Finally saw “Children of Men,” the acclaimed 2006 film by Alfonso Cuarón, starring Clive Owen and Julianne Moore. It’s set in Britain in the year 2027, a time of global societal collapse; illegal immigrants are herded into cages and camps and the human race has fallen infertile. For the first half-hour this felt didactic and heavy-handed, but in time a more complex message began to emerge. The imagery was inspired and original, the ending bleakly poetic, unforgettable.
Still, something about the film irks me, and I was closer to pinpointing it when I happened upon Slavoj Zizek’s bloated commentary that appears on the official “Children of Men” DVD site. The trendy Slovenian philosopher cites smoking bans as evidence of creeping totalitarianism, then writes:
In today’s market, we find a whole series of products deprived of their malignant property: coffee without caffeine, cream without fat, beer without alcohol… and the list goes on. What about virtual sex as sex without sex, the Colin Powell doctrine of warfare with no casualties (on our side, of course) as warfare without warfare … ?
The high crime of decaf exposed, at last. Thank god for the postmodern academy. Zizek continues:
We from the First World countries find it more and more difficult even to imagine a public or universal Cause for which one would be ready to sacrifice one’s life. It effectively appears as if the split between First World and Third World runs more and more along the lines of the opposition between leading a long satisfying life full of material and cultural wealth, and dedicating one’s life to some transcendent Cause. Is this antagonism not the one between what Nietzsche called “passive” and “active” nihilism? We in the West are the Last Men, immersed in stupid daily pleasures, while the Muslim radicals are ready to risk everything, engaged in the nihilist struggle up to their self-destruction.
Why can’t we be more like the Muslim radicals, ready to behead Jewish-American journalists, to shoot women and girls for the crime of learning, to cut down Benazir Bhutto and as many of her followers as happen to be standing nearby? Now that’s dedication! Transcendent!
When you bother to look at what the radicals actually propose and practice, it’s not so easy to dimiss anti-jihadism as “hatred of the Muslim other.” Muslims are being slaughtered by these radicals practically every day.
More from Zizek:
No wonder that the only place in Children of Men where a strange sense of freedom prevails, a kind of liberated territory without this all-pervasive suffocating oppression, is Blackpool [sic – it’s Bexhill – DA], the whole city isolated by a wall and turned into a refugee camp run by its inhabitants, illegal immigrants, and, at the film’s end, ruthlessly bombed by the air force. Life is thriving here, with Islam fundamentalist military demonstrations, but also acts of authentic solidarity – no wonder the newborn child makes it appearance here.
Zizek is bonkers if he can interpret Cuarón’s refugee camp, a pure nightmare, as “liberated.” He is madder still to cite the presence of “Islam fundamentalist military demonstrations” and conclude that life in such a place is therefore thriving. But such are the romantic delusions that retard left-wing thought in our time. Perhaps Zizek didn’t notice that “The Fishes,” the band of self-styled leftist revolutionaries in Cuarón’s film, prove to be as brutish and contemptible as the camp guards.
Zizek aside, I simply find Cuarón’s portrait of the future First World society preachy and overdone. (Perhaps P. D. James’s book, which I haven’t read, shares this flaw.) Zizek quotes Cuarón as follows: “Many of the stories of the future involve something like ‘Big Brother,’ but I think that’s a 20th-century view of tyranny. The tyranny happening now is taking new disguises — the tyranny of the 21st century is called ‘democracy’.” Hard to imagine the committed and beleaguered democrats of the Muslim world agreeing with him there. And hard to imagine what, other than democracy, will ensure that the dark future Cuarón envisions doesn’t come to pass.
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