The Present and the Future

I watched the State of the Union address on Tuesday, but this is about all I can remember:

My fellow Americans,

In these times of terror, our nation is facing its most challenging tests. The sudden and surprising emergence of sectarian violence in Iraq is threatening to thwart our mission. At home, we are more divided than ever. There is no money left for social security. That's why I'm asking Congress to approve the addition of 92,000 troops to our armed forces over the next five years. In short, at a time when we must succeed, many have accused me of failure.

But I do have some good news.

I just saved a buncha money on my car insurance.

[THUNDEROUS APPLAUSE]

I'd like to give a shout-out to Dikembe Mutombo. That guy never got enough credit. Also, the woman who created Little Einstein cartoons and sold her company to Disney. Now she works with the guy from America's Most Wanted to help keep America's babies from being stolen. She truly represents the American dream.

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Now that it's Oscar time, let's return to the weighty world of the silver screen. Did anyone else notice that in film, 2006 was the year of sexual deviance (and there's more on the way)? I recently saw the delicious Notes on a Scandal ("both characters are utterly despicable," claims the New York Times' Mahnola Dargis of the "predatory" female leads whose "aberrant sexual content" put off the MPAA as well). Definitely the smartest, least afraid of its subject matter, and most entertaining of the bunch (OK I haven't seen Deliver Us From Evil. I did see the preview at least a half-dozen times. That counts, right?).

Then there's that movie about the future that got snubbed, even though all the film types are talking about it: Children of Men. It's true, this is a great movie (holy cinematography, Batman), a dystopian flick about what might happen if the human race could no longer reproduce.

I was reluctant to see this one because I was afraid it would end up being a sappily redemptive story in which humankind recovers its hope and innocence upon discovering that, inexplicably, another child has been born. Fortunately, the tone is so gritty and dark, the visuals so eerily realistic that, at the very least, you'd be hard-pressed to accuse director Alfonso Cuaron of mawkishness. CoM does a lot of things very, very well. Toward the end of the movie, Cuaron drops viewers into a war zone in an extended battle scene shot on handheld camera with incredibly few edits. This scene alone comprises the most powerful anti-war message I've seen onscreen for a long time. Cuaron's portrayal of near-future British society's feverish fetishization of the child (when the youngest human on the planet is murdered, it becomes something akin to a national day of mourning; an office worker's desk is covered with images of kids who no longer exist) isn't so far off from our reality today.

At the outset of the film, I was drawn to our reluctant hero Theo (Clive Owen), who refuses to pay any mind to the apocalyptic panic buzzing (and exploding) all around him. On the other hand, he certainly doesn't display anything that could be characterized as zest for life - that is, until he comes around and has "finally found his reason to keep going" (Dargis again), i.e. protecting Kee (played by the aptly named Claire-Hope Ashitey) and her child. As humanity dwindles away, everyone seems pretty hopeless. Sure, there's Theo's brother who "no longer worries about tomorrow" (J. Hoberman), and whose opulence affords him residence in a fortified tower and the world's greatest art collection. But his accretion of material pleasures comes across as an existence that is just as depressingly empty as Theo's. The only person who seems to have any fun is Theo's toking buddy Jasper (Michael Caine), whose passion for the Beatles and fart jokes is surpassed only by his selflessness (he lives with and cares for his invalid wife - and oh yeah, blithely gives his life to save the child).

But in light of my previous observation about the movies of 2006, here's my Big Question: Where's the sex? Keeping in mind that children have an immeasurably large effect on both our sex and our politics, let me repeat the premise of the movie: the human race can no longer reproduce. The species is about to become extinct. You know that question, "What would you do if the world were about to end?" Not even once do we see a hetero couple fucking with wild abandon. Sex with no consequences. Does that sound like a recipe for despair?

It's fairly ridiculous to state, as Hoberman does, that "Infertility is but a metaphor that enables Children of Men to entertain the possibility of No Future" (here's where I give my own shout-out to Lee Edelman, whose critique of our culture's unyielding dedication to "reproductive futurism" in his book No Future informs this post). Infertility is in fact essential to CoM's conception of apocalypse. This isn't just any old world-ending event: say, your cataclysmic nuclear meltdown or moon-sized meteor strike. Humanity is merely withering away. Without hope for the future, people appear to have nothing to live for today (cue extreme repression, senseless violence, and state-assisted suicide).

In the film's final scene, we discover that, in saving the Kee's baby, Theo has made the ultimate sacrifice. His faith rewarded, as the child - now just as much his child as Kee's, as Kee has named her after his own dead son - is rescued by the clandestine Human Project in a ship called Tomorrow. Do I smell symbolism? The child - and thus the existence of children in general - represents our hope that Tomorrow holds something better for our children, that it will offer them more than we were ever able to enjoy. We make the most difficult sacrifices - and require that our children sacrifice as well - in the hope that our kids and their kids will know a better life in the future.

Intrinsically, what is so hopeless about a world without children? True, we would all have to forgo the joys of childbearing. But how many of us live for this - and only this - experience? What I'm asking is for us to consider that a world without children would also be a world without the endless responsibilities and sacrifice to which childrearing inevitably consigns us. I can't help but notice that there exists the possibility for liberatory - and dare I say, utopian - readings of the CoM apocalypse scenario. What would you do in a world in which your obligations to the future of humanity had been erased? When we're dead and gone, what difference will it make to us who's left?

If the blood-splattered realism offered by CoM impressed anything upon me, it is an awareness that life is awfully precarious. For both the masses living under the boot of the fascist British state and CoM's equally fascist revolutionaries, the figure of the child calls upon all to sacrifice. When we protect the child, we preserve our hope for the future. But what are our own lives worth when we give completely of ourselves for the child and the future that it represents? To me, there's something deeply disturbing about our investment in the next generation. If we are willing to frame the entirety of our politics around children, as we do today; if we are prepared to give up our own wants - and maybe even willing to die - in service of an abstract and unknown future, then how much do we value our own lives, our own pleasures, our own experiences?

A world with no future, with no children that we are compelled to protect, is a world for us, today.

If the world were about to end, what would you do?