When I returned home after the end of spring semester, my best friend told me she had given up on hope. She said that she needed peace and was tired of walking around angry at everyone and frustrated with everything. Forgoing hope, alongside adopting the Chinese proverb in which people are nothing more than an empty boat, would initiate that internal contentment. This was her way of reconciling with, or maybe resigning herself to, reality. We couldn’t have a conversation about it for about a month because I didn’t really understand her predicament. What does it mean to be a vessel, and what does it mean to let go of hope? I sat with these questions the whole summer.
Three months later, a few days before I came back up to Binghamton, my father and I sat down to re-watch Alfonso Cuarón’s “Children of Men.” Originally a novel written in 1992 by P.D. James, “Children of Men” takes place in 2027 England in a truly dystopian setting. However, the reality depicted there is not so difficult to imagine materializing. It’s been two decades since the last child was born and the threat of extinction, bolstered by a flu epidemic, grips the whole world. Violence eats away at every corner of life — most countries and environments are war-torn, economies are in shambles and civilization is ending. In England, that feeling of individual or national endangerment is expressed in all those typically unproductive and truly primitive ways — rampant xenophobia, classism, racism, etc. Migrants are placed in detention centers and camps and anti-establishment factions engage in resistance — all the while elites sit in their skyscrapers and watch bombs fall on everyone. It feels very close.
In this world so dull and gray and blue, that even the green of the trees feels gone, Theo Faron, a radical activist turned pessimistic civil servant, is recruited by his ex-wife Julian, head of a militant immigrant rights group, to help a young migrant girl named Kee obtain transit papers. Initially kept in the dark as to why the papers were needed, Theo agrees in exchange for money, but material reward soon becomes obsolete — Kee is pregnant, and the group is hoping to get her to Tomorrow, a medical naval ship working on a cure for rampant infertility. So the story goes on.
Bleak is the word and suspense is the game. Cuarón is beyond masterful. The color scale is abysmal and the setting is limbo. The pacing is perfection — each scene lingering exactly as long as it should, every frame capturing all that it needs to. The plot develops smoothly in spite of how quick-paced the film is, with all events transpiring within a few days. Neither excessively silent nor overbearing with dialogue, it mirrors in sound, words and visuals the fragmented way we engage with one another — the unspoken and unexplainable truths my best friend felt — all of which are further facilitated by a shaky lens and intimate first-person perspective that puts you in every scene.
The film leaves viewers with difficult questions to parse through. Why is it that countries establish their legitimacy through mass militarization and accumulation of arms? Why do we continue to viciously construct differences and impose imagined boundaries that rarely serve the people within them nor resolve the issues they claim to be addressing? Is the only way to leave this violence through “sanctified” violence? Where does the dream and need for a more equitable world come from? Can it ever be fulfilled, or are we, as a species, destined for discord and endless striving? Is Tomorrow coming and am I a fool to wait on it?
As the world collapses on itself in the film, you can’t help but feel like you’re looking into a mirror. It is a film about how we have developed as a species, throwing the human condition and the state of the so-called civilized world in our faces and asking us to really think about what there is to be proud of while we try to deny the urge or need to wipe ourselves clean. The beauty of the film is that it offers no answer to any of these questions — it offers no comfort. It is foggy and ambiguous and trying. I cry horrifically through the last thirty minutes of the film every time I watch it with my heart splitting in 10 different ways.
After my rewatch, I took the gray ending and my best friend’s declaration of the early summer on a walk. I thought about Jasper recounting Theo and Julian’s relationship — how their faith brought them together and chance brought them apart — and about the balance in leaving room for the inevitability and power of chance and still practicing faith. I thought about faith as a stronger force than hope, especially in the overwhelming and sublime confrontation with reality. Hope tends to imply a certain passivity, an endless waiting, a delaying of action. Faith allows you to take action without the promise of a better world materializing, but only because of your belief in the legitimacy of the action now, not the future. Maybe that’s the point of the ambiguity of the film, that you should not need certainty or guarantee to be propelled into motion.
I thought about Theo and how completely he gave himself to Kee and her child. He can be described as an unexpected savior and I guess, in some ways, he is. He is broody, with eyes that convey resignation and surrender. He is not driven by stringent political affiliation or a desire for power, so his reason for motivation does not seem immediately obvious. I think his faith is just simple and honest — in the face of an expecting mother, there’s no reason why she and her child should not have access to whatever safety and security they can. He is an empty boat, and this is admirable — he is an impersonal figure with no intentions for himself, and that renouncement of the personal combined with a rejection of blind and binding dogma or idealism allows him to serve others in the name of eternal truths and beliefs.
The other night, my friend Reina came over for dinner and picked up a fortune I have lying around the bathroom sink. “The usefulness of a cup is in its emptiness.” She asked what it meant, and I told her I didn’t have the words. Now, I’d hesitantly offer this — when we stop consciously constructing and needing to prove our identities as we align ourselves with values and systems of belief that ground us in a universality, we make ourselves empty. When we aren’t motivated by the notion of reward or personal development, but rather by an internal sense of right founded in celestial truths that we know, even if they can rarely leave the tips of our tongues, we can be of use. When we live at the intersection of faith and chance, we will always find ourselves grounded in the present. Maybe, that’s how you serve your fellow men. Maybe that’s what I’d like to take away from being their child.
Kyriaki Yozzo is a senior majoring in philosophy, politics and law.
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