children of men
Music: Fields of the Nephilim: Mourning Sun (2005)
Yesterday Brooke and I saw Alfonso Cuaron's Children of Men, a film about worldwide infertility in the not too distant future. I don't want to spoil the story for you that have not seen it, so I will lay off on many of the details. I will say that the film is the best I have seen this year and last because of the careful way in which the characters are developed: by the end of the film you really care for the protagonists—so much so you may have no fingernails left. It's a very tense movie, a tear-jerker and a edge-of-the-seat ride: teeth grinders and nail-biters beware!
The film is not simply a "sci-fi" action thing (comparisons to Blade Runner are misplaced), but a compelling drama about sovereignty and the assertion of a "state of exception"---and what happens when hundreds of thousands of "fugies" are reduced to the state of nature. A young, African American woman becomes a madonna-like figure at the end, stopping state soldiers in reverent awe (like homo sacer). I suppose my positive response to this film has a lot to do with my lust for science fiction, but there's something very compelling about it beyond that; it's just well done.
It took some hours to sort of "get over" the unexpected emotional upheaval the film achieves (at least for me and Brooke). The movie is just plain disturbing, and precisely for the reason that Zizek has already suggested:
I would say that it’s a realist film, but in what sense? Hegel in his esthetics says that a good portrayal looks more like the person who is portrayed than the person itself. A good portrayal is more you than you are yourself. And I think this is what the film does with our reality. The changes that the film introduces do not point toward alternate reality, they simply make reality more what it already is. I think this is the true vocation of science fiction. Science fiction realism introduces a change that makes us see better. The nightmare that we are expecting is here.
Not all science fiction does this amplification very well at all (oh, say, The Fountain). Unlike the maudlin fakery of Spielberg's doom and gloom epics (with perhaps the sole exception of Minority Report), Children of Men is disturbing because everything in the diagetic frame has a real referent in today's world; it sort of collects all the coordinates of violence in our contemporary "real world" situation and puts them all in one place. Cuaron is careful to show the ecstasy of human sadism in the name of order (the banality of evil) and cause (misguided revolutionary politics). The sovereign (for example, the racist soldier on the bus in the fugie camp) and the revolutionary (for example, the dread-locked "terrorist" who murders in the name of uprising) are both portrayed in ways that effectively demonstrate what Agamben has argued: when the state of exception becomes the rule we witness the arrival of death machines.
Things I liked about the film: the acting, character development, the pacing, the realistic violence (but never gratuitous), Michael Cane's character (especially when he plays that crazy music and gets stoned). Things I did not like about the film: the fake infant, the portrayal of people with dread-locks, perhaps even the realism itself.
On the way home, Brooke asked: "Why is she black?" We discussed the reasons why the Madonna was conspicuously marked (she had a Caribbean accent, for example, and in one scene disrobes to reinforce her markedness, and we learn she was turning tricks and don't know the father's name, and so on). Of course, her race was overdetermined for reasons that one would expect (evolutionary theory, Henry Louis Gate's Africana-mania, British primitivism/fetishism, and so on). I am l unsure what I think about the "white man saving the black woman" stuff. On the one hand, during the last half of the film everyone is literally colorblind---no one (of the protagonists) really gives a shit about their cultural identifications. The film does a good job of showing how, in the midst of violence, discrimination makes no sense for survival (at one point Owen's character and the Madonna hook up with a Romanian woman with bad teeth and they take care of each other). On the other hand, the viewer is asked to rely on racial stereotype ("Oh, but of course it’s a black woman who is pregnant, since they are naturally more promiscuous," and so on).
Well, I dunno. Just thinking aloud. But the film makes me think, and this is good. Damn good. After seeing the Brothers Quay Piano Tuner of Earthquakes with Brooke last week (and suprisingly being bored out of my gord), I was starting to worry about film these days. My faith in filmmaking is restored.