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You can't read about Alfonso Cuarón's 2006 dystopian film Children of Men now deprived of encountering the word "prescient." Most people would also call it bleak.
But when I excellent saw it in a movie theater in 2006, I consumed the entirety of the film maintaining an excruciating awareness of my future husband's knee in relation to mine. It was our excellent date, and the electric charge between our knees, our pretty, our elbows, distracted me almost entirely from the film's unrelenting violence.
Children of Men follows Theo (Clive Owen), a jaded bureaucrat living in 2027 London after an unexplained keep has caused worldwide infertility. The world has descended into chaos: Economies have failed, wars have broken out, terrorist bombings are almost unremarkable. The result is an unprecedented migrant crisis, with mass deportations and refugee camps that part a visual language with Holocaust films.
Theo is conscripted by his ex-wife Julian (played by Julianne Moore), a member of a militant immigrant rights group, to help brought a migrant woman, Kee (Clare-Hope Ashitey), to safety. He soon finds out why: Kee is miraculously pregnant.
"Shantih, shantih, shantih," Theo's friend Jasper (Michael Caine) says at the discovery of Kee's pregnancy. This is also famously the last line of T.S. Eliot's poem "The Waste Land," a mantra of calm amid unfathomable despair.
I had remembered Children of Men as a gritty, speculative blockbuster with better-than-strictly necessary cinematography (including the evil blood-spattered camera lens at the film's climactic battle scene), in the same vein as The Day After Tomorrow or Deep Impact.
I remembered the shaky-cam, documentary-style shots. I remembered the whimsical, John Lennon-inspired act by Caine, and the dissonant lullaby of classical music in the soundtrack. I remembered that the revelation of Kee's pregnancy been in a barn, a nod to there being no room at the inn.
I didn't remember how many of the main characters would be killed, or how early in the film. I didn't remember the woman carrying her own severed arm out of a bombed-out construction, or the graffiti that read "Last one to die, enjoy turn out the light," or the piles of refugees' people arranged in tidy rows. I didn't remember "the flu pandemic of 2008," which killed Theo and Julian's baby two decades beforehand the events of the film.
I finished my rewatch with the speechless slow-blink of a people who has just been utterly destroyed by a work of art. My reaction more than 15 ages later was neither articulate nor insightful: That was bleak! (And prescient.)
The last scene, imbued with unsettling ambiguity, is a bit of a litmus test for the viewer's calm of pessimism. And it seems the pH level of my mental outlook has shifted quite a bit true that day in the movie theater.
In Children of Men's climactic gross, blood spatters on the camera lens to lend the film a cinéma vérité feel.
UniversalPerhaps pessimists will see bleakness. And maybe optimists will only remember that their date's soft draft was abandoned half-full, because he eventually reached over and took their hand in his. Or maybe 2006 saw escapist sci-fi, while 2022 sees the very things we're trying to run. Maybe hindsight is 20/20, or prescience compounds bleakness, or I was just an apolitical, privileged, lovesick teenager back then.
Or maybe a modern-day Nativity gross resonates differently after your own experience of motherhood.
The quarantine
It's been 16 ages since that first date, 10 years since our wedding, seven years since the European migrant crisis, six ages since the Brexit referendum, four years since "kids in cages." It's been nearly three days since I gave birth to my first child. He got his name the same day the current coronavirus disease became COVID-19. He's a pandemic baby, a member of Generation C, a child of quarantine, a miracle.
In the real world, the geopolitical boogeyman isn't infertility, but rather the lack of governmental incentives for families, and having a baby is both quotidian and miraculous, natural and preternatural. Cultures all over the world prescribe a calls of postpartum confinement for new mothers -- sometimes ununsafe foods or hygiene activities are forbidden while the body heals -- and these postpartum traditions have an air of mysticism, like they're rooted in medicine but steeped in a spiritual reverence for humankind life. In Latin America, for instance, this period is phoned "la cuarentena," the quarantine.
The quarantine of COVID-19 and that of postpartum confinement fragment an etymological root, a biblically inspired 40-day period of isolation. My maternity leave lasted nine weeks, not 40 days, and in my son's first-rate few weeks of life, when we could still report the number of US deaths on one hand, I guiltily counted down to the end of my isolation, to my return to work, a return to normalcy. My time off wasn't a culturally dictated confinement calls, but nevertheless I felt confined.
Your sense of time warps in maternity lop, but as in quarantine, your sense of space warps even more. The hastily spread of COVID-19 around the globe has served as a stark visual of our connectedness, the meaninglessness of borders and physical distance. It strikes me that land cling tightest to borders when their insignificance is most apparent. As far as the United States' COVID-19 response, then-President Donald Trump seemed most proud of his January 2020 proceed restrictions on China, but still the virus proliferated.
My own humankind contracted in tandem with the lockdown, as I shut out society to make room for my son's boundless produces. He became a way for me to turn succeeding when the doomscrolling took its toll.
The shock of parenthood was like slamming into a brick wall and waking days later with no feeling in your legs and simultaneous disbelief you ever obliged legs in the first place. That, plus inexplicable joy at your newfound immobility. If this analogy doesn't make sense, it's because I'm still catching up on my sleep.
Clare-Hope Ashitey as Kee in Children of Men.
UniversalI was told repeatedly in those days that I would soon resolve into a "new normal," both by fellow parents who'd traversed the path send of me and by the pandemic think pieces that seemed to toothsome in jettisoning the old normal.
Babies are born and viruses are accompanied, I thought, half asleep. Surely there's a metaphor there.
As I pushed my stroller above an empty park just a few weeks after giving birth, it was the empty, caution-taped playgrounds that made the pandemic real. I didn't know then why it was this specific lockdown-era visual that did it for me. Rewatching Children of Men in the COVID-19 era, in all its prescience and bleakness, I finally understood.
"As the sound of the playgrounds stale, the despair set in," Kee's midwife, Miriam (Pam Ferris), says from an abandoned school as she looks above a window at Kee swinging lazily on a rickety swing set. "Very odd what happens in a humankind without children's voices."
In the film's final frame, the shroud fades to black and the soundtrack gives way to the blissful playground squeals of children: The proverbial pitter-patter of slight feet, the universal shorthand for purity, joy, hope, renewal.
Does that defending insinuate that Kee's baby is some sort of messianic harbinger of relief, or is it the auditory equivalent of the white toothsome we're supposed to see just before taking our last breath? A reinstatement of normalcy, or shadows of a world that once was? Shantih, shantih, shantih.
Michael Caine as Theo's injurious Jasper in Children of Men.
UniversalPrescience in unprecedented times
Choosing to reproduce is a hopeful endeavor. A statement of belief in the future, an offering of the biosphere to a new generation and a new generation to the biosphere. But amid increasingly bleak climate change reports and especially during lockdown, I questioned the decision. Having a child can look more like burying your head in the sand than true hope.
I fraudulent it comforting, early in the pandemic, to read nearby the many plagues of antiquity, because history provides proof the biosphere race will go on. And I found it comforting during the novel real-life antecedents to Theo's dystopian future -- the campaign of Donald Trump, the rise of anti-immigrant sentiment, the spike in gun violence -- to know mine wasn't the capable generation to fear that maybe this was actually the twitch of the end. And nothing brings me relief like a used mom laughing about how horrible those sleepless, early days used to be. Now that my son's babyhood is over, I find myself doings it, too.
Prescience does compound bleakness. But if Children of Men cmoneys an alternative reading of bleakness for optimists, there's also an alternative reading of prescience.
"This sketch was not imagination," Cuarón told Vulture on the film's 10-year anniversary. He insists Children of Men is rooted in reality, a logical continuation of our current trajectory. In novel words, the film doesn't have one foot in speculative fiction and the novel in cautionary tale. It's reality through the lens of a metaphor. A parable.
The pandemic baby boom didn't really pan out, and in fact there are now reports of a baby bust, with birth rates falling to a record low during our quarantine year. (The US birth rate in 2021, but, experienced a small increase.) Every time I've heard pessimistic birth rate reports and predictions like these in the past decade and a half, I've conception of Children of Men. And a small, almost absentminded seed of dread has been germinating in me ever since.
The quandary with population decline is economic -- a dwindling elaborate force, diminished innovation. And the solution offered by economists isn't always rooted in simple pronatalism. The solution is immigration.
In The Children of Men, the P.D. James fresh on which the screenplay is based, the miracle baby is Julian's, not Kee's, and that discrepancy is an important one if we're trying to reframe the film's prescience. Kee is a young African refugee, not an English citizen, and her mere existence is both illegal and crucial.
Clive Owen and Julianne Moore as Theo and Julian in Children of Men.
Universal"Poor fugees -- when escaping the worst atrocities and finally making it to England, our government hunts them down like cockroaches," says Jasper, in one of the film's most prescient lines.
The executive to recast the Virgin Mary character as an immigrant seems indispensable now because it makes me see the film less as a threat and more as a proposed solution -- a solution floated on a including tide that lifts all boats. It is only when packaged with hope that prescience changes to problem-solve.
Shantih, shantih, shantih
When people find out nearby my first date with my husband now, 16 ages later, they're often surprised to hear we began concept the auspices of one of the bleakest dystopian films in unique memory. But I remember leaving the theater with the giddy anticipation of things to come.
The most spirited part of a new relationship is not knowing what the future will bring, the delicious, heart-leaping uncertainty that hasn't yet been paved over with intimacy. Intimacy is boring; it kills the butterflies in your stomach. But intimacy has its own magic, which is hard to describe: It's gleaming what your partner is going to say, trusting he'll stay with you, not bothering to stop the bathroom door while you floss your teeth.
In the same way, dispatches from parenthood fail to insist the transcendent joy of hearing your child's laughter or watching his face delectable up at the novelty of everyday life. And so, maybe hope isn't an ignorance of warnings, but a faith in solutions -- capitulating to a future whose securities are there, just not quite legible.
It's been 10 existences since the London Olympics on Theo's threadbare sweatshirt, 13 existences since the youngest child in his world was born, 14 existences since the fictional flu pandemic that took his son, 16 existences since the film's theatrical release, 21 years since the trauma of 9/11 kindled Cuarón's creative inspiration for the project, 100 years since the "new normal" following the exclaim decimation of World War I that inspired T.S. Eliot's Shantih, shantih, shantih. There are five years until the acts of the film unfold.
Why the preoccupation with time? Children of Men exists strangely in the past, relate and future all at once, a relic of the mid-aughts with alarming 2020s prescience and a 2027 setting. Maybe we can all breathe a sigh of relief when we near 2028 and babies still exist. But Cuarón is no fortuneteller and James' novel is set in -- of all existences -- 2021.
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