Children of Men: a feelgood movie
Children of Men, (2006): written by Alfonso Cuaron and Timothy J Sexton, directed by Alfonso Cuaron
What better way for Carl and I to cheer ourselves up on a cold, rainy March day than to re-watch dystopian future fertility disaster flick Children of Men? Based on a starchy novella by PD James it abandons her Daily Mail-flavoured vision of a society in collapse (property prices plummet and anyone can go to university) ,along with her heavy-handed nativity allegory (baby born to a virgin in a shed, yes honestly), for full-blown, twenty-first century, detention-camp-and-terrorist horror. Indeed the film’s as compelling for the nightmarish Britain its characters inhabit, cleverly reminiscent of rolling Sky coverage of a civil war, as it is for the central plot about the survival of a girl and, most importantly, of her baby.
As archetypes go the Child, or Puer, is one of the classics; one might call it the archetypal archetype, though Carl didn’t seem to think that was funny when it tried it out on him earlier. The Child archetype has miraculous properties, connoting and causing the disruption of the usual by the supernatural, the remarkable; it connects the spiritual with the temporal, the quotidian with the transcendent. Cf Christ, the child prodigy, those fat little putti all over Italy in the Renaissance. Cf, in fact, pretty much any baby, depending on how you feel about babies of course but also bearing in mind that we were all one once. Very new infants provoke awe and fear (and boredom, true); we handle them often as though they are tiny, ancient icons taken from the most sacred niche (don’t be rude). This adult, conscious response to the brand-new, aged-seeming newborn and the archetype it literalises is shown to dramatic effect towards the end of Children of Men, when the baby is ushered through the midst of a battle between rioting refugees and armed militia. This child, as in PD James’s book and the Greatest Story that she was revisiting, brings hope and salvation unexpectedly and apparently miraculously.
The overt horror of the world we witness in Children of Men, the world without children, is the shell that remains when this miraculous link with the transcendent is lost. In practical terms the loss of children has meant economic collapse, which in turn has triggered civil unrest that is turning to anarchy. But what is also lost is a relationship that in a religious context would be with God; in this humanist movie it is a relationship with what could be termed the spiritual part of ourselves, the element of humanity that lifts us beyond, and out of, a grim animal struggle for survival not only as individuals but collectively. The element that has enabled us to create culture and beauty as well as squalor and cruelty. This, the film suggests, is not so much what makes us human as what makes humanity and being a human worthwhile. Kee and her miracle baby, representing the restoration of progress towards a future, are being taken to safety with an obscure organisation known as the Human Project, and they are getting there on a ship called Tomorrow. The Puer is the essential but miraculous part of ourselves that enables humanity to progress through time, to learn, to build, to be more than animals.
As with actual children, of course, there is another facet to the Child; their eeriness, so successfully played on by the creepy kid familiar from horror films. The Child comes from whatever there is before consciousness and life, and therefore seems to hover between this world and death or the beyond - the liminality characterises children in the films of Guillermo del Toro, for example. And in ordinary life people who operate close to the Puer archetype are far from being innocent creatures of light; Jung referred to the archetype in full as the puer aeternus, and how wearying is an eternal child: brilliant, gifted, scintillating company, unreliable, needy and incapable of engaging with life in an ordinary, prosaic way. The kind of people who borrow money to buy scratch cards and live on their friends’ floors and you only realise you mind when they've already gone.
But that’s for another time; it’s not where CoM is taking us. It is a film that, through the metaphor and archetype of the Child, shows us our own best and worst possibilities. We have all been babies and we could all be terrorists.
Carl says: the divine child Messias… is the mediator, the symbol of a new attitude in which the opposites are united… heralding the rebirth and restitution… of all that is lost.
What better way for Carl and I to cheer ourselves up on a cold, rainy March day than to re-watch dystopian future fertility disaster flick Children of Men? Based on a starchy novella by PD James it abandons her Daily Mail-flavoured vision of a society in collapse (property prices plummet and anyone can go to university) ,along with her heavy-handed nativity allegory (baby born to a virgin in a shed, yes honestly), for full-blown, twenty-first century, detention-camp-and-terrorist horror. Indeed the film’s as compelling for the nightmarish Britain its characters inhabit, cleverly reminiscent of rolling Sky coverage of a civil war, as it is for the central plot about the survival of a girl and, most importantly, of her baby.
As archetypes go the Child, or Puer, is one of the classics; one might call it the archetypal archetype, though Carl didn’t seem to think that was funny when it tried it out on him earlier. The Child archetype has miraculous properties, connoting and causing the disruption of the usual by the supernatural, the remarkable; it connects the spiritual with the temporal, the quotidian with the transcendent. Cf Christ, the child prodigy, those fat little putti all over Italy in the Renaissance. Cf, in fact, pretty much any baby, depending on how you feel about babies of course but also bearing in mind that we were all one once. Very new infants provoke awe and fear (and boredom, true); we handle them often as though they are tiny, ancient icons taken from the most sacred niche (don’t be rude). This adult, conscious response to the brand-new, aged-seeming newborn and the archetype it literalises is shown to dramatic effect towards the end of Children of Men, when the baby is ushered through the midst of a battle between rioting refugees and armed militia. This child, as in PD James’s book and the Greatest Story that she was revisiting, brings hope and salvation unexpectedly and apparently miraculously.
The overt horror of the world we witness in Children of Men, the world without children, is the shell that remains when this miraculous link with the transcendent is lost. In practical terms the loss of children has meant economic collapse, which in turn has triggered civil unrest that is turning to anarchy. But what is also lost is a relationship that in a religious context would be with God; in this humanist movie it is a relationship with what could be termed the spiritual part of ourselves, the element of humanity that lifts us beyond, and out of, a grim animal struggle for survival not only as individuals but collectively. The element that has enabled us to create culture and beauty as well as squalor and cruelty. This, the film suggests, is not so much what makes us human as what makes humanity and being a human worthwhile. Kee and her miracle baby, representing the restoration of progress towards a future, are being taken to safety with an obscure organisation known as the Human Project, and they are getting there on a ship called Tomorrow. The Puer is the essential but miraculous part of ourselves that enables humanity to progress through time, to learn, to build, to be more than animals.
As with actual children, of course, there is another facet to the Child; their eeriness, so successfully played on by the creepy kid familiar from horror films. The Child comes from whatever there is before consciousness and life, and therefore seems to hover between this world and death or the beyond - the liminality characterises children in the films of Guillermo del Toro, for example. And in ordinary life people who operate close to the Puer archetype are far from being innocent creatures of light; Jung referred to the archetype in full as the puer aeternus, and how wearying is an eternal child: brilliant, gifted, scintillating company, unreliable, needy and incapable of engaging with life in an ordinary, prosaic way. The kind of people who borrow money to buy scratch cards and live on their friends’ floors and you only realise you mind when they've already gone.
But that’s for another time; it’s not where CoM is taking us. It is a film that, through the metaphor and archetype of the Child, shows us our own best and worst possibilities. We have all been babies and we could all be terrorists.
Carl says: the divine child Messias… is the mediator, the symbol of a new attitude in which the opposites are united… heralding the rebirth and restitution… of all that is lost.
posted by Ask my Animus at 5:10 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
>a href=$BlogURL$>">$lt;lt;Home