Children of Men: Delivering Hope
Extracurriculars
I recently saw the film Children of Men for the first time. This movie is an incredibly intense viewing experience, not just due to the content and subject matter, but the directorial choices that maintain immersion and tension - long shots and longer scenes, sparse musical backing (with much of what does exist being diegetic), and over-the-shoulder/documentary-style camerawork. The premise is that in the near future, some poorly-understood condition wreaks havoc on women’s fertility and global birth rates quickly plummet to literally zero; the film is set in the UK about 18 years after the birth of the last baby. The implications of this change are extreme: widespread civilizational collapse, with the UK maintaining a semblance of civilizational order by expelling migrants and imposing a police state. The plot centers on a man safeguarding the first pregnant woman in nearly two decades. Because she is seen as holding the keys to the future of the human race, she and her baby are not safe almost anywhere.
One of the tasks of the film is to justify that such an extreme end state is a plausible outcome of a world without children. For example, places like Italy, Japan, and South Korea are losing most of their children and struggling with an aging population, but they aren’t descending into anarchy. Several critical differences are explored1:
The sudden collapse of entire categories of jobs (obstetricians, elementary school teachers, toy makers, construction workers, etc) rather than a change that allows for an orderly reconfiguration of the labor market.
Rather than intentionally being childless or having smaller families, all women are collectively suffering the trauma of infertility.
Countries today can import people from younger countries in Africa, the Philippines, etc, but the situation gets dire fast if nobody is having kids.
Last, the confusion and despair coming from something so absolute and immediate brought about by unknown causes, with the natural consequence being the extinction of the species, leads to existential panic that expresses itself in religious fervor, nihilism, and terrorism.
This is the work of backcasting done well - taking something really provocative and establishing its plausibility.
More broadly, I was struck with the idea that not only are children the reason so many people are intrinsically motivated to care about and work for a future beyond their lifespan, but in some ways we find ourselves acting as the parents of our own futures: we try to nurture and develop our preferred futures to give them a chance of thriving in the world, and sometimes we’re called upon to sacrifice for them.
Finally, and worth special mention this time of year, the overlap with the Christmas story was pretty comprehensive: a baby being born to a woman through seemingly miraculous means, potentially to save humanity, being watched over and protected by a man who isn’t the father, in impossible circumstances and a hostile political context. By setting it in the future, the film shows how the Nativity, which we think of as a story about the past (if we think about it at all), has always been a story about the possibility and fragility of our future - “the hopes and fears of all the years”. It might be worth taking a moment this Christmas season to consider what we need to do together in order to make futures suitable for our children, and children suitable for our futures.
To be clear, these ideas aren’t presented in heavy-handed exposition or formal arguments, but in great visual storytelling, by moving around the environment and experiencing it.