Here are several quotes out of order:
If the terrorists are ready to wreck this world for love of the other, our warriors on terror are ready to wreck their own democratic world out of hatred for the Muslim other.
==
Today’s predominant mode of politics is a politics of fear, a defense against potential victimization or harassment: fear of immigrants, fear of crime, fear of godless sexual depravity, fear of the excessive State itself (with too high taxation), fear of ecological catastrophies, fear of harassment (which is why Political Correctness is the exemplary liberal form of the politics of fear). Such a politics always relies on the frightening rallying of frightened men. The big event in Europe in the early 2006 was that the anti-immigration politics “went mainstream”: they finally cut the umbilical link that connected them to the far Right fringe parties. From France to Germany, from Austria to Holland, in the new spirit of pride at one’s cultural and historical identity, the main parties now find it acceptable to stress that the immigrants are guests who have to accommodate themselves to the cultural values that define the host society – it is “our country, love it or leave it.”
==
In a typical Hollywood sci-fi, the future world may be full of unheard-of objects and inventions, but even the cyborgs interact exactly the way we do – or, rather, did in old Hollywood melodramas and action movies. In The Children of Men, there are no new gadgets, London is exactly the same as it is now, only more so – Cuaron merely brought out its latent poetic and social potentials: the greyness and decay of the littered suburbs, the omni-presence of video-surveillance… The film reminds us that, of all strange things we can imagine, the weirdest is reality itself. Hegel remarked long ago that a portrait of a person resembles it more than this person itself. The Children of Men is a science-fiction of our present itself.
It is 2027, with the human race rendered infertile - the earth’s youngest inhabitant, born 18 years ago, was just killed in Buenos Aires. The UK lives in a permanent state of emergency, anti-terrorist quads chasing illegal immigrants, the state power administering the dwindling population which vegetates in sterile hedonism. Are these two features – hedonist permissiveness plus new forms of social apartheid and control based on fear – not what our societies are about? Here comes Cuaron’s stroke of a genius – as he put it in one of his interviews: “Many of the stories of the future involve something like ‘Big Brother,’ but I think that’s a 20th-century view of tyranny. The tyranny happening now is taking new disguises — the tyranny of the 21st century is called ‘democracy’.” This is why the rulers of his world are not grey and uniformed Orwellian “totalitarian” bureaucrats, but enlightened democratic administrators, cultured, each with his or her own “life style.” When the hero visits an ex-friend, now a top government official, to gain a special permit for a refugee, we enter something like a Manhattan upper-class gay couple loft, the informally dressed official with his crippled partner at the table.
Children of Men is obviously not a film about infertility as a biological problem. The infertility Cuaron’s film is about was diagnosed long ago by Friedrich Nietzsche, when he perceived how Western civilization is moving in the direction of the Last Man, an apathetic creature with no great passion or commitment: unable to dream, tired of life, he takes no risks, seeking only comfort and security, an expression of tolerance with one another: “A little poison now and then: that makes for pleasant dreams. And much poison at the end for a pleasant death. They have their little pleasures for the day, and their little pleasures for the night, but they have a regard for health. ‘We have discovered happiness,’ - say the Last Men, and they blink.”
No comments:
Post a Comment