Friday, January 12, 2007
Children of Men
For no reason at all, I imagined this film to resemble Michael Haneke's Time of the Wolf: subtle, disturbing, irresolved and quietly intense. It was instead more of a big-budget action movie whose art director consulted the dystopian literary canon for wisps of indie credibility. That probably sounds very disparaging, but this film was closer to that hot mess, V for Vendettathan I'd hoped.
All the same, a lot of the detail was striking. Beginning with the premise, two decades of infertility coinciding with and contributing to nuclear war, the permanent suspension of civil liberties (oh no), etc, is novel. I liked the lack of an explanation, although that did not imply a lack of exposition: characters swap sob-stories about when they first realized the world was going to hell, and the yellowed headlines papering a terrorist cell's hideout, while a nice visual, were too melancholic and backward-looking to be altogether believable. In other words, this movie succumbed to the near-universal affliction among dystopias, which is for characters rehash conversations and events that would have become, by the time of the movie according to the narrative's own chronology, ancient history. (New Yorkers just don't talk about Sept. 11 all the time). But that's just Hollywood's heavy hand, broadening the appeal.
Back to the good things. The symbol of the crown, so anachronistic and fainly embarrassing to many Brits, gets a steely update and serves as the focal point for the UK's self-hagiographic survival skills. Surveillance cameras along back-country roads are hot shit (as it were). The Ark of the Arts--I don't know; kind of ridiculous (although the truly inexplicable inclusion of an injured, possibly psychologically scarred boy playing a video game with wires under his fingernails is awesome). My favorite image was the sight (through a car window!) of a marching band and exotic animals on some sort of royal parade ground--it's crypto-imperialist, grotesque and somehow fascist, but without the obviousness of, say, "Big Brother is Watching You." Rampant toxic waste doesn't really make sense, but it was gross--as were fields of dead animals and people, burning--the spiritual pollution of the beloved English countryside.
Mass deportations of illegal immigrants don't really hold up, either (Europe's low birth rates already force it to permit hundreds of thousands of foreign workers each year), but that's missing the point. The point--emphasized by radio deejay chatter, character backstories and lots of other details--is that the industrialized west may have already hit a point where a precipitating crisis (be it total infertility or anything else) will necessarily trigger a cascading series of actions and reactions leading only to a brutal and aesthetically hideous police state that dominates the media by fear and executes patently absurd policies. What stupider way to combat depopulation than by launching into xenophobic overdrive?
Along with V for Vendetta and 28 Days Later, there's a common theme of British anxiety in the age of terrorism or even just globalization. Always an island of relative stability, never been invaded in almost a thousand years, usually on the winning side of wars, a ghost of its former imperial self, a relatively tiny place that nonetheless gave birth to the world's lingua franca--still there's a streak of paranoia, over infection by disease (see Mary Shelley's The Last Man, or the laws quarantining all pets for six months before entry, to keep the UK free of rabies) or being entrapped by a futuristic fascism enforced by the isolation of being borderless and off to one side of Europe. A totalitarian government that can seal everyone in and manipulate the media to portray the rest of the world as having fallen into chaos is a fear peculiarly strong in Britain, judging by three recent post-apocalyptic films.
****
All the same, a lot of the detail was striking. Beginning with the premise, two decades of infertility coinciding with and contributing to nuclear war, the permanent suspension of civil liberties (oh no), etc, is novel. I liked the lack of an explanation, although that did not imply a lack of exposition: characters swap sob-stories about when they first realized the world was going to hell, and the yellowed headlines papering a terrorist cell's hideout, while a nice visual, were too melancholic and backward-looking to be altogether believable. In other words, this movie succumbed to the near-universal affliction among dystopias, which is for characters rehash conversations and events that would have become, by the time of the movie according to the narrative's own chronology, ancient history. (New Yorkers just don't talk about Sept. 11 all the time). But that's just Hollywood's heavy hand, broadening the appeal.
Back to the good things. The symbol of the crown, so anachronistic and fainly embarrassing to many Brits, gets a steely update and serves as the focal point for the UK's self-hagiographic survival skills. Surveillance cameras along back-country roads are hot shit (as it were). The Ark of the Arts--I don't know; kind of ridiculous (although the truly inexplicable inclusion of an injured, possibly psychologically scarred boy playing a video game with wires under his fingernails is awesome). My favorite image was the sight (through a car window!) of a marching band and exotic animals on some sort of royal parade ground--it's crypto-imperialist, grotesque and somehow fascist, but without the obviousness of, say, "Big Brother is Watching You." Rampant toxic waste doesn't really make sense, but it was gross--as were fields of dead animals and people, burning--the spiritual pollution of the beloved English countryside.
Mass deportations of illegal immigrants don't really hold up, either (Europe's low birth rates already force it to permit hundreds of thousands of foreign workers each year), but that's missing the point. The point--emphasized by radio deejay chatter, character backstories and lots of other details--is that the industrialized west may have already hit a point where a precipitating crisis (be it total infertility or anything else) will necessarily trigger a cascading series of actions and reactions leading only to a brutal and aesthetically hideous police state that dominates the media by fear and executes patently absurd policies. What stupider way to combat depopulation than by launching into xenophobic overdrive?
Along with V for Vendetta and 28 Days Later, there's a common theme of British anxiety in the age of terrorism or even just globalization. Always an island of relative stability, never been invaded in almost a thousand years, usually on the winning side of wars, a ghost of its former imperial self, a relatively tiny place that nonetheless gave birth to the world's lingua franca--still there's a streak of paranoia, over infection by disease (see Mary Shelley's The Last Man, or the laws quarantining all pets for six months before entry, to keep the UK free of rabies) or being entrapped by a futuristic fascism enforced by the isolation of being borderless and off to one side of Europe. A totalitarian government that can seal everyone in and manipulate the media to portray the rest of the world as having fallen into chaos is a fear peculiarly strong in Britain, judging by three recent post-apocalyptic films.
****
