HELIOCENTRISM IS NIHILISM:

The Children of Hollywood’s Deformed Imagination: Alfonso Cuaron is no P. D. James. (Thomas Hibbs, 1/03/07, National Review)

Perhaps we have made our Omegas what they are by own folly; a regime that combines perpetual surveillance with total indulgence is hardly conducive to healthy development. If from infancy you treat children as gods they are liable in adulthood to act as devils.
— The Children of Men, P. D. James [...]

In James’s novel, infertility operates as a symbol of mankind’s despair, of the nihilism that lurks just beneath the surface of modern life. The questions made explicit in the infertile world are: For what are we living? Why do we have children? What do we want to hand on to them? Cuaron is simply incapable of even recognizing these larger issues, let alone dealing with them on the screen. The book dwells in compelling detail, not just on xenophobia, but also on the disorders of modern sexuality, the stultifying of human passion and feeling, the flourishing of the desire for death, and the narcissistic attitudes toward children. James describes a world in which dolls (artificial children) and pets (child substitutes) have become objects of fawning desire, christened in birth celebrations and buried in consecrated ground to satisfy “frustrated maternal desire.”

Cuaron’s hope lies in a revolutionary unrest for something new, but that is not, in the novel, a feasible way out, since human desire has been sapped of energy and focus. Indeed, governance in the novel is precisely what Tocqueville described as the new physiognomy of servitude, a world in which citizens willingly subject themselves to the complete control of a bureaucratic apparatus, here concretized in the leadership of one man. The book makes wonderfully clear that democracy is no threat to the new tyrant; instead, it is an abiding assumption of the new form of tyranny. Because he gives the people protection, comfort, and pleasure, Britain’s leader would win any election in a landslide. As Tocqueville astutely saw, libertarianism and centralization — mirror images of one another — are not so much enemies as allies in the vanishing of a spirited public life and in the diminution of humanity.

For all of its promise of protection and pleasure, the new regime seems only to exacerbate the strange mixture of fear and longing for death, even as it serves to remove pleasure from our grasp. Officially sponsored group suicide, called the Quietus, allegedly allows individuals to choose when they die; yet the book makes clear that this is subject to abuse, as the government forces death upon those who have second thoughts and offers incentives to families to ease the elderly out of this life. Cuaron’s film turns this critique inside out and deprives the Quietus of any problematic status; the film’s only use of the Quietus is as a private and legitimate act of euthanasia. For the increasingly tepid pleasures experienced in this world of complete sexual freedom, there is government-sponsored pornography. As P. D. James puts it in the book, one might suppose that with the “fear of pregnancy permanently removed…, sex would be freed for new and imaginative delights.” But that is not the case: “Sex totally divorced from procreation has become almost meaninglessly acrobatic,” characterized by “painful orgasms, spasms without pleasure.”

Cuaron reduces James’s supple account of the human condition and the great political dangers of modernity to narrow ideological politics. That leaves Cuaron with nothing more to offer his audience than naïve, romantic-sounding, 1960s slogans about the younger generation. Cuaron has said, “I have a grim view not of the future but of the present. I believe evolution is happening and human understanding is occurring and that the young generation is the one that is getting some new perspective of reality of what’s going on in the world. The new generation will prove that the Earth is going around the sun, not the sun going around the Earth.” Sadly, that does not even rise to the level of John Lennon; instead, it is Whitney Houston, singing “I believe the children are our are future.”