ABSTRACT
The year is 2027. After eighteen years of global infertility, the civilian infrastructure has broken down. Britain has turned into a totalitarian state based on mass surveillance and total closure of its borders. Immigrants are herded into cages and mistreated. At a detention center, an atrocity exhibition reminiscent of events at Abu Ghraib prison and Guantánamo Bay unfurls. Such are the scenarios posed in the science-fiction dystopia of Children of Men (Alfonso Cuarón, 2006), drawing connections among immigration debates, heightened state surveillance, the invasion of Iraq, and the US/UK “War on Terror,” where torture is routine practice. For Slavoj Žižek, its apocalyptic future is a critique of present-day realities in which “the true focus of the film is there in the background” (Žižek, 2007). In this essay, I argue that Children of Men uses its science-fiction genre conventions and reportage-like camera style to portray a history of the neo-imperial politics of the present. Situating my analysis within a postcolonial critique of sovereign power, the state of exception, and its biopolitics, I focus upon how the film enables us to read the oppressive power dynamics of some of the darker aspects of today’s global realities. First, I will explain what is postcolonial about my reading of this film, establishing parallels between discourses of Orientalism and contemporary discourses of terror and security, which provide the film with its social and political contexts. Then, I will move on to a close analysis, using the critical tools of postcolonial theory to explore the film’s fictional portrayal of recent policies and its imagery of terror, torture, and detention.
