esperanto’s whereIstand blog

This whole ridiculous episode really throws into high relief the kind of petty, vicious bigotry that persists in our society when it comes to sexuality.

That men must surreptitiously seek the company of other men in bathroom stalls; that police devote precious resources to obliquely persecuting these men when real victimization is taking place all around us; that the merest hint of homosexuality can sink a Republican’s political career more precipitously than a hetero sex scandal, corruption, unchecked and shameless greed, incompetence, pathological dishonesty or quasi-fascist, muscle-bound paranoia; nothing good comes of these things.

I can’t blame Larry Craig for resigning. He’s no gay liberation superhero, and his ability to effectively represent his constituents is definitely impaired. And yes, technically, he did plead guilty to a crime — not the kind of behavior we want to encourage in our leaders, though the criminality of his actions is pretty suspect in my opinion. Yes, I’d rather not have people touching my feet while I pee, but do the police really need to be involved? And where are these uniformed protectors when men are boorishly propositioning women instead of their fellow men?

Just goes to show how far we haven’t come.

whereIstand Tags

• LarryCraig
• Should Senator Larry Craig resign?
• Is homosexuality a choice?

I wouldn’t necessarily say that reality shows have "no impact" on TV quality, but I think their effect is pretty neutral. Most of them are lame, but because of all the space they take up, the scripted shows that make it to prime time tend to be better. I would say it’s a wash.

I’m probably watching more shows regularly now than I ever have in my life, both sitcoms and dramas, on cable and broadcast TV. There’s one almost every night. Of these so-called appointment shows, only one of them is a reality show. That would be Man vs. Wild on the Discovery Channel.

To me, reality shows are fatally flawed because they will always be transparently fake. It’s a condition of their format. In a traditional documentary film the crew follow their subjects around for hundreds of hours and then sit down to identify the 90 minutes or so of watchable footage. A reality show, in contrast, needs 45 minutes every week at the very least, and so the creators must constantly manufacture drama when none exists.

At first this was done via arbitrary and often mysterious structures and rules, along with the much-copied "vote you off the island" pioneered by Survivor. Not so much reality as a hybrid of game shows and LARPing with more attractive contestants. The later trend has built competitions around the actual skills of its contestants (see The Apprentice, Top Chef, etc.), a marginal improvement that still leaves plenty of room for staged silliness.

While not alone in this distinction, Man vs. Wild represents the highest achievement reality TV can ever hope to achieve: it’s brilliantly bad.

The show pulls off this feat largely because of its good intentions; it tries to eliminate the obvious staginess of reality TV by importing its conventions into a nature show, following a real survivalist through the real wilderness, not just some remote Pacific island owned by CBS.

The premise is that Bear Grylls, an ex-Special-Forces Brit who is the youngest man to climb Everest (or something like that), will show viewers how to survive in some of the most extreme locales in the world using only what nature makes available. As you might expect, the educational aspect is tangential, since it’s not really what you’d call "news you can use." Unless you can use chestnuts such as "Peeing on your turban can help prevent heat stroke if you’re lost in the desert."

So basically in every episode, Bear Grylls, armed only with a water bottle and a flint (though in later episodes he has inexplicably added a cup to his repertoire) leaps from an aircraft into a location
where an adventurer could conceivably be lost: a mesa in the Moab desert of Utah, a mountain in Alaska, the top of Mt. Kilauea, the middle of the Pacific Ocean, etc. Then for the next few days he tries to make his way back to civilization using only his wits, foraging for food and clean water and generally tromping around in a boy’s fantasy.

The brilliance of this show is how it negotiates the tension between reality and staginess, because you’re continually aware of the fact that in every absurd and difficult situation Grylls nimbly escapes from, he’s accompanied by a camera crew (I’ve deduced from his off-hand references that this crew includes more than one person). You never question that they are really alone in the desert, stranded on an uninhabited Pacific island, or marooned
atop a mountain glacier, but you must constantly wonder how extreme the situations really are. Was it really necessary for Bear Grylls to climb down a jungle waterfall if the camera guy can shoot him doing it from four different angles? While he’s sucking latex from a tree and biting heads off of snakes, are they just pulling hamburgers out of their backpacks?

The constant absurdity of this second-guessing tempers the very real danger of being lost in the wild with a touch of camp that lets you sit back and enjoy the idiosyncrasies of Bear Grylls. First of all, his name; it’s so perfectly harmonized and indivisible that it has to be fake, and it is, though to be fair "Bear" is apparently his middle name. Second and paramount are his military forthrightness and unflagging optimism, which combine to make him tremendously charismatic. When a helicopter drops him in the middle of the ocean and he starts swimming madly for a deserted island barely visible on the horizion, he happily reports that he’s "only about two miles" away. When he scrapes a filched robin’s egg off of a hot, dusty rock in the middle of the Moab, it’s "one of the best scrambled eggs I’ve ever had." (Well, it certainly had to be better than the raw egg that he cracked into his gullet, shell and all, only minutes earlier.) When he tears the head off an Alaskan salmon and chows down, it’s "so fresh." When his entire dinner consists of a tiny garden snake he pulls out of a bush and eats practically alive, he concludes, "The head is still moving. That was a good meal."

It’s both campy and really impressive. He’s in beautifully dangerous locales, having adventures that are real enough to look genuine, even if you know they’re not. Regardless of whether he really needed to rappel down the waterfall or clamber into the glacial tunnel, he is doing it with cheery facility and telling you all about it at the same time. Nature adds an element of true unpredictability to the show, not just the unkempt whims of Donald Trump. I don’t see how a reality show could be better than this.

whereIstand Tags

• What impact has reality television had on the quality of programming?

As the cliché goes, money talks and bullshit walks. But who runs? Only people who can afford it.

In theory, we select our representatives and leaders by voting, either directly or through the absurd electoral college system. But long before our time comes to step inside that goofy little booth, a lot of decisions have been made on our behalf, without our permission. Who’s to blame? All that talking money.

Consider that we were talking about Hillary Clinton as the front-runner for the Dems in the 2008 election fully four years before any vote would be cast. Because of her visionary political agenda, her commanding international presence, her impeccable leadership qualities? No, because she doesn’t have any of these things. What she has is access to the massive fund-raising network she and her husband built during his eight years as president. It’s a year until the first primary election and her war chest already numbers in the tens of millions. Already, she is quite literally buying votes.

Meanwhile, it’s a joke for the public to consider supporting many candidates who may very well be more qualified for executive office, bolder and more visionary in their thinking, more in tune with the American public or more in line with our own politics. Why? Because they’re po’. (Relatively speaking, of course.)

It’s ridiculous. I have a serious problem with the fact that the expenditure of money can be considered "speech" or expression in this country, but that’s already been decided by the Supreme Court and there’s not much to be gained by shouting at the rain. Let’s just say that if money equals speech, some of us were born with a much larger vocabulary capacity than others. (Now there’s a political slogan that’s about to catch fire.)

There is a solution. It’s called Clean Elections, but thanks to Buckley, it’s got to be voluntary. We’re seeing already that voluntary campaign spending limits are going to be a joke in 2008, so we’ve got to beef up the system (and fast), because the presidency isn’t getting any cheaper.

I wrote an article on Clean Elections for a small magazine in upstate New York last year; I’d link to it, but the magazine has since folded and even its website has vanished off the face of the internets. Still, I’ll use that research to make my case.

With minor exceptions, this is how Clean Elections reform works: to qualify, a candidate must collect a significant but relatively small number of $5 donations and signatures from his constituents—enough to keep fringe candidates out without making the process prohibitively expensive or time-consuming. Once the candidate has met that threshold, he receives a set amount of funding from the government coffers and is barred from accepting further donations. If his opponent eschews clean financing and outspends him with private donations, the candidate is eligible to receive more public money, up to a predetermined cap. Many versions of the plan also provide for additional money to counter independent advocacy campaigns that tacitly support their opponents.

The advantages of this system are manifold. First of all, it removes a great many opportunities for interest groups to purchase influence over elected leaders. There is some evidence that Clean Elections has weakened some powerful lobbies where it’s been enacted. For example, Maine and Arizona, the two states that have adopted the plan, have since passed sweeping health-care reforms over the objections of big business. It’s suggestive, if not definitive, evidence.

This is the most obvious benefit, but it’s also probably a little overblown. Special interests have spent all eternity getting around rules like that; no reason to believe this change would suddenly stop them cold. Clean elections, however, addresses another problem, and one that more obviously reaches from the highest office in the nation to the lowest: the sheer amount of time it takes to raise enough cash to run.

For my story, one county legislator in upstate NY, mounting a campaign for state senate, told me:

Morning, noon and night, I’m supposed to be calling people and asking for money, all the time.  Even [reaching out to] voters, at least right now, has become secondary to money.

A recent NY Times article (subscription req’d) made note of this as well—the local League of Women Voters is sponsoring workshops for would-be candidates, and one of the lessons, according to Douglas Muzzio of Baruch College:

What one has to do in campaigning is, in a sense, mind-blowing. Just going to your Rolodex and asking friends for money can be a terrifying experience.

Under Clean Elections, campaigns are less expensive, and the candidates can stop cold-calling their frat brothers for handouts and start doing the people’s business.

It’s true that it’s mostly lefties who support Clean Elections (the description does include the words "public financing," after all), but come on, conservatives: shed your bogus "small government" pose—not even your own party believes in that anymore—and seize the opportunity to take the Hollywood influence out of politics once and for all!

whereIstand Tags

• Do regulations on campaign contributions violate the First Amendment?

Apologies for the awful pun, but this is the year and a boffo headline seemed appropriate. Scorsese goes back to his roots with a gritty crime drama and finally takes home the prize.

This is why:

1. "The Departed" is way better than "Gangs of NY" or "The Aviator," the last films Scorsese has had in the Oscar race. It’s definitely the best movie I’ve seen this year (though I’ve only seen three of the Best Picture nominees so far), and in my opinion it’s even better than the Hong Kong original, which was awesome in its own right. It redefined violent movies for me forever; every gunshot caused me pain.
2. Scorsese has returned to the form that made him famous back in the days of "Mean Streets" and "Taxi Driver." Really, who wants to take the guy who got famous making Mafia movies and give him a statue for movies about the Dalai Lama and Howard Hughes? This is the movie the Academy is waiting for. Conversely, if he doesn’t win for this one, he’s never going to. It’s a golden opportunity.
3. He finally ushered Leonardo DiCaprio out of puberty with "The Departed," which deserves some kind of award anyway.

That is all.

whereIstand Tags

• Which film will win best motion picture of the year? (expired: 2007-02-25 05:00 PM)
• Who will win the Oscar for achievement in directing? (expired: 2007-02-25 05:00 PM)
• Should Leonardo DiCaprio have been nominated for his role in “The Departed?”

I used to be a ravenous consumer of movie reviews. Every Friday I’d drill through all the new movie reviews in The New York Times and Salon, because I found that I most consistently agreed with their critics—every review, of movies popular and obscure. I’ve never lived too far from an art-house theater, and there was always an opportunity to see pretty much any movie I wanted to. And I always had a list.

Then I had an unusual experience. I went with my girlfriend to see a movie and it wound up being sold out, so we decided to see a movie neither of us knew anything about. We had only seen a trailer for it, and we were fans of its star and his previous work; I hadn’t read any reviews and didn’t really know anything about the plot. In fact, I didn’t even know it had been released yet.

I found it entertaining and funny, and the characters drew me in. The ending was a little lacking. Then over the course of our after-movie discussion, we sussed out the particulars of the vaguely bad taste the movie left in our mouths and came to realize how truly vacant and immature it was, despite its hip, entertaining sheen.

Later, I looked up a few reviews of the film on Metacritic, and found that most of the nation’s critics had come to the same conclusion.

It’s really pathetic, how revelatory this experience was for me. Now, for the cultural pronouncement:

In this "Information Age," sometimes the joy of discovering information about things interferes with our discovery of the things themselves.

Normally, my relationship with that movie would have gone like this: "Well, it turns out that one’s supposed to be bad. Let’s go home and watch game shows with my roommates instead."

But now, I aspire to know as little about movies as possible before I see them, particularly regarding the plot. Really, only two or three questions need to be answered:

1. What’s the premise?
2. Is it any good? (Really, the thrill of discovery doesn’t need to extend to bad movies all the time.)
3. Who directed it? (optional)

This weekend I finally got around to seeing "Babel." [Moderate spoilers ahead—nothing you wouldn't read in a review.] It was okay—nowhere near as overrated as the wretched "Pan’s Labyrinth," but very far from being the best movie I’ve seen this year and certainly not deserving of the Oscar. I was prepared to dislike it because my girlfriend had been trashing it for months, and I had heard tidings from the Internet that it was the kind of movie that acted like it had something important to say without ever getting around to it. Other than that, I knew almost nothing about what the movie was actually about.

This I chalk up to good trailers, and I’ll explain why. I saw one in the theater a while ago, and have seen numerous TV spots since. They depict a bunch of characters who seem to have nothing to do with each other: Americans in Morocco, Mexicans, blonde kids, Japanese people. Everything I remembered from the trailers happened in the beginning of the movie, and none of it suggested the direction the movie would eventually go.

Instead of checking off the mental list of highlights assembled from the half-dozen reviews I’d read, I was free to let the movie take me where it would. The most noticeable effect of this new freedom is that I find movies much more suspenseful—not like monster-movie hackery, where you’re just wondering when the ghoul will jump out, or suspense-movie suspense, where you’re waiting for the twist ending.

Movie reviewers are careful not to give away the big surprises, but even the cursory plot details they need to set up their opinions rob a movie of much of its surprise. I literally knew nothing about the plot of the movie past the first five minutes or so. Even learning how the disparate characters are related to one another was a discovery, and one that could be ruined by too much spoon-feeding in the trailer.

I’ve seen a few movies lately that I didn’t like that much, or as much I should have, given the hype. "Pan’s Labyrinth" was one, "Babel" is probably another. But with both, instead of being armed with an opinion that I fit pieces of the movie into as I watched, I very much enjoyed watching both movies and only afterward did I mull them over and decide they didn’t add up to much. It was a much more satisfying experience.

If this sounds tragically nerdy to you, chances are you grew up pre-Internet. But, fellow Children of the Web, if my sad story resonates with you, I recommend you give blind moviegoing a try. It’s always possible these days to know too much.

whereIstand Tags

• What impact has the Internet had on the film industry?
• Are critics’ reviews a reliable guide to a movie’s quality?

I’m going to go out on a limb here and draw a connection between modeling and sports on this one. The stereotypes would have you believe that models and athletes are at opposite ends of the female spectrum (models as objets d’art, athletes as muscular, beastly lesbians, etc.).

But they are intimately related in that they are professions in which intense scrutiny is placed on women’s bodies. They are not unique in this characteristic (see also every moment of a woman’s life), but the parallels are fascinating.

Take weight restrictions on models. I was all set to answer "Yes" to this issue because of the horrific images of female beauty the modeling industry has perpetuated, ushering in body image crises for generations of girls at forever earlier ages. Then I read what thus far seems to be the only public figure position on this issue, that of Diane von Furstenberg (too lazy to find the umlaut).

We need to make sure everyone is sensitive to the issues. But to calculate the girls’ body mass – I personally think it is demeaning. I’m all about empowering women. And by lining them up against the wall and weighing them, surely you are making them feel more like meat than ever – even if it’s little meat, if you know what I mean.

Bang. The curse of political correctness has been that what looks good on paper often turns out a disaster in practice. Von Furstenberg is dead-on, and I have no doubt that body mass restrictions would soon lead to such a ghastly spectacle—which, in the end, is probably worse, because I doubt the skinny-model ban would have much effect anyway, leaving us with what von Furstenberg cleverly labels women not just as meat, but as lean meat.

But on to Act 2. Take this recent article from the New York Times, "Athletes Embrace Size, Rejecting Stereotypes," which examines the duality between male college athletes, whose body weights are public, and their female counterparts, whose body weights are not.

Even as women are embracing their size and power, projecting the notion that a wide body can be a fit body, the idea of weighing female athletes is under vigorous debate.
* * *
Female athletes still face the same enormous societal pressures that other women face to remain thin and to possess a body type that many find unrealistic, especially for sports … Thus, many become vulnerable to what is called the female athlete triad: eating disorders, interrupted menstruation and osteoporosis.

One of the NCAA’s doctors raises a specter almost identical to von Furstenberg’s nightmare vision:

The N.C.A.A. recommends that women not be weighed on a regular basis, said Dr. Ron A. Thompson, a psychologist and eating-disorder therapist in Bloomington, Ind., who consults with the collegiate association. He said he opposed making weights public and the practice of weighing female athletes. Lining athletes up for weigh-ins is a form of “public degradation,” Thompson said.

“Weighing doesn’t accomplish anything, and it can cause undue anxiety and even trigger unhealthy weight-loss practices,” Thompson wrote in an e-mail message.

The rest of the article goes on to enumerate various restrictive weight policies at colleges and examples of women who are breaking this mold by, tragically, stating the obvious: female bodies competing at the highest level of physical prowess are going to look as freakishly powerful as male bodies do.

“We’re women who are not apologizing for being bigger and being different or for being athletic,” Paris [a dominant center at U of Oklahoma described as "the female Shaquille O'Neal"] said. “It’s more acceptable in society. For my generation, it’s really not a big deal.”

Her twin sister, Ashley, a center-forward at Oklahoma, said that their mother, who is 6-1, told of slouching as a girl, and of buying shoes that were too small, in an effort not to stand out.

So what do I take away from this comparison? There are a lot of ways to objectify the female body, both ill- and well-intentioned. Fetishistically calculating women’s ratio of weight to height probably isn’t the best way to relieve them of body image problems. And if Courtney Paris is right, maybe we’re making progress.

whereIstand Tags

• DianevonFurstenberg
• Should minimum weight restrictions be placed on models?
• [open thread]

My reasoning on this issue is simple: I am tired of my friends telling me that this or that new animated movie is "awesome." It is not.

What appeals to a child about a movie should be very different than what appeals to an adult. In fact, one of the principal joys of entering adulthood was the realization that I had become categorically superior to all children.

I have not seen "Shrek," an animated feature that was universally lauded by my friends in college. I saw the first ten minutes of "Finding Nemo," another flick that one of my movie-obsessed friends listed among his favorites of whatever year it came out; it sucked. I saw "The Incredibles," mostly because I read an article in Salon about how it advanced conservative theories on education and I was intrigued; there are worse things I could have done with 90 minutes, but the movie was wholly unmemorable. (Couldn’t find the article on Salon, but it was mostly trumped up anyway.)

Really, the chief value of kids’ movies to adults is essentially childish. It either helps them pretend to reclaim the magical feeling in their loins from when they first saw "The Great Mouse Detective" (just me?) or makes them feel smart because they get all the sex jokes that go over kids’ heads or they’ve picked up on the ham-fisted PC message encased within. Give me a break. Let kids have their own movies, so they can leave us alone for a while and watch them.

whereIstand Tags

• Should animated films try to appeal to both adults and children?

Whoops, this time we—I mean, "the Iraqi government"—did it.

Iraqi officials who attended the hanging said the calculation in the case of Mr. Ibrahim, a 55-year-old of medium height and build, had allowed for a “drop” of eight feet — too much, according to at least one United States Army manual — and about that amount of thick yellow rope could be seen coiled at Mr. Ibrahim’s feet before the hanging.

The video showed his head being snapped off as the rope went taut, and ending up, still inside the hood, lying in the pit of the gallows about five feet from his headless body.

Barbarism defined. Instead of cutting the man’s head off with a big knife, we tore it off by accelerating his body to a high speed and jerking back on his neck. And if this had gone off "humanely," we would have jerked back only hard enough to break his neck without actually shredding it to bits.

The Iraqis described the decapitation of Mr. Ibrahim as a “rare incident,” but they acknowledged that a similar thing had happened at least once before in the score or more of hangings that have been carried out since the fall of Mr. Hussein. They cited the case of an Egyptian man hanged in the northern city of Mosul for offenses linked to the insurgency, who had also had his head separated as he fell.

I don’t understand how an enlightened society can stand for this.

One of the most authoritative manuals, the United States Army’s “Procedure for Military Executions,” issued under the authority of Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower when he was Army chief of staff in 1947, gave a chart that recommended that a man of about Mr. Ibrahim’s weight, about 185 pounds, would need a “drop” of five feet seven inches — nearly two and a half feet less than the drop for Mr. Ibrahim — to assure what the manual called “a proper execution.”

Nothing gives one human being the right to tear off another’s head; the fact that we sanction executions where failure to carry the 1 can lead to such a result is appalling.

whereIstand Tags

• Are there circumstances under which you support capital punishment?

Fair warning: don’t read this if you haven’t seen the movie (and maybe if you haven’t seen "Y Tu Mama Tambien" either).

Alfonso Cuarón, director of "Children of Men," is fast creating a niche for himself as a not-quite-mainstream genre subverter. He takes a movie genre that on its surface looks very familiar—the teenage sex comedy/road movie ("Y Tu Mama Tambien"), the kid wizard movie (whichever Harry Potter movie he directed), the sci-fi dystopia—and gives it a twist that reveals both how bankrupt the genre has become and how relevant and meaningful it should be.

I’m not going to talk about the Harry Potter flick because I haven’t seen it, but from what I know about it, he did something along these lines with that one, modernizing it or something. Don’t care. Onward:

Y Tu Mama Tambien

"Y Tu Mama Tambien" is brilliant film, the teen movie to end all teen movies, because it takes the conventions of the teenage sex comedy and blows them all to hell. It’s an entertaining and moving film, but it’s also a devastating critique by example, turning on the same simple hook as "Children of Men": placing realistic characters in cliché situations.

You can tell from the beginning that it’s a smart movie (the strangely detached narrator makes a joke about Lacanian psychoanalysis within the first five minutes) but the action belies little about what’s to come. Tenoch and Julio drive around acting like typical, hormone-engorged movie kids, taking drugs, having sex, acting gross, clashing with adults. One is really rich, one is lower-middle-class, but that’s nothing new.

Then something really weird happens: they’re driving around, talking about girls or bitching about something, and the movie stops. We leave them behind and go outside the car, where the narrator tells us a little story about the anonymous landmark they’re driving past: it’s the site of an accident that killed a young mother in rural Mexico, or a parade of labor protestors, or whatever else it is (too lazy to go back to the movie, but I’ve seen it multiple times).

It’s the trials and tribulations of the poor country people that Julio and Tenoch don’t see, because they’re busy romping through the playground of life—the very people, it’s implied, that Tenoch’s government minister father is actively engaged in short-changing.

It’s the "click" moment when you realize you were wrong about this movie. From here on, everything is upside down. They find the imaginary beach they lied about visiting, but it’s about to vanish forever at the hands of a condo developer. The older sex kitten they cajole into joining their trip reveals just how childish they really are, and she her most satisfying sexual experience on the trip winds up being convincing her oversexed male companions to JUST MAKE OUT ALREADY. She only went on the trip in the first place because her husband was cheating on her and she knew she was about to die of cancer, and in the process she destroys Julio and Tenoch’s friendship forever.

And thus the road movie/sex comedy genre is reduced to its core: a movie about ignorant, privileged, latently homosexual kids who act like studs but are really babies. But it’s no polemic; it’s a story about real people in an unlikely situation. It’s moving and true.

Children of Men

"Children of Men" is all the more superior for being more subtle (despite some overly expository dialogue in the first act). There’s no non-diegetic narrator telling you where to look, but by the end, you’re left with a frighteningly realistic vision of dystopia, not the Charlton Heston damn-you-all-to-hell variety.

Subtlety: not a word one usually associates with the dystopian thriller. Don’t get me wrong; I have a serious weakness for dystopian fiction (I’ll forward you my 20-page paper I wrote on agricultural dystopia and the biotech industry if you don’t believe me – it requires a certain dementia to compare Monsanto to "Soylent Green"). As far as I’m concerned, the late 60s, early 70s output of Charlton Heston is as near the pinnacle of filmmaking as I care to get, and the new "Battlestar Galactica" TV series is pretty good as well.

But there’s no denying that it’s a silly genre, devoted to ham-fisted political metaphors, sci-fi geekfests and action-hero posturing. In "Children of Men," Cuarón tackles not the usual dystopian question—What can the future tell us about the present?—but a more difficult one: What would a dystopia really look like?

So he sets it only 20 years in the future, meaning that any futuro-gadget fetishism is right out: everything looks the same as it does now, only dirtier. Other than that, you have your standard setup: humanity has gone to hell, a repressive government is clashing with a mysterious underground resistance, and an apolitical hero is thrust into the midst of it all on a mission to save the world.

The "click" in this flick arrived for me when Julian was killed. I knew at that moment that Theo would not reunite with his old flame, return to his activist past and fight the power, or save the world. His background gives him just enough of a conscience to compel him to act, but he fears the resistance even more than he fears the government, because they’re an unknown quantity.

Theo sets off on his quest because he can’t imagine changing the world without first escaping from it. Life as he knows it is literally hopeless, and even the first pregnancy in 17 years can’t save it now. This fact is very satisfyingly telegraphed in the scene where he and Ki are given free passage by the awe-struck infantry, stunned into silence by the sight of a pregnant woman—for about 30 seconds. Then another bomb drops, and the usual chaos returns.

Normally, a satisfyingly dark ending leaves the protagonist dead or hopelessly screwed after solving the mystery of why everything is so fucked up, or how humanity can beat the forces of evil, or whatever they’re investigating. Not so in "Children of Men," because Cuarón recognizes that in real dystopias, regular people don’t solve mysteries; they go about their business and run away from stuff that blows up.

There are a ton of mysteries in "Children of Men," and none of them are solved: why people are infertile, why Ki is pregnant, whether the Human Project really exists, whether the world can be saved. It’s not a movie about a dystopia; it’s about people in a dystopia.

More importantly maybe, it takes the opposite path from "Y Tu Mama Tambien," leading the audience down the same foggy path as the characters. We know no more than they do about the results of their actions; we have the same blind faith, hope, or simple lack of choice as they do. The only non-diegetic moment is the sound of children laughing over the end credits, which really tells us nothing. As a result, it’s not a movie about them; it’s a movie about us.

Would we risk our lives as Theo does? Would it make a difference? Would we ever know?

whereIstand Tags

• [open thread]
• Do films have the power to effect social change?