A recent piece at Counter-Currents prompted me to reflect on Alfonso Cuarón’s film Children of Men (2006), loosely based on the novel by PD James. The piece by Trevor Lynch confirms that the pregnant woman being black (in the film) is Cuarón’s idea, and was not the case in James’ original novel. I had always wondered that, but never looked into it. This travesty completely changes the arc of the story and the symbolism of the pregnancy. James was an ardent Christian; I don’t know if she harbored a Pope Francis-styled Christianity (“3rd world refugees are our salvation!”) or an Anglophilic (and implicitly white) Christianity.
I’m also curious how other dominant features of the film are depicted in the novel. In the film, the Gestapo-like tactics of the “Homeland Security” police, and the latter’s callous disregard for and disrespect of the illegal immigrants they round up, is ham-fisted, moustache-twirling Hollywood villainy. Many of the illegal immigrants detained (held in small, crowded cages, like animals… get it?) more resemble emaciated, East European, Holocaust survivors than they do Muslim immigrants, an obvious attempt to draw some sort of misplaced historical analogy. (It appears the refugee & DHS themes were entirely Cuarón’s doing.)
As I recall, the radical, Antifa-like, terrorist group called ‘The Fishes’ are a militant group of Leftists claiming to be an ‘immigrants rights’ group. I read it as something of an insurgency-coalition formed between radical Muslims and the radical Leftists. Doing the illegal immigrants’ bidding, they are the source of much of the film’s bloodshed. Thoroughly paranoid in their conspiracy-theorizing, they blame coffee shop bombings not on Muslims (or Leftists) but on the government. (The sequence with the trigger-happy, dreadlocked wigger is particularly terrifying.)
From a purely technical point of view, Children of Men contains some brilliantly choreographed, single-shot sequences, the most famous being a six-minute-plus scene in which the protagonist Theo is first captured by The Fishes, narrowly escapes their clutches, only to flee to an even more dangerous situation involving government tanks and artillery. It is a most impressive sequence and had to have been a nail-biter for the Director and all involved.
I’ll never forget first seeing the movie’s extraordinary, penultimate scene, where we see a Hezbollah-like, ragtag (but uniformed) parade of Muslim insurgents marching through an embattled, mostly destroyed cityscape. Before we actually see them on screen, complete with green, Hezbollah-styled bandanas covering all but their eyes, we hear their uniform chants echo through th ealleyways: “Alluha Akhbar!”
Lynch notes that PD James “predicts the rise of Left-wing terrorist violence, which makes sense, since Leftism is a form of religion for unbelievers.”
I’ve long been surprised we haven’t yet seen leftwing suicide bombers here in the West. (Paul Schrader’s recent film First Reformed,with its radical green agenda, entertains this as a rational course of selfless‘activism’.) The requisite level of religious fervor on the Left certainly exists, as does other religious trappings. If one compares our current socio-political scene to that of the late-1960s/early-1970s, the rhetoric of hate and extremism by the Left then is certainly matched by today’s rhetoric, but there’s a notable deficit in the respective levels of political violence. In today’s scene, we’ve had nothing like the organized terrorist attempts of the Weather Underground and their ilk. (For comparison: in an 18-month period between 1971 &1972, the FBI counted an estimated 2,500 bombings on American soil, almost 5 per day.) Similarly, while BLM has inspired some targeted killings, we are today experiencing nothing like the urban riots of the late 1960s (Watts; Newark; etc.)
Mitigating factors taking place today include the different and plentiful flavors of Soma we now have (internet-based entertainment; Netflix; cellphones), the more decentralized ways in which people ‘meet’ (online groups vs. organized physical meetings), and the embodied narcissism (‘the world revolves around me and my feelings’) intrinsic to leftist identity politics, one that perhaps eclipses necessary levels of self-sacrifice.
In time, though, as the religiosity of Political Correctness (with its dogma of anti-whiteness) intensifies, and the bleak nihilism and meaninglessness of hedonistic ‘expressive individualism’ becomes more readily apparent, extreme political violence will likely become manifest.
