinematographer, Emmanuel Lubezki. Dinello explores the film's criticism of the pathologies of a reactionary politics that normalize discriminatory hierarchies and perpetuate vast differences in privilege. Children of Men prods us to imagine an egalitarian alternative with a narrative that urges emotional identification with rebels, outcasts, and racial and ethnic outsiders.

1. Introduction: Clash of Civilizations

‘Muslim community demands an end to the army’s occupation of mosques’, begins Children of Men (Cuarón, 2006) with the calm, routine voice of a news anchor narrating over a black screen. He chronicles the events of the day that detail a clash of racial, religious and ethnic civilizations. The Homeland Security bill is ratified, keeping British borders closed and continuing the forced deportations of immigrants; the ‘Siege of Seattle’ insurrection enters its thousandth day. Replacing the black screen, a rapt group of café patrons gaze up at television monitors. Dazed, they tearfully react to what is described as the ‘lead story’ of the day: the youngest person on earth, 18-year-old ‘Baby Diego’, has been stabbed to death after spitting in the face of an autograph hound, who was then immediately beaten to death by an angry crowd. We realize that no one has been born for 18 years. A disheveled man — Theo Faron (Clive Owen) — pushes his way through the crowd to order coffee as a melodramatic tune accompanies a mini-documentary of the famous child’s life. The realization of humanity’s eventual extinction has plunged the world into despair.

1: Theo orders coffee, oblivious to the death of ‘Baby Diego’.

Theo ignores the TV news report and shoves back through the crowd. The opening sequence memorably ends with a long hand-held camera take as it follows Theo out of the café and into London’s Oxford Street. The sound of horns, cars and motorized rickshaws replace the emotive TV music. It’s 2027, but the city is not flashy or futuristic. As Theo pours whiskey into his coffee, the camera moves around him to reveal the area: dirty buildings and a double-decker bus with a flat-panel telescreen advertising trendy clothes for dogs. The atmosphere is hazy, crowded and polluted with piles of black garbage bags strewn on the sidewalk. The camera keeps circling around Theo framing in the background a man and woman kissing and suddenly behind them a bomb loudly detonates inside the café, flames and debris exploding into the street. As we hear screams of terror, the trembling camera strays forward past a shocked Theo, who fearfully flattens himself against a building, to view a bloody disoriented, traumatized victim staggering out of the smoke, holding her severed arm. The screen abruptly cuts to black and the movie’s title appears in big stark white letters accompanied by a piercing high-frequency tone.

2: Theo narrowly avoids café bombing.

The electrifying opening of director Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men introduces the central character as well as thematic, visual and audio elements that structure the entire movie: an alcoholic, apathetic protagonist and unpredictable terrorism; xenophobic nationalism and an immigration crisis; global chaos and a frightened citizenry; state tyranny and hatred of foreigners — all amidst a world-wide infertility pandemic that threatens human extinction. Along with the film’s ruinous milieu, Cuarón and his cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki also initiate the film’s primary visual strategy: a raw, mobile documentary style, utilizing a hand-held camera that sometimes roves autonomously to focus on background atrocities that the main character ignores. This cinema vérité style blends with long, uninterrupted takes and composition-in-depth with minimal close-ups. The camera operator becomes another character, moving freely and showing everything in focus, such that characters and surroundings are inseparable. The style — unique to the science fiction film — presents the realistic illusion of uncut, un-fragmented time and space that immerses the viewer in the gritty decay of future London.

Beyond this, the detailed mise-en-scène — as well as the soundtrack — incorporates numerous references to our world. In the opening, the mention of ‘Homeland Security’ resonates with post-9/11 United States, the U.S.A. Patriot Act, and the ‘War on Terror’. Children of Men also evokes past horrors, like the Holocaust and the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, and more recent horrors, like Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay prisons. One aspect of the film’s brilliance is its visual density. The film constantly weaves, into the background, allusions to transhistorical social and political realities, thus establishing an analogous simultaneity between the horrors of its science-fictional world and those of the real world.

Clips of radio and television news, photographs and newspaper headlines document the 2027 dissolution of British society and the world: not only a world-wide infertility epidemic but also nuclear war, terrorism and disease outbreaks. In England, government-posted signs and billboards require fertility tests, television commercials advertise suicide drugs, and propaganda videos denigrate immigrants. The media intermix not only provides expository detail and character information, but also becomes part of the film’s consistent visual and aural background aesthetic and anti-authoritarian political critique.

The opening also inaugurates several motifs. The first image, after the black screen, shows the café crowd gazing at the monitors above them. In the centre of the frame is a woman cradling a dog. The animal turns to Theo and watches him as he orders coffee. When Theo exits the café, another dog appears in an animated advertisement on the side of a passing bus. These are the first of many dogs, cats, and other animals that are ever-present. Among other things, they suggest a world of nature that will inherit the earth once the human species dies out.

An auditory motif occurs when the concussion of the bomb blast damages Theo’s ears causing a ringing sensation. This subjective condition is called tinnitus, an affliction that I share with Theo. It results from the destruction of the frequency-sensing cochlea hairs in the inner ear. The ringing emanates from the activation of sensory nerves caused from the body’s continuously failed attempts to repair the damage, which is usually permanent. Hearing loss also occurs, which is signified in the film by the muting of other sounds when the ringing occurs. Cuarón and sound designer Richard Beggs employ the piercing noise as a sonic motif, which takes on evolving significance for Theo’s traumatic physical and mental state as well as country’s moral disintegration.

Book Description

Loosely based on the 1992 novel of the same name by P.D. James, Alfonso Cuarón’s staggering film of Children of Men dramatizes a world in violent turmoil with humanity hurtling toward extinction after eighteen years of infertility. Plagues, environmental degradation, violent rebellion and war have shattered the world into a battleground of military rule, ethnic tribalism, high security Green Zones and internment camp Red Zones. While the wealthy elite insulate themselves from politics, the totalitarian British government ‘hunts down refugees like cockroaches’ and cages them like animals.

Topical even at the time, the film now feels like it’s been torn from today’s headlines. The shock of Brexit, the U.S. election of nationalistic fear-monger Donald Trump and the spread of xenophobia in reaction to the global immigration crisis — all make it feel like we’re living in a real-world dystopia: the dawning of the autocratic apocalypse. Children of Men alludes to recent war zones, like Yemen, Syria and Iraq, while depicting frequent terror attacks, government repression and a white supremacist agenda.

Still, amid injustice and brutality, Children of Men offers up resistance as a means to fight oppression and despair. Reluctant hero Theo Faron struggles through an existentialist’s passage from apathy to rebellion while helping smuggle Kee, an inexplicably pregnant African refugee, to safety. Though still fraught with uncertainty, the birth of her child represents hope for the rise of a new world.

Resonating with today’s disturbing political ambience, the film also exhibits a unique artistic and thematic depth. Children of Men forgoes grandiose Hollywood crane shots and manic action-film fast cutting. Instead, its dazzling cinematography incorporates several lengthy, suspenseful, emotionally draining single-shot sequences whose riveting realism derives from an aesthetic articulated by French film theorist André Bazin. Thematically, the infertility plague not only reflects a potential environmental catastrophe that resonates with the fear of contagion, but also points to Western civilization’s spiritual impotence under ‘disaster apartheid’ in the words of social critic Naomi Klein (2007: 406). With science’s failure to find a cure for infertility and technological development stunted, the film questions our culture’s worshipful attitude towards technology. While critiquing religious fundamentalism, Children of Men suggests an evolutionary twist on the Nativity story and interweaves spiritual allusions, enhanced with its exquisite sound design and music. Though it questions the impact of 1960s counterculture and violent revolution, Children of Men attacks human complacency in the face of fascism, xenophobia and apartheid and dramatizes the philosophy of French resistance fighter and philosopher Albert Camus (1913-1960) who advocated steadfast rebellion in the face of tyranny, injustice and death.

While exploring Children of Men’s explicit and implicit content, I will discuss the film from a psychological, philosophical and ideological perspective that will explicate its politically progressive significance. Further, I will analyse Alfonso Cuarón’s visual, directorial and aural style as organically related to its themes. While occasionally referencing Cuarón’s thematic objectives, as expressed in interviews, my viewpoint will be derived from the film itself and the words of other writers, rather than the author’s intention. As D.H. Lawrence famously said, ‘Never trust the artist. Trust the tale. The proper function of a critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it’ (1971: 8).

The first three chapters of the book discuss the film’s release, its critical reception — then and now — its social, political and generic context, its development from book to script, and its visual approach. The latter three chapters, while still incorporating further aspects of its visual style, will discuss in more depth the film’s political and philosophical themes and its supportive sound and music architecture.

Contemporary Political Relevance

I’m writing this book in 2019, living in the United States amid the malicious, corrupt, amoral, incompetent, nepotistic, gangster regime of President Donald Trump who fawns over tyrants and encourages white nationalist violence such as the 2019 terror attack on Muslims in New Zealand. When Children of Men was released in 2006, the caging of immigrants and mass deportations seemed like a dramatic fictional exaggeration but now it’s reality. Recently, under Trump’s ‘zero tolerance’ border enforcement policy, nearly 3,000 children were ripped from the arms of their parents — migrants and asylum seekers. Initially put in cages and fenced internment pens, some children were used as hostages to extort legal asylum seekers to give up their claims and leave the country. Over 100 government-contracted incarceration camps around the country have been created. Described by the New York Times as ‘a rough blend of boarding school, day care center and medium security lockup’, they are overcrowded and lack sufficient toilets, showers, beds and basic hygienic care while unruly children are drugged to keep them docile (Barry, 2018: 1). After a judge ordered all the separated children to be reunited with their parents, the government could not fully execute the order because they failed to keep proper records. This exposed the policy as state-sanctioned kidnapping and child abuse. Along with trying to wall off the U.S. from Mexico, the American administration bans immigrants from Muslim-majority nations while — like Russia — it sent cruise missiles rather than humanitarian aid to war-torn Syria. Under Trump, the speed of America’s plunge into casual barbarism is breath-taking. Children of Men offers a salient critique of anti-immigrant xenophobia and ultranationalism — one of the few recent films to do so.

3: Police state enforces immigrant apartheid.

The 9/11 Twin Towers attacks, the 2003 Iraq invasion, and the 2005 London bombings remained open wounds when Children of Men was made. The film vilifies the Iraq war and occupation as well as the excesses of the U.S.A. Patriot Act and the so-called ‘War on Terror’. Except for the television series Battlestar Galactica (2003–2009), popular culture tacitly supported these policies or ignored them, so the film’s politics felt refreshingly provocative and progressive, especially for a big budget science fiction action film intended for a wide audience. When it opened, during the 2006 Christmas season, Children of Men received an extremely positive critical reception,¹ appeared on many critics’ top ten lists, was nominated for three Oscars and won two British Academy Film Awards (BAFTA) for cinematography and production design. Aside from praising its innovative visual style, many reviewers focused on the film’s presentation of terrorism as a looming threat and on its criticism of the Iraq occupation. Some wondered whether the Yuletide market could handle a movie so bleak, and, appraised by blockbuster standards, the movie’s box office disappointed. Profit aside, Children of Men is a visionary work of protest art and political inspiration.

Suspenseful and propulsive, Children of Men ventures beyond standard entertainment: the character played by the film’s biggest star is shockingly murdered 28 minutes into the picture, its overall tone is unremittingly grim, and its stunning verisimilitude gives it the feel of war zone reportage. When released, the chaotic escape from the Bexhill immigrant detention camp at the end of the film looked like documentary footage from the Iraq War’s horrific 2004 battle for Fallujah. In 2018, the scene now resembles a Syrian War documentary such as The White Helmets (von Einsiedel, 2016) or video from the war in Yemen. Along with the film’s presentation of battleground turmoil and horror, Children of Men is prescient in its dramatization of police-enforced racism, ethnic hatred and the scapegoating of foreigners. At the time, immigration was certainly an issue, but one whose exponential growth and monumental consequences were downplayed or ignored in Europe and the United States.

Twelve years after the film’s release, the immigration crisis has exploded with the number of displaced people increasing more than 49%, since 2000, to ‘258 million’ in 2017, according to the United Nations (United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, 2017). The refugee increase results from a world in disarray: wars, famine, climate change, persecution, and political instability. Resentment of immigrants and refugees, along with antagonism towards the inequities of globalization, has led to the precipitous rise of right-wing, nationalist, anti-immigrant ‘populism’ that fuelled Trump’s successful presidential campaign. Brexit, the spread of xenophobic authoritarians, and the Trump wrecking ball threaten to further crack up a European Union promoting openness, free trade and multicultural pluralism. Children of Men depicts a geopolitical crisis: the world carved up into Green Zones of privilege and Red Zones of restriction. Social critic Naomi Klein describes this division in The Shock Doctrine as ‘A cruel and ruthlessly divided future in which money and race buy survival’ and where stark partitions exist ‘between the included and the excluded, the protected and the damned’ (2007: 413, 414).

Children of Men returned to the cultural conversation in 2016 not only because of its tenth anniversary, but also because of its unsettling relevance at the conclusion of an ugly year that climaxed with the disturbing, fraudulent U.S. election of racist reality TV star Donald Trump as President. Enthusiastic reassessments of the movie appeared. Slate headlined a video from the well-known author, economist, and political scientist: ‘Francis Fukuyama Explains Why Children of Men Is So Great’ (Fritcke and Gill, 2016). Critics viewed Children of Men as a documentary about a future that had now arrived, citing news stories like ‘New Rules Stall Migrants Headed for Northern Europe’ and ‘Trump Announces Muslim Ban’. Vulture said: ‘Future Shock: Children of Men — overlooked 2006 masterpiece mig...