Wingless Storks

When I talk with other people who also loved the movie Children of Men, the first remark always seems to be: “How about that 12-minute single shot in the battle scene towards the end, isn’t that amazing?”

Yes, it is. Crazy-long one-takes sure immediate the viewing experience. So do realistic characters insistent on self-destruction and terror. Futurological instead of futuristic, Children of Men deduces dystopia from our present politics.

(Don’t read further if you haven’t seen this movie, or Y Tu Mama Tambien, yet.)

In an early scene, an aging hippie friend named Jasper tells Theo, the movie’s hero, a joke pertaining to humanity’s infertility—the film’s most prominent apocalyptic plot element. It boils down to this: “I don’t know why there aren’t any more babies, but this stork sure is delicious!”

Stork eating is a cutting metaphor for politics in 2007. The future is our baby, politics carries it, and we’re currently eating what could save us. The world has enough resources to feed and clothe all people, but we can’t untangle the intangibles we’ve created to properly redistribute them. How has this happened? Perhaps it’s indifference. As Theo’s super-rich cousin shrugs, most of us “just don’t think about it.” He retreats into his fortress world instead, much as many of us currently choose to withdraw into unneeded possessions and pointless daily routines.

The message of the movie is to struggle against the world’s self-destruction. The passivity exemplified by Theo’s cousin brings the end just a little bit closer. Worldwide infertility is the perfect apocalyptic conceit, because it turns time into a cage, which is the only way to examine what apocalypse would actually mean.

Cuarón’s images of apocalypse are products of today’s retreat and indifference. They’re empty structures symbolizing man-made institutional monstrosity. Gas chambers do this, and so do Children of Men’s mega, L-shaped housing projects and nightmarish refugee camps, both built to hold nothing but mayhem and torture. The characters in this movie don’t seem to know whether to try to hold time back or to fast forward through it. Millennial Christianity and government-distributed suicide pills are both options, each amplifications of popular present-day self-lobotomies.

A third way is also presented: to be heroic even while crushed underneath the weight of the world. Existential weightlifting is not new terrain for Cuarón, it is explored on an individual level in Y Tu Mama Tambien, his previous masterpiece, in which the protagonist reconciles herself with the impending finality of death, ending her life well and redemptively at the entrance of the symbolic Heaven’s Mouth.

Here we have a hero, Theo, who emerges from a world not unlike our own, one presented by Jasper as a manifestation of the “cosmic battle of faith versus chance.” He shows how these two forces have interacted throughout Theo’s life. It was faith that brought Theo and his wife together, he explains, since they both were anti-war activists and so traveled in the same circles. Chance was, however, as much a culprit—who knew they would meet each other at an enormous rally? It was faith, in each other, Jasper adds, that made the two of them want a child. And chance dressed up as bird flu and stole him away.

The question begged—and the film’s thematic payoff—is, as Jasper puts it, “why bother when life makes its own choices,” whether in the form of bird flu or infertility. Against such odds, can we really make our own luck?

Our circumstances are always limited, our free will always constrained, and to think otherwise would be delusional. But Children of Men—like most good stories and all of life—presents the mix of faith and fortune, action and accident that comprises life. Cuarón’s illustration poignantly depicts how chance is man-made and seems to make more and more of its own choices.

Theo, for his part, doesn’t wait for a miracle. Faith in this movie is the only thing to act on, and we see our hero full of it as he fights the good fight to save Khee’s baby. Without his faith against the whims of a lunatic world, the couple will never make it to the human project. Chance endlessly toys with us and him, maliciously in the mutiny of the military escort Sid and benevolently in the kindness of a random and resourceful landlady. Theo’s destiny is to get shot in the stomach and die. But as faith and chance would have it, the baby makes it, because Theo never stopped, even at death’s door.

A local environmentalist described to me the world as he sees it: a life boat containing seven billion people, only a few of whom are rowing. And so we sink. How appropriate is the film’s end, on a life boat of three: two wingless storks and one baby.