A Cosmic Battle Between Faith and Chance
On pessimism, hope, and Alfonso Cuarón's "Children of Men".
“A child, more than all other gifts
That earth can offer to declining man,
Brings hope with it, and forward-looking thoughts.”
~ Wordsworth
I was young, and naive, and full of the callous materialism and crude utilitarianism of our times when I first saw the film A Quiet Place. The product of those conditions was a hyper-rationalism that couldn’t understand why the couple in the film would choose to bring a baby into their post-apocalypse world, rather than abort it with cold and calculated efficiency.
That pessimism about bringing a child into a degraded world has become the norm with eco-doomers, for whom the future is a wasteland, brought on by the “overabundance” of people today, unfit for the babies of tomorrow. And that’s bled out into the wider culture: a quarter of voluntarily childless Americans cite climate change as a reason not to have kids, while more than a third point to anxiety over “the state of the world”.1
I needed a lot of growing up to see, on my next viewing of A Quiet Place, that the decision to have a child even in the face of danger, scarce resources, and man-eating aliens isn’t a plot hole, or bad writing to force conflict into the story, but is, rather, the whole point of the film. The aliens are secondary; what matters most is hope.
I hadn’t realised how much that film owes to Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men.
Eighteen years before Children of Men begins, humanity became infertile. The world has since fallen to civil wars, terrorism, and famine, while only Britain has held out. But “holding out” might not mean much if it looks like this: informing on your neighbours, forced fertility testing, widespread suicide, and jackbooted soldiers treating immigrants like vermin, in scenes lifted straight out of Nazi Germany. Cuarón is a master of the telling detail, from the texture of city streets to the mix of propaganda and advertisements plastered over crumbling brick. Nothing is flashy here, including the everyday technologies that feel moments away from reality, as if innovation is no longer worth the effort. This world feels lived in, to the point of feeling worn out.
This is the backdrop against which our disillusioned hero, Theo, wonders who would want to bring a child into this world if they could? The cynicism of today’s anti-natalists is presaged in Theo’s insistence that we are beyond redemption:
“Even if they discovered the cure for infertility, it doesn’t matter. Too late. The world went to shit. You know what? It was too late before the infertility thing happened.”
Here’s a man so committed to the problem that he refuses a solution, so committed to his apathy that he can’t even bring himself to use the state-endorsed method of painless suicide; he settles for taking up smoking, perhaps the most passive form of dying he can find. He’s neither dead nor alive, so it’s fitting that he’s described by Cuarón as “a zombie”. (The screenplay also uses the wonderfully evocative phrase “a veteran of hopelessness”.)
With every nihilistic utterance or shrug of passivity, Theo demonstrates the inexorable braiding of life and death. He’s a man who believes he has nothing to live for, and so he has nothing worth dying for. The film opens with Theo narrowly avoiding a bomb that detonates the café he’s just walked out of. He almost died as a nameless victim to a pointless act of violence, the literal instantiation of sound and fury signifying nothing. As we’ll find out by the end of the film, not all deaths are equal; a death in service to something beyond oneself is the only eternal life we can be certain of on this side of mortality.
Something he might live and die for comes in the form of Kee, the first pregnant woman in eighteen years, but there’s no come-to-Jesus moment for Theo. When his ex asks him to escort Kee out of Britain, he accepts only on the condition (the pretence?) of a large payment.2 Later, he implies that he’s agreed to help Kee in the hope of rekindling something with his ex, but her scepticism is reinforced when Theo’s first question to her group is, “You got my money?” His motivations will be transformed slowly over the journey that follows.
For Kee, however, her reason to live came suddenly and with certainty. She tells Theo about realising she was pregnant, how she considered ending her life, until she felt the baby kick for the first time. “Little bastard was alive,” she says with an amazed smile, a grin full of wonder, “and I feel it. And me too — I am alive.” Life begets life: not only in the obvious sense of the generational downstream, but upstream as well, causality flipped on its head.
Hope, in Children of Men, isn’t some easy or twee thing. It doesn’t simply fall upon people like grace. Theo’s aged hippy friend says that life “is a mythical, cosmic battle between faith and chance”: humanity may have become infertile by chance, and Kee might have gotten pregnant by chance, but what we do with that invests it with meaning. This is what the old hippy celebrates as “faith put into practice”: not merely hoping for the best, but acting on that hope. Choosing to continue the pregnancy; giving shelter to the victimised; escorting a young woman safely through Hell — these things aren’t easy, but they rouse our heroes from the anaesthetic fug of mere existence to create a meaningful life.
These choices and their actions must be made and taken again and again; this also makes it difficult. Near the end of Children of Men, we have a glimpse of the peace — a fine sliver of the paradise — that children represent. When Kee has her baby, the child’s cries silence the screams of war surrounding them. The fighting stops. The adults around, who moments ago were shooting at each other, silently watch the tiny miracle carried through their ranks. Then, an explosion, and the fighting starts again. Nothing is permanent, not peace nor war.
Children of Men is not a sermon admonishing us to “rise to the occasion”, and it doesn’t trade in bromides about being the change you want to see in the world. Instead, it offers a compelling picture of what a world without hope looks like. It’s up to each of us how we respond to that. We can leave it up to chance, or we can put faith into action, again and again.
After Theo is first approached to help the young woman and he refuses, one of the group throws coins at him, sardonically saying, “Here you are, bus fare.” In another of Cuarón’s elegant use of a telling detail, Theo actually picks up the money. No backstory or dialogue needed to tell us just how hard up Theo is.