The Future Ghetto
Children of Men, Gaza, and our collective future
“Both the Rightist belief in racial, religious, and national destinies and the Leftist faith in human management have created the situation in Gaza.”
The 2006 film Children of Men has haunted my mind ever since I first watched it the year after it was released.
The film presents a near-term apocalyptic scenario in which all women in the world suddenly stop becoming pregnant. No reason for this situation is presented in the film, which takes place in the U.K. just short of two decades after the catastrophic moment of infertility. In that future world, the youngest person alive becomes an international celebrity, with all the details of that person’s life followed obsessively by the media in the same way the lives of royals or films stars are now. When the youngest dies, the world mourns, but then shifts quickly to the next youngest person.
The plot focuses on a man, Theo, who finds himself reluctantly charged as the guardian of an African woman, Kee, who has become pregnant. He’s compelled into this role after being kidnapped by a radical political organization led by his estranged wife, Julian (played fantastically by Julianne Moore), and we learn quickly that Theo was also once a radical leftist. Julian tries to convince Theo to help smuggle the pregnant woman out of the UK to a research group in the Azores, but before he can even decide, Julian is murdered by rivals within the group who instead would like to use the woman’s pregnancy as a political tool against the government.
Theo, another activist, and the pregnant woman escape the murderous rivals together, and they flee to the home of his friend Jasper, an aging hippy and former political cartoonist (played by Michael Cain). Theo then decides to carry out Julian’s plan of smuggling the woman out of the country, but this requires first getting into a heavily-guarded refugee camp by the sea. Jasper elicits the help of a police officer to whom he sells marijuana, who agrees to arrest Theo and the two women and transport them into the camp.
The pregnant woman goes into contractions on the police bus, and the other activist sacrifices herself to distract the guards. This allows Theo and the pregnant woman to flee to the cramped apartment of an old refugee family, where the child is born.
What follows is an almost perfectly-filmed sequence of relentless action, with most of the longest scenes filmed continuously. A Romani woman has arranged a small boat for the two of them to use to meet a transport ship; however, they must first travel through the refugee ghetto to get there. Unfortunately, the entire zone is in an uprising against their jailers, and the rival activists who killed Julian have also caught up with them.
It’s this scene which has haunted me ever since I first watched the film and each time (at least a dozen now) that I’ve watched it again. If you’ve time — and the stomach, as it’s quite violent — to watch it, I’ve included it below, starting from the moment the rival activists appear about to murder Theo.
The genius of this long scene is that much of it is filmed continuously, such that the viewer feels every bit of the chaos, fear, and intensity of the ghetto in which everything takes place. Theo is shown running through a bombed-out bus filled with refugees hiding within it, then running across a street strafed with gunfire to reach a crowded tenement building being shelled by government tanks. Some of the people inside attempt to surrender but are gunned down immediately. Theo gets inside to find the woman and her baby, all the while dodging crossfire while refugees huddle in corners and militants return the soldiers’ bullets.
What haunts me most about this scene is the director Alfonso Cuarón’s intentional references to actually-existing situations. The refugee ghetto scenes were filmed in East London, but Cuarón is said to have told his set designers to make everything looker poorer and more run down, in his words “like Mexico.” Also, he specifically included imagery from the Balkans, Palestine, and other contemporary conflicts to give a universality to the ghetto’s situation, while also including people from as many nationalities as possible within its confined walls.
This all makes the ghetto that Cuarón creates in the film shockingly familiar, especially in contrast to the future United Kingdom — and world — that he presents. The London of Children of Men is not much different from the London, or Paris, or New York City of our current day. “Everyday” people go about their everyday lives as if nothing is falling apart, working their jobs, eating at their restaurants, and going back to their homes just like they do now.
However, just outside these enclaves of normality exist open air prisons full of other sorts of people for whom “normal” is a nightmare. Normal is squalor, raids by police or soldiers, and walls both visible and invisible which keep them separated from those for whom life is completely different.
Most haunting of all about Cuarón’s depiction not just that it feels familiar, but it also feels disturbingly inevitable. The film was created almost two decades ago, yet its future ghetto felt both familiar then and familiar now. It’s difficult not to think of what’s happening in Gaza now when watching those scenes. Again, this is part of the director’s intention — Cuarón was one of many influential artists, musicians, and other cultural figures adding their names last year to calls for a ceasefire.
I’ve certainly found the current siege of Gaza quite horrifying, and not just because of the slaughtering of completely uninvolved Palestinians by the Israeli Defence Forces. The most horrifying aspect of this situation is that it extends far beyond the present moment into both the past and into the future.
What I mean by this is that there’s a haunting universality to Gaza.
Gaza is a ghetto, an open-air prison, managed externally by a nation of people who barely understand how it was that they became its prison guards. They, with their own haunting ghosts, wish just as much to continue on with their own lives as those whose lives they actively limit and restrain, and thus cannot easily see what it is they have created and what it is they constantly enact.