Children of Men | review by Rafe McGregor

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. *****