Based on the similarly titled 1992 novel by famed mystery writer P.D. James, Children of Men is a combination postapocalyptic narrative and dystopian narrative, set in 2027 Britain. The “apocalypse” of the film involves the fact that no new baby has been born to the human race since 2009, apparently due to unexplained universal female infertility. As a result, the human race simply waits to age and die, with no hope for a next generation. Despair and suicide run rampant, while chaos reigns in most of the world. The Britain of the narrative seems to have maintained order better than has the rest of the world, but at the expense of a xenophobia that has seen the country close its borders and become a virtual police state, obsessed with keeping out illegal immigrants—which is the dystopian aspect of the film. When a young woman turns up pregnant, the film becomes a race to get her and the fetus to safety from the forces (both government and anti-government) that might seek to conscript the mother and baby for their own purposes. Civil servant Theo Faron (Clive Owen) ends up with the principal responsibility for getting the young woman out of a Britain that looks suspiciously like an extension of the Bush Administration’s Patriot Act–era United States (in power at the time the film was made). Brutal government discrimination against immigrants in the film is obviously meant to recall Nazi Germany, and the fact that it also recalls the early-twenty-first-century U.S. is one of the film’s central statements. The cynical Faron often seems ill-suited to the task of hero but has apparently succeeded by the end of the film in getting both mother and infant (born along the way) to safety. Indeed, a key element of the plot of Children of Men involves Faron’s evolution as a hero. The end, however, is left somewhat uncertain, as is the status of Faron, who has been shot and might be either dead or unconscious.
Children of Men offers no explanation of the cause for the universal loss of female fertility. Indeed, it is made clear that the cause is unknown. We also get few details about exactly how the cessation in childbirths actually proceeded, though one character who had been working as a midwife at the time notes that it began with a rising rate in miscarriages, until finally pregnancies ceased altogether. What we do know is that the last baby born alive was one Diego Ricardo, who, as the film begins, has just been murdered at the age of 18 years, 4 months, and 20 days. Ricardo, we are told, was born in 2009, and on-screen text informs us that the film begins on November 16, 2027, the day of his death. He was thus born on June 27, 2009. Assuming that his gestation went full-term, this would mean that conceptions ceased sometime around September 20, 2008.
One other bit of historical information we get is that Dylan, Theo’s young son, had died in 2008 as the victim of a global flu pandemic. It is known that some viral infections can cause infertility, so it seems natural to suspect that this particularly virulent flu might have been the source of the universal infertility, though there is no evidence in the film to support this possibility, other than the correspondence in dates. Still, in our own pandemic-era world, the possibility that a pandemic was the source of the infertility at the center of Children of Men is certainly intriguing.
Whatever the cause of the infertility, Children of Men suggeststhat this infertility deprived humans of the ability to look forward to the future was so dispiriting that human societies either collapsed or descended into tyranny. In this sense, the film can be effectively glossed by the work of the Marxist utopian theorist Ernst Bloch, who, in works such as the magisterial The Principle of Hope, argued for the importance of being able to envision and hope for a better future. By thinking the “not-yet,” argued Bloch throughout his work, people could potentially gain the ability, not only better to weather difficult situations, but also to make progress toward a better world. By demonstrating the dire consequences of losing the ability to imagine a better future, Children of Men would seem to stand as a strong argument in favor of Bloch’s thesis.
On the other hand, the infertility itself did not literally cause the dire social conditions we see in the film so much as it served as a catalyst that accelerated trends that were already underway, even before the infertility. As Theo tells his friend, the seasoned marijuana grower Jasper Palmer (Michael Caine), early in the film, “Even if they discovered the cure for infertility, it doesn’t matter. Too late. The world went to shit. You know what? It was too late before the infertility thing happened, for fuck’s sake.” Of course, Theo is particularly bitter and cynical, presumably because of the death of Dylan—which also apparently contributed to the breakup of his relationship with Julian Taylor (Julianne Moore), Dylan’s mother. But there is nothing in the film that disputes his diagnosis here, a diagnosis that contributes to the sense that the dystopian world portrayed in the film is really meant as a commentary on the present-day world in which the film was made.
Such, however, is generally the case with dystopian narratives. As I have pointed out elsewhere, “the principal technique of dystopian fiction is defamiliarization: by focusing their critiques of society on spatially or temporally distant settings, dystopian fictions provide fresh perspectives on problematic social and political practices that might otherwise be taken for granted or considered natural and inevitable” (Booker 19). In short, dystopian fiction relies on a particularly direct form of the “cognitive estrangement” that Darko Suvin long ago declared to be the central strategy of all science fiction. For Suvin, science fiction places readers or viewers in astrange world that is different from their own. By contemplating these differences as they negotiate a science fiction text, audiences at least potentially gain the ability to see their own world in new ways. For Suvin, this process has strong political implications, because these renewed perspectives help science fiction audiences to see that their world could be different than it is and that genuine change is possible.
Dystopian fiction, I would argue, is a particularly good illustration of Suvin’s concept because the worlds depicted in such fiction are almost always directly related to the worlds of the creators of such fiction, having changed through the extension of certain trends that were already identifiable in the world of the creator. That is especially the case with Children of Men, in which the oppressive, paranoid, xenophobic attitudes that drive government policy were so clearly conceived by the filmmakers as extensions of anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant attitudes that were prevalent in the Western world (especially in the United States) at the time the film was made. One can only speculate about whether the film is set in Britain in order not to alienate American audiences with a critique that might hit a bit too close to home.
Granted, the novel on which the film was based is also set in Britain, though the Britain of the novel is a much more conventional dystopia that focuses on oppressive domestic politics and not on the exclusion of immigrants. In fact, this Britain openly invites immigrants so that they can be exploited as a cheap labor force. The political focus of the film has been changed substantially to reflect the changes in the post-9/11 era of the War on Terror, changes that were, of course, more dramatic in the United States than anywhere else. In this way, incidentally, Children of Men resembles the near-contemporaneous V for Vendetta (2005), another dystopian film that is set in Britain and based on British source material (the 1982 graphic novel of the same title) but that changes the politics of the original in a way that many critics felt were designed to aim its dystopian critique more at the U.S. than at the U.K. In fact, the film version of V for Vendetta even directly attributes the dire social conditions in that film to the effects of “America’s wars.”[1]
The plot of Children of Men helps to hold together the film’s visual depiction of a future world in decay and on the brink of collapse, but itis definitely the visuals that lie at the center of the film. Through these visuals, director Alfonso Cuarón (with the aid of cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki) produces a seemingly extreme future world that is nevertheless disturbingly similar to our own. The grim texture of the future London society portrayed in Children of Men is conveyed via some specific information and dialogue, but it is mostly conveyed via action and images. For example, we can gauge the oppressive and xenophobic nature of the ruling regime through the numerous scenes in which police or soldiers are shown brutalizing civilians, especially immigrants who have made long, dangerous journeys to England in search of a better life only to be greeted with hostility and violence. We can also get an idea of the rapidly declining quality of life in London via the many scenes we see of decaying buildings, sidewalks stacked with bags of uncollected garbage, and streetside cages in which immigrants have been penned up like hogs about to be taken to slaughter.
In one quick sequence of only a few seconds, the film displays (without comment) puddles of polluted water on the ground, pipes emptying chemicals into those puddles, and a row of smokestacks spewing pollution into the air. This sequence thus illustrates the ability to deliver succinct visual messages that greatly supplement the main thematic material of the film. In particular, while environmental decay and climate change are not identified as central causes of the infertility crisis or the subsequent decline into despotism, the film is able subtly to associate these factors with a dark future—with clear implications for our own global predicament.
Meanwhile, the future world of Children of Men seems even grimmer because the underground organization known as the Fishes, the main source of resistance to the tyrannical government that we see in the film, may not be any more ethical or virtuous than the government itself. The film’s action begins as Theo leaves a coffee shop only seconds before a deadly bomb is detonated, demolishing the shop. The film eventually makes it clear that such bombings are routine events in this version of London, a situation that the government attributes to “terrorists” such as the Fishes, thus justifying their oppressive policies as necessary steps in the fight against terror. The Fishes, on the other hand, claim that regular bombings are actually being carried out by the government itself, precisely so that they can scare people into accepting their policies as necessary.
This latter view is endorsed early in the film by Jasper, and we at first have reason to believe that it might indeed be correct. By the end, however, we are unsure which atrocities might have been committed by the government and which by its opponents, who seem equally reprehensible. The government, after all, is consistently portrayed in the film as a sinister force that would clearly be capable of staging the bombings to further their own power. Indeed, it soon becomes clear that this government is so unscrupulous and untrustworthy that nothing they say can really be believed. By the end of the film it is unclear whether we can fully trust the picture of the world that is being conveyed by the government in a constant stream of pro-government and anti-immigrant propaganda. An ad running on a screen in a train in which Theo rides announces, “The world has collapsed. Only Britain soldiers on,” but the outcome of the film suggests at least the possibility that other enclaves of functioning civilization (perhaps superior to that in Britain) do still exist.
When we first encounter the Fishes in the film, we find that Julian is one of their members and that she is spearheading what appears to be an effort to get a young black immigrant woman, Kee (Clare-Hope Ashitey), safely out of Britain and into the hands of a mysterious (but presumably humanitarian) organization known as the “Human Project,” which is rumored to be working on an infertility cure and which is supposed to offer sanctuary to Kee. Soon, though, we learn that Kee is pregnant with the first baby in over eighteen years and that the Fishes plan to use her for their own purposes. Those purposes are never made entirely clear, but they apparently hope the existence of the baby will help to trigger a revolution. This society looks like it might be in need of a revolution, of course, but a revolution led by the Fishes seems undesirable, given that they ultimately murder Julian because they know she will not approve of their use of the baby. By this time, though, Julian has recruited Theo to help with Kee’s transit, a task he must now attempt to perform while evading both the government and the Fishes, meanwhile remaining unsure if the Human Project even exists.
The film from this point centers thematically on Kee and her baby, who emerge as the most important people in the world and as the hope for humanity’s future. The central character in terms of plot and point-of-view, though, is Theo, and his evolution in the course of the film from cynical civil servant to courageous and idealistic hero is a key to the success of the film. This aspect of the film again differs significantly from the source novel, in which Theo is a very different character, indeed. In the novel, he is an Oxford don and the cousin (and former advisor) of the dictatorial ruler of Britain. Ultimately, he kills that ruler and seems poised to replace him; meanwhile, the novel ends with Theo baptizing the newborn infant (born to Julian—the wife, not of Theo, but of the leader of the Fishes—in this version of the story).
By making Theo much more of an Everyman figure, the film makes him more relatable; at the same time, by making him a former activist who has become weary and cynical, then having him recover his idealism and courage, the film adds important elements of plot development that the novel lacks. Meanwhile, this ending baptism points toward the notion of Christianity as a key to recovery from the pessimism and despair that had reigned in England prior to the birth of the infant. The film drops this religious message, replacing it with a vague association between the newborn infant (whom Kee elects to name “Dylan” in honor of Theo’s son) and the infant Christ (even though the infant will turn out to be a girl). For example, when Theo first sees that Kee is pregnant, religious-sounding music sounds in the background as Theo exclaims, “Jesus Christ!”[2] Later, when he asks Kee about the father of the baby, she at first replies that she is a virgin, which of course makes Theo (and the audience) think of Christ, until she laughs and says that she has had so many partners that she has no idea who the father is. Little wonder, then, that multiple critics likened the journey of Theo and Kee to that of Joseph and Mary, as when Dana Stevens (noting that the film opened in America on Christmas day) called the film “a modern-day nativity story.”
It is not entirely clear what message this association between baby Dylan and Jesus Christ is supposed to deliver, other than perhaps identifying the baby as a potential savior of humanity. Of course, Children of Men disrupts the conventional form of the salvation narrative in a number of ways. That the baby is a girl makes her an unconventional Christ figure; that Kee is promiscuous (possibly a sex worker) makes her an unconventional Virgin Mary figure. And Theo, as an embittered alcoholic, at least starts out as a highly unconventional hero figure who succeeds only because he receives so much help from others. Such factors combine to undermine the typical patriarchal nature of salvation narratives, which are always in danger of sliding into fascist strongman politics.
In the final segment of the film, Theo and Kee make their way to a refugee camp, from which they plan to rendezvous with the Human Project by boat. The way refugees and illegal immigrants are rounded up and then shipped to such camps obviously recalls the concentration camps used by the German Nazis used to imprison (and ultimately execute) millions of Jews, gypsies, communists, and others deemed undesirable by the Nazi regime. Throwing the Nazis into the mix might seem to be an unnecessary complication, but it serves an important function. In particular, by making the practices of the film’s dystopian British regime reminiscent of both Patriot Act America and Nazi Germany, Children of Men subtly suggests parallels between the two, providing a warning that the War on Terror was moving America in a very bad direction that could end in fascism and genocide.
As the film proceeds, the hoped-for revolution might actually be underway as chaos erupts inside the camp. Government troops battle in the streets with the Fishes, a Muslim militia[3], and perhaps other groups as well. Granted, it is not clear that this revolution will succeed (or that it would even lead to improved conditions); after all, from what we see, the government forces do seem to have much more firepower as their tanks roll in. Two fighter bombers fly in as well, bombing the camp—though it is not entirely certain that these bombers represent the British military. It is possible that they represent some outside force, coming to the aid of the insurgents. In any case, the film ends on a hopeful note, even though Theo’s condition remains unclear. The boat that we are apparently meant to identify as the Human Project boat (whose name, Tomorrow, suggests hope for a better future) arrives to pick up Kee and Dylan. Then, as the film cuts to its end credits, we hear the sound of laughing, happy children in the background, seemingly implying that many more births will be forthcoming.
Despite seeming suspiciously similar to the dreaded “Hollywood ending,” the film’s conclusion points in a legitimate utopian direction, with the lingering uncertainties helping the ending to seem less contrived and more believable than it might otherwise have been. Theo’s evolution as a hero is part of the film’s utopian message as well, suggesting that people can change for the better. It is important, though, that Theo never comes off as a superhuman action hero, able to overcome all obstacles through virtue of his unique abilities. Instead, he is a rather ordinary man, which suggests that ordinary people can do great things. Perhaps most important of all are the fact that Theo needs help from so many other people in order to achieve his mission and the fact that the people who help him include people of multiple genders, races, and nationalities. The film thus eschews individualist, patriarchal, and nationalist solutions, in favor of collective, multi-racial, and internationalist action. As Mónica Martín puts it, the film’s positive turn can be seen as an example of “cinematic cosmopolitan utopianism” (57).
In terms of the film’s multi-racial and internationalist orientation, it is surely significant that Kee is a black refugee from Africa—as opposed to the mother figure in the novel, who is white and British. Among other things, one could take the choice of a refugee for this role as a reference to the fact that refugees and other immigrants have so often become productive citizens making important contributions in their destination countries. On the other hand, Kee’s race could be a bit problematic, given that there is a long legacy of racist stereotyping built around the notion that black women are hyper-fertile. Edna Bonhomme notes this legacy, citing a 1932 publication in the journal Birth Control Review, which claimed that “the present submerged condition of the Negro is due in large part to the high fertility of the race under disastrously adverse circumstances.” Moreover, Bonhomme goes on to note that this stereotype was still harmful to black women in 2020, when she was writing. “Disastrously adverse circumstances” would certainly seem to be the case in Kee’s world, so choosing to make this film’s mother figure a black woman is clearly in danger of falling into the trap of reinforcing this stereotype.
Meanwhile, there are also obvious problems with the way Kee is portrayed in the film. Formerly a lowly and despised refugee, she suddenly emerges as perhaps the most valuable individual in the world. But this new valuation of Kee occurs only because she has been able to get pregnant and give birth, which is problematic in several ways. First of all, it recalls the legacy of American slavery, in which women slaves were valued as much for the fact that they could give birth to more slaves as for their own work. Second, to place so much value on a woman strictly because of her ability to bear children invites feminist objections for obvious reasons, which have been explored in places such as Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985)[4]. Granted, the film involves an extreme situation in which the survival of the human race might be at stake, but the film’s decision to identify the infertility problem as a female malady wasn’t really necessary. Indeed, in James’ novel, it is men who are infertile, so that the birth of a baby after so much time indicates a special ability on the part of the father of the baby, not the mother[5].
It is also the case that, while the film leaves Kee’s ultimate fate unknown, it seems clear that any of the various groups competing for custody of her, including the Human Project, would put her to much the same use—producing as many babies as possible. Perhaps she would do so willingly, but it is not clear that she will be given much choice in the matter. In this way, her story potentially becomes a commentary on contemporary debates over abortion. After all, the “right-to-life” argument that all embryos should be allowed to develop into actual infants, regardless of the mother’s wishes, is rather similar to the notion that, having demonstrated that she can produce offspring, Kee should be required to produce as many as possible—with the difference, again, that Kee’s particular production might help save the human race.
Such possible criticisms aside, it should also be noted that Children of Men is a widely acclaimed and much respected film, notable especially for its creation of such a visually compelling future world and for using that world to comment effectively on important contemporary political issues. Combining postapocalyptic and dystopian modes, it follows P. D. James’ 1992 novel The Children of Men, Children of Men in imagining a crumbling future world in which no new human babies have been born for more than eighteen years, while creating a plot built around the surprising occurrence of a new birth at last. However, it updates James’ novel to the current political situation in 2006, while envisioning a 2027 Britain that is actually more an extension of 2006 America than of 2006 Britain, placing a great deal of emphasis on hostility to immigrants and a paranoid response to terrorism as key symptoms of a society in decline. The film contains a number of aspects that might be seen as flaws, but it ultimately succeeds in creating a vision with a potential to encourage its viewers to view contemporary political issues in a new way. And even the film’s flaws potentially encourage productive debates about issues related to race and gender.
Works Cited
Bloch, Ernst. The Principle of Hope. 3 vols. 1959. Translated by Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice, and Paul Knight, MIT Press, 1995.
Bonhomme, Edna. “How the Myth of Black Hyper-fertility Harms Us.” Aljazeera, 16 August 2020, https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2020/8/16/how-the-myth-of-black-hyper-fertility-harms-us. Accessed December 29, 2021.
Booker, M. Keith. The Dystopian Impulse in Modern Literature: Fiction as Social Criticism. Greenwood Press, 1994.
Feeney, Matt. “George Bush Ruins Another Movie: What Terry Gilliam’s Brazil Reveals About the Wachowskis’ V for Vendetta.” Slate, 23 March 2006, https://slate.com/culture/2006/03/george-bush-ruins-another-movie.html. Accessed December 27, 2021.
Martín, Mónica. “Utopia as a Cosmopolitan Method in Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men.” Utopian Studies, vol. 32, no. 1, 2021, pp. 56-72.
Sparling, Nicole L. “Without a Conceivable Future: Figuring the Mother in Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men.” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, vol. 35, no. 1, 2014, pp. 160–80.
Stevens, Dana. “The Movie of the Millennium: Alfonso Cuarón’s Fantastic Children of Men.” Slate, 21 December 2006, https://slate.com/culture/2006/12/alfonso-cuaron-s-fantastic-children-of-men.html. Accessed 28 December 2021.
Suvin, Darko. Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre. Yale University Press, 1979.
Notes
[1] On the notion that V for Vendetta is aimed primarily at the American Bush administration, see Feeney. I might also note that V for Vendetta had an American director (James McTeigue) and American screenwriters (the Wachowskis). Cuarón is Mexican, but all of the five screenwriters of Children of Men are American, except for Cuarón himself.
[2] Another character will later repeat this same exclamation when he first sees the actual baby.
[3] We are given no real information about this militia, but we do see them marching in formation through the streets of the camp, carrying assault rifles and other weapons and chanting, “Allahu akbar!,” an expression that has come in the West to be associated with Islamic militancy, even though it is really simply a declaration of belief in the greatness of God.
[4] Noting that all of the parties competing for power in Children of Men value Kee for the same reason, Nicole Sparling discusses the film in terms of biopolitics and biopower.
[5] In The Handmaid’s Tale, widespread infertility is attributed to women, but there are signs in the novel that male infertility is at least as much a problem as female infertility.