"Children of Men" dir. Alfonso Cuarón

After attempting last night to ensnare my father in the addiction to Battlestar Galactica that has such a vise-like grip on my mother, my boyfriend, my roommates, and myself, my parents and I moved on delightedly to last year's Children of Men, Alfonso Cuarón's adaptation of a dystopic fertility-drama by P.D. James. I have been wondering of late why two of my favorite sci-fi shows, LOST and Battlestar, are so enthralled by issues of fertility (and particularly by the idea of women being stolen away from their community to serve as birthing vessels or harvested for ovaries). What does this say about the reproductive politics and anxieties of our age? And Children of Men continues that theme, making (I have heard) a crucial adaptation to the source novel's plot (from the standpoint of the title's logic, at least): in James's book, the world's population is growing older and dying out because human men are no longer fertile. In the film, it is the women of the world who begin miscarrying, and then no longer become pregnant. But unlike its television brethren, Children of Men fails to make much of these anxieties about fertility by (for instance) tying them in any kind of a complex way to the perils of hybridity.

But, under the benign influence of Adam and Sam at Filmspotting, who have a rule that their reviews should always begin with the positive, perhaps I should begin by admiring Cuaron's cinematographic choices, most notably a long, LONG shot that forms the spine of a painstakingly choreographed battle scene. Explosions are constant, limbs and limbless people litter the scene, and when blood spatters the camera lens, the spatter remains for several more minutes of violence. The whole film partakes in a grittily realistic aesthetic that strives to make the apocalyptic future seem as much the same as our present day as possible. Virtually every time you think that the Hollywood demand for a peaceful, happy ending has triumped, a new outbreak of terror and violence disillusions you.

Much as I like the attention to detail that is the film's hallmark, it all seems rather mannered: heavy on intent and light on meaning. The constant evocation of the political iconography of our times (hooded prisoners, a freedom fighter's funeral with crowds of Arabs chanting "Allahu Akbar") seems flippantly citational rather than coherently allegorical. Overall, the film has the air of being all ending: characters consistently fall by the wayside of the film's central quest (to deliver a miraculously pregnant woman to safety) before we feel we know them, which minimizes both our narrative engagement and our sense of the characters humanity. This is a troubling narrative strategy, since many of these characters are, in fact, the ignored and dehumanized of society, made at best into symbols and vessels for other people's feelings. And that is indeed what the film's only non-expendable character remains at the film's end.

Even the realist aesthetic leaves something to be desired, in the end. Apocalypse and dystopia can easily seem mannered, which is why so many of the best films of this genre (consider Bladerunner) exploit an extreme aesthetic that makes allegory, symbolism and philosophical speculation seem less contrived.

But this brings me to a question: why is the UK such a magnetic setting for apocalyptic and dystopian fantasies (think 28 Days Later or Brave New World)? Is it something to do with being an island culture, with borders more easily closed and guarded against danger, help and otherness? Or is it an inheritance of the Blitz mentality and the accompanying peril of occupation? Does anyone have any theories?

Children of Men
Dir. Alfonso Cuarón
(2006)
**1/2

"Something Rotten" by Jasper Fforde

I finished the fourth and last of Jasper Fforde's "Thursday Next" series a couple of nights ago, a series based on a madcap melding of classic British literature with the police procedural and mystery genres. At first I found these books madly witty and gripping reads, but this last one was actually a bit tedious (I am doing my best not to make a nasty, reviewerly pun on the title). When Thursday, the overburdened heroine who always seems to triumph through a masterpiece of luck rather than skill, takes on impossible task after impossible task* I merely found myself thinking "Sigh. Are there really enough hours in the day for her to accomplish all this and pick up the baby from the sitter?" And it seems to me to be a bad sign when the reader is thinking about the protagonist's planner/diary when she is supposed to be enthralled by the plot.

Mostly I just miss the literary wit of the previous volumes in the series, a few of which took place at least in part in the world of literature. Somehow, Fforde's experiments with averting fate seemed more complex when fate was literally textual, and what was at stake was, for instance, preserving the denouement of Jane Eyre we all know, love, and find endlessly troubling. Something Rotten returns to the "real world" of Fforde's satirically alternative England (where the established church is that of the Global Standard Deity, or "Gsd," and there is a demilitarized zone separating England from Wales) in order to weave together several series-long plot-lines, but there just seems to be too much to do, without much personality to drive it along. Alas!

Something Rotten
Jasper Fforde
**
Finished May 17, 2007 in Washington, DC

*In this book, Thursday is trying to un-eradicate her husband, whose birth has been wiped out by unscrupulous time travelers; save Hamlet from being colonized by The Merry Wives of Windsor; smuggle Danish literature out of England into the Socialist Republic of Wales before it is burned by the scapegoat-hungry government of Prime Minister Yorick Kaine, while convincing her superiors at her government job that she is vigorously hunting for seditiously Danish books; prevent Kaine from declaring despotic rule over the country by (don't ask me to explain the causality of this) ensuring that her hometown team wins the croquet tournament; raise young Friday, her son, who will only speak in Lorem Ipsum (the faux Latin that graphic designers and book layers-out use as dummy text); and avoid being assassinated by the spouse of a close friend. Believe me when I tell you that, as spoilerish as the above may seem, it really only describes the beginnings of each of these plot-lines.




[Addendum, May 20, 2007: I just remembered that this was one of the works for both my Once Upon a Time Challenge and my Chunkster Challenge. I am about a month behind on the Chunkster, and am not sure what my last two books for the challenge will be. Perhaps David Copperfield will be one. As for the Once upon a Time Challenge, which ends about a week before the Chunkster, I am equally behind, having finished a mere two of my five books. But I will say this for myself - I have begun the very dry Morphology of the Folktale and have every intention of finishing it. I am nothing if not optimistic in my intentions. My Down Under Challenge is the only one of my massive reading goals that is proceeding according to ambition; my 52 plays and New York Times Notable Book Challenges are both sadly neglected. I blame never being at home for more than a week and a half at a time. Curse you, compulsive travel!]

Returned!

So I am back in the U.S. of A. after a month abroad, and was sitting down a few minutes ago to read the fourth chapter of David Copperfield for my Dickens book group (it is the chapter in which David comes home from an idyllic seaside holiday to find his mother remarried to the tyrannical and grimly named Mr. Murdstone) when I found it was making me so profoundly anxious that I actually HAD to close the book and put it aside.

So, to dispel my anxiety, I will tell a brief, happy tale, a tale which expands on the themes of poor David's experience.

My trip back from the UK was long, tedious, and distinctly uncomfortable. It involved a whole day of travel, several enormous and leaden bags (despite my resolution not to bring many books on this trip), two underground lines with no elevator access, a claustrophobic daytime plane trip in which everyone around me glared hatefully at me whenever I turned on my light to read, a LONG bus ride into New York, and then a LONG train ride out of the city again -- all before I arrived at my apartment and lugged the massive baggage up the &^%* stairs.

So I arrived at JFK airport in a fairly frayed mood, let us say. And when I arrived, I had a message on my cellphone from my California-dwelling boyfriend of seven and a half years, whose tone usually ranges broadly from deadpan to taciturn. In this message, however, he sounded rather upbeat, although all he said was something along the lines of "Call me to let me know you got in OK." So, as I waited for my luggage in a room that was (of course) rather weak in the cell phone service department, I became intrigued by this unusual tone and called him back to say "I'm here!" To which he replied: "That's good. So... [crackle crackle crackle] will you be [crackle crackle crackle]...."

"What?" I replied. "Say that again?"
"I can't [crackle crackle] reception [crackle]!" came his answer.

So, driven to the edge of annoyance, I yelled, "DID YOU HAVE SOMETHING IMPORTANT TO TELL ME?? TELL ME BEFORE WE GET CUT OFF!!!," drawing stares from those around me, including the customs officials.

"No."

-he said, in an abashed sort of way. Which of course, made me feel abashed in return.

When I called him back from outside the airport (waiting interminably for the bus to the city), I apologized for my frustrated yelling, and explained that the tone of his message had planted an odd seed of hope that he would be waiting outside the arrivals area with one of those little signs. He laughed and said that in that case, he should probably hop on the train. "You are the world's worst liar," I said, and he moved on to describe the chores he had been doing, and how he needed to make an appointment with his dentist (as I was haranguing him to do that day or the next). I spent the rest of my bus and train rides sulking unfairly at him from afar for not surprising me at the airport, after traveling across the country in secret to visit me.

So I dragged myself up the stairs of my apartment, and who should be sitting in our living room, watching TV, but my boyfriend.

Who, I should clarify, is in fact the world's BEST liar. I'll have to keep my eye on him....