Revisiting Children of Men

Dayo Olopade, on the coming dystopia:

Mohan Munasinghe, reporting for Britain's intergovernmental panel on climate change (IPCC), thinks reports of our civilization's demise have been greatly underexaggerated. According to the substance of a talk Munasinghe gave recently at Cambridge, we are headed for an ugly, dystopian future driven by resource shortages and overpopulation that will produce devastating competition and in all likelihood, more walls and more wars. "Climate change is, or could be, the additional factor which will exacerbate the existing problems of poverty, environmental degradation, social polarisation and terrorism and it could lead to a very chaotic situation," he says. (See the rawkin' Children of Men for more on how "chaotic" that could look.) [emphasese mine - RD]

This is a hobbyhorse of mine, but as my previous forays on the subject are either behind the NR subscriber wall or lost in TNR's vanished archives, let me try the patience of my readers by noting that Olopade has inadvertently put her finger on the problem with Alfonso Cuaron's adaptation. The film's hellish, quasi-totalitarian dystopia does indeed feel like a compelling vision of a future dominated by "resource shortages and overpopulation"; unfortunately, the whole frickin' point of the story is that it's set in a world where women stopped being able to have children about twenty years back. Cuaron's vision channels doomsayers like Mohan Munasinghe to impressive and riveting effect, but unlike the dystopian vision in the film's source material, it more or less wastes its supposed premise in the process.

Comments

I haven't read the book, but I thought the events in the movie actually made sense in an irrational kind of way. Clearly, Britain and the rest of the world feels threatened by the unexplained infertility of all women. And I think when people feel threatened they respond in ways that don't always make sense. So even though their population is declining, Britain goes to extreme lengths to keep out immigrants and foreigners. It's counterintuitive, but I think it's evidence of a country protecting itself from what it perceives could be further threats to their existence.

Posted by jn | May 20, 2008 10:27 AM

I don't think that's fair to Cuaron's film. The society it presented was not being overwhelmed by resource shortages and overpopulation... it was being overwhelmed by nihilism and a shortage of hope and human decency. The rest of the world was falling apart, and the Brits were only holding their civilization together through exclusion and violence. I thought the scenes in the empty schools and playgrounds, and the "Christmas cease-fire" in the gunfight, gave a compelling explanation of what had been lost.

Of course, the main thrust of the film was to present James's dystopian world as being very similar to our own, and to suggest that our current world suffers more from a shortage of humanity than from overpopulation or resource shortages. It seemed to me that this was also the main theme of the book. Where James and Cuaron differed, I think, was in the specific aspects of our own world they saw as the most troubling, and the values they saw as redeeming.

Posted by LaFollette Progressive | May 20, 2008 10:43 AM

How about this--the CoM world faced an overpopulation of narratives. With the kids missing, nobody has any stake in the apparently nearly over future of humanity. All they have is their own individual pride, their own egotistical goals that they're willing to fight for. Either you're a reactionary and you kill for security, order, homogenity, nativism, sanitation (note how Theo uses disgust as a weapon against both sides), convenience, or comfort; or you're a radical and you kill for boredom, jihad, apocalypse, freedom or--as the dude who shot the protagonist said, "dignity". Without children there's nothing to live for but the pleasure of being Right and Vindicated.

In fact, it even implies a thematic explanation for the infertility--there were so many narratives and so much egotism that in a spiritual way there just wasn't any _room_ for children anymore.

Posted by Consumatopia | May 20, 2008 10:58 AM

The film's hellish, quasi-totalitarian dystopia does indeed feel like a compelling vision of a future dominated by "resource shortages and overpopulation"

Truly, I don't know where you're getting this.

A endorse what Consumatopia says, and I don't understand what you have against that movie. It is basically a conservative and Christian movie. Maybe it isn't as explicitly so as the book, which I haven't read, but I think you're missing the entire point of it.

Posted by Brendan | May 20, 2008 11:09 AM

In fairness, Brendan, I had a similar reaction to Chris Orr's review in TNR (don't feel like trying to hunt it down in their permanently borked archives). But he explained in comments there that in the book, childlessness was a constant theme on almost every page.

Now, I think that the movie was a gripping, thought-provoking portrait of, as LaFollette Progressive puts it, a society "overwhelmed by nihilism and a shortage of hope and human decency." But, I think that Ross is right (apparently, as I haven't read it either) that the movie dropped something that was important in the book. Also, I think he's right on the economics.

None of that means that it isn't a successful movie. Really, I'm glad that I didn't read the book, because I could enjoy the movie for what it was.

Posted by Elvis Elvisberg | May 20, 2008 11:21 AM

WTF, this was supposed to be a post about the seriousness of climate change, surely.

Posted by Bill | May 20, 2008 12:03 PM

Ross has a very good point. Much as I admire CoM as a cinematic exercise, it is fundamentally incoherent. What it depicts extremely skillfully and convincingly is the type of world that results from the type of course that we're on -- one involving struggles for resources, micro and macro, that make for more wars, mroe tribalism, more xenophobia, etc. But that vision is at war the film's actual premise, which is that the nub of the crisis is the 20-year-long spate of human infertility. Now, that may well come with all sorts of pathologies of its own, but I think it's a safe hazard that those pathologies probably won't involve the kind of hyper-militarized anti-immigration xenophobia depicted in the film. In such a world, there would be a global labor shortage (much like what followed the black death) that would rather encourage just the opposite.

Posted by Sebastian Dangerfield | May 20, 2008 12:06 PM

Haven't read the book, which I gather is rather different, but I think demanding that the film describe the consequences of an impossible catastrophe in a socioeconomically "realistice" manner is off-base. The filmmakers are not running a controlled experiment here. Inferility in the movie is symbolic for a lack of hope, patience, and humanity in modern society, and beautifully deployed at that. As has been pointed out above, without a future, the eschaton imminent, all that matters is glory and vindication in the here and now, the race to put your own stamp on the end of the world. We see this competition to define the end of the world in the revolutinaries, in the xenophobic gov't which carpet-bombs the refugee coast, the glimpsed armageddeon enthisiasts praying in yellow slickers in London, the perservationist perparing a pharonic tomb for artistic treasures. This is why Michael Caine, an old hippie content to see out the end caring for his wife and enjoying weedy good-fellowship with his friends, and who dies refusing to betray his friend to an apocalyptic scheme, is the most heroic character in the film. The movie is conservative in the small-c, conservationist sense which has little to do with modern Conservatism, celebrating small scale humanity and community in the face of man-made catastrophe.

Posted by Justin K. | May 20, 2008 12:36 PM

I struggled over CoM for a long time, and then one day the truth appeared to me in a blaze. It's an action movie. It's a brilliantly made, wonderfully shot, deftly acted action movie, but at the end of the day it belongs alongside Die Hard and Predator rather than more serious films.

Once you have told yourself that, you are free to relax a bit and enjoy it.

Posted by Tim Dees | May 20, 2008 12:42 PM

Re: So even though their population is declining, Britain goes to extreme lengths to keep out immigrants and foreigners.

Conversely, it seems to me that many people would respond to a future of overpopulation and resource shortages by having _more_ children. The idea being that if the world's carrying capacity is being exceeded and there is going to be a massive population crash, you would want to have as many children as possible in hopes that one would survive the coming apocalypse, and ensure the survival of your line. In the aggregate of course this sort of behavior would be disastrous (see 'tragedy of the unregulated commons') but on an individual level it makes perfect sense, and in such circumstances I would at least be _tempted_ to respond in the same way, although I can recognize it would be wrong to do so.

Posted by Hector | May 20, 2008 1:41 PM

Tim - it's much more than an action movie. It is potentially the first competent example of action-noir. The noir might not be as visible because that genre gets associated with certain accidentals like stylistic camera angles and use of shadows, and dialogue and untidy conclusions. But noir really seems to be about the narrative being not only observed but seemingly altered by the viewer's act of viewing (represented by the camera eye), and so the characters are at the mercy of each twist and turn. Things are arranged that comport with the viewer, but are strange coincidental events for the characters. Children of Men has this and yet it is packaged as an action-chase movie.

j

Posted by Joe Brancaleone | May 20, 2008 1:42 PM

It's amusing that the distopian futures were once the exclusive playground of the religious. Now it appears that science wants in.

When science lead the pack with predictions of flying cars and protein pills, we all thought progress would heal our ills. Now that we all see the truth (progress *bad*, hemp *good*), we see our ability to invent and transform our environment as a negative, not as beneficial trait.

Truth is, whatever we do or don't do to the world, we'll survive is some fashion - and the Earth will "heal". Just like it did when there were massive die-offs that we somehow didn't cause. Like the end of the Cretatious period.

This doesn't mean we keep driving SUVs and start barbequing baby seals - however it does put this end of days porn in something of a better focus.

Posted by Moose | May 20, 2008 1:58 PM

Well, Cuaron fans will always have his masterpiece, Y Tu Mama Tambien.

Posted by Dilan Esper | May 20, 2008 1:58 PM

It's amusing that the dystopian futures were once the exclusive playground of the religious. Now it appears that science wants in.

When science lead the pack with predictions of flying cars and protein pills, we all thought progress would heal our ills. Now that we all see the truth (progress *bad*, hemp *good*), we see our ability to invent and transform our environment as a negative, not as beneficial trait.

Truth is, whatever we do or don't do to the world, we'll survive is some fashion - and the Earth will "heal". Just like it did when there were massive die-offs that we somehow didn't cause. Like the end of the Cretaceous period.

This doesn't mean we keep driving SUVs and start barbequing baby seals - however it does put this end of days porn in something of a better focus.

Posted by Moose | May 20, 2008 2:00 PM

It's amusing that the dystopian futures were once the exclusive playground of the religious. Now it appears that science wants in.

When science lead the pack with predictions of flying cars and protein pills, we all thought progress would heal our ills. Now that we all see the truth (progress *bad*, hemp *good*), we see our ability to invent and transform our environment as a negative, not as beneficial trait.

Truth is, whatever we do or don't do to the world, we'll survive is some fashion - and the Earth will "heal". Just like it did when there were massive die-offs that we somehow didn't cause. Like the end of the Cretaceous period.

This doesn't mean we keep driving SUVs and start barbequing baby seals - however it does put this end of days porn in something of a better focus.

Posted by Moose | May 20, 2008 2:01 PM

In such a world, there would be a global labor shortage (much like what followed the black death) that would rather encourage just the opposite.

Actually, given that the youngest humans would have just entered the workforce, there would be a tremendous labor surplus from all the unemployed teachers and caretakers and full-time parents looking for work. So xenophobia actually makes economic sense--the reason the refugees are entering Britain is to escape disorder, the reason Britain keeps them out is to keep out their dirt, disease, and disorder. There's a shortage of social capital, not a shortage of land.

Not that I'd agree labor shortages ever seem to dispel xenophobia in the real world, but in any event there was no labor shortage in the film.

But yeah, it's true that economics by itself would not compel the sort of crisis seen in the film. The global crisis is a social crisis caused by the panic of a childless world, not at all Malthusian. (The film shows plenty of fertile countryside and woods).

Of course there is all kinds of stuff from the book that got left out of the film--not for time constraints, but because the themes of the two works are different even though they discuss the same subject. I haven't read the book, so I can't rule out the possibility that the book is better. But I can rule out the possibility that the movie is incoherent.

Posted by Consumatopia | May 20, 2008 2:57 PM

It's a stupid, stupid movie, the "Day After Tomorrow" with better tracking shots.

Posted by Steve Sailer | May 20, 2008 9:55 PM

The funny thing is that they would have been better off without even the name "Children of Men," which helped sink the movie at the box office because it sounded like it was about gay marriage, like "Yours, Mine, and Ours" with two gay guys. So, they should have just ditched the whole idea of adapting "Children of Men." Granted, the book has an interesting premise, but it turns out to be, inevitably, very unsexy -- the whole world is getting old and staid.

The studio should have just hired some hack to make up a plot about _too much_ fertility and let Cuaron make the movie he wanted to make about how we shouldn't be mean to illegal immigrants.

Posted by Steve Sailer | May 21, 2008 7:08 AM

It's possible to have a work of art that fairly describes both the unfathomable spiritual value of childbearing and also does justice to the threat of overpopulation. I would recommend 'The Sparrow' and its sequel 'Children of God' to any of you guys, great book. The book is set in the near future on a greatly overpopulated earth (and involves another world as well) but is very favorable towards the idea of procreation (and at the same time has a pretty jaundiced and bitter view of sexuality).

Posted by Hector | May 21, 2008 8:35 AM

Steve, I can't say I'm surprised that you didn't enjoy a movie that gives the viewer a first-person perspective within a refugee camp. Not to mention that the film was sorely lacking in ethnic stereotype verisimilitude.

Posted by LaFollette Progressive | May 21, 2008 10:43 AM