Who You Calling Illegal, Pilgrim: Children of Men review
Published at Imagine 2050
http://imagine2050.newcomm.org/2008/06/19/who-you-calling-illegal-pilgri...
By Walidah Imarisha
“The public face of immigration in the USA is not a rainbow; it is brown. Don't get me wrong. People from Asia, Africa, Europe AND Latin America are migrating to the USA, among other places. Yet in the popular media the portrayal of the immigrant is usually that of a Latino.” Bill Fletcher, “Another Side to Race and Immigration,” ZNet, July 30, 2007
Alfonso Cuaron, director of the 2006 release Children of Men, mighta wanted to have a sit down with brotha Fletcher before filming his fulla potential but ultimately disappointing film about immigration and race. Well, Children of Men is about race, but spends the entire length of the film consciously avoiding the topic of race.
Children of Men, set in London in 2027, looks to a future where humans aren’t reproducing: the last baby was popped out 18 years before. The world is falling to pieces, the economy is at an all time low. We are led to believe this is a result of the infertility, but because it adamantly a refused to address the issue of race, Children of Men is a film with holes big enough to drive a mack truck through.
England’s response to the global turmoil is shown in the film through a commercial on the subway: “The world has collapsed; Only Britian soldiers on.” Soldiering on means lining up refugees (called “fugees”) and shoot them in the street.
The film, however, is not about the fugees, their struggle to free themselves from oppressive and genocidal situation. It’s not even about Kee [Clare-Hope Ashitey], an underage black fugee prostitute who gives birth to the first baby born in almost two decades. Predictably, the hero is yet again a white man: Theo, [Clive Owen], a white former radical and his journey to find something to believe in again.
In the end, the fugees, other than Kee, are faceless, nameless, powerless, and often grotesque stereotypes. The only images we see of Middle Eastern fugees is after an uprising in a ghetto occurs; screaming “AllahuAkbar” in the street, masked, waving rifles, some of the fugees are riding horses. Where they found horses in a fugee relocation center (read concentration camp), I have no idea, but clearly it would not have been a complete racist caricature without them.
Even Kee, hope of the future, is powerless in the film. She follows Theo blindly, ignoring the fact that for any young black immigrant sista to stay alive on the mean streets of London as a sex worker, she’s have some pretty baaaad survival instincts and intuition of her own. Of course then we wouldn’t have a great white hope, so they strip her of that.
Instead of addressing the fact that immigrants are portrayed as being brown around the world, the film runs from the discussion of race at all. The fugees are shown as being of all races, with eastern Europeans just as oppressed and brutalized as immigrants of color. This is not the reality of the world we live in, and by avoiding that reality, Cuaron leeched this film of the majority of political relevance it could have had.
Who is seen as illegal in this society we live in? Who is suspect, stopped and asked for i.d.? Whose very existence is illegal? The only reference to race in the film is when a white woman fugee is in one of the police cages, complaining that she was put next to a “schwartze” (German for black), gesturing to the black man next to her. That’s the only race reference, and if you don’t understand German you would miss it, miss the very important fact that this woman is more worried about being next to a black than the fact that they are going to put a bullet in her head. That is the reality of the dialogue about immigration today, that it can never be severed from a discussion of race.
“Recognizing the racialization of immigration should help one understand that much of what we are witnessing is a scapegoating of Latinos for much larger forces and factors that are underway in US society… the restructuring of capitalism that has been underway and that immigrants are the victims rather than the source,” says Bill Fletcher.
Replace “U.S.” with “England” and you have an inkling of the kind of message and dialogue Children of Men could have prompted. Without it, the film ultimately repeats the same, flawed, current day political debate; Regardless of what side you’re on, left or right, we only see it through the eyes of white u.s. born citizens while the voices, experiences and agency of immigrant populations, especially of color, are completely erased.
