To realize a better world in and beyond Alfonso Cuaron’s Children of Men or to sit with faith.
When I came home after the spring semester ended, my best friend told me she had given up hope. She said she needed rest and was tired of walking around angry at everyone and frustrated with everything. Giving up hope and following the Chinese proverb that people are nothing more than an empty boat would bring that inner contentment. It was her way of coming to terms with reality, or perhaps coming to terms with it. We couldn’t talk about it for about a month because I didn’t really understand her predicament. What does it mean to be a ship, and what does it mean to give up hope? These questions haunted me all summer.
Three months later, a few days before I returned to Binghamton, my father and I sat down to rewatch Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men. Originally a novel written by PD James in 1992, Children of Men is set in 2027 England in a truly dystopian setting. The reality depicted there, however, is not so difficult to imagine. It has been two decades since the last child was born, and the threat of extinction, exacerbated by a flu epidemic, is sweeping the entire world. Violence is consuming every corner of life – most countries and territories are torn apart by war, economies are in ruins, and civilization is collapsing. In England, this sense of individual or national endangerment is expressed in all those typically unproductive and really primitive ways – rampant xenophobia, classism, racism, etc. Migrants are placed in detention centres and camps, and anti-establishment factions resist – while the elites sit in their skyscrapers and watch bombs fall on everyone. It feels very close.
In this world so dreary, grey and blue that even the green of the trees seems to have disappeared, Theo Faron, a radical activist turned pessimistic civil servant, is recruited by his ex-wife Julian, the head of a militant immigrant rights group, to help a young migrant named Kee obtain transit papers. At first kept in the dark about what the papers are needed for, Theo agrees in exchange for money, but the material reward soon becomes obsolete – Kee is pregnant, and the group hopes to take her to Tomorrow, a naval medical ship working on a cure for rampant infertility. And so the story continues.
Grim is the word and suspense is the game. Cuarón is beyond masterful. The color scale is abysmal and the setting is suspended. The pacing is perfect – each scene lingers exactly as long as it should, each frame captures everything it needs to capture. The plot develops smoothly despite the film being so fast-paced, and all events happen in the space of a few days. Neither overly silent nor with too much dialogue, it reflects in sound, words and images the fragmented ways we relate to one another – the unspoken and untold truths my best friend felt – all of this further enhanced by a shaky lens and an intimate first-person perspective that puts you in every scene.
The film poses difficult questions for viewers. Why do countries gain legitimacy through mass militarization and the accumulation of weapons? Why do we continue to viciously construct differences and enforce imaginary boundaries that do little to serve the people within them or solve the problems they supposedly address? Is “sanctified” violence the only way to escape this violence? Where does the dream and need for a more just world come from? Can it ever come true, or are we as a species doomed to discord and endless striving? Will tomorrow come, and am I a fool to wait for it?
As the world crumbles in the film, it feels like looking into a mirror. It’s a film about how we have evolved as a species. It throws human nature and the state of the so-called civilized world in our faces and asks us to really think about what we can be proud of while trying to suppress the urge or need to whitewash ourselves. The beauty of the film is that it doesn’t answer any of those questions—it offers no comfort. It’s blurry and ambiguous and exhausting. Every time I watch it, I cry horribly for the last thirty minutes of the film and my heart bursts in ten different ways.
After my rewatch, I took the gray ending and my best friend’s explanation from early summer for a walk. I thought about how Jasper portrays Theo and Julian’s relationship—how their faith brought them together and chance pulled them apart—and the balance of leaving room for the inevitability and power of chance while still practicing faith. I thought about how faith is a more powerful force than hope, especially in the overwhelming and sublime confrontation with reality. Hope tends to imply a certain passivity, an endless waiting, a postponement of action. Faith allows you to act without the promise of a better world coming, but only because of your belief in the legitimacy of the action now, not in the future. Perhaps that is the point of the film’s ambiguity, that you shouldn’t need certainty or guarantee to be set in motion.
I thought of Theo and how completely he gave himself to Kee and her child. He could be described as an unexpected saviour, and I think in some ways he is. He is brooding, with eyes that express resignation and surrender. He is not driven by strict political affiliation or a quest for power, so his motive does not seem immediately obvious. I think his faith is simple and honest – faced with an expectant mother, there is no reason why she and her child should not have access to whatever safety they can get. He is an empty boat, and that is admirable – he is an impersonal figure with no agendas for himself, and this renunciation of the personal, combined with a rejection of blind and binding dogmas or idealisms, allows him to serve others in the name of eternal truths and beliefs.
The other day my friend Reina came over for dinner and took a fortune I had lying around the bathroom sink. “The usefulness of a cup is in its emptiness.” She asked what that meant and I told her I was lost for words. Now I would hesitantly say this: When we stop consciously constructing and proving our identity while we orient ourselves around values and belief systems that anchor us in a universality, we empty ourselves. When we are motivated not by the idea of reward or personal development but by an inner sense of rightness based on heavenly truths that we know even if they rarely roll off the tongue, we can be of service. When we live at the intersection of faith and chance, we will always be anchored in the present. Maybe that’s how you serve your fellow human beings. Maybe that’s what I want to learn from being their child.
Kyriaki Yozzo is in her final year of studying philosophy, politics and law.
The views expressed in the opinion pages represent the opinions of the columnists. The only contribution that represents the opinion of the Pipe Dream editorial staff is the editorial feature.