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Ethics, Aesthetics, and the Future in Alfonso Cuarón's Children of Men
Ethics are the aesthetics of the future.
-V. I. Lenin1
What is that sound high in the air
Murmur of maternal lamentation
Who are those hooded hordes swarming
Over endless plains, stumbling in cracked earth
Ringed by the flat horizon only
What is the city over the mountains
Cracks and reforms and bursts in the violet air
Falling towers
Jerusalem Athens Alexandria
Vienna London
- T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land2
The DVD release of Alfonso Cuarón's Children of Men (2006) may herald the first global blockbuster marketed as a teaching text. Both the director's statements in interviews for the popular press and the DVD's extra features offering commentary and analysis from Slavoj Zizek, Naomi Klein, Tzvetan Todorov, Fabrizio Eva, Saskia Sassen, John Gray, and James Lovelock suggest a film ready-made for cultural studies analysis. Moreover, the film, with its numerous allusions to contemporary geopolitics and dense network of high-culture and popular cultural citations, offers a doubly coded model of this type of analysis, combining an ideological critique of post-9/11 global politics with a meditation on cinematic aesthetics and their interpretation. As this essay will elaborate, Cuarón's film organizes its generic take on the dystopian science fiction film - responding in particular to the strain that Fred Glass conceptualizes as the "New Bad Future Film"3 - through a critical reading of the themes and referential aesthetics of T S. Eliot's The Waste Land. Expanding on the diverse interpenetrations of the film's ideological and aesthetic critiques, I argue that Cuarón's film provides a compelling response to the aphorism attributed to Lenin: that ethics are the aesthetics of the future.
"I will show you fear in a handful of dust":4 Visualizing the Dystopian Present
The movie is loosely adapted from P. D.James's novel Children of Men (1992), which, according to the author, sprang from the question "If there were no future, how would we behave?"5 The film, which links its vision of the future to contemporary political, economic, and environmental concerns that did not yet exist when James wrote her novel, intimates that we would behave very badly indeed; Cuarón portrays a dreary future after the nuclear and environmental destruction of the entire world outside of...