Watching Children of Men (2006) in 2023.

I hadn’t seen Children of Men before. I remember it being well received by my film buff friends back when it came out in 2006. For some reason at the time, it didn’t appeal.

Quite why, I don’t know. One of my best-loved films at the time was Bladerunner, and the Handmaid’s Tale was a book which walked alongside my thoughts most days, just as did and still does, Frankenstein. And, going without saying of course, Orwell’s works were well internalised both through my studies and through the mass consciousness. So, my snubbing of Children of Men wasn’t a genre thing; I wasn’t simply favouring the fluffy (except on hangover sofa days maybe!) Dystopia, sci-fi and spec-fic were amongst my literary favourites.

Perhaps I simply didn’t adequately respect the tastes of those acquaintances who told me how good it was. Or maybe my available bandwidth was too much reduced by M.E brain fog, post-literature-degree exhaustion, and navigating my intellectual world with then still undiagnosed ADHD. I don’t know.

Watching it for the first time a couple of nights ago, my jaw fell open throughout the opening scenes. Set in 2027, just around the corner from now (and 2006 still so recent in my mind, yet paradoxically 2027 back then sounding so far away).

I must have had a rather rose-tinted perception of British tolerance in 2006, assuming our then Labour Government, for all their flaws, mostly represented those ostensible British values of tolerance, inclusivity and diversity which I held so dear. I was in the latter half of my 20s, attending more to my socialite leanings than my socialist ones and there were still so many drinks to be drunk. Scribbling blogs of my rambling wine-soaked thoughts on MySpace, I was sadly unaware of the concepts of ‘income streams’ and ‘monetisation’ or the opportunities in the digital sphere for those with creative or literary hobbies. I was flailing around somewhat, a mite distracted from my core values and their alignment with my output.

While I was enthusiastically organising Love Music Hate Racism events at the time, I very naively believed I was pushing on an open door, so effectively had I curated my sphere, my echo chamber. I closed my ears to the whisperings of bigotry and prejudice a few degrees of separation away from my inner bubble, believing them to perhaps be expressions of tasteless irony, not real clues pointing towards what lay beneath the wider public sentiment. Those were the days when we might think of a comedian or sketch show “they’re not *really* being racist/ableist, because we’re all so switched on these days, so they can’t be.” Ha, bless us.

This speculative fiction, Children of Men, to me at the time would have seemed too implausible. A Britain caging and deporting immigrants in hostile environments. Calling anyone they deem “unBritish” (wozzat?!) illegal. A Britain simultaneously expressing its support and saviourhood for asylum seekers whilst stuffing its unwanted offal into the intestinal linings of its hidden chaotic fugee cities. A Britain compelling its citizens to snitch on “illegals” and even those of their own kith and kin.

But in recent years I’ve passed through many international arrivals tunnels into the UK and seen those posters and videos drilling our perfect Britishness into us, the state exhorting us to report any unwelcome incomers. Notices telling them directly that they are aliens. I’ve felt the implications of a superior, more comfortable and accessible line welcoming me into my country. I’ve wondered at it all. And I’m a chronic thinker. Many I know thankfully are too.

Many out there just aren’t. They have their bread and circuses. Many would miss even this unambiguous symbolism, not having been trained to analyse all text, even that text standing before you named Reality, nor to note the language and semiotics therein. It’s not just the perpetual divisive rhetoric, now so persistent as to almost be invisible, it’s also a close reading of the landscape, the architecture, of our post-noughties world.

The “invasion of cockroaches” and their treatment by the Home Office is beautifully articulated by Michael Caine’s character Jasper as though he was describing our current climate, not a dystopian future. For today’s audience, the film is a veritable blueprint for current policy. I’ve watched in horror from afar the daily progress of a Parliament I don’t trust towards its unspeakable goals.

I escaped my beautiful, beloved homeland, and await the next chapter.

Children of Men bears a few more watches for me, I think, and a study of its script. I need to ingest more of those fleeting images, the hidden details laden with prescience.

I caught a few delicious posters, public service announcements and pieces of text, such as a Daily Mail headline “Charles should be Throne Out!” And of course, “will the last person to die please turn out the lights” which reminded me of a famous piece of 1980s Frome graffiti, emblazoned across its ugly 60s precinct “Will the last person to leave Frome please feed the pigs”.