in Alfonso Cuarón's Children of Men
This paper analyses Alfonso Cuarón’s film Children of Men (2006), arguing that the film reveals the anxieties surrounding the construction of a patently British national identity, especially in a postcolonial age characterised by transnational mobility across the globe. As Jayna Brown points out, the film is marked by “a melancholia for a time when boundaries between racial and national bodies were stable, when the difference between ‘us’ and ‘them’ was clear” (110). Likewise, Julia Echeverra Domingo asserts that the film’s government relies on “the construction of terrorists and immigrants as the polluted Others,” or “invading agents” who threaten Britain, thereby “highlighting a dichotomy between infected, thus dangerous and dehumanized, individuals . . . and healthy ones” (150). Yet, building on Domingo’s viral metaphor, I contend that it is this depiction of the foreign Other as a viral threat which also generates anxiety about the fundamental instability of British national spaces, bodies, consciousness and identity. In other words, the very act of quarantining migrants within the refugee camp—contingent on their status as contaminating foreign agents—also ironically infects British consciousness. These so-called contaminants enact continual “outbreaks” into Cuarón’s onscreen spaces, and onto the British topos. The exile of migrant bodies to the camp—also that partitioned Other-colony within British territories—thereby paradoxically emblematises a leaking of Otherness into Britain itself.
Thus, the banishment of Others into the camp also comes to highlight the marginalised camp’s omnipresence in both the British landscape and mindscape. Likewise, Giorgio Agamben examines the concentration camp as a “space of exception” whereby “[w]hat is excluded in the camp is, according to the etymological sense of the term “exception” (ex-capere), taken outside, included through its own exclusion” (96, emphasis original). The camp is literally brought outside of its own boundaries, shown to have an integral function in establishing British society and national identity. On the one hand, the refugee camp is therefore the enactment of a border between the British Self and colonised, pathologised, Othered bodies. On the other, the film highlights the means through which the rule of quarantine allows for an infection of British identity, revealing how that same system which governs the camps can itself turn against the British topos and national-cultural consciousness. Accordingly, the space of the camp is revealed as a necessary precondition for Britishness: an external, Other space that paradoxically constitutes British identity, precisely via its spatial and symbolic expulsion from the British Self. The camp is thus both inside and outside of the British Self, but also inside and outside of its own boundaries. As an integral tool for defining Britain’s ideologies, the camp’s modus operandi flows beyond its own spatial borders into Britain. In Agamben’s terms, the camp thereby becomes “a zone of indistinction between outside and inside, exception and rule, licit and illicit” (97). Despite continual attempts by the government to banish immigrants from British society, the film dramatises how these attempts at exile are precisely that which allow the refugee camp to leak out of containment into Theo’s experience of Britain, “as the hidden matrix and nomos of the political space in which we are still living” (Agamben 96, emphasis mine).
I begin by arguing that the dehumanising treatment of refugees in the camp is foreshadowed in various moments in the film, even prior to the actual introduction of the camp to the film’s onscreen diegesis. This contamination into the everyday spaces that Theo traverses subsequently reveals how the camp leaks out of its spatial and temporal boundaries: its positionality within the narrative. In so doing, the foreign nature of the camp—represented onscreen as residual metonymic and metaphorical traces—pervades the film’s mundane, British spaces: “[t]he camp is thus the structure in which the state of exception . . . is realized normally” (Agamben 96-7, emphasis original). Brown traces one such moment in the scene where Kee reveals her pregnancy to Theo (see Fig. 1). She contends that the presentation of Kee’s body alongside the disfigured bodies of animals may be read as “a critique of European domination of man and environment,” insofar as Kee announces how “they cut off [the cows’] titties,” paralleling Kee’s own reduction to reproductive bare life (130). Brown writes:
As she stands amongst the cows, her own body becomes that of an imperiled animal. By way of letting Theo know about her pregnancy, Kee unbuttons her dress and lets it drop to the floor, exposing her naked body.
Her body in this moment is freighted with meanings. As sounds of angelic voices ring, the film re-enlists old tropes: Kee is the archetypal reproductive black female body, part beast, part human. The scene echoes the history of black woman’s sexual body as spectacle and evokes the long history of black women’s bodies as capitalism’s formative commodity. (130)
Thus, even in this moment, Kee collapses the boundaries between the refugee camp and the farm through the slippage of meanings appended to her body. She symbolically aligns her body—and by metonymic extension, the other refugee bodies—with the disfigured bodies of animals that are an integral part of the British pastoral topos.
Fig. 1. Kee reveals her naked pregnant body among a herd of cows, evoking a parallel between commodified black slave bodies and the cows whose “titties” have been cut off.
Just as Brown traces the historical link to black subjugation in this moment, the film continually ties this historicised account of effaced, black slave bodies and animal bodies to the contemporary plight of the refugees within Children of Men’s own universe. That is to say, the disfigured bodies of the cows also function as a metaphor for the dehumanising processes that reduce the refugees to the status of quasi-animal. The image of the cow is itself therefore a metaphorical hinge, “a threshold of indistinction and of passage between animal and man, . . . exclusion and inclusion” (Agamben 63). Thus, the refugee “is precisely neither man nor beast” and “dwells paradoxically within both while belonging to neither” (Agamben 63).
Such parallels between human and beast are drawn for us when the camera detaches itself from a subjective identification with Theo, the protagonist. In other words, “the mobile camera” deliberately stops and lingers even after Theo leaves the onscreen frame: “the spectator’s focus falls on the surrounding setting, sometimes even at the expense of the narrative” (Domingo 144). As breaks in the narrative that foreground the details in the onscreen background, these mobile cinematographic moments allow us to explore that threshold between man and beast visually. For example, when Theo disembarks from the train to visit Jasper, the camera tracks his movements as he walks past crowds of refugees. Here, the “fugees” have been corralled like livestock, locked within cages by armed guards (see Fig. 2a). Although Theo attempts to unsee and unhear this scene in the background, the film never gives us the liberty of doing so. After Theo walks out of the frame, the tracking medium-long shot stops featuring him altogether, gradually focusing into a medium shot of a distraught, elderly migrant lady behind the cages, pleading with the guards in German (see Fig. 2b). The shot thus loses track of the foreground—namely Theo, the British protagonist—in order to emphasise the spatially and visually marginalised and exiled refugees. In so doing, the camerawork reveals how England’s landscape is punctuated with markers from beyond its borders. On one hand, the cage is an attempt at quarantine: pathologised as contaminants and reduced to beasts, the refugees’ bodies must be prevented from bleeding into the British space. On the other, the concentration of migrants within the cages also renders them into an all-too-visible spectacle of the crowd. This literal incarceration is thus also a metaphorical liberation: the homogenising accrual of the caged refugees is precisely that which draws attention to them. This allows them to stand out from behind their bars, contaminating both the visuals of Cuarón’s shot and the space of the British city. Therefore, the quarantine of the Other is revealed as a self-effacing gesture enacted on the Self: in attempting to “herd” the refugees and contain the spread of the pathogen, the British city effectively infects itself with these Other presences.
Fig. 2a. The mobile camera tracks Theo as he walks past caged refugees.
Fig. 2b. After Theo walks out of frame, the camera then lingers on a caged woman pleading with a British guard in German.
Likewise, the German words of the woman penetrate the bars of the cage, registering as part of the film’s diegetic soundscape. Even so, Cuarón’s decision not to translate her cries foregrounds her foreign Otherness. Her voice contrasts with the patently English voice of the public announcement system in the background, which orders British citizens to prepare their identity cards. Thus, the point here is not just that the migrants are symbolically given a voice, but that this voice is always contrapuntal, speaking alongside the authoritarian British voice within the film’s saturated, multi-dimensional soundscape. Therefore, the deep focus, complex soundscape and mobile camera do not just present the British Self and foreign Other separately, but also highlight their concomitant presence in England. The British toposbecomes what Edward W. Soja terms “Thirdspace”: “a space of extraordinary openness” that “can be expanded to encompass a multiplicity of perspectives that have heretofore been considered by the epistemological referees to be incompatible, uncombinable” (50, emphasis mine). Visual and aural foreign presences leak into Cuarón’s diegesis just as they leak into the British landscape, rendering England’s topos as a composite of inside and outside, rather than “purely British”. The film’s presentation of segregated migrants in the British metropolis is therefore also a moment of porosity, a symbolic demolishment of the cage’s barriers even as the physicality of trapped immigrant bodies is emphasised for us. Furthermore, Cuarón’s use of film techniques highlights the literal interchangeability of foreground and background, embodying at once a syncretic mixing of the English and the foreign, but also a profound postcolonial threat. In other words, the British metropolitan centre can just as easily be decentred, as exemplified by the camera which untethers itself from Theo: the British protagonist at the core of the narrative.
Moreover, just as Kee metonymises a history of black slavery, so does the German woman indicate yet another historical allusion that contaminates Theo’s British present and presence. Her German plea, along with her position within the cage, evokes the concentration camps of the Third Reich. [1] Still, Cuarón does not just allude to history, but also rewrites it by aligning the film’s political regime with Hitler’s. This draws parallels between how Britain, an erstwhile Allied power, has in fact been corrupted by fascism. In this sequence, the German-speaking lady is neither the Nazi subjugator of the past, nor is she seen by the guards as a citizen: German or otherwise. Instead, she is thrust into the position of the camp inmate, along with a herd of other migrants who are similarly divested of their cultural markers by the British political system. Ironically, it is the jingoistic British guards who are transformed into figures of neo-Nazism, contaminating ultranationalistic British identity through the ghosts of Germany’s history. The subsequent suggestion that Syd, the camp officer, be called a “fascist pig” also alludes to this erosive interchangeability of cultures and national histories (Domingo 145). With this phrase, fascism again constitutes a metonymic parallel comparison Nazi Germany and neo-Nazi England, blurring the boundaries between the two regimes, epochs and nation-states. Likewise, the animality connoted by the “pig” epithet is turned against those very same English officials who seek to impose the label of beast onto immigrant bodies. Thus, the film renders British national identity as tenuous, destabilised by the very political mechanisms that are integral to its formation.
In fact, the film emphasises this fragility of British identity even within English borders, foregrounding the economic relationship between central British and marginalised migrant spaces. Cuarón thereby highlights not only the contrast between the visual representations of the two realms, but also the illicit trade which sustains both, emphasising how both of them rely on one another. In a film mostly characterised by hard, white lighting and a cluttered but predominantly drab urban mise-en-scene, Jasper’s house is depicted onscreen as a pastoral utopia. On the level of the narrative, the home in the countryside represents a literal escape from the drudgery of city life for Theo, who refuses to move in with Jasper only because “then [Theo] would have nothing to look forward to.” The way in which Jasper’s house is shot also emphasises its utopian function. As opposed to the drab city and the ramshackle, dystopian environment of the Bexhill refugee camp, the interior of the home is rich with colour (see Fig. 3). Likewise, shots of its exterior emphasise the surrounding pine forest and greenery, evoking its location as an outlying cabin nestled within nature (see Fig. 4).
Yet, even as Theo reclines comfortably in Jasper’s sofa, smoking weed, Jasper reveals that he has been trafficking marijuana to Bexhill illegally. The latter states that this “is one of the perks of having a refugee camp in the neighbourhood,” foregrounding the spatial and economic links between Jasper’s house and Bexhill. In fact, even the name of Jasper’s patented blend of marijuana, “Strawberry Cough,” evokes epidemic fluidity and gestures towards a porous outbreak of clandestine trade between the two spaces. Similarly, later in the film, Jasper’s weed trafficking contact at Bexhill, Syd, also becomes the means by which British capita—Miriam and Theo—can enter the camp. The utopia that Jasper’s house represents is thereby revealed as predicated on the economic manipulation of cash flows into and out of the camp. Accordingly, the cannabis plants in the background of Jasper’s living room are tied to Bexhill even as they proliferate within the homely pastoral cottage (see Fig. 3). Thus, the film reveals how Jasper’s relative affluence stems from postcolonial flows of capital, which echo instances of economic manipulation associated with the British colonial era. These include the British East India Company, the opium trade and other instances wherein England siphoned riches from the colonies during the age of imperialism. With this recontextualised allusion to empire, the film highlights how Jasper exploits the drug addictions of corrupt camp officials and impoverished migrants alike. Yet, while colonialism is founded on trade with the Other outside of British lands, Jasper’s trafficking is made all the more ironic as he deals with the Other that is already within Britain’s borders. In other words, the visual contrast between the space of the camp and the space of Jasper’s home also reifies the power imbalance that binds the two realms. This reveals ironically how Jasper—himself an allusion to the English colonial trader of the past—is reliant on the refugees in an illicit chain of supply and demand, even as England’s government attempts to distance itself from the camp by expelling the refugees into the peripheral, coastal town of Bexhill. Thus, the paradoxical Thirdspace—a Britain that is always marked by non-British elements—is dramatised not just within each of Cuarón’s shots, but also in the relations and visual contrasts between the different settings in each shot.
Fig. 3. Jasper’s home is colourful, idyllic, pastoral and even utopian in contrast to the infertile grey of the English cityscape. Top-lit cannabis plants also dominate the background, evoking ties between the house and Bexhill.
Fig. 4. Jasper’s home is nestled in the forest, evoking pastoral idyll.
Moreover, the bomb blast at the start of the film gestures towards this same tension that already exists within Britain’s borders, as well as the possibility of self-inflicted damage enacted against the British city by its government. As Domingo points out, this incident has “neither a cause nor a traceable executor” (146), leading to a “liquid fear” that is “diffuse, scattered, unclear, unattached, unanchored, free floating, with no clear address or cause” (Bauman, cited in Domingo 146). Contemplating the threat that stems from this unknowability, “Theo wonders who may have planted the bomb in the coffee shop, asking himself: ‘Islamic? Fishes? Fuck knows,’ to which Jasper replies, ‘I’ll bet it was the government. Every time one of our politicians is in trouble, a bomb explodes’” (Domingo 146). Interestingly, this conversation takes place while the camera is not centred on Theo and Jasper. Rather, a long shot in deep focus vaguely tracks their moving car in the extreme background, whereas the charred corpses of cattle burn in the foreground (see Fig. 5). On one level, the abovementioned correlation between the bodies of cattle and those of migrants is foregrounded once more. The dehumanising rhetoric of the British nation-state is further emphasised when the burning cattle shot cuts to Jasper talking about how migrants are “rounded up like cockroaches,” and then to another shot when a refugee bus pulls up alongside Jasper’s car. A visual parallel is enacted between the immigrants crammed onto the caged bus and cows transported to the slaughterhouse in livestock trucks, which solidifies the metonymic threshold that rhetorically conflates the bare lives of both humans and beasts (see Fig. 6). As in the abovementioned analysis of the scene with the German lady, the burning cattle which pollute the British pastoral countryside symbolise a metonymic substitution, standing in for and alluding to the caged refugee bodies that taint the British city.
Fig. 5. As Theo and Jasper discuss the bombing, cows are burning in the foreground, tainting the air and surrounding pastoral landscape as Jasper’s car speeds past in the far background.
Fig. 6. A shot of a moving refugee bus, packed with illegal immigrants leaning against cage bars, invoking the image of a livestock truck. This resonates with the preceding shot of burning cattle, emphasising the refugees’ status as quasi-animals.
Moreover, the fact that Jasper and Theo’s conversation takes the form of a voiceover also establishes another relation, suggesting that the burning cattle incident is itself untraceable. The burning cattle are not just metonymies of dehumanisation, but also an event in and of themselves. Here, the relationship between shot and sound also ties the spectacle of the burning cattle to the men’s conversation on the untraceability of the bombing. Like the bomb that was planted offscreen, the presentation of the burning cattle event in medias res—that is, while the bodies are already burning—evokes liquid fear, along with liquid signification which is similarly untethered to any one meaning or causal root. Just as anybody could have planted the bomb in the coffee shop, the question of who or what killed and burnt the cows also remains speculative. Among other possible readings, the burning cows could be a terroristic statement enacted by one of the many groups who populate the infected Thirdspace of Britain. The cattle could have been set alight as an ideological statement by the Islamists or Fishes, or the bandits who later push a burning car onto the road, or conceivably even the British government as Jasper suggests. Conversely, Domingo suggests that the cattle could also serve as an allusion to a plague—presumably, then, they have been burnt by a farmer who wants to curtail the spread of the infection (149). Even then, they are emblematic of both the illness—insofar as the bodies themselves corrupt the landscape visually—and the cure—that self-inflicted burning. The point is that the ambiguous portent of the burning animal bodies can be read in several ways, all of which symbolise both the literal and metaphorical infection of the British countryside, but also an attempt to quarantine the spread of both kinds of infection.
Moreover, this outbreak of meanings is in fact exponential: the signification multiplies against itself, or the different layers of metaphoricity can themselves be read as metaphors for each other. For example, the British farmer who burns his cattle to prevent infection can also evoke the figure of the British camp official who imprisons migrants in the camps. Even more powerfully, the British government can slip along this vector of liquid signification and become aligned with the terrorist, as Jasper points out with the bombing. Thus, the ambiguous Thirdspace generated by Cuarón’s mobilisation of film techniques does not just reside in the sensorial multidimensionality of his shots, but also in a hermeneutic space of possibilities. The multiplicitous yet concatenated readings enabled by the unexplained phenomena of the burning cattle opens up “a third term that disrupts, disorders, and begins to reconstitute the conventional binary opposition,” creating “an-Other that comprehends but is more than just the sum of two parts” (Soja 52). And just as fire constitutes the quintessential double-edged sword, so can the polyvalent image of the burning cows signify both the brutal efficiency of England’s government and the possibility of its self-destruction, the cleansing of the English landscape but also its pollution. In other words, the same dystopian ideology that devalues the bare lives of humans and animals can also be turned against whoever wields it.
Indeed, this possibility of British self-effacement is enacted as Theo, Kee and Miriam cross over into Bexhill. Despite the camp’s function of protecting the integrity of the English citizenry by segregating the migrants away from them, the logic of the camp eventually turns against Miriam, a British subject who is beaten by a guard and pulled off the bus. Like the cows, Miriam and the other refugees—all of whom are now united by their “not-Britishness”—are essentialised in their dehumanisation: “[i]nsofar as its inhabitants were stripped of every political status and wholly reduced to bare life, . . . power confronts nothing but pure life, without any mediation” (Agamben 97). In other words, the logic of the camp that renders the migrants into quasi-animals also elides the differences between them—the reduction to bare life is an equivocating gesture of reductionism subjected to all refugees. However, it is precisely this homogenising nature of the camp’s logic which also opens up the potential for the camp to be turned against the people that it is meant to protect: as they pass into the camp, the rules of British citizenship are suspended. The camp’s homogenising power—also the British government’s power—is predicated on “confront[ing] nothing but pure life.” As Miriam is hauled off the bus by British guards, she is not only subjected to physical violence but also the onscreen enactment of the symbolic stripping that Agamben discusses. As the bus’s lights are turned off, placing emphasis on the harshly lit background of the shot, we see Miriam with a bag placed over her head, joining a long chain of refugees reduced to bare life (see Fig. 7). As in the sequence with the caged German, bare life itself becomes a cinematic spectacle that erodes Britishness, engulfing and consuming Miriam’s body as a visually and ideologically overpowered symbol. While some bodies are caged like the German woman, others are literally de-faced with bags like Miriam’s, or else they are stripped of clothing. Thus, citizenship and even the epistemic construction of one’s ontological humanity are contingent on the spaces in which the citizen’s body is located—the body can lose its meaning and value in relation to the spaces that envelop it. In other words, the body itself can become a warped Thirdspace if distanced from the contextualising markers of citizenship. This is not only the case once the refugee is forced out of his/her own country, but also when the British citizen adopts the position of the refugee.
Fig. 7. A bag is placed over Miriam’s head as she is reduced to bare life alongside a death row of refugees.
While Miriam emblematises an erasure of British citizenship, Theo destabilises British markers of identity, transgressing the performative boundary between British and non-British via his act of mimicry in this scene. When a guard is about to pull Kee off the bus, Theo replies “Caca! Piss. Piss. Caca. Smell. Girl.” This act destabilises British identity in several ways. First, the English language itself is subject to syntactic shattering. This is literally broken English; there are no sentences, only word-fragments. Secondly, Theo’s act of impersonating, exaggerating and caricaturing a non-British migrant’s broken English already destabilises British cultural markers, emphasising that national identity is not integral to one’s ontology. Rather, identity is always read symbolically from the body and can be stripped away, warped or overwritten, just as Miriam’s face is literally defaced by the bag. This scene parallels an earlier sequence, wherein a Five Fishes member tells Theo that the government will “take [Kee’s] baby and parade a posh, black, English lady as the mother,” similarly emphasising the substitutability of British and refugee bodies. This, in turn, reveals that citizenship is not inborn, but symbolic or discursive. Moreover, the act of mimicry is already a reversal of British colonial history, turning Britain’s past against its present by recontextualising and overturning the roles of coloniser and colonised. Homi Bhabha outlines an account of historical colonial mimicry, discussing Anglicized colonial subjects who imitated British culture. On the one hand, these subjects were administrative tools, middlemen for the British to liaise with the so-called “uneducated” colonised masses (Bhabha 127). On the other, Bhabha highlights how the very existence of these middlemen also destabilised, even debased British culture in an anticolonial gesture. Their “act” of putting on British markers via the mimic man’s Anglicization proved that there was nothing innate about British culture to the ontology of the British body; the “mimic man . . . is the effect of a flawed colonial mimesis, in which to be Anglicized, is emphatically not to be English” (128, emphasis original). Thus, the mimic man’s “mimicry is at once resemblance and menace,” destabilising colonial culture through his body in “this area between mimicry and mockery” (Bhabha 127). In reversing Bhabha’s model via his own mimicry, Theo then acts out a postcolonial mockery of this colonial mockery, a double turning against Britain. Like the German lady, he is not merely a ghost of history but also a form of historical reversal via recontextualisation. He is not Bhabha’s mimic man—not a colonised subject imitating the British—but the contemporary interpretation of its direct opposite: a British citizen who debases himself by passing off as soiled refugee. His body itself is a pivot for a parody of colonial mimicry, already enacting a radical rewriting and reversal in colonial power structures that interchanges British and non-British identities with each other, thereby rendering corruptible the British identities of both the colonial past and the postcolonial present.
In fact, even Theo’s use of the word “caca” enacts this self-effacing slippage between British and non-British. Etymologically, the word itself is emblematic of transnational fluidity, evoking not just the Spanish and French caca and British cack along with the Latin root cacāre, but also the “Middle Dutch cacken, Dutch kakken, early modern German kacken, Danish kakke; also Czech kakati, Polish kakać” among a slew of other related slang words in various other Indo-European languages (OED). The word thereby invokes a history of linguistic flow that itself questions the origins of English words and the politics of linguistic borrowing. This already indicates a porosity of British borders, emphasising the interstitial branches that bind English—packed with foreign loan words—and Other non-English languages together. Moreover, “caca” semantically suggests the contaminating potential of effluvia, waste and pollution; just as Kee’s body is literally soiled by amniotic fluid, so does Theo symbolically soil himself in order to deceive the camp guard. Thus, Theo plays into the guard’s statement about migrants which “disgust [him],” thereby infecting Britishness through his own body. He indicates not just how refugees are perceived as “the very embodiment of ‘human waste’” but also how the British can perform the same role (Bauman, cited in Domingo 148). Theo not only effaces his status as English subject, but has also fooled another English subject through this effacement, physically and symbolically collapsing the boundaries between both Bexhill’s and Britain’s inside and outside by opening up a Thirdspace of self-debasement.
In conclusion, Cuarón destabilises British identity by constantly highlighting a fluid interplay between mise-en-scene elements in both the foreground and the background, enacting a visual metaphorisation of colonial reversal. Cuarón therefore suggests that Britain is, in fact, not the topos of a quintessential Britishness, but always contaminated, already always presenting itself alongside migrant contagion. Thus, England itself becomes a Thirdspace—a blend of non-British and British spaces—thereby suggesting that the very defacement and containment of refugees in the camp also paradoxically catalyses a self-governed fracturing that destabilises markers of British identity in the film. In other words, the symbolic quarantine of refugees is not just a postcolonial mechanism of the government and the camps, but also contains the potential for a radically self-enacted anticolonial downfall. The empire does not just strike back, but effectively strikes back against itself.
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[1] Although she does not discuss this shot with the German refugee, Domingo does point out various other references throughout the film—such as the mise-en-scene of Bexhill—which also reify this parallel between Britain and Nazi Germany (145).
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