I wrote the following commentary tying Children of Men, a new sci-fi film about migration and war, to writings by Zizek that I've been studying lately, only to find this:
http://jdeanicite.typepad.com/i_cite/2006/12/zizek_and_child.html
"I shouldn't be surprised--Zizek will be on the DVD version of Children of Men. The director knows his work.
News - The Human Project.
Slavoj Zizek Reacts to Children of Men
Philosopher and cultural critic Slavoj Zizek provides his commentary and observations about Alfonso Cuaron's Children of Men. The filmmakers recently spent time with Mr. Zizek after identifying him as an important element in their research because of the unique philosophical view he offers on both the implementation of governmental power, and the damaged emotional state of a refugee...
SLAVOJ ZIZEK:
For me, Children of Men is a model of a kind of materialist subversion of a reactionary classic, because the novel is obviously a spiritualist Christian parable of resuscitation, bringing new life and so on. The novel ends with baptizing. It’s clear Christian parable. The film is a model of how you can take a reactionary text, change some details here and there and you get a totally, a totally different story. 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.
...I think that this film gives the best diagnosis of the ideological despair of late capitalism. Of a society without history, or to use another political term, biopolitics. And my god, this film literally is about biopolitics. The basic problem in this society as depicted in the film is literally biopolitics: how to generate, regulate life."
Read on for my commentary...
WARNING: contains tons of spoilers.
Cuarón's children of men contains a number of valuable insights for understanding Zîzek and Baudrillard's concepts of "the real", with reference to the concept of bare life. This became most clear to me the first time watching the film in the scene where Theo's (the main character's) wife, Julian, is killed. The scene follows a number of scenes in which Julian is apparently introduced as a major character. The romantic relationship between Theo and Julian in the past is alluded to a number of times. Julian even hints at resuming their relationship and kisses Theo.
In the master shot that contains Julian's death, the scene begins with a playful road trip kind of interaction. Theo and Julian are playful, flirtatious and end up kissing. Their kiss is interrupted by screams of panic. Moments later, the car is descended upon by a horde of people coming out of the countryside forest, including a motorcyclist pair who shoot Julian in the neck, killing her in moments. The death is long and very bloody, seemingly uncharacteristic for a hollywood film. At this moment I immediately thought of Zîzek's line "welcome to the desert of the real", with regards to terrorism, echoing the earlier statement by Baudrillard. This death scene is a clear demonstration of the real that Zîzek claims the U.S. was re-introduced to on 9/11. The uncontrollable, unexplainable power that can take away your loved ones at any moment. The murder is senseless. The audience can only presume that the horde is after the car, regardless of the humanist mission that Julian is on.
Another scene in Cuarón's powerful commentary on the future and present of violence as a result of globalization comes late in the film. As Theo and Ki try to escape the city and get to the Human Project, the camera zooms into a scene of an older, apparently Arab woman, holding a dead man, apparently in his twenties. This is another scene indicative of the concept of bare life, where one's son, mother or other loved ones are on the edge of dying at any moment. The scene of the crying Arab mother holding her dead son in the midst of marching hordes of armed militants is one that is repeated daily throughout the Arab world. Possibly the most powerful aspect of this film is that most of the audience for this film would never sit down and watch a documentary about Palestine or Iraq and see this scene in such great detail and sadness.
Another example of this kind of bare life that so many are experiencing around the world as war and precarity spread to so many countries is shown near the very end, when Theo and Ki walk through the building under fire carrying the baby. As time seems to slow and people stop to turn and look, the bullets continue flying and people continue dropping, their deaths seemingly unnoticed among the moment of sublimity introduced by the first human baby in 18 years.
Cuarón is apparently very influenced by Gaspar Noe, often described as brutalist. Noe makes frequent use of master shots, as does Cuarón, and in Irreversible, uses extended scenes of rape and death similar to the scenes described above, although Noe's are even longer and wouldn't be acceptable to Universal Studios. Another apparent reference to Noe is the simple white on black block lettering in silence that open and close the movie, much like the text that Noe uses to open and close both I Stand Alone and Irreversible.
With so many references to immigration in this film, its hard not to see the strong attempt to depict the spread of this kind of precariousness of life, bare life, the real, as a commentary on the situation of migrant people around the world. So many migrant people live on the very edge of sustenance, looking for labor daily at Home Depots, building shanty's in Southern California canyons in the middle of suburbs or dying in the desert, literally chased to death by border police, often watching their loved ones dying in the process. The kind of danger that priveleged western viewers of Children of Men find so suspenseful or stressful is the daily realty for so many people around the world.
