Climate change allegory.
Children of Men is
Alfonso Cuarón’s adaptation of P.D. James’s dystopian novel,
The
Children of Men.
Cuarón was
initially uninterested in the project, which he described as “a science-fiction
thing about upper classes in a fascist country”, and his adaptation replaces
James’s Christian themes with a rich and rewarding exploration of the
compatibility of the free market and authoritarian nationalism. The novel was
published in 1992 and set in 2021, the film released in 2006 and set in 2027,
and both narratives take place in England during an extended global pandemic of
human infertility. The film was a critical success and commercial failure (the
latter relatively minor, recouping 93% of its budget at the box office). Its critical
and cult following rose steadily over the next decade and a half, reaching a wider
audience with the coincidence of the novel’s setting and the COVID-19 pandemic.
The late music critic Mark Fisher opened his 2009 bestseller,
Capitalist
Realism: Is There No Alternative, with a discussion of the film’s
representation of a dystopia unique to late capitalism, in which “internment
camps and franchise coffee bars co-exist” without contradiction. As we approach
2027, the UK is increasingly resembling Cuarón’s depiction, led by a
self-selected elite that seems to delight in cruel and unusual punishments of
the poor and displaced as much as it delights in exploiting its public service
for financial reward. Praiseworthy though this prescience is, the film’s
contemporary value lies elsewhere.
As Fisher notes, Children of Men is not simply what
Amitav Ghosh would later call disaster fiction set in the future in The
Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable. The film is neither
about adapting to post-apocalyptic conditions nor about anticipating the
apocalypse to come. The apocalypse is, rather, already in progress, ‘being
lived through’. Creating a compelling and convincing narrative that is neither
pre- nor post-apocalyptic is notoriously difficult, challenging enough in a
novel or television series but even less likely to be achieved in a two-hour
feature film (Children of Men is only 100 minutes from opening to
closing credits). Octavia Butler is one of the few narrative artists to
succeed, with her peerless 1993 novel, Parable of the Sower. For all
Butler’s literal genius (she was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 1995), she
was unable to continue as successfully in the sequel, Parable of the Talents,
and unable to complete the trilogy with Parable of the Trickster, which
was unfinished at the time of her death in 2006. Parable of the Talents relies
on a conspicuously artificial compression of several decades for credible
closure and Butler’s multiple attempts at writing Parable of the Trickster
never reached more than fifty pages. Cuarón’s success is akin to Parable of
the Sower and his mastery of the multiple temporalities of cinema is
exemplary, perhaps even unique.
The fertility crisis in the film is approaching its second
decade and the global response has been economic and political collapse, which
have only been averted in the UK by the election of an authoritarian government
and the establishment of a police state. Refugees are detained on site in streetside
cages and transported to sprawling concentration camps like Bexhill-on-Sea,
where they are largely left to their own devices. The police have been
militarised, a new paramilitary force created, and the Armed Forces placed on internal
security duties, providing three overlapping levels of counter-terror and
social control. The narrative initially seems to deploy the mythic mode of
storytelling characteristic of Hollywood, proceeding from an inciting incident
through an initial objective, watershed, and nadir to an unpredictable but
inevitable zenith. In retrospect, Cuarón both deploys and subverts the
archetype of the hero’s journey, exploiting it to prioritise a specific
engagement with the apocalypse that I cannot reveal without spoiling the film’s
final few minutes. That hero is Theo (played by Clive Owen), a former activist
who is called to action when his estranged wife, Julian (played by Julianne
Moore), recruits him to the Fishes, a resistance movement led by Luke (played
by Chiwetel Ejiofor). Theo’s mission is to escort a young refugee, Kee (played
by Clare-Hope Ashitey), to the south coast, where she will be picked up by a
mysterious international organisation known only as the Human Project. Theo has
become a cynical alcoholic since his split from Julian, but remains useful to
the Fishes because his family connections are sufficient to secure transit
papers for himself and Kee. Theo acquires the papers, meets Kee, and then discovers
that she is pregnant, about to give birth to the first human baby in eighteen years.
The watershed is his decision to complete the mission, in spite of the exponentially
increased risk, Julian’s death, and betrayal by Luke.
Children of Men’s style is as nuanced as its form and
its cinematography and mise-en-scène are routinely praised by critics
and theorists. With respect to the former, philosopher Slavoj Zižek has analysed
the film’s apparently inexhaustible visual density, the totality of a world
represented with meticulous attention to detail in every aspect, which is both
a reflection and critique of the post-9/11 culture of control. With the respect
to the former, the narrative is threaded between two magnificent long takes, one
of 247 seconds and the other of 379 seconds. The first, which takes place
approximately a quarter of the way through, depicts a car chase in which Luke
tries to save Theo and Julian from homicidal bikers. The second, which takes
place approximately three-quarters of the way through, depicts Theo’s attempt
to rescue Kee when Bexhill-on-Sea erupts into a tripartite battle among Islamist
revolutionaries, a Romani militia, and the British Army. Together, the two
takes constitute a seamless combination of film style and film form, which are
deliberately and brilliantly understated to produce a very familiar – and very
British – dystopia. The understatement also facilitates the integration of the
mythic with the everyday (to which I shall return below): Children of Men
is about both ordinary people and the end of the world.
Cuarón’s
reproduction of the lived experience of an apocalypse-in-progress is the film’s
greatest achievement. But if it is to be anything other than a purely aesthetic
accomplishment, then it must matter in some way and Children of Men’s extra-aesthetic values are not immediately obvious. In A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Towards a
History of the Vanishing Present, which was published in 1999, literary
critic Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak argues for the ethical and political value of
what she refers to as the literary imagination. She focuses on language,
reading and literature, but her thesis can be extrapolated from the literary
mode of representation to hybrid modes of representation that combine the
linguistic with the pictorial, such as cinema. The literary imagination frees
the reader from the constraints of truth without severing the text from the
world, which is why one is moved by a literary text without believing in it. As
such, the literary imagination is a paradigm for value without a commitment to
truth and trains one to reconsider, reappraise, and reconceptualise social
reality as socially constructed rather than naturally extant. Drawing on a
tradition that began in the Romantic era, Spivak calls this training aesthetic
education, demonstrates how it transforms the individual by indirect, implicit and figurative means, and concludes that it is “an excellent instrument for a
slow transformation of the mind”. The transformation is achieved by a detranscendentalisation
of elitism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, and other forms of oppression that
exposes them as political and plastic and thus susceptible to being dismantled as
part of the reconstruction of a more just and sustainable social reality.
The experience of watching Children of Men is the
experience of living through the late capitalist apocalypse with Theo, Julian and Kee and recognising that the sequence of events narrated are both fictional
and relevant to our own lives. Returning to Fisher (not to be confused with the
fictional Fishes), the particular and peculiar relation between the
reality of the film and the reality of the world in which we watch the film is
the shared experience of what sociologist Jason Moore refers to as the
Capitalocene in Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation
of Capital. The Capitalocene is the geological epoch during which
capitalism has had a significant impact on the Earth’s ecosystems and climate.
Capitalist world-ecology began in 1450, drove climate change for over five centuries,
and is currently self-destructing in consequence of the copious amounts of
waste it generates. Children of Men detranscendentalises the
Capitalocene in the way Fisher suggests, by dramatising, exaggerating and
anticipating the epoch’s final decades. The relevance of the film’s reality to
our own is all too easy to identify – it is what lies ahead in a few decades or
in a few years, during another global pandemic, one far more destructive than
COVID-19. Sadly, this world is much easier to identify in 2023 than it was in
2006, which was after 9/11 but before the Great Recession. The crucial point,
however, is that we are already living in and through this more destructive
pandemic and the relations among our reality, the film’s reality, and the Capitalocene
are articulated by the figurative element in Spivak’s aesthetic education.
The setting of Children of Men is an extended fertility crisis at the literal level of narrative
meaning and a foreclosure of human futures that represents climate change at
the symbolic level of narrative meaning. The fictional fertility crisis is the
real climate crisis: both will destroy the human species if they are not
averted or ameliorated; both occur across rather than within generations; and
both create contemporaneous economic, social, and political crises. They are
also both turning points in the web of life, the response of an overpopulated
and exhausted planet to the numbers of people it is required to sustain and –
much more importantly – the concurrent and exponential increase in resource
consumption. In the fiction, this response is human infertility, which will
reduce consumption by reducing the population. In reality, this response is
climate change, which Moore describes as capital being forced to internalise the
cost of its own waste, which is in turn the beginning of the end of the
Capitalocene. The significance of this symbolism to the narrative’s thematic
content means that Children of Men is best understood as an allegory. Traditionally,
allegories took religion as their subject, integrating the real, material, and
everyday with the figural, spiritual, and divine, which recalls the centrality
of Christianity to James’s original novel and the way in which Cuarón combines
formal and stylistic devices to portray the everyday experience of the
apocalypse-in-progress. Allegories do not impose a single or even twofold meaning
on a narrative, but function so as to reveal a structure of multiple and intersecting
representational and extra-representational levels of meaning. They are, in
consequence, ideal vehicles for the detranscendentalisation of the complexities
of the late Capitalocene, in which multiple crises combine to exacerbate
multiple inequalities and multiple injustices. All of which is to say, I cannot
recommend this film enough. If nothing else, it helps us make sense of the
complicated, confusing, and contradictory world in which we find ourselves in
the first quarter of the twenty-first century. As such, Children of Men
exemplifies the great writer Samuel Johnson’s criterion for poetry, that its
purpose is ‘to instruct by pleasing’: Cuarón has provided us with one of
the most pleasurable lessons we are ever likely to receive on one of the most unpleasant
subjects possible. *****
