I’ve seen some feminist bloggers take on the movie Children of Men, but none so far from an explicitly feminist point of view, so I thought I’d take that on. I expressed anxieties earlier that a film that raised hysteria about underpopulation when we are in fact a world facing overpopulation might be reactionary, but upon seeing the movie last night, I have to state outright that I was utterly wrong. If nothing else, people who express anxieties about “underpopulation” in America and Europe are usually anti-immigration folks, and this film took an unabashed pro-immigrant stance, which I appreciated.
First, a note about the aesthetic value of the film—even if Children of Men were every bit as reactionary as the blurbs make it out to be, it would be a movie worth viewing. It was perhaps the best paced film I’ve seen in a long time, and really captured the feeling that one would have if caught in a situation like the hero’s, where all decisions have to be made on trust and instinct. It was moving and beautifully filmed, and the subplot about the leftist revolutionaries who are so dedicated to ideology that they forget the humanity that made them leftists in the first place could probably fit into a reactionary film. Could, but probably wouldn’t, since the subplot is rather too subtle for your wingnut crowd. After all, there’s a division between the grounded socialists and the People With Egos, a distinction that would be lost in a genuinely reactionary film. In sum, this movie would have been great no matter what the subtle political themes.
With the perfunctory disclaimer out of the way, the film was very pro-feminist on a number of levels, including the fact that it passes the Mo Movie Measure. But what I found really interesting was this—it presents something of a bait and switch to the audience, in terms of gender expectations. The title loudly proclaims the movie to be about the Children of Men (very patriarchal sounding), but the one child in the movie is born to a woman who is dismissive of the idea that the identity of the father is even relevant. And it makes sense, actually, that if there hadn’t been a baby born on earth for an entire generation, the paramount importance of paternity would fade away and the obvious fact that maternity is more time-consuming and immediate would become undeniable. The Christian version of the virgin birth is generally interpreted as super-patriarchal, where god is viewed as so powerful he can impregnate without befouling himself by touching a woman, and women are nothing but vessels. But this movie offers an alternative interpretation of the virgin birth—one where “virginity” is irrelevant and one where a woman’s stake in motherhood is fully respected for the sacrifice and hard work that it is.
In the large sense, this movie isn’t really about fecundity, but about hope. Babies are nothing but a symbol of hope, really. The movie is about what would happen to a world without hope, and the disturbing conclusion is that it wouldn’t be much different than the world we have now. And while both men and women are capable of feeling genuine hope—the sort of hope that rests with a child, which is to say the reality-bound hope, the hope for small joys and long life—the movie rather explicitly frames false hope as a result of male dominance and male control.
There’s a number of different ways the movie critiques male dominance as inherently damaging and egalitarian relationships between men and women as the only real source of hope.
The leftist revolt against female leadership is self-destructive. The movie gets underway when the main character, Theo, runs across his American ex-wife Julian, who is the leader of a pro-immigrant group. You get the strong impression that Julian is a wise, down-to-earth leader and never forgets the love of humanity that brought her to be a human rights activist. Naturally, she’s taken out by a faction of her group that wants to ignore their core humanist values in order to start a violent revolt. The fact that the anti-violence faction has all the women (and some men) and the pro-violence faction is entirely male doesn’t strike me as an accident, but a symbolic alliance with the feminist value of insisting on respect for women, even as some facetiously claim that feminism somehow impedes other struggles for justice.
Read the rest of the article at Pandagon.
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