Tag: PD James

I like Alfonso Cuarón’s bleak, dystopian cinematic interpretation of Children of Men (based on the PD James novel) wherein the world collapses after an infertility pandemic strikes, causing there to be no human births for over 18 years. It poses remarkable questions like, “What do we value about life?” and “What do children mean to humanity’s sense of longevity and continuity?” and “Does the future exist if humans won’t be around for it?” Though this film appeals to my sci-fi post-apocalyptic proclivities, its treatment of women, children, and reproduction leaves much to be desired.

Children of Men immediately draws critical attention to this futuristic declining world’s tendency to turn women and children into symbols. The opening scene shows droves of people mourning the death of the youngest person in much the same way that celebrity deaths are mourned, setting up the 18-year-old man as a symbol of youth and a reminder of humanity’s impending extinction. The activist immigrant rights group, the Fishes, sees young pregnant Kee (portrayed by Clare-Hope Ashitey) as a symbol. She is not only a West African immigrant, but also the only woman to become pregnant in 18 years. She is a symbol of the humanity of immigrants, the salvation of the human race itself, and of a coming revolution. It is also made clear that women are forced to submit to fertility tests or face imprisonment, rendering these survivors little more than failed symbols of reproduction and shamed symbols of infertility. Though the film overtly critiques this desire to turn human beings into symbols, it indulges in it quite a bit.

The scene in the abandoned school is pregnant (pun intended) with symbolism.

“As the sound of the playgrounds faded, the despair set in.” – Miriam

As the young Kee sits alone on a rickety swing set, the camera pans the dilapidated building and Miriam recounts her experiences as a medical midwife at the beginning of the pandemic. The scene mourns imaginary children who never existed along with an imaginary future that proves likewise illusory. The empty school reinforces the crushing absence of children, which in turn represents the absence of a future.

The film apparently resists turning pregnant Kee into a symbol by showing that the only sane response to her pregnancy is that of Theo’s overwhelming desire to get her to a doctor so that she can receive necessary medical attention. However, when Kee reveals the fullness of her pregnant stomach to Theo, it is nothing but indulgent symbolism. She takes her shirt off in the middle of a barn full of cows, her posture of one hand covering her breasts and the other cupping her belly simultaneously one of modesty and fecundity. 

Kee is dehumanized and symbolized

This image of the pregnant black woman amongst livestock paired with the swelling music that evokes apotheosis is particularly offensive to me. Her humanity is transcended into grotesque female-coded symbols like earth, goddess, fertility, and nature. Her blackness is racistly used to reinforce the nature symbolism as well as the birth and beginning of mankind. The deliberateness of these symbols is even more apparent when the original PD James text The Children of Men is considered in which Julian (played by middle-aged white Julianne Moore) was the character with the mystical pregnancy. Though it is impossible to not read some symbolism into Kee’s pregnancy, her “revelation” scene is exploitative and is done dramatically and specifically to benefit the male viewer in the form of Theo.

Which leads us to the next issue I had with Children of Men: Most of the female characters are peripheral or marginalized. The midwife Miriam is portrayed as a religious nutcase who does some kind of spiritual Tai Chi, chants over Kee’s pregnant belly instead of using the hard science she learned in medical school, and believes in UFOs. Janice, the wife of Jasper (played by Michael Caine) is catatonic. Marichka is a Romanian woman who doesn’t speak English, babbles a lot, and has a bizarre relationship with her dog.

The unsavory Marichka driving Theo & Kee to a filthy room for the night

Julian, though a strong woman, is too often shown from Theo’s perspective as the beautiful, unattainable bitter ex-wife and forever mourning ex-mother. Not only that, but she dies suddenly very early on in the film. Her death itself is the most important thing about her because it’s an inside job, showing that the so-called immigrant rights activist group has questionable morality and can be trusted no more than the oppressive government regime. Therefore, Julian’s death is highly symbolic and paradigm shifting.

The Fishes scorn Julian’s non-violent methodology and murder her in order to exploit Kee’s baby as a symbol for revolution.

Not only were there few representations of non-symbolic women, but the entire film, a film about fertility, motherhood, and childbirth, is told from the perspective of a man. The most flagrant example of a marginalized female character is Kee. She is a child herself with no true agency, who knows nothing of pregnancy and motherhood, who must rely on the experience and protection of Theo. Kee’s lack of agency and complete reliance on Theo set up yet another patriarchal iteration of genesis wherein the rebirth of the human race isn’t due to Kee and her baby girl, Dylan; it’s due to the perseverance of a lone man whose ideals may be jaded, but he feels compelled to “do the right thing”  no matter what noble sacrifices it might require.

Theo sacrifices his own life to protect Kee and her baby, ensuring they make it to safety first

Not only is Theo the martyr and savior of this film, but he knows more about motherhood than Kee does. He delivers the baby, coaching Kee on how to breathe and push, motivating her when she is overcome. He then delivers Kee and her baby to the so-called safety of The Human Project (a secretive group purporting to be searching for an infertility cure). 

I ask you, why is this story told from Theo’s perspective? Why isn’t Kee our heroine? She’s the one with messianic qualities and an epic quest who undergoes a mystical pregnancy, sneaks her way out of West Africa only to become a hunted “fugee” in Britain, before traversing war-torn areas only to give birth in a filthy flophouse before escaping via rowboat to the elusive, mythical Human Project. Why is her tale told once removed in the form of Theo? Her femaleness along with her Otherness as a black woman and her status (in our current day culture) as a pregnant woman apparently give Cuarón license to strip her of real humanity and complexity. Her lack of agency in her own story and the way that she’s relegated to supporting-character land make it easy to inscribe meaning upon her, to turn her into a symbol in a way that Theo and his friend Jasper aren’t really because they’re men…children of men. 

In the novel version, it is the male sperm that becomes nonviable, causing the infertility pandemic. In the movie version, it’s the women who are suddenly infertile after repeated miscarriages. This puts the blame on women for the pandemic while identifying men (i.e. Theo) as the solution to the problem. It even makes me wonder if the way that the film depicts infertility as full of despair (as if civilization must collapse if we can’t make babies) is some sort of derailment of a masculine ideal, wherein reproduction and the passing on of one’s genes is a vital component of manhood. Yes, it would suck if humanity’s extinction was imminent, but the implosion of cultures and societies does not necessarily logically follow. Even now, we destroy our environment and use up our resources at an unsustainable rate, and first world countries do not fail because of it. The slow march toward extinction is one we’re increasingly familiar with as war over oil spreads across the globe and our climate Hades-heats up.  

Children of Men‘s depiction of women as props, tools, symbols, or cardboard underscores the notion that women’s true purpose is reproduction, and when women can’t reproduce, they’re not only useless, but society itself collapses under the burden of their neglect of duty. Despite many of the intriguing themes this film explores (including a scathing denouncement of the treatment of immigrants), Children of Men ends up falling in line with its mainstream contemporaries to assert that women are merely bodies, that a woman’s value lies in her ability to reproduce, and that she has and should have no control over that body or that ability to reproduce.