Mediacology

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It’s about time the pop culture produced a decent dystopic cult movie. Enter Children of Men, directed by Mexican filmmaker Alfonso Cuaron (Y tu mama tambien, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban), a post-Baghdad, Road Warrior-type movie sans the cheesy trappings of antiseptic sci-fi. Add one part Black Hawk Down, two parts Blade Runner, one part Sarajevo, stir, and you get a gritty, politically conscious thriller capturing the ennui of our times. Just as Casino Royale eschews the usual Bond clichés for a more neo-realist, noire vision of realpolitik, Children of Men disposes the neon and shoulder pads for sour-reeking pollution, mob rule, torture-for-democracy, dust-covered video monitors, and the post-apocalyptic ambience of globalization on the brink of losing-it-badly. Not too far off really, and if you look closely, much of the background is a stand-in for daily reality that most immigrants and residents of third-world slums already grapple with.

The story celebrates life amidst so much death, but you can barely avoid mortality’s stench. The moving moments offer hope for the alternate reality creeping up on our horizon line. Coming from Mexico, I suspect that Cuaron has true instincts for the reality of future megalopolises, and a great suspicion of the cruel combination of fear, power and racism. Like all sci-fi, Children of Men is as much about the future as it is about the present.

For supplemental reading, I recommend a few pieces by people much smarter than me. I really enjoyed Sheerly Avni’s piece, “‘Children of Men’: Universal’s Orphaned Masterpiece,” which goes into how Universal is doing everything it can to bury this decidedly anti-Bush/Blair/Neo-Con movie. Also, at the Children of Men Web site, there is some really interesting commentary from chic philosopher, Slavoj Zizek. I quote it entirely here:

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Slavoj Zizek’s Transcript:

For me, Children of Men is a model of a kind of materialist subversion of a reactionary classic, because the novel is obviously a spiritualist Christian parable of resuscitation, bringing new life and so on. The novel ends with baptizing. It’s clear Christian parable. The film is a model of how you can take a reactionary text, change some details here and there and you get a totally, a totally different story. I would say that it’s a realist film, but in what sense? Hegel in his esthetics says that a good portrayal looks more like the person who is portrayed than the person itself. A good portrayal is more you than you are yourself. And I think this is what the film does with our reality. The changes that the film introduces do not point toward alternate reality, they simply make reality more what it already is. I think this is the true vocation of science fiction. Science fiction realism introduces a change that makes us see better. The nightmare that we are expecting is here.

I think that people who notice that Children of Men is in a strange way a remake of Y Tu Mama Tambien have a point. What attracted me immensely to Cuaron’s first international breakthrough in Y Tu Mama Tambien is this wonderful tension between figure foreground and background. That is to say if you look at the film superficially, in foreground it’s just a sexual adventure with a desperate ending. The woman has cancer and so on. But then you notice how the texture of the film is totally permeated with signs of social oppression. Like you learn that the young boy’s family had to escape to United States because they were involved in some big corruption in Mexico. Then you learn that they are friends of the president. Then remember when they travel along the roads of Mexico you always see strange things like police beating some group of people, beggars and so on. And I think this is a unique formula. I admire it so much. The true focus of the film is there in the background. And it’s critical not to lose that background, but at the same time it’s crucial to leave it as a background. Sometimes you can see the oppressive social dimensions only if it remains in the background. I think that is one feature that connects Cuaron with Raymond Chandler, if good reviewers detect it. Chandler offers a unique portrayal of silent despair decadence, desperate lost lives of California in the 40’s, 50’s and so on, but it’s filtered through the narrative of detective story. Sometimes you get this social background of despair only if it’s filtered through an apparently amusing story. And it is clear that the truly most radical impact of global capitalism is not just this immigration immobility but it’s that in a way we lack this basic world view. A meaningful experience of totality. Which is why we all talk about culture because that culture has lost its substantial character.

So this I think is a true despair of the film. It’s not so much infertility. I think it’s problematic to focus on infertility and then do the obvious spiritualist trick and say ‘oh but you know this biological infertility is really a metaphor for spiritual infertility’ or whatever. I think that we should avoid this cheap direct spiritualist reading of the film. I think that the true infertility is the very lack of meaningful historical experience. It’s a society of pure meaningless hedonism. Today, ideology is no longer big causes such as socialism, equality, justice, democracy. The basic injunction is ‘have a good time’ or to put it in more spiritualist terms ‘realize yourself’. This is why I think Dalai Lama is such a big hit. He preaches enlightened Hollywood egotism; be happy, realize your potentials and so on and so on. And this is our despair today. I think that this film gives the best diagnosis of the ideological despair of late capitalism. Of a society without history, or, to use another political term, bio politics. And my god, this film literally is about bio politics. The basic problem in this society as depicted in the film is literally bio politics: how to generate, regulate life. But again, I think the crucial point is that this obvious fact shouldn’t deceive us. The true despair is precisely that; that all historical acts disappear. Like all those classical statues are there, but they are deprived of a world. They are totally meaningless, because what does it mean to have a statue of Michelangelo? It only works if is signals a certain world. And when this world is lacking, it’s nothing. It all depends on whether we have a world. Do we have some horizon that makes it meaningful? It is against this background I think that the film approaches the topic of immigration and so on.