(Some minor spoilers)
So Maia saw Children of Men, and provides a detailed review over at Alas.
I saw it, too, and I think I disliked it for the same reason she liked it.
(Don’t get me wrong: it was a really good action movie, suspenseful and driven and tightly-plotted. And funny in the way that Hollywood action movies usually don’t manage. I am always happy to see Clive Owen. Like Maia says, it wasn’t afraid to depict the kind of murderous brutality that you really would expect to see in a dystopian society full of furious, paranoid, despairing people.)
Maia says:
What made this sequence so powerful was not that it showed us a distopian future, but that it showed us our distopian present. The images of refugees who are selected as dangerous at the entrance to the campis deliberately evocative of photos we’ve all seen from Abu Grahib. The camp they then enter is Gaza with British signage. The most potent political comment, in this amazingly political film, was the message refugees heard as they entered the hell-hole of a refugee camp: “Do not support terrorism, we are here to help you.”
I don’t know if I agree with this. The thesis of the movie–and I understand that we aren’t meant to take it so literally–is that this is what happens when people lose hope. Why have they lost hope? Well, there are no children; there have been no births for nearly two decades. If there were children, everyone would be less inclined to horrific behavior towards other human beings, because we would have some hope for the future that would give us reason to love each other. In other words, if only women weren’t all infertile (of course, sterility is always the woman’s fault, even in the future), society wouldn’t look like this.
Thing is, there are children everywhere; we live in the Arcadia that these people have been expelled from. There are children in refugee camps, and starving countries, and war zones, and bombed-out cities. Children die of dystentery and other preventable diseases. They die of malnutrition. They die of violence. They die in pain. Many of those who don’t die suffer horribly and grow up to watch their own children suffer. The climax of the movie was a scene where Kee, the young mother, takes her child down from a refugee-camp tenement through a crowd of awed refugees and into a crowd of awed soldiers. The sound of the baby’s cries are miraculous to all who hear them. For a few moments, the soldiers stop shooting, terrified that they might hurt the baby. No one wants anything more than to keep that little child safe and to look on in wonder at her and at Kee.
I don’t call that dystopian so much as utopian.
Except in the book from which this is adapted, I believe, it is the men who are sterile. So it wasn’t even a mindless reflex to make it women’s fault; it was a deliberate rewriting of the source material for nasty ideological purposes.
Oh, really? I’ll have to read the book.
No, in the book it’s never really established whose fault it is. It’s a general mystery. But the book turns the miraculous mother into yet another vessel character (“I just want what’s best for my miracle-baby”), and all she gets to do is ping-pong between the three wannabe-babydaddy men who are all trying to prove their dicks still work. They kill the baby’s bio-father – the man she actually liked – and she barely blinks.
The big deal they make in the book over the woman’s working pipes would imply that it’s women who are infertile (nobody makes a big deal over the dead bio-dad). But besides that gaping inconsistency, it’s generally agreed that everyone is sterile all at once, men and women.
Yeah, I didn’t like the book.
Well that reaffirms my faith in P.D. James. I was rather disappointed to think that she’d written something so sexist. I’m already disappointed enough that she’s consigned to the trash heap one of the best female detectives ever, Cordelia Gray, in favor of more books about Adam Dalgliesh. Not that I don’t like Dalgliesh. He’s a good character. I just really liked Gray.
So I looked up the book on Amazon and, indeed, it’s that sperm count has gone to zero. It also makes the title somewhat more sensible to me. I kept thinking “So, women are sterile. A woman is pregnant, and the title is ‘Children of Men‘? Well, nothing sexist about that, no, no, no.” I’m off to a bookstore later, so I’ll be picking up this book now too.
SPOILERS
I thought the movie was well done in terms of its cinematography and pacing, up until the end. I found it incredibly difficult to believe that not one of the soldiers would have tried to detain Kee and Theo to get the baby for the government. The whole Mary and Jesus feeling was a bit much. And at the end, where she’s on the verge of being picked up by a boat named “Tomorrow”. So yeah, not so dystopian in the end. To me it would have been more fitting in terms of dystopia if there hadn’t been a boat, or it wound up being a government boat.
In the movie, it’s definitely the women. Women are infertile, women go for fertility tests, etc. Nobody is concerned with the birth father in the movie, either.
Right. That’s the problem with dystopian movies: they usually have to end with the protagonist loving Big Brother, or they’re not consistent. It would have made more sense if she and her baby had not survived. Not that I didn’t get all sappy when they did.
Except we don’t know anything about the Human Project or the “Tomorrow” except that everyone believes they’re doing something really important to help mankind, and there’s this vague sense they’re hopefully the ‘good guys’. There’s really no guarantee.
I thought the movie was amazing for the choice of light and single-shot takes alone. I wasn’t as impressed with some of the bigger emotional moments as the small ones (the ping-pong ball) but overall it was a hell of a thing.
The whole “infertility” thing seems kind of ripped off from “The Handmaids Tale” if you ask me…
In other words, if only women weren’t all infertile (of course, sterility is always the woman’s fault, even in the future)
I loved this movie, and shall defend it to the death. I don’t think your criticism is fair. If the movie had maintained the fertility of women, and the precious cargo was a fertile man, much of the dramatic tension would have been lost. A pregnant women is a much stronger image than a guy with a high sperm count.
Also, the lack of hope isn’t necassarily about the lack of children, but rather what the lack of children means. This is a world in which there is no tommorow. Even in Rwanda or Darfur, there is a tommorow.
Those aren’t the only two options. The third one–and the far more scientifically plausible one–is that sterility occurs for both genders. It’s really unlikely that something would poison every female reproductive system on the planet but leave sperm swimming blithely on.
I find it interesting and a little surprising that the movie was perceived as being sexist in this particular way. I’m usually the first person around to cry sexism, and although I did find the Mary-and-Joseph thing tiresome, I have to disagree that the movie attributed infertility to some fault of women. It was a big mystery that seemed to be related to the general shittiness of the world, but I didn’t see anyone even implying that it was women’s fault.
SPOILER ALERT:
And actually, I liked the way it subtly called attention to the sexism of most people in the movie (and the audience) by pointing out very quietly after the birth how everyone just assumed all along that the baby would be male; it was a small surprise to everyone when it was a girl.
But yeah, I definitely thought the weakest link in the movie was the “Human Project” stuff, as well as the entire premise that one more baby would somehow fix things. They never explained exactly why that would be the case.
As is probably apparent, I had mixed feelings about it. I thought they did an amazing job creating a world; I thought they did a less-than-amazing job creating a storyline within that world. I think I would have found it more interesting/consistent with the world of the movie (if infinitely more depressing) if, for example, the baby had been stillborn, but the mother was captured by the government for study/forcible impregnation.
Even in Rwanda or Darfur, there is a tommorow.
Mike, I may be misreading your point here, so forgive me if so. Are you suggesting that the movie was trying show a world that was categorically worse than Rwanda, Darfur, Guantanamo, etc., or that the movie was merely using dystopian devices to illustrate/symbolize the horror of these realities?
It seems like you’re suggesting the former, in which case I have to disagree. I think it was doing the latter. Saying that even in these places there’s a tomorrow misses the entire point. There is no tomorrow for the people who are killed. There’s an empty, horror-filled tomorrow for the people whose children are killed or maimed, for people who are tortured and raped. And I think the point of the movie was to illustrate that fact, not to minimize it.
Again, if I’m misreading you, please correct me.
You could have still had a pregnant woman as the focus of the plot, because it would have been just as “miraculous” for her to get pregnant if all men were infertile. Having the issue be the infertility of men wouldn’t necessitate having a highly fertile man as a main character.
Also, what piny says about it not having to be either/or.
Yes, that’s true, but having the boat be named the “Tomorrow” certainly leads you in a specific direction. Not a dystopian one either. Unless they’re planning a sequel that will make it clear where they were heading, and I don’t think they are.
Hee. If this were made by, say, Ron Howard, we’d totally be heading off to find Kee’s sister, Lee, who is also miraculously pregnant.
I didn’t get either one of those two out of the movie, because they simply spent far too much time outside of Bexhill in a far too Western world. What I got out of it had more to do with a critique of Western racism than a statement about the horrors of Rwanda and Darfur.
Although I am with you on Guantanamo, because that fits in with the critique on Western racism. I thought Bexhill was supposed to be evocative of something like Guantanamo.
I found the book interesting but flawed. I’m very surprised that they seem to have changed the name (and even race, for Pete’s sake) of the ‘Virgin Mary’ character. In the book, her name is Julian (a misunderstanding when her parents tried to register her at birth as Julia Ann, if I recall correctly), and she is a married thirtysomething, white, apparently middle-class British woman.
I can’t remember if she made much of a fuss over the death of the bio dad. He was an Anglican priest with whom she’d been secretly cheating on her husband at the time she conceived, leading to the husband believing for much of the book that HE was the father. It’s been a long time since I’ve read the book, so I’m rusty on some of the details.
Lesley, do you know the circumstances under which she quit writing the Cordelia Grey books? The actress playing Grey in the TV adaptations became pregnant, and the producers decided to write in her pregnancy and make Grey a single mother. At which point James was furious because
a) I don’t think she was consulted on the decision
b) she felt that Grey was not the sort of character who would become a single mother (!!!!)
So she quit writing books with the character because she was pissed off.
Indeed. Not even the crazy religious groups that had sprung up in response to the prospect of the extermination of the human race were specifically blaming women.
I had a much better response to the movie than most people here, I guess. I saw a lot of political commentary that was apropos to stuff that’s going on today, including the use of propaganda to push a false reality upon a complacent populace and the constant undercurrent of racism involved in immigration related policies. I also enjoyed the fact that the “hero” was not yet another superhuman John McClane type who was actually fallible and emotional. You know, like a human being.
A pregnant women is a much stronger image than a guy with a high sperm count.
Actually, it’s just another movie cliche. I, for one, would probably give a thought to seeing where a guy is earnestly fleeing from evil agents competing for his sperm. The woman-as-vessel thing is an automatic turnoff. If I never see another example of this “character” again it will be a hundred million years too soon.
Full agreement with both. Not seeing it ’cause the whole prospect just disturbs me utterly. Three guesses what woulda happened if she didn’t want to be pregnant and wanted an abortion.
In some preview or commercial I saw, there was something about a sign saying “Avoiding fertility tests is a crime.” So, yeah—Handmaid’s Tale all over again. If a woman has the misfortune to be fertile, she’s government property, used as an incubator.
I don’t do horror movies.
I also don’t think the movie set it up as the women specifically being infertile. The focus seemed to be on the woman because the people who knew of the pregnancy had no way to track the father, and they couldn’t enlist the help of the authorities without endangering the woman, the man, and the baby. I don’t recall any specified gender for fertility tests (the ads telling people to get tested featured footage of sperm and an egg, both). What I did notice was that the movie posters explicitly claimed that women were infertile. I don’t know if this was the idea of the filmmakers, or of somebody in marketing who just assumed infertility had to be a woman’s problem.
This is the sort of thing that makes no sense as symbolism or a political analogy, but makes perfect sense in terms of internal story logic. If it was the only baby, the first chance, or only chance at the human race not going extinct, then it would make a lot of sense for everyone to decide they need to keep the baby safe; for the miracle they all hoped for to lead to a (temporary) halt to the killing. And as soon as they’re no longer dealing with the extremely rare type of person, they all decide to go back to killing the people who don’t have the same rarity value. It worked for me.
I would have loved the horribly ambiguous ending. They’re in the mist, Kei’s calling out for the boat, and there’s a sound. Something that might be the boat, or a boat, or something completely different. Fade to black. The end.
“A pregnant women is a much stronger image than a guy with a high sperm count.”
If it were kept to the original theme of male infertility, don’t you think people could put two and two together if a woman popped up pregnant? If all men are sterile and then suddenly someone is pregnant, it stands to reason that somewhere, some man must have viable sperm. Of course, it would just be a hoot if a woman and her best friend came up pregnant. “Hey!” Awkward…
I just still hate that tagline: “In the future, women are infertile.”
I’m already infertile in the present, so I guess I’m ahead of my time.
I can see why they would have the fertility of women be the focus just for the sake of plausibility. Even now the only things you *really* need to make a baby are an egg, a womb, some DNA and a lab. A fertile man need not exist, but the egg and the womb have to come from a woman.
And I agree with Kyra- this looks mandatory pregnancy propaganda, especially since the situation could theoretically be duplicated by women simply choosing not to have children. As if to say “See! See what happens when you’re too selfish to have kids?”
No, I did not know that. Well, I can’t say I blame her for being pissed off. Too bad.
And if the miraculous fertile man were killed, as the bio-dad apparently was, then there would be no more babies from him, at least, so this one baby and therefore this one pregnant woman would be extremely important.
Starfoxy says: this looks mandatory pregnancy propaganda, especially since the situation could theoretically be duplicated by women simply choosing not to have children. As if to say “See! See what happens when you’re too selfish to have kids?”
I really think this is reading too much into it. The movie was propaganda for a lot of things, to be sure – for an end to torture, for an end to extra-judicial detention, for an end to anti-immigrant hostility, against the department of homeland security, and against people who would use a woman’s body and child for their own political ends. But all those things were right on the surface. I truly don’t think it was intended to further the agenda of anti-abortion, anti-contraception groups. It did buy into the glorification of motherhood and childbearing that those groups promote, but it was pretty far from being “mandatory pregnancy propaganda.”
I’ve actually heard that response already – “Look! Women are having careers instead of babies and are using contraception and getting abortions and the birth rate is already dropping and we’re DOOMED!” But they were generally people I thought were turds anyway.
Although I wasn’t nuts about the woman-as-precious-baby-maker theme to the movie, I was glad that they didn’t, in the movie, know what caused the mass infertility, attributing it to “the flu epidemic or something” and not to, say, overuse of hormonal contraception (which would have pissed me all the way off). And I kind of liked the implied comparison between the inherent value of a pregnant woman vs. the inherent value of a pregnant fugee woman; I mean, if, as a society, we’re going to be seeing women as baby machines anyway, why not specify what brand and quality?
Maybe it’s just because I’m a feminist and gave it an optimistic, feminist-neutral reading, but I didn’t see it as so much a sign of what happens when the world loses hope as a sign of what happens when people let their passion for a cause overwhelm their humanity. I kind of saw the baby, the infertility, everything, as a MacGuffin, all set up to say, “See? See what happens, you fascist bastards? Want to blow up an abortion clinic? Want to pave over Iraq? Want to shoot immigrants on sight?” If the human race were dying because of outrageously high infant mortality, the story could be the same, but with a seven-year-old in Kee’s place.
On reading the preview descriptions, I had the same fear, that the movie would imply and reiterate blame on women (damn them for being infertile). I’d like to read more criticism about the film and also see it, as it does sound intriguing.
One thing, I wonder about: Why is it so bad to have a zero or subzero birth rate? We hear about the ‘problems’ facing some European countries and Australia all the time; the media tacitly accepts that it IS problematic if birth rates are receding. Why, oh why, is this a problem? I mean, as you point out, there are enough children ‘to go around’ — if we ‘generously’ count the children of others, the children who might be less desirable for some reason. Also, what’s so wrong about a society getting smaller? — I think the problem is what happens as a result of all of these discourses: that we reinforce that women have reproductive freedom is a problem and that the role of women is to have children (and, hence, not be in public space). This reinforces gender-stereotypical arguments that are bad for both sexes. This also has a homophobic edge in that it reinforces social contempt for queers, whose sexuality is framed all the more as deviant and “nonreproductive.” Blah.
I loved the film. I thought it was incredibly powerful and I loved the amount of exposition about this future world that they were able to communicate through quick images or phrases. Also, the long shots, especially during the action sequences, were amazing.
As far as only focusing on the woman, Kee, the pregnant woman, was an illegal immigrant who didn’t know who the father was (there were a lot of options). They didn’t focus on the father because it would be very difficult, probably impossible, to track down who it was without going to the government.
I also don’t think that the movie portrayed Kee as a ‘vessel’ at all. The point of her escape was that everyone else (the government, the underground groups) all wanted to use her for their specific causes. Only the Good characters cared about what she thought or what she wanted to do. Also, there is no punishing of the women in the film for being infertile. It’s generally accepted that it’s the fault of both genders. The promos and the taglines that blame women are the fault of the studio’s marketing department.
There’s nothing wrong with a lower birth rate. What’s wrong with a 0 birth rate, worldwide, (as in the film) is it will lead to the dying out of the human race. If no babies are born starting tomorrow, that gives humans a little over 100 years left on the planet. That’s what makes the premise of the film interesting. If the idea of making the world better for our children has gone out the window, how do people react?
And yes, it does show many of them react in the way that some people are acting today (hello Guantanamo!).
No kidding, Lesley. Note to aspiring TV producers: when doing a series of adaptations from books, consult the novelist before making changes. I mean, whatever James’ reasons for not not envisioning Cordelia Grey as a maternal and/or single maternal character, she is ultimately James’ character.
You can always stick the actress behind a potted plant or give her a really big purse to carry if the novelist really doesn’t want it written in. I’m presuming the contract was written such that they didn’t HAVE TO consult James or fall in with her decision, but it would seem like a smart thing to do nevertheless. Otherwise you run the risk of killing the goose that lays the golden eggs.
Mind you, it’s not unheard of for producers to make sweeping changes to adaptations. Reginald Hill’s Dalziel & Pascoe books had been changed beyond all recognition by the time they hit the screen. In fact, they ended up licensing Hill’s characters and then writing their own mystery plots for the detectives to solve. Far inferior to the plots in the books, naturellement.
AND they had Pascoe and his wife Ellie divorce, and her move to another city with their small daughter. As far as I could see, the sole reason they did that was to be able to bring in hot young love interests for Pascoe, and never mind that in the books, Pascoe’s relationship with Ellie is an integral part of who he is as a character.
In the books, it’s Dalziel who has the failed marriage, the self-destructive habits, problematic post-divorce relationships with women, no children or nonexistent relationship with estranged children… But I guess Dalziel is too old and fat and unsexy to be a *glamorous* divorced detective.
AND from what I saw of the adaptations (and admittedly, I didn’t see all of them, mainly because when they stopped using Hill’s plots, they rapidly went downhill), they wrote out Edgar Wield’s partner Edwin. Even though the middle-aged odd couple romance between the butch police officer and the eccentric antiquarian book dealer was a very sweet and sometimes utterly hilarious aspect of the later books.
Er, WOW, that was off-topic. Sorry guys.
Just speaking for myself: if the topic is a movie or a teevee show, it’s pretty much okay to go in divergent media directions. Carry on–I don’t know much Gray or Dagliesh, but this is interesting.
You need sufficient population replacement rate to care for and provide services to the aging population. Someone has to stock the grocery shelves, repair the infrastructure, pay the taxes, etc. The birthrate at which providing services becomes an issue is higher than the birthrate at which depopulation becomes an issue. Some places in Europe, and also Japan, I believe, currently have low enough birthrates where they are concerned about providing for the aging.
btw, you can’t have a sub-zero birthrate. you can have negative population growth, that is just population decline. birthrate, however, has to be positive.
In a culture which didn’t worship motherhood (not mother’s, mind you, but motherhood), would this image be as powerful?
Funny. I saw it and thought it was really intense. Was a little ambivalent at the woman as baby-maker angle, but I hadn’t seen any of the ads for it, and didn’t realize until just now that the tagline specifically pointed to female infertility. I had just assumed everybody was infertile. Interesting marketing technique.
Anyhow, now I have kind of funny images in my head about what a movie about a single fertile man (with millions of fertile women) would be like.
“In a world where all men are infertile. . . one man soldiers on. . . to try to repopulate the world. . .”
*Snerk*
There’s Y: The Last Man.
Yup, the movie showed that if no one was ever able to have children, then many negative consequences would result, so it must be saying that any woman who chooses not to have children in our current world are doing something morally wrong. Wait…what? Non sequitur, thy name is ideology.
And I would like to say that I think the movie did the last scene in precisely the right way. It is believable that, in a world where the youngest person is a celebrity, the sight of the first baby in 18 years might cause people to temporarily stop fighting. But notice that the truce does not last forever. Ultimately, the soldiers and the resistance movement are more interested in fighting than protecting the child (it isn’t like they are out of harm’s way when the fighting stopped). They were just touched for one brief movement. That happens. It happens in war where the opposing sides play soccer or share cigarettes and the like. It was an incredibly moving scene.
And as for Rwanda and the like, I think the extinction of the human race is something of signifance and to be avoided if at all possible. The fact that the extinction of humanity would be a great tragedy (the art gallery scene anyone?) does not mean that genocides are not tragedies and evils themselves.
I think the movie was getting at a notion of redemption. We had screwed up (and the movie I think goes to a certain length to show that it isn’t blaming women for the predicament, causal location and blameworthiness are two different things): the human species was going to die a slow, ignominous death with our hands around each other’s throats. And this person offered us a chance, only a chance mind you, to bring us back from the brink. For a do-over. How can that not be compelling?
I guess I just don’t understand the negative reactions to the movie.
Piny, you beat me to it. I was just typing,
“So who’s gonna be nerdy enough to step up and compare this to ‘Y: The Last Man’?”
I didn’t take that this world was created by lack of hope – the main character explicitly says that the world was turning to shit before children stopped being born. Since the refugee camps so resemble what happen in our world, they can’t have been simply a result of lack of hope. I saw it more as the lack of children took the opportunity for this to happen.
Incidentally I thought the movie was explicitly criticising compulsory child-rearing with the signs everywhere saying “Avoiding your fertility test is a crime.”
I did actually have a more complicated reaction to the political narrative of the film, which I didn’t write in that post because I wanted it to be mostly spoiler free. It was the world that he created that I loved more than anything that happened in it.
Piny -
I think the movie DID show how the ‘if we had kids things people would love each other’ thing doesn’t hold up: in the scene you mention they stop shooting for, like, a minute. Then they go back to it. I agree with Maia: the power is in showing us how so often we *already* act like there’s no future & therefore no long-term consequences.
Not as powerful, but it’s still much easier to do than a fertile male. It’s more visual to show a pregnant woman with a visibly pregnant body than to have some guy running around and have everyone talk about his sperm count. On film, a good visual usually has more dramatic impact.
Part of the reason Y: The Last Man could pull it off was that he wasn’t just the last fertile man; he was the last man. So everyone could stare, gasp, and go, “It’s a man!” Having a fertile male, or a fertile-but-not-pregnant female, leads to more showing and less telling. Unless they’ve got a baby or child in tow, in which case you’ve got a split between the proof of restored fertility, and the person with restored fertility. You could do it that way, but there’s definite advantages to having someone who’s visibly capable of reproducing.
I don’t know what anyone else thinks, but as far as I’m concerned Reginald Hill is always on-topic, everywhere. I adore the Dalziel/Pascoe books. The ending of “On Beulah Height” quite literally sent chills down my spine, and that doesn’t happen too often to me. And now I’m glad I haven’t seen the adaptations.
Well, also what I liked about Kee’s character was her attitude of, ‘Shit, I don’t know who the fuck he is, and honestly, I don’t need him anyway.’ :P
Really, I thought the movie served partially as an indirect commentary to how bullshit it is to only think of women as babymakers, since that’s what the government’s stance was at that point.
I liked that, too, although I imagine the Human Project scrambling around frantically, trying to find all the likely candidates, and checking to see if any other pregnancies turned up, in case there’s only one fertile male.
I also liked that when she found a guy who she trusted to stick by and protect her and her baby, they didn’t hook up. There were a lot of solidly practical reasons for them to not develop that kind of interest in each other in that particular stretch of time, and it’s nice to get away from the idea that a woman who likes and trusts a guy must automatically get romantically involved with him. That sort of thing smells a bit to much of the “he gives her protection, she gives him nookie” idea.
And it’s nice that not only did the woman who screwed around and not know who the father was basically wind up okay with it, but she didn’t get punished by the movie in some way. Under the circumstances, the pregnancy was basically a good thing, and she wasn’t hurt, humiliated, or pushed to feel bad about herself for having slept around.
For Tara,
A negative population rate is a problem in terms of capitalism. Our current (awful) system works through growth of markets. There are two or three ways to grow markets (force indigenous cultures to buy sh** they do not need and ruin their economy, create new “needs” in existing markets, and you guessed it, increase the population). Thus, our corporate masters see negative population growth and they automatically think negative growth rate, lower profits, etc. That’s my guess, in addition to the anti-feminist stuff.
I also loved this movie.
I particularly loved how Theo, perhaps 15 minutes into the beginning or so, says that the world was fucked long before people stopped having babies.
The film also managed to set up almost everyone: religious loons, governments, activists blinded by ideology.
I liked that. I even liked the cheesy name of the boat:
Tomorrow.
If I ever had a boat (I never will, but that’s beside the point) I’d fuckin’ name it Tomorrow. ;)
Yeah, that’s true, but I guess I’m still curious about her reasoning. It seems to me that there are two possible reasons. The first is that James is pretty conservative, or maybe the word is old-fashioned, about things like sex. I think that single motherhood would just kind of be a shock to her value system. But the other is that she sees parental love as a potentially violent and dangerous passion, and Cordelia is not a passionate character.
I haven’t read or seen Children of Man, but I think it would be interesting to think about it in relation to James’s kind of ambivalent ideas about parenthood in general.
Wow. Why would anyone think that splitting up Pascoe and Ellie would be a good idea?
Haven’t read the books in question, but I can think of one other reason off the top of my head. Parenting is a big committment in terms of time, energy, and effort. It creates a lot of restrictions and logistical complications in terms of where you send a character and what you do with it. For a novelist, if the story is to be at all plausible, you have to account for who’s watching the kid at any given point, how major life changes affect the kid, how the kid will react if the parent gets injured, how the parent will adjust their decision-making in terms of accounting for the fact that they have a child to raise, etc.
This is particularly hard in writing a single parent, because you can’t just write it so the other parent manages the kid by themselves for the night, runs interference in a crisis, or otherwise reduces the complication. Any effort to send the character out to meet with someone, follow a suspect, or otherwise do her job outside of school hours means having to arrange child care. There’s ways you can keep much of the character’s independence, but they all take time, effort, adjustments, and space on the page. And there’s a whole list of major developments (moving, health problems, new love interest) you can’t write without accounting for how it will affect her child.
I can quite understand objecting on purely practical grounds. If I had a series of novels I was working on, and I found out that someone wanted me to provide serious adjustment to all my future character arcs to account for a major change in my character’s circumstance which I hadn’t accounted for, but some TV producer had decided to throw in because they didn’t feel like making the actress wear loose tops and carry a giant purse, that might just put me off the whole thing.
If all the women of the world became infertile, would anyone really be bothering to find out of the men were, too?
I loved this movie. One of the best of the last year. I didn’t see anything in it that blamed women for infertility: the signs in London say ‘mandatory fertility testing’ and don’t specify a gender, and the midwife character talks about how all of a sudden women who were pregnant spontaneously aborted and then there were no more babies. There was no linkage at all between birth control/abortion and the infertility — it was seen as some sort of viral mystery. We didn’t get any ads over here talking about women being infertile either/
I also thought the pregnant-woman-baby adulation thing was perfectly understandable in the context of the scenario, but it was undermined quite consciously by the filmmakers: the whole thing about ‘baby’ Diego, Theo’s comments about the world being fucked up, Kee’s character being a ‘Fugee’, the state fixation with reproduction verging on fascism — all this was nicely done.
And the ‘utopian’ moment described above turns out to be for nothing, because the fighting resumes in less than a minute, and the whole place is bombed out of existence shortly afterwards.
Where I am, all the posters referred specifically to women being infertile, which confused me, because I’d heard that in the book it was supposed to be the men. But my impression from the movie was that they weren’t trying to specify that women were the problem, just that there were no more babies. So I wrote the whole thing off as someone in marketing being stupid.
I quite liked it because it is part of human nature that people can sometimes, for a moment, pull out of the violence and chaos around them, and be better. That sort of spontaneous moment of grace, where everyone in the vicinity acts better than they normally would, and gets a little reminder of their common humanity is quite real, but it’s not reliable, and it doesn’t last. You can’t build a better world on the assumption that everyone’s going to see the helpless child and decide to stop fighting (some people try to steal the baby, some people try to kill for it, some see it as a possession, and some only improve until it’s out of their immediate view), but sometimes people get lucky and find that moment of human concern right when they need it most.
I think there was an implication that the religious movements were recruiting women, Theo mentions the woman he was dating had just Renounced and was now flagellating herself for the sins of humanity. It did not get into whether or not this was a movement just for women.
Frankly this aside like the assumption that the baby would be a boy and the assumption among the characters that it was the women that were infertile (I wish they had left it in the movie and had not included that notion in the marketing) made the movie stronger. There was a lot of information in the background and a lot communicated that had to be thought over. And it was action packed.
That isn’t actually what happened here. James only wrote two Coredelia Grey books, the second of which was published in 1983. Four T.V. movies were produced between 1997 and 2001. Because there were four movies and only two books, at least two of the movies had to be based on new material, and James must have agreed to having her character put in scenarios she didn’t write. And even if James were going to write “future character arcs,” a proposition which seems dubious since she hadn’t touched the character in 15 years, nobody was requiring her to change her character, because she could just have ignored the T.V. show if she ever wrote another book about Cordelia Grey.
I suspect very strongly that she was outraged on political or character-based, rather than practical grounds.
Sally, very interesting.
Interesting. So if she hadn’t written any since 1983, was her not writing the character any more really related to the TV movies? Because if she didn’t touch the character in fifteen years, it’s quite possible that she’d just run out of stories to tell about her.
And I’m aware she’d be free to ignore the TV movies. What I was picturings a number of “polite” hints that it would be “easier all around” if she’d just adjust the charecter she created to fit the new direction they were taking her. And the reaction of people who’d gotten into the books from the TV movies wanting to know when she was going to introduce the kid. Not so much being trapped by it, as the extra pressure to include an unworktably complicated development. Because you can write good single parent detectives (like Easy Rawlins), but if you don’t feel inspired to work out how the kids fit in, it can be a misery having people expect that of you, even if you’re able to write it your own way.
Sorry for screwing up on that one. My info was based on a newspaper interview with James that I read many years ago. Sounds like I got it wrong. Sorry.
I’m just going to have to call shinanegans on this one. I thought it was a good movie. It was a not entirely predictable, sarcastically, bleakly funny, all around pretty smart movie. If it were full of propoganda and bias, the bias was overwhelmingly pro-human rights, not anti-woman. At least that’s what I took out of it.
Here’s a story about the future of the human race being measured in mere decades and the people left on the planet are doing their best to hurry things along, in every sick way they can think up. There was plenty of mercenary backstabbing, treachery, and utter wrong-headedness on display in that film. Hell. Here is a woman who may be the last hope the species has for survival, and this pack of desperate rebels move heaven and earth in order to put Kee and her baby right in the middle of their shitty little war — right where she has a good chance of dying.
I think they called the movie “Children of Men” because of the world that Kee’s baby was born into. The whole film was a lurid display of the many evils that are largely the offspring of “man”-kind.
This does raise a question: Wouldn’t they have been able to thaw out some ovaries and sperm, from various fertility clinics, and just buy some time that way?
Second question, and I know I’m displaying my ignorance by asking: Wouldn’t the situation have been much less grave if it were the men who were infertile? With artificial insemination and sperm banks, it seems to me that women are actually quite a bit more important in the whole process of reproduction.
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I have this ugly feeling that the main reason they changed that part of the premise, making women infertile in the movie, is that they were worried that North American audiences would complain about a there being so many “effeminate” men in one movie. People can be just that stupid sometimes.
Medicine Man: Thawing out the sperm and eggs (not ovaries) from various fertility clinics would not work because, as the midwife noted, even the pregnant of the time were having miscarriages at a high rate and the problem got worse from there. That point does lend credence to the thoughts here that this was an issue with female biology. I suppose, though, that I just assumed that it was an issue of male and female sterility while I was watching the film. When I saw the fertility clinic testing signs and the focus of the story on the pregnant woman (which, to my mind, the narrative of any story needs to be focused and tightened for a film – a necessity of the medium), I saw something of a commentary on modern life. Really, how do you think that the world would react today if faced with the same problem. Government officials in the Bush administration would immediately turn to female biology as being the problem with male biology being an afterthought.
From personal experience: a couple that I know were trying to get pregnant, but were having difficulties. The male told me about all of the tests the female was undergoing in order to correct the “problem”. I asked what tests he was seeking for himself. He told me that he wasn’t seeking any and it was almost certainly a biological issue for the woman because, and I kid not, “women are complicated”. I scoffed, called bullshit, and, a year later, he was in an office and told by a urologist that he was the one with the biological “problem”. So, this reaction from the government and others of seeking the problem and solution within the female was entirely plausible to my mind.
Also, interesting to me was the Christian imagery. The Mary, Joseph, and Jesus moment in the film was beautiful. I loved how the fighting, when it resumed, still endangered all three. It demonstrated how fleeting such kindness can be in real life as well as the dystopian future in which the story is set.
I saw Pan’s Labarynth last night and loved it. One thing that struck me about both films is the Christian/Catholic motifs brought forth in both stories. Redemption/happiness through suffering and all of that.
Okay, I have to ask.
Was there a specific indicator that women were the only ones being fertility tested? Did I miss it? Because I didn’t spot anything about how women needed to get their fertility tested, only “Avoiding Your Fertility Test Is A Crime”, and I just assumed they were checking the little swimmers, too.
Since so many of the comments here seem to be working from the idea that women specifically were getting their fertility checked, and not everyone, I’d really like to know if there was something in the movie I didn’t catch to indicate that.
I have to add my voice to those saying this movie was wonderful. I went to see if with my sexism detectors at full blast but didn’t notice anything beyond the usual background noise present in everything in our culture.
I would recommend this movie in fact as (besides the infertility sci-fi angle) it represents reality for many pregnant women in the world. Somewhere a woman is giving birth in an urban warzone that’s probably not too unlike the one portrayed in this movie.