Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men asks a timely question—how should we behave at the end of the world?
Theo’s morning routine, Children of Men, 2006
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Today is an exciting day because we are going to talk about Children of Men, one of my favorite movies of all time. I mentioned at the tail end of last week’s issue that I was thinking of rewatching it, and I did just that last and found it to be about as affecting as it was the first time I saw it and have been thinking about it all week. So we are going to revisit this 2006 dystopian masterpiece, with an eye toward its political and ideological subtext, and how it translates to a 2022 viewing.
I think if you haven’t seen it and it sounds like you might want to, maybe go watch it first, otherwise you can still read this but there will be spoilers. And if it’s been a while, maybe read this and then go rewatch it later I think you will get a lot out of it. OK buckle up here we go.
If there were no future
The first time I watched Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men was the year it came out or shortly thereafter, so around 2006, when I would have been calculator type type type 28. At the time I was running a canvass office in Portland, Oregon, probably working on some combination of LGBTQ+ rights, conservation and climate change, and this was deep into the post-9/11 Bush administration, so I wouldn’t call it a political awakening, exactly, but it definitely shook me up. I remember thinking about it for days after, watching it a second time before sealing up the little envelope and mailing it back lol, and even watching all of the surprisingly pedagogical DVD extras.
Probably because of its intensity, I don’t think I had watched it again since that first week I saw it, up until last Saturday’s rewatch. But I think about and talk about and reference the movie fairly often, because that’s the kind of movie it is. It gets under your skin.
Jamie and I each owned a copy of the DVD when we started dating and for years they sat side by side on a shelf in our various apartments which maybe says something about our marriage I don’t know what exactly. We often use the title as a kind of shorthand, exchanging a knowing “children of men” to describe a certain kind of unjust, chaotic, or dysfunctional situation, especially when juxtaposed with otherwise run-of-the-mill trappings of modern capitalist society. As Mark Fisher describes it, “internment camps and franchise coffee bars co-exist.”
One example that comes to mind was the time the Orange Line, one of the more decrepit subway lines in Boston, caught fire and filled a station with smoke, right in the heart of one of the country’s wealthiest cities, and passengers were kicking out windows of the train cars to escape. Children of men. (Now that I think about it, a lot of the examples I can think of are MBTA related.) It describes a certain kind of uncanny, despairing feeling that something is profoundly fucked up here and there is nothing we can do to fix it.
The movie is loosely based on the 1992 book by P.D. James, which lacks the film’s politics, but has the same central concept of a world in which humans stopped being able to reproduce, and no baby has been born in 18 years. The fallout is told through the experiences of a civil servant in London, Theo Faron, who is called upon by radical activists he associated with in his younger days to escort a young immigrant woman named Kee, who has inexplicably become pregnant, out of the country for her safety. P.D. James has said the book intended to answer the question, “If there were no future, how would we behave?”
This week I’ve been reading some retrospectives on the movie from recent years, which are loaded with terms like prescient, still resonant, more relevant than ever, etc. And after rewatching, I would agree, especially as climate change accelerates and many are asking themselves that very question posed by its premise.
I have also been wondering what exactly it is about the movie that makes it so affecting and, dare I say, radicalizing. What is that feeling it gives you and why? And why is it so persistently resonant? The answer, I think, is a combination of factors, including stylistic choices Cuarón made, a clear-eyed depiction of the systemic failures that underlie any number of real world global crises, and a very faint thread of hope that leads us to a redemptive conclusion.
Utterly realist
Children of Men‘s main contribution as a work of filmmaking is what one scholar described as its “utterly realist style,” and that plays a big part in its emotional impact. It’s shot like a documentary, with a handheld camera following our disheveled protagonist along his journey, starting with routinely pouring whiskey into his morning coffee on the streets of London, and ending with a barefoot scramble through a firefight in a refugee camp. It’s also filmed in a series of unpolished, seemingly unedited tracking shots, the longest lasting six-and-a-half minutes, during which drops of blood spatter the camera lens and remain there in the final cut. This approach means you are kind of stuck with Theo, experiencing whatever chaos just as he experiences it.
But not exactly, because we actually see a lot more than Theo usually does. Especially early in the film, he’s so jaded, moving through his life zombie-like, that we notice many details of his dystopia, including several acts of violence and cruelty in the background, even though he’s reached to the point where he mostly ignores them. (Much has been made of the imagery imitating classic works of art that also populate the screen, which adds a dreamlike layer over the realism. See this paper by Spanish literature professor Samuel Amago.)
The use of media as a storytelling device, too, is immersive, with almost all of the exposition taking place through video and audio news snippets or collages of newspaper clippings. This is how we learn that societies around the world have collapsed, that Britain has isolated itself from the outside world, and that the country is overrun with refugees, which citizens are to report for deportation. The use of media is especially potent considering the film came out five short years after 9/11, which most of us absorbed through a nonstop loop of media. Shaky cameras stumbling through a smoke-filled Manhattan were not too far behind us. So the way we experience the geopolitical violence in Children of Men is the same way many of us have experienced it in reality—through a 360-degree chorus of media.
The visual look of the film is also important. As Amago points out, Cuarón has notably said he wanted to make an “anti-Blade Runner,” and as his art department brought him concept sketches of futuristic cars and technology (it takes place 20 years in the future), he would reject them and instead point to actual imagery from Palestine, Iraq, Northern Ireland, Sri Lanka, the Balkans, Chernobyl.
The turmoil depicted in the film, then, is not speculative. It is real political violence of the time, and the only thing futuristic about it is the fact that it is no longer far away—it’s right here, in a city that will feel at least culturally familiar to much of his audience. Using the sensory language of the last time political violence breached viewers’ daily lives, Cuarón warns us that it will continue to happen in years to come.
Haunts the present moment
A cliche about good science fiction is that it is remarkably prescient. We marvel at the clarity with which its creators foresaw the future, as is the case today with Cuarón and Children of Men. A modern audience sees in the film a familiar world of environmental decline, despair over a hopeless future, low birth rates, cultural stagnation, growing xenophobia, authoritarianism, refugee crises. “Why Children of Men haunts the present moment,” says The New Statesman. From the BBC, “Why Children of Men has never been as shocking as it is now.” “How the sci-fi thriller foresaw a dark future,” one journalist wrote last year for NBC News:
The way “Children of Men” reflects reality has evolved and expanded every few years, shape-shifting to match the moment. But on each leg in its trip through the zeitgeist, it has mirrored the world with “brutal clarity,” said Mark Fergus, who co-wrote early drafts of the script with his creative partner Hawk Ostby.
Considering the fact that its meaning seems to morph to match the present moment, and that its entire central premise remains completely fantastical, why are we convinced that Children of Men is so spot-on?
All good science fiction brings with it shrewd insights, not about the future, but about the present. Authors simply dial things up a notch to create the effect of a caricature that feels more real than its actual subject. One way I have described this in the past, as in the case of eerie near-future depictions like Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, is that they seem prescient because lots of the horrible things in the world during the time they were written never got any better. It’s easy to see the future when you recognize that things don’t change.
So the wisdom of Children of Men is the unspoken, but heavily telegraphed, leftist analysis of underlying geopolitical conditions that drive any particular moment’s crisis, so long as those conditions continue to exist. It’s said that Cuarón himself brought this analysis to the film, which was originally pitched as an adaptation of the book in the style of a “dystopian Casablanca.” Cuarón—fresh off of directing a Harry Potter movie, but not too long after his politically charged Y tu mamá también—took it in a new direction, drawing inspiration from 1966’s The Battle of Algiers, another revered and subversive film, about the Algerian Revolution.
If all sci-fi is reflecting the moment in which it’s made, there’s no question that Cuarón made the decisions he did in response to post-9/11 neoconservatism. In the five years prior, right-wing hawks dominated the Republican Party, which in turn dominated the U.S. and the Global North. Democrats were all but universally accepting of a massive expansion of the powers of the executive branch, resulting in endless, pointless foreign wars, the dissolution of previously cherished domestic civil rights, and the rise of extrajudicial police actions, including surveillance, torture, kidnapping, deportation, interminable imprisonment, all in the name of defeating some nameless, stateless foreign threat.
This critique is unmistakeable in Children of Men, with images from the War on Terror recreated in the background of the film’s action. The black bags over the heads of Abu Ghraib detainees become a recurring trope in the film. The opening voiceover describes a “Homeland Security Bill” and military occupation of mosques. Government PSAs remind citizens to report the presence of immigrants, reminiscent of the “see something, say something” propaganda that emerged in the 2000s.
Out the window left of Theo you can see a recreation of one of the most upsetting photos from Abu Ghraib.
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Cuarón could not see the future. But he could clearly see the underlying conditions that were contributing to whatever crises the future might hold. In that sense, “the infertility thing” is just a placeholder, what Roger Ebert called at the time the film’s MacGuffin. It’s not the thrust of the problem this world is facing, it’s a symptom and an accelerant, or a concept climate change communicators will know well—a threat multiplier.
When talking with his old activist friend Jasper, played by Michael Caine, Theo reflects on continued efforts to cure the condition: “Even if they discovered the cure for infertility, it doesn’t matter. It’s too late. The world went to shit. You know what? It was too late before the infertility thing happened, for fuck’s sake.”
The walls don’t work
So what are these underlying conditions? They are fairly overt in the text, but even more so in the supporting documentary that Cuarón directed for the DVD release, The Possibility of Hope, which features Slavoj Žižek, Naomi Klein, Fabrizio Eva, Saskia Sassen, Tzvetan Todorov and others. The philosophers and historians drive home the film’s critique of global late capitalist society. All borders are removed for the flow of capital, so as to allow private industry’s expansion into new markets to consume new resources. For people, however, more borders go up and those borders become more militarized. The walls don’t work, of course, so the police and surveillance state expand. Extreme inequality and environmental degradation caused by runaway extraction make entire regions unstable or uninhabitable. That leads to mass migration, which leads to more cultures overlapping, hoarding and protection of resources, and growing fear of a foreign other.
Naomi Klein describes “global green zones,” areas in developing countries where private industry creates “safe” regions that offer the comforts of Northern wealth—generators, food, bottled water. Domestically, this looks like gated communities and luxury high-rises, often existing alongside abject poverty. In the film, we see this juxtaposition when Theo visits his cousin, a high-ranking government official, to finagle travel papers for Kee. He traverses street protests from the backseat of a Rolls Royce, looking out the window at parks where orchestras play and the wealthy parade around with pet zebras and camels, bizarre luxuries intended to fill the emptiness of their lives.
This raging backdrop of all-too-familiar dysfunction, albeit cranked up a few notches, invites us to project our own moments of acute crisis onto the film’s sci-fi conceit. COVID is a reasonable fit, as we sleepwalk through our pandemic-era lives with no clear end in sight. Characters refer to “the pest,” and we learn that Theo and his estranged wife Julian’s child died in a flu pandemic. Corporate ads for “Quietus,” an at-home suicide kit, run constantly in the background, the tagline “You Decide When” is a familiar neoliberal take on public health. The culling of the population rhymes with COVID-era tolerance for the death of the sick and old.
But more than anything, a modern viewing presents glaring parallels to the climate crisis. There’s a strong case to be made that the infertility in Children of Men can be read entirely as the ticking clock of climate catastrophe, a timer on humanity that is running out. Both are a symptom and an accelerant of geopolitical problems. Just as Theo points out that a scientific solution to infertility wouldn’t repair the state of the world, so do climate justice advocates warn that superficial tech fixes won’t repair the ravages of an extractive economy.
Both problems also yield the same all but certain outcome—a global refugee crisis. At its core, Children of Men is a story about a mass wave of refugees fleeing unstable regions, and the resulting cruelty toward people from outside a nation’s walls. It’s portrayed by cages of immigrants on the streets of London, an entire seaside retirement community converted into a massive detention site, and violent conflict. Such nationalism and isolationism could very well define the future climate crisis. The Washington Post recently described such a worst-case scenario:
Imagine in the coming years a global politics shaped by resurgent nationalism. Governments prioritize their own energy and food needs, invest more in national security than in global development, and undercut international efforts to curb the emissions of greenhouse gases. In this future, carbon emissions will roughly double by the end of the century, hastening along with them the drastic array of catastrophic environmental effects linked to global warming, from the melting of the Arctic to heat waves that make whole regions uninhabitable to an intensification of the extreme droughts, wildfires and floods that have already blighted parts of the world this summer. When some climate scientists speak casually, they categorize this imagined future as “Trump world.”
One of the big unanswered questions about climate change is how we will treat each other when things start to get really bad. Cuarón answers that question for us in Children of Men, and it is Trump World.
The possibility of hope
My biggest criticism of Children of Men is something that came up in a recent interview with author Sam J. Miller, and it’s a criticism of a lot of dystopian fiction. That is, reality doesn’t exist as utopia or dystopia, and we are always living in some combination of both. In Children of Men, there is an inescapable bleakness that, while effective in the telling of this story, seems unlikely even in the worst futures.
As Rebecca Solnit describes in A Paradise Built in Hell, disasters often yield some of the best of humanity. It also triggers the worst of us, often at the level of power-brokers and property holders, but on the ground, crisis often inspires joy, community, care, even fun. We see it in the aftermath of every catastrophe, in impromptu camps, kitchens, libraries, and parties where people demonstrate their love for each other.
We don’t see a ton of this in Children of Men. Among members of the uprising, we see mostly a grim version of solidarity. The depiction of this rebellion is, maybe not evil, but not great, although they do have a cool little farm set up, so I don’t know, maybe Theo just caught them on a bad day.
There are glimmers, however. Maternal figures like Miriam, the midwife who cares for Kee alongside Theo. Marichka, a diminutive fixer in the refugee camp who becomes an unlikely action hero. There is also the sweet and often funny relationship that develops between Theo and Kee, who is initially treated much like a piece of property, but becomes a fully developed character over the course of their friendship.
And of course, how can we forget Michael Caine’s Jasper, a highlight with his hippie hair and chunky cardigan, smoking weed and playing old records in his hidden away country home. Jasper’s not much of a hero, more of a Falstaff, and feels a little like a checked-out Boomer radical. But his humanity remains fully intact, right up until his sad end. He is notably an editorial cartoonist, whose humor undermines joyless authoritarianism. I coincidentally read an essay by David Graeber recently that contrasts the way manners are used to wall off hierarchies of wealth and power, while the practice of joking—in which equal relations playfight and talk openly about various bodily functions—signals a kind of permeability between the self and others. Jasper embodies this power as he asks gunmen to pull his finger, farting before they execute him.
And finally, we have Theo. Our white, male, middle-class bureaucrat, a cog in the machine who has given up on being an ethical human, until his redemption. You might see Theo as a white savior, but he doesn’t really save the day. He doesn’t lead oppressed masses to glory like Daenerys Targaryen. Instead, he does one good, ethical act—he helps Kee get to a boat. (The boat is owned by The Human Project, a not-so-subtle description of the thing Theo had once given up on, what Wendy Brown might call “the project of individual or collective mastery of existence.”) What starts off as a job to make a quick buck becomes a favor, and ends as a sacrifice, as he dies not even knowing if it was successful. But he did it. He helped.
It makes sense that Theo is our protagonist, in part because of Cuarón’s likely audience. Children of Men challenges a middle-class viewer to ask themselves the question posed by the book—If there were no future, how would you behave? Theo’s path tells us that, even if it’s true that there is little hope ahead for humanity, we find redemption by choosing to act not as a bureaucrat or a property owner, but as a human.
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Podcast
I’ve been hearing some interviews lately with this activist and writer Daniel Sherrell, who recently published the book Warmth: Coming of Age at the End of Our World, and something he said on a recent New Yorker podcast really hit me and feels relevant to today’s issue so here it is:
When I imagine myself behind a veil of ignorance, not having been born yet, and somebody were to tell me you would be born in the year the first popular book on global warming would be released. You’ll see it. As you come of age, it’ll transition from a niche research topic to an ongoing global catastrophe. Obviously, I would’ve felt grief about that, and I do feel grief about that.
But also, if somebody had likewise told me that you’re going to spend the rest of your life coming together with people who share your values to try to create a polity and economy that actually treats everybody with dignity, I can’t think of a more meaningful way to spend a human life.
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Listening
Children of Men also has a lot of great music in it and I love this Jarvis Cocker song called “Running the World” that is the second song as the credits roll.
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OK that is today’s issue, thank you for reading, now and then it is nice to put an English degree to work because I paid for it.
I watched Children of Men and read some grown-up books, but I also did end up playing The Witcher on Switch for like 5 hours last weekend and also I watched three NBA games which is another fun new coping mechanism I have acquired ever since Jamie got me League Pass for Christmas. Suns are looking good I’m just going to put it out there.
Take care out there folks act like a human.
Tate