Without a Conceivable Future: Figuring the Mother in Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men

Alfonso Cuarón repeatedly insists that he did not intend to create a science fiction film when he directed Children of Men (2006); rather, he understands his work as an extrapolation from his post-9/11 context into the future through his technique of “referencing” familiar images, icons, and visual rhetoric.¹ At stake here is whether accepting Cuarón’s own generic designation obscures some of the critical work that the film does and, conversely, whether perhaps reading Cuarón’s film as science fiction could lead to a more nuanced interpretation of his vision. Darko Suvin, a leading scholar in the debates about the nature of science fiction, defines science fiction as “a literary genre whose necessary and sufficient conditions are the presence and interaction of estrangement and cognition, and whose main formal device is an imaginative framework alternative to the author’s empirical environment [i.e., novum].”² The novum that changes substantially the aesthetic and the affect of the future world of Cuarón’s film is global infertility. As it is set in a world without a “conceivable” future, Children of Men, I contend, when understood through the lens of science fiction, reveals the crisis of representation embodied in biopolitical figures, such as bare life, and exposes serious implications for reproductive, civil, and human rights. Such an aesthetic, I argue, transfigures the concepts of nation, hope, and futurity and their symbolic weight on actual bodies within the world of the film.

Beginning in 2027, Children of Men chronicles the monotonous and, in some regards, alienated life of alcoholic divorcé Theodore Faron, who continues to mourn the premature death of his son (by influenza) and the subsequent separation from his wife, Julian. These losses are so great that they strip him of his social ambition, political action, and optimism. Julian, who has channeled her mourning into activism, is now allied with an underground militant organization known as the Fishes, which aims to undermine government operations and protect immigrants and illegal aliens who have become the British nation’s internal enemy, political target, and obsession.³ After years of being incommunicado with Theo, Julian and her crew contact him for a special mission, which entails that Theo safely transport Kee, a “miraculously” pregnant refugee, out of the country and into the hands of the Human Project, a mysterious humanitarian organization that is committed to finding a “cure” for worldwide infertility and appears to be the only rogue protector of human rights remaining. This film, loosely based on the novel with the same name by British writer P. D. James, projects the anxieties about the future of a world that has become infertile in the midst of environmental collapse, man-made disasters, and perpetual war.⁴ In both the film and the novel Cuarón and James situate their lone pregnant mother characters as vessels of hope for the future.⁵

In light of the premise of global infertility the identities of the mother figures in the book and film versions of Children of Men become even more crucial to an understanding of their problematic but indispensable relations with the nation. In James’s pre-9/11 version the pregnant mother is a British citizen, Julian, who is described as an idealistic political dissident with a disfigured hand. The father of her baby is an unlikely suspect (an epileptic priest named Luke) at the same time that their reproductive compatibility is a surprise to the government that has already dismissed them as eugenically unfit and non-reproductive. Informed by post-9/11 border politics, Cuarón’s new Eve is Kee, a “fugee” woman, or, in this case, a dark-skinned refugee of African descent, whose child will most likely be stateless, following the illegal status of its mother and the circumstance of its unknown paternity. Interestingly enough, both mothers, whose reproduction is considered undesirable in terms of the national “ideal,” pass under the radar as this future version of Britain screens only eugenically fit citizens for fertility, which further suggests that it is not merely...