“It’s not the bullet you see coming that gets you.”
My old friend Stan used to tell me that all the time. In his case, it proved to be prophetic as, being the decade-long possessor of a donor kidney, he always assumed that he’d die of renal failure when his donor organ finally gave out. In the end though, what killed poor Stan wasn’t his kidney but his colon, which ruptured back in 1999 and put him into septic shock. 3 days after he called me telling me he was going to the hospital to see why he had blood in his stool, Stan was dead. It wasn’t the bullet he saw coming that got him in the end.
I say this as a part of the long windup to my review of “Children of Men,” which I saw this past weekend, to illustrate a point. As a culture, we have always had a sort of love affair with cassandras. Anyone who can write a book or tell a story about impending doom, whether it be ecological, economic, military, cultural or otherwise, will find a large and eager audience. I have no idea why we’re this way, I just know that we are. We love to hear people tell us that the end is nigh. Something in us loves to be harangued and told that if we do not mend our ways we will suffer the fires of hell for it. On a personal note, I remember breathlessly listening with Robbie to some tapes he picked up on a church retreat back in like '81 about the evils of rock-n-roll. I was so spooked by the (ahem) “satanic imagery” in my music that I literally broke apart and threw away my 8-track of Rush’s “Moving Pictures” because it had a pentacle on the cover art.
To give a more recent (and topical) example, one has only to see all of the books and now even movies that take it as an article of faith that our cars’ and factories’ emissions are driving up the planet’s temperature to see my point. I am not here to join that debate because frankly I am not smart enough to add to that conversation. I do however want to point out though that
cause celebres like this have proven to have a pretty poor track record. In other words, just because any one particular issue can so transfix and dominate peoples’ attention at any particular time has absolutely no bearing on whether or not it ever comes to pass.
Case in point, back in the 1960s and 1970s the
cause du jour, the “global warming” of its day, was overpopulation. Back then, you had chicken littles on TV and in books casting dire predictions about the future because the world was simply getting to where it had too many damned mouths to feed and not enough food to feed them. I learned one of my favorite phrases from a book called “The Population Bomb,” the deliciously ominous “die-off.” I remember that the writer of that book, Paul Erlich, was screeching that unless we mandated enforced birth control, a-la the Chinese, on a worldwide scale that the human race was headed for a major “die-off” of hundreds of millions of people. I can't recall if he ever offered how we were to do this, presumably we Americans would send platoons of eunochs to every corner of the world, all armed with sharp little scissors to snip mens' nutsacks wherever we found them. It's funny now, 2 decades later, but back then, people got really worked up thinking about shit like this.
You see, Erlich got it all wrong (as usual; he also wrote a book called “The Panic of 89” that forecast a second Great Depression that was to come in the 1990s and we all know how
that worked out). It isn’t the bullet that you’re looking at that gets you, it’s the one you don’t see. And right now, the bullet that only a few people see coming is underpopulation, or as it's also called, demographic collapse.
In a nutshell, the argument is this. Right now, in many parts of the developed world, there are simply not enough babies being born to replace the people who are dying off. In Europe, populations are in such free-fall that governments are trying everything they can to encourage people to have more babies, to no avail. Spain and Italy have the lowest birth rates in Europe and Russia has such a public health catastrophe on its hands because of its falling birth rate, AIDS and rampant alcoholism that they are beginning to resort to Soviet era pro-natal policies to try to reverse the trend. There is a pseudonymous writer named “Spengler” whom I like very much who writes for Asia Times (atimes.com). He penned a great quote about Europe’s
ennui in the face of its self-imposed extinction when he wrote that “in 100 years, German will only be spoken in hell.”
Almost everywhere you look, the pattern repeats itself. In the Orient, Japan, Hong Kong and South Korea are all watching their birth rates collapse and don’t seem to know what to do about it. If you thought that the Chinese would rush in to fill the void, it will interest you to know that their birth rates are also falling, especially in the coastal manufacturing hubs where most of their new wealth is accruing. Thus far, Latin America and North America seem to be bucking this trend but even here, our rates of increase are on the decline. It’s not really known if this trend can be reversed, either, once it gets going in earnest. After all, deeply ingrained cultural habits are very hard to change, and if you have a society of people who have been raised to value things like successful careers, nice houses, and all the other
accoutrements of the good life more than making a family, it’s awfully hard to change their minds and convince them to start having babies. The bottom line is that, in a lot of places in the world, people have simply lost interest in having children. In a post-modern world where people have been raised on a diet of “Sex and the City” you can’t make them want to watch (nor certainly re-embrace the values of) “Little House on the Prairie.” Not even at gunpoint would that work.
All of this begs a HUGE question: why? Why is this happening? Well, that question is bigger than me and though I have opinions, I have no answers. I only mention all of this to set the stage for the dystopia that is 2027 London in “Children of Men.”
The backstory of the movie is this, in the future, for some reason that is never explained, women have lost their ability to get pregnant. This has happened all over the world and the result has been chaos as a humanity that has lost its future generations has largely given up hope and reverted to the Hobbesian state of nature. Humanity is like a death-row prisoner and knows that it lives on borrowed time. Savagery ensues and, as a result, all nation states have collapsed except for England which, as one of the billboards on a London double-decker morosely informs us, “soldiers on alone.” But even merry Olde England, the very avatar of civil society, can maintain public order only through an authoritarian government, beset as it is with hordes of desperate refugees and terrorists. The opening scene shows a glum Clive Owen as he buys a cup of coffee in a Starbucks-like store then walk out into the street seconds before it is destroyed by a terrorist's bomb.
I really liked the dreariness of this movie. The director, Alphonse Cuaron, well-captures what I think a dying world would look like. What would a people who no longer heard the squeak of playground swings and who knew that after their generation died off there would be no others to come after
do with themselves? After about 25 years of increasingly desperate efforts at trying to find a cure, I think most of them would lose hope and just kind of fade away. Cuaron’s London is a city that is fading away. The government gives out ration packs with suicide pills for those who can't face life any more. The buildings are gray and crumbling because hey, what would be the point of spending money keeping them looking smart if no one’s going to be around to appreciate them for much longer? Who would give a shit? The people of the city are angry and unfriendly and look at each other in furtive glances as they pass each other on the street. This is what I think a dying world would look like, one that has lost its hope for the future but still muddles on, out of nothing but sheer habit.
The acting is fine too, though this isn’t really an actors’ showcase kind of movie. Clive Owen is good, and has the same commanding presence he did in the awesome “Sin City” from a few years back. I have never really been a fan of Julianne Moore but she’s fine here too, though the script doesn’t ask too much of her. Michael Caine is pretty funny as a pot-smoking septuagenarian hippy, who proves to have pretty deep reservoirs of courage later in the movie.
Frankly though, I must confess that the movie does have a pretty idiotic plot. Once you get your attention off the sets and begin to actually think about it, you’ll find holes big enough to drive a car through. For instance, the obvious one; why--in a world that is desperate beyond belief for news of a birth,
any birth--would a pregnant woman be in danger? They try to explain it with typical Hollywood multi-culti bromides by saying that the government wouldn’t want to admit that the first child born in England would be to an illegal African immigrant. Frankly, I find this to be ridiculous in the extreme and would think that in such a world, any pregnant woman, be she black, white, red or purple would be swept away and protected more zealously than the Queen of England herself. Hell, they'd probably make her the queen. The movie also never satisfactorily explains the motives of the terrorists and I was never convinced I understood why they were so keen to take the pregnant lady.
Be that as it may, the thought that went through my head while watching “Children of Men” was that there was a nugget of a very good idea that got buried here by a clumsy screenwriter who, when called upon to develop the narrative, simply fell back on the comfortable clichés that are the stock in trade of his craft. Still though, it was this nugget that I think inspired Cuaron to create such a visually rich movie and it is for that--and that alone--that I think this movie is worth seeing.
Rating: 4 beers out of a 6-pack.
P.S. I learned just before I went into the theater that “Children of Men” was actually adapted from a novel of the same name by mystery novelist P.D. James. I ran over to the Barnes & Noble as soon as I could after the movie and picked up a copy of it. You probably won’t be surprised to know that, thus far, it bears little resemblance to the movie.
