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The following is excerpted from Reproductive Acts by Heather Latimer.
This chapter departs from the previous three by turning its focus to a film, Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men (2006), an adaptation of P.D. James’s novel, The Children of Men (1992). The film tells the story of a futuristic infertile world plagued by pandemics, terrorist attacks, and global wars since women stopped being able to reproduce. Its narrative follows a young black refugee and prostitute in England, named Kee, who finds herself pregnant eighteen years after the last baby was born. The film differs from the other texts studied in this project in terms of medium and also because it is an adaptation of a novel written by an English author, is set in England, and has a Mexican director. Despite these differences in national setting and authorship, the film complements and expands the project’s national scope as it is a text that simultaneously touches on North American and global reproductive politics. Also, by weaving a storyline about infertility into one about terrorism, refugees, and the politics of migration, it speaks to how those politics have adapted and shifted since 9/11 and the beginning of the US-led “War on Terror.”
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While I view Children of Men as obviously engaged with reproductive politics through its plot, characterizations, and themes, Cuarón has been adamantly ambivalent about the reproductive side of the film’s politics. In interviews, he has claimed that the film’s premise of a futuristic infertile world is insignificant and is “just a metaphor” for the current state of humanity, that he “decided to not even care about [the infertility] and just take it as a point of departure.” Cuarón explains that he found James’s idea of a childless world “haunting,” so much so that he “realized that the premise could serve as a metaphor for the fading sense of hope that humanity has today.” In the film’s DVD commentary, Slavoj Žižek echoes Cuarón’s sentiments when he says that he, too, sees the film as having little to do with its storyline. Instead, what Žižek claims the film gives us is a hyper-real version of our current reality in that what is shown in the background – a destroyed environment, suffering refugees, terrorist attacks, and other effects of global capitalism – is the real story; the film shows us “a society without a history, or to use another political term, biopolitics … [T]he basic problem in this society as depicted in the film is literally biopolitics: how to generate, regulate life.” For Žižek, the film’s premise of an infertile world is a metaphor for the ideological despair of late capitalism: “the true infertility is the very lack of meaningful historical experience.”
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One of the more obvious ways that this haunting takes place is in the film’s alteration of the novel’s central reproductive premise; whereas in James’s novel the world is sterile because all sperm suddenly loses its potency, in the film all women mysteriously stop being able to stay pregnant. Pausing to consider the political implications of this change, it is obvious that the film’s point of departure is actually quite value-laden. The impossibility of an equal exchange of sterility for infertility – that it is not possible to say sterility means the same as infertility – indicates how difficult it is to claim the film is only using its premise as a metaphor. Yes, infertility clearly symbolizes the state of humanity in the film, but the film’s reproductive politics cannot be confined solely to the level of metaphor. Even further, I would like to suggest these reproductive politics are integral to the film’s exploration of what Cuarón and Žižek see as its “real” themes. For instance, the film’s examination of the effects of globalization, capitalism, and migration means it engages with ideas about futurity, nation, and family. These ideas, in turn, are linked to reproductive politics in a manner that goes well beyond the scope of the film or its use of metaphors. The film engages in reproductive politics not only in an obvious way through its narrative but also in a much more subtle way through its exploration of these other themes connected to the failings of democracy, the effects of terrorism, and the status of the human.
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