Children of Men

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0:00:03.1 Natalie Dowzicky: Welcome to Pop & Locke, I’m Natalie Dowzicky.

0:00:05.3 Landry Ayres: And I’m Landry Ayres.

0:00:07.3 Natalie Dowzicky: It’s the year 2027. Infertility threatens mankind of extinction and the last child born has perished. How will Earth’s population survive? Here today to talk about Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men, is executive director of Feminists for Liberty, Kat Murti.

0:00:23.4 Kat Murti: Hi, thanks for having me.

0:00:25.5 Natalie Dowzicky: Research fellow at the Cato Institute’s Robert A. Levy Center for Constitutional Studies and host of libertarianism.org’s own Free Thoughts Podcast, Trevor Burrus.

0:00:35.9 Trevor Burrus: Thanks for having me.

0:00:36.0 Natalie Dowzicky: And finally, the Cicero devotee, intellectual history editor at lib​er​tar​i​an​ism​.org, and the host of the Portraits of Liberty podcast, Paul Meany.

0:00:46.8 Paul Meany: Thanks to all.

0:00:48.5 Landry Ayres: Children of Men is a science fiction film ostensibly, but it is not the flashy, epic, space opera of Star Wars or the gritty, cyberpunk, dystopia of Blade Runner. The film seems more like a reflection of society today in a not too distant future. How does that manifest in the film and what do you think that says and is trying to do differently than other science fiction films?

0:01:23.3 Trevor Burrus: It’s interesting from an art design standpoint, because while the movie was made in 2006, but now it’s only six years away from 2021, but the movie very much wants to be familiar, it does not want to be strange. This is a basic kind of decision that you make when you do science fiction, but just speculative literature in general, or movies or whatever. Do you want it to be familiar, or do you want it to be strange? And the goal here, just take the cars. If you look at the cars, I mean, they look like… They kind of… I mean, given that it was 2006, they kinda look like the cars today. They’re not trying to make wildly different cars, they’re not trying to make wildly different billboards, the ads, the propaganda, everything is extremely familiar, which is very, very important for the movie. The movie does not work if it does not seem like our world, and that’s extremely important for the themes of the movie.

0:02:26.6 Kat Murti: Yeah, I completely agree. As I was watching it, the only thing that stood out to me was, there’s this one scene where they’re in that art gallery/​house, and Alex, that kid, is playing some sort of computer game on this weird… What’s clearly meant to be what becomes our modern smartphone, but that one was literally the only part of the film that looked sci-​fi-​y to me. The rest of it just looked like it could be something happening today, anywhere in the world, and that was the purpose. Cuarón, the director, said that he made the decision to make it like a newsreel, he wanted it to look realistic, he didn’t want it to be fictional. His whole purpose was to have something that looked like it was actually happening. He called his movie an essay, a diagnosis of the state of things at the time, and said that the whole takeaway that he wanted people to get from it was that the future isn’t some place ahead of us, we’re living in the future at this moment.

0:03:36.2 Kat Murti: And that is absolutely what I got just watching this film in 2021, the parallels, right? Like, here is this world after a major pandemic, there’s a lot of issues with anti-​immigration, there’s a lot of nationalism, there’s a weird focus on fertility, of course, in a more sci-​fi-​y type way than we’re seeing now, but I mean, how many headlines have we seen over the past year, year-​and-​a-​half, about whether we’re having a baby boom, whether women aren’t having enough babies? I mean, this has been one of the major stories of the last year, right? And then, of course, there’s a refugee crisis, there’s wars going on, I mean, this… It felt real and it did because it was meant to feel real.

0:04:24.3 Paul Meany: I was gonna say, I think it’s a really good point, because Alfonso Cuarón originally didn’t wanna take the script, and then after 9/11, he decided he would. And so, it kind of… The world became more like this, he had his ear to the ground politically, and the beginning of the film, it says, “The Homeland Security Bill has been passed after eight years.” And like, “This is just after the Patriot Act passed.” And so, it really is life imitates art in a lot of ways, and people are kinda like… Was Cuarón just really lucky and predicted everything? No, he actually was observing everything around him and saw where the winds were going.

0:04:57.0 Kat Murti: Yeah, there’s this Abu Ghraib-​type scene too towards the end of the movie as they’re trying to break into the refugee camp. And literally, the only thing that made it look different than the photos we see of Abu Ghraib was that they were wearing their… The detainees were wearing their everyday clothes and had black bags, so there’s less orange in it, that was the only major difference that we saw.

0:05:21.4 Natalie Dowzicky: Yeah, Kat, you bring up a good point of a lot of the different elements that are in play during the movie, and I was kinda hoping that for the audience we could kind of un-​puzzle the political dynamics that are at play throughout the movie. ‘Cause there’s a bunch of different groups, there’s the Fishes, who are fighting for equal rights for every immigrant, and then there’s a lot of nationalism elements. So can we explain the politics at play or the political realm that’s going on in this film?

0:05:52.7 Kat Murti: Yeah, it’s fascinating, isn’t it? So, looking at this as a libertarian, there’s definitely a lot in that movie that spoke to me, but I wanted to see where the director was coming from and… You know, I first saw this movie, I saw it online, on the Internet, I did not buy the DVD, but apparently, on the film’s DVD release they have the famous Marxist philosopher, ŽIžek, who’s famous for saying, “It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism.” And so, that was interesting to me, that they included him talking about late capitalism as one of the bonus features on the DVD, because I didn’t really see the movie as a strong criticism of capitalism at all. And so, I kinda dug into that a little bit more. It was quite interesting, because Cuarón himself, he was a Marxist growing up, and when he was talking about Children of Men in 2016, so this is about 10 years after the release of the movie, he talks about how the ideas behind the movie was to talk how his generation had been tainted by the ideology, and he said that ideologies are mental tools of separation.

0:07:12.5 Kat Murti: And so, I really saw that with the Fishes as well. Like the Fishes, when they start, I mean, they’re clearly some sort of leftist revolutionary group. There’s alludence to George Orwell throughout, who himself had the sort of like… He was sort of a leftist revolutionary liberationist, who himself had these moments of realizing that maybe some of these politics weren’t going the way that he wanted them to. And so, the Fishes, it seems as if they are a liberating force, and then you find out that they’re kind of like not that great either. They’re just as much a part of this corrupt power system. They are their own states. They are terrorists in their own right. And even though they have this great goal, the Fishes are at war with the British government until they recognize human rights for every immigrant, they’re bombing people, they’re murdering people, they’re setting up all of these things, and honestly, what are the human rights of Kee, the refugee that they essentially decided to take hostage, and they want to use her for their political goals, right? So I think there’s this really smart message in there about, there’s no one ideology that is without fault.

0:08:35.8 Paul Meany: I really like that point, because PD James originally released the book in 1992, which is the exact same year as Francis Fukuyama released The End of History. And I think originally in the book the characters are all kinda like these high level government bureaucrats, I’m not sure about the higher classes, but Cuarón’s version, Cuarón didn’t actually really read the book and didn’t really like it. He liked the premise, but didn’t really wanna adapt the book, so it was really much his own creation, a lot of characters. And in the movie, the characters, it’s all about ideology, and they’re all using… You often hear in debates about abortion, pro-​choice actors will often say, “Pro-​life people just see women as vessels.” And in the film lots of people just see Kee as a vessel for their own aims, for their own goals. They’re using her as a means to an end.

0:09:20.8 Trevor Burrus: I think the political dynamic to Natalie’s question, it breaks down to one issue, which is, what happens when people don’t think there’s a future? And if politics is a… If you break it down to its core, it’s sort of just this Hobbesian war in suits and voting, where people are trying to take their share via some sort of voting mechanism. What’s really going on is that… Think about what’s happening in a future where there’s no children. First of all, your productive capacity is predicted to go down. If you just even take today… So like there are some concern in Western democracy, developed world that the birth rate is going to create a problem, and it will, ’cause the birth rate’s going down, and there are huge demands from the older generation in terms of pensions and other things that the younger generation is simply not gonna be big enough to fulfill, and that’s going to create extreme struggles of just over resources. And resources here let’s just say is just cash, but it could be anything else.

0:10:31.7 Trevor Burrus: And I think essentially, the politics is about people retrenching into their groups when they see the pie shrinking. So we are used to believing that the pie will get bigger, that our children will be better off than we were, but this is flipping that around. What are the politics of the shrinking pie, and the politics of no hope?

0:10:56.0 Kat Murti: I think that this ties back to the realism of this movie, because again, first off, it’s such a loop for me to realize that this movie is almost 20 years old now, because I feel like I just saw it. I mean, I didn’t just see it now, but I feel like when I first saw it I just thought, “It feels so real.” And part of that is this, right? Like, we as libertarians for the most part, we do see a future that is brighter than the current future, but I don’t think that’s true of a lot of Americans, and a lot of people around the world, and I think that that might be tied to this rising anti-​globalism, a pro-​nationalism populism that we’re just seeing coming up all around the world, starting really around the period that this movie was released. It was the early 2000s that we start to see these trends, and they’re really coming to fruition now, right? So it’s because people feel that what was promised to them, their slice of the pie is not gonna come around.

0:11:57.3 Trevor Burrus: Yeah. And I think it’s there with this sort of exogenous factor of the fertility aspect. And basically… I mean, it’s interesting, as one of the things you see in the movie is, you see the burning cows, like the agriculture, like, take that group. I thought about, what are the interest groups that are not portrayed? So farmers, agriculture. Imagine these people who have a lot of political clout, and have for a very long time, seeing the demand for their products go down every year. So they made 1000 more cows than they need and they have nothing to do with them except for burn them. And so, what are they gonna do? They’re gonna go to the government and say, which they have done before, this is what farmers do, “We need a guarantee of the price of beef, because we… It was really good 10 years ago, and now it’s not so good,” and think about every group doing that, it’s just this massive self-​interested no-​hope politics is fascinating to watch.

0:12:58.1 Kat Murti: So that’s interesting to me the way that you saw the cows in that and other scenes, ’cause I also, for me, I was looking at the cows as a symbol of motherhood. And so the burning cows, is the fact that the infertility problem, the fact that there hasn’t been a child born for 18-​and-​a-​half years at this point, at the beginning of the movie. And the cows sort of form that same thing in the scene where Kee reveals that she’s pregnant to Theo, the protagonist, she’s in that cow barn, which on the one hand is supposed to be a Biblical illusion, but on the other hand, like cows are a symbol of fertility, of motherhood, and she even talks about how the cows… And she talks about in factory farming how a lot of times the cows “extra udders” will be cut off to fit the machinery and how the cows, they’re the symbol of motherhood, the symbol of their own motherhood is abrogated to fit into the state. It comes back to that vessel message, so that’s actually what I read from it. So, it’s interesting to me to hear how you talk about it from this economic standpoint that I also agree with, I just didn’t read into it.

0:14:14.5 Paul Meany: One thing I think about without… A world without hope is that, it’s awfully banal, like it’s very business as usual and I think all of us kind of from Coronavirus now have a bit of an idea of this that like, the end of the world is often quite boring. And it’s very just… They’re going along as business as usual and there hasn’t really been much of a change or evolution in some ways, but in some ways they’re just enforcing rules that no longer even matter. That’s what I think is so interesting is that they’re so tired ideologically they can’t even break out of their own imagination at this point. They can’t think of a better way to police Britain or a better way to research fertility. They just enforce these ridiculously authoritarian laws, and it’s different from the book, ’cause in the book, the problem was, not no one wanted to rule anymore, and that people thought it was too much responsibility and that everything was going away anyway, but in the movie, people are governing too enthusiastically.

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0:15:09.0 Landry Ayres: This no hope ideology, I think is really evident and I think it’s worth exploring from the protagonist’s perspective, which is Theo, who we haven’t really talked about a whole lot. But Clive Owen’s character of Theo who we follow serves as an… Sort of as an audience member stand in. I wouldn’t say that we are meant to be Theo, but we are meant to perceive the world, not just through Theo’s eyes but through his ears, specifically, so there’s a lot of critical acclaim for the sound design and mixing of this movie, and how the film takes place, not really from his point of view, but from what a lot of sound designers will call the point of audition. So while the camera is not his eyes, the sound design mix is meant to very much evoke what Theo is hearing, and you hear that in the transition, that sort of mirrors his perception of the world throughout the entire movie.

0:16:09.0 Landry Ayres: So you start off in the very beginning in that scene where they’re getting the news about baby Diego and his passing, and he goes outside to spike his coffee that he’s got and there’s no score, there’s just cars and rickshaws going outside and the sort of murmur of crowds and shuffle of feet. And then there is the explosion of the bomb going off, and it induces this tinnitus that becomes almost like a musical like motif throughout the movie to symbolize a lot of things, mostly death, or loss, which Julianne Moore’s character Julian specifically calls out and says, It is the Swan Song of your ears trying to recreate the pathways, but they’re dying out. So we see the transition of Theo from this living in this soundscape where there’s no score, there’s very little emotion or attempt to sort of change that. There is no score, it is only diegetic sound, the only music you hear for the first half or so of the movie is from sources in Michael Caine’s character’s car, or playing in a coffee shop or just the soundscapes of being outside.

0:17:27.4 Landry Ayres: And then as it transitions and goes on as Clive Owen’s character begins to become more invested in the journey of believing in Kee being the hope that the world has, and taking her to try and get to the coast, suddenly you get these pieces of music that are integrating religious imagery and chants from Christian words and Buddhism and Hinduism and you see where he comes from when he is talking to Michael Caine about the Human Project as they’re smoking the strawberry cough in his house, and they’re talking about the Human Project and he says, “Even if they discovered the cure for infertility, it doesn’t matter, it’s too late. The world went to shit. It was too late before the infertility thing happened.” And so, you can see his complacency early on, and as it transitions and he gains this hope, you literally are hearing it impact the way his emotions change throughout the movie. And I think that is really really important because it’s showing where Theo came from and where he can go if he finds this hope, but we’re only getting it from his perspective.

0:18:48.0 Kat Murti: I actually wanna offer a parallel quote here, because I think that Theo’s perspective in that scene was really telling, but I think in a later scene where Theo’s brought… I forget her name, Miriam and Kee back to that house as a safe house after they find out that the Fishes’ safe house is actually not so safe, it’s essentially a trap. You hear Michael Caine’s character explaining what happened with Theo, and he says something along the lines of Julian and Theo met by chance, but they were there because of what they believe in, their faith, and they wanted to change the world and their faith kept them together, but by chance, Dylan was born and Theo’s faith was lost out of chance. And so, Julian and Theo had been married, they had a child, this child died in the flu epidemic, that’s happened forever ago. Dylan would have been Kee’s age, and he’s, of course… This so… I mean, that’s the loss of hope for Theo, his marriage breaks down, he lost his child, his mother seems… Is currently in dementia, she’s staring frequently at a photo of Julian and Theo with Dylan, the toddler before he passed away.

0:20:10.0 Kat Murti: So there is all of that, but then there’s also this other aspect of, okay, he never actually totally loses hope, right? He still… He wants to participate in this. You can tell that he’s still in love with Julian in a certain way. You can tell that he still has some feelings about all of this, that’s why he believes that… That’s why he even tries to help Kee even before he knows that she’s pregnant. There is some hope there. I think it’s almost like a studied indifference in this horrible world. And so, it’s interesting to see his path, because it’s sort of in a way he’s moving in a more hopeful direction, but in another way, he’s also… It’s always been there, it’s just sort of under the surface because of what’s happening around him.

0:21:03.0 Paul Meany: I think something really interesting about the film is the way Theo learns to become a better person, like he’d lost hope and then he kind of regains confidence and throws himself back into the fray for some cause that means something to him. I think a lot of people in the film, they spend their time fighting for things or they’re being very aggressive and violent, but I think a lot of the best people in the film are the characters that sacrifice for something. So Jasper sacrifices himself to save some time for the group, Miriam does the same thing to get some of the border guards off the bus who were harassing Kee and then Theo, in the end, sacrifices himself as well, and even Julianne Moore’s character, yeah, her name is Julian as well actually, [chuckle] even she did to an extent. All the characters that are quite cruel and nasty in the film, they can only channel their passion for something through aggression. They can never imagine sacrificing themselves, only others. I think that’s… Maybe that’s just me, but I think it’s a really interesting part of the film, especially when everyone is trying to use Kee for something.

0:22:00.7 Landry Ayres: Yeah, Alfonso Cuarón has specifically said that it is about the dangers of ideology for at least part of it as well, I believe.

0:22:08.3 Kat Murti: Right, and it’s the characters who are less ideological, it’s the characters who are really acting out of more of a personal faith, belief, or a personal connection that do the really human things. And we even see that when they’re in the refugee camp, when there’s that big bombing scene, all of these kinds of things, the moments of humanity are when people take a step back from that ideology and just react to what they’re seeing and this amazing thing that there’s been a baby.

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0:22:46.4 Trevor Burrus: I think it’s massively important that the main character is a man, and I think if you look at the title of the film, Children of Men, and that it uses men in this context, whereas I think there’s multiple children, so to speak, in this movie. One of the things that you’re seeing is what happens to men when one of the biggest civilizing forces of men, which is fatherhood, looking to the future, goes away. So many of the problems that have emerged are just sort of men. If you think about the scene with the army, near the end of the movie, it’s just all these men who are fighting each other with tanks and bombs and everything, and over this child, and the lack of male, I guess, responsibility is I think a huge part of this. And I think it’s sort of distilled into Theo, that like, Theo is a man who lost his child, has no hope, has sort of turned to his most primal self until he is given the opportunity to do something for the future in that way. And I think overall, that part is really interesting, and you see it in particular when Luke, the Chiwetel Ejiofor character, finds out that the child is a girl, assuming that it was gonna be a man, but I think that that’s the interesting thing about… When I watched it again that really struck me over and over again was the title and what men are doing in this film and what Theo, in particular, goes through as a man was I think a huge theme of this.

0:24:39.3 Kat Murti: Yeah, so that’s actually… I’m glad you brought up the gender of the baby, because I think that was such a huge point as well. Everyone assumed by default that this baby would be a boy. There’s literally no reason for them to have done this. Kee is of course, secretly pregnant in a world in which she didn’t even know that she was pregnant for a while because she’d never seen a pregnancy before. And there’s this poignant moment towards the end where Theo shows her how to burp the baby, because again, she’s never seen a baby, she’s never seen a pregnancy. She’s eight months pregnant in the movie, I’m currently eight months pregnant, so that was very interesting, [chuckle] and relatable just [chuckle] watching the scene, right?

0:25:25.1 Natalie Dowzicky: Kat is so dedicated to the recording.

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0:25:30.0 Kat Murti: Right. And no, but it was very relatable for me, but this, the gender of the baby is very interesting, because there’s this awe at having a baby and then finding out the baby is female. It’s just like this increased level of awe. And when you think about it, this is a world of infertility, the entire human race is dying out, and they’re dying out in one part, because they’re murdering each other, but they’re also dying out because they’re incapable of reproduction. And in a world like this, a female baby represents so much greater of hope than a male baby, because a female baby in 18 years or so, she could be having a child of her own as well. Whereas a male baby, that chance would be so reduced, and I think it’s hope, but it also brings us back to that vessel message, right? Like, Kee overwhelmingly over and over and over again is treated like a resource, she talks about how the cows, the symbol of motherhood are treated like… Again, like a resource who can be adapted to be pushed into a certain mold. And it certainly raises the question about what will happen with the future of this child as well.

0:26:51.4 Trevor Burrus: Yeah, that’s a really… It’s an interesting point too, because for most of human history, children… Women have been regarded to some extent as a resource.

0:27:05.0 Kat Murti: Yes.

0:27:06.2 Trevor Burrus: And that’s for a variety of reasons, mostly actually lack of economic development, but it is interesting, when you… If you ever do like a mind game and you think about making a ship to go to a different planet, so you have to choose like a 1000 people to go to a different planet, and when you’re thinking about women, it’s hard to not think about them as a resource in that context. Meaning like, if you’re saying, do you want a 60-​year-​old female scientist or an 18-​year-​old woman for this generation ship that will go to a different planet? That’s when you start thinking about women as a resource, and one of the things I think that has caused men to become horrible in this movie is that they don’t think about women that way anymore and not thinking about them positively in this way, so the men just become horrible, horrible things.

0:28:00.1 Kat Murti: Oh, that’s interesting, because certainly men thinking of women in that way has also caused them to do many horrible, horrible things.

0:28:04.3 Trevor Burrus: Oh yeah, of course, yeah, no, both sides. Yes, yeah. It’s not a solution to that, but yes, absolutely.

0:28:10.5 Paul Meany: The original book was written by a woman, PD James and in the book, the reason for infertility is that men’s sperm count has dropped to zero, but in the movie, all of a sudden it’s ’cause women are having miscarriages. So it kind of shifts it and people in the movie, it might be because they feel a sort of blame, like, the movie alludes to people… Theo talks about when he was dating a girl who had some weird kind of religious fervor for punishing herself, ’cause she thought the infertility was from God or something. And so, you can kinda see how the movie shifts it, like, the idea that it’s women’s fault almost.

0:28:40.1 Kat Murti: So that’s actually… That’s really interesting, I was just thinking about this when Trevor was making the point about, would it be better to have an 18-​year-​old woman or a 50-​year-​old woman on your ship to another planet, and you start thinking about the fertility, because… Or even my point about a female child versus a male child being born into this world, because at the end of the day what’s actually really interesting is that male infertility is just as tied to age as female infertility, and it’s in fact tied to it more so than female infertility. Men’s sperm counts go down faster, there’s a lot of health problems tied with male sperm counts, etcetera, but for the most part in our society, we overlook that, that’s very rarely a part of the message whatsoever. And we very much view it as a man can be a father at any age, but a woman has this very small window. And so, that… Your point about the difference in the book versus the movie is a poignant one.

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0:29:44.6 Natalie Dowzicky: There are two big things I think that we’ve been been talking about and that’s this infertility aspect which, when I was watching and this is the first time I’ve seen this movie, I immediately thought of The Handmaid’s Tale. Now, I know, infertility, because… Well, I’ve recently been watching new The Handmaid’s Tale season, but infertility and fertility is like, obviously a big discussion in that show, and then viewing women as a resource, and if you can get pregnant, you’re put on a pedestal in their society and all that stuff. So, I was going back and forth with Landry was saying, I was like, it’s interesting that infertility is in a lot of these like dystopia sci-​fi futuristic, whether it be shows or movies. And then the other thing we’ve been kind of skirting around that I kind of was hoping we could dive into a little bit more is, I’m not the most religious person in the world, but even I picked up on the religious undertones of the movie, but can someone explain this idea of it being a nativity story?

0:30:52.9 Trevor Burrus: The Christian myth, the Christian story begins with a type of birth, right? At least, not so much in Mark, but in Matthew, Luke and John. So… And as Kat pointed out, the having Kee in the manger, in the barn when she reveals her pregnancy is very big. It’s interesting, because there’s that joke she makes too where she… About whether or not she knew who the father was, and first she says like, “Oh, is this gonna be a miracle birth?” And saying, “No, no,” there was a bunch of guys and she didn’t know which one. And here, I guess, the analogy to Theo would be Joseph to some extent, or Joseph was not actually the father of Jesus, if you get to the details of this. But he shepherded and raised Jesus in the way that Theo is. So it has these sort of Nativity aspects to it, because such births are world changing, at the end of the day and that’s I think what is going on here.

0:32:01.4 Kat Murti: Yeah, there’s a lot of other religious aspects, right? And I think it goes beyond… There’s that whole discussion we talked about a little bit about faith, which can come in many different forms. But there’s also just like, so many illusion throughout, including the fact, the Fishes, they call themselves the Fishes, it wasn’t totally clear, but I wondered throughout if that was meant to be a reference to the early Christians calling themselves the Fishes. So that was definitely of interest to me. And of course, they are also very obsessed with this, the one fertile woman with the miraculous birth. She’s sort of at the center of what they’re doing in the course of the movie, not in general. But there’s all sorts of things, there’s references to religious terrorism. You see so much faith and lack of faith all come out of this crisis. People are both turning into faith and moving away from it. And people are also using that faith to justify any number of acts, both positive and negative.

0:33:12.5 Landry Ayres: I was also just thinking, and this kind of just popped into my head as we were talking about it. I didn’t think about when I was watching the movie, but it’s not necessarily nativity an illusion, but I think there is a definitely Biblical imagery. Once the baby has been born and people are coming after it in the story of Moses. They are literally rushing to get this baby into a boat and send it down a river to where it can eventually be safe, and eventually bring hope, hopefully to the population. So, I think there’s also that Biblical imagery there as well.

0:33:46.4 Paul Meany: I also thought of after Christ is born King Herod killing everyone.

0:33:49.7 Trevor Burrus: Yeah, Herod in the Massacre of the Innocents. Yeah. Which is a… Which is explicitly a parallel to Moses. Yeah.

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0:34:00.1 Paul Meany: So one thing that really struck me in the film, I’d love to chat about is immigration in it. ‘Cause I watched this film a few times now, and the first time I watched it, I assumed that all the fugitives, what they call refugees, I assumed that they’re all from the Middle East, ’cause they’re all speaking different languages, and you can’t really understand them. But it’s one of those films where that’s just kind of implanted in your head because of all the news. When you start looking a little closer, I noticed one of the first guys who talks to them when they get into Bexhill, he’s Irish. And then I started to realize that there was, I think, a Chinese family at one point that Theo runs into where they’re taking cover from the tank or something like that. And so, you start to realize, oh, my God, no, wait, it really is all of the world. It is… It’s not just what you usually think of, it’s everyone and it makes you start to think how we’ve treated other people in the Western world. If it was us, what would happen?

0:34:48.1 Kat Murti: The director talks about how that was one of his goals with the film, right? He feels, and I think he’s writing this, that a lot of times when we think about desperation when we think about refugee crises, when we think about these kinds of things, especially the way that they’re depicted in pop culture, a lot of times we see it as sort of this Western world, this Western wealthy world, and then everyone else. And so, that was interesting to me. Actually in one of the very first scenes in the film, you see Theo and you see these cages that are just in the streets of London, where they’re clearly throwing the illegal immigrants. You hear these messages about illegal immigrants and how terrible they are throughout SPSAs. But one of the first things I noticed was, there was an old woman speaking German in the cage. And then I noticed a lot of Germans who were grouped in this throughout. I saw when we were in Bexhill the refugee camp I saw French flags. So that was really interesting to me. Certainly there’s a lot of Roma people.

0:36:00.8 Kat Murti: And the other thing that the director does to try to break down these… The stereotypes we have about how the world works, which countries could actually be afflicted by these issues and which countries are somehow “safe” from them. He actively tried to make London in the film look like Mexico City. And he was just so like… So he talks about how he wanted it to look like Mexico City and have this gritty reality and bring back… You have to realize also, this film came out in 2006, which is right around the peak of a lot of the drug war murders happening in Mexico City in Mexico. And so, that was sort of at the forefront of his mind as well, just as he’s setting up this whole scene. So showing how the global interconnectedness of all of these crises where there’s really not this safe space away from it. And I think the immigration is a huge part of that. This nationalism is a huge part of that. And then honestly, the way that the film ends, the closing credits is this fantastic song. I didn’t know it previously. I guess I should have. But it’s apparently a John Lennon song, and it’s, “We don’t know… We don’t care what flag you’re waving. We don’t even wanna know your name, and free the people now,” are basically the key lines there. And that, I think is the thesis, at least around the immigration question.

0:37:35.1 Paul Meany: I think it’s really interesting that it’s life imitates art again, because when you’re saying that on the train and stuff, you hear all these announcements. Those announcements are on the tube in London today, and they like, came in… I remember them coming in for the first time and hearing it when I used to visit. So it really… It was just really bizarre to realize that that used to not be the case and now is and now we all… Just think about airports, how many different messages you get. How often there’s so much security, you start to realize how much of a, not dangerous world you’re living in, but a world racked by fear.

0:38:07.8 Kat Murti: A world that is made to look dangerous as a way of taking control almost.

0:38:13.5 Trevor Burrus: Yeah, and of course, I mean, given the pandemic year, this is particularly interesting, because if we think back to last spring, the idea of… Australia basically did and has shut down, like, closed its borders entirely. My brother lives there, and he actually can’t even leave. Some of the countries like Taiwan or so with this, that was their first move, was…

0:38:38.1 Kat Murti: Yeah, my parents are in India, and right now, the options to leave are very limited.

0:38:43.7 Trevor Burrus: Exactly, the first move is to basically be like, “Alright, shut the borders, don’t have intercourse with the rest of the world, and then maybe at the end of the day we’ll be… ” New Zealand did this too, because their islands have an advantage on this and that’s part of this being England, right? Like, you pointed out, Kat, that they’re Germans and French because those borders you can just walk across unless you build a wall on them. Islands have this advantage and be like, “We can be like the one place. As the whole world goes to hell, we’ll be the one place, but we can only maintain this.” There’s always the immigration myth, if we keep these people out, and so, you see all this kind of stuff that became extremely relevant, not just in 2016 with the Trump administration, but then became relevant again with the Coronavirus pandemic.

0:39:30.6 Kat Murti: Well, I think it also ties back to the fertility thing, right? Because I found it interesting that in this world of total infertility, they’re still having this massive anti-​immigration sentiment where we kinda see this in our own modern world, right? We have these welfare states that are built up on this idea that every generation will produce more children than the previous generation. Trevor, you talked about this already, and of course, we’re not doing that, and there’s so much consternation, there’s so many think pieces and things like that about, “Well, why aren’t people having more children? They should be having more children,” because they’ve got this pyramid scheme essentially built upon that. And one thing that Libertarians often bring up is, “Well, you know, a lot of these things could be fixed if you would let in more immigrants,” but the same people who a lot of times want to reduce women’s access to markets and things like that in order to force them to have more children for the nation, they are just as angrily against the idea of immigrants filling those roles. And it was interesting to me to see that parallel in this sort of alternate universe in which having children wasn’t even an option.

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0:40:47.7 Landry Ayres: And now for the time in the show where we get to share all of the other things that we’ve been enjoying with our time at home, this is Locked In. So, Trevor, Kat, Paul, what else has been occupying your time that you think our audience might enjoy?

0:41:04.7 Trevor Burrus: I’ll start. The two things that have most recently occupied me are… So the show Invincible on Amazon Prime, which is an animated superhero show that is very, very good, and just forewarning, it’s very violent. Even animation, it can make you a little bit almost queasy, but it’s very, very well done. And in terms of books, the most recent book I read is Jeff Tweedy, who is the lead singer of Wilco and was in a band called Uncle Tupelo. He has a book out called How to Write One Song, which is sort of a meditation on creativity and the meaning of song writing that is exceptional. I highly recommended it even if you’re not a songwriter or wannabe song writer, just as a meditation on creativity.

0:41:57.4 Kat Murti: Yeah, so I’ll go. I have been watching Sex and the City, which is a show that was super, super popular around the time…

0:42:07.4 Natalie Dowzicky: Love. Love it.

0:42:08.1 Kat Murti: Okay, [chuckle] so I actually hate this show.

[laughter]

0:42:09.9 Natalie Dowzicky: Really?

[laughter]

0:42:11.0 Trevor Burrus: Oh, that was a hot take there, yes.

0:42:14.4 Kat Murti: Yeah, I do. I hate it.

0:42:15.4 Natalie Dowzicky: Oh, my gosh.

[laughter]

0:42:16.8 Trevor Burrus: I hate it too. I hate it too. I hate it too.

0:42:19.8 Kat Murti: It’s a terrible show. It’s a terrible show.

0:42:19.9 Landry Ayres: I love it, but not because it’s good.

0:42:25.5 Natalie Dowzicky: Yeah, same. I love it. It’s like the same reason I would watch Grey’s Anatomy.

0:42:30.0 Kat Murti: Okay, I hate that show too. Yeah.

[laughter]

0:42:32.9 Trevor Burrus: Why do you need to bring Grey’s down? Why do you have to bring Grey’s Anatomy down? There’s no need.

[laughter]

0:42:38.3 Trevor Burrus: I’ll tell you what, 17 seasons of Grey’s Anatomy is enough.

0:42:40.8 Kat Murti: Yeah, seriously, though.

[laughter]

0:42:43.1 Kat Murti: I hate it. It’s so boring.

0:42:44.5 Paul Meany: Saving lives, is the life time profession.

0:42:46.8 Kat Murti: But early 2000s, basically the same period, the Children of Men, a little bit earlier, Sex and the City comes out, it’s huge. I hated it. I couldn’t stand it because of these terrible stereotype tropes of what it means to be a man, what it means to be a woman, all of these things that, really, they’re just ridiculous ideas and it’s been… So I’ve always sort of meant to go back and watch it, because it’s such a big pop culture phenomenon that I think really shaped our culture in many ways. And so, I’m doing that now, and it’s fascinating, ’cause it’s been, I hate to say this, but almost 20 years now, and… Yes, it’s crazy. Been almost 20 years since Sex and the City, and it’s fascinating to see how much our culture has changed over time, because there’s just all of these assumptions that they talk about, whether it’s stuff like men could never respect a woman who earns more money than them, or there’s assumptions on things like, okay, a woman can’t… If a woman wants to get married, they have a whole conversation about this. She has to rent. She cannot buy her own property, because no man would want to marry her if she owns property because it throws off the balance of power.

0:44:02.3 Kat Murti: And just all of these, like, all sorts of weird gendered, almost like combative attitudes towards what it means to be a man or a woman and looking for a relationship, a partnership that listening to it now, it’s just like, our culture has moved so far ahead from what at the time was viewed as this very progressive show. And so, that’s kind of been my positive message coming out of Sex and the City.

0:44:36.7 Paul Meany: I’m terrible, because I just don’t really watch a huge amount of TV, so all the TV I watch is to detoxify after a day, Survivor, and like, Catfish reality TV.

0:44:49.5 Natalie Dowzicky: Do not… Don’t you dare mess with Survivor’s name. Survivor is…

0:44:54.1 Paul Meany: Survivor’s brilliant… No, it’s a brilliant show.

0:44:55.7 Kat Murti: Amazing. [chuckle]

0:44:56.0 Paul Meany: But I have like… I watched… When Trevor said I watched Invincible, I was like, that was my one show I could say. That was my one thing, I’ve nothing to recommend. [chuckle]

0:45:03.9 Kat Murti: I mean, I’m clearly still stuck in the ’90s from every time we do this, so.

0:45:09.3 Landry Ayres: That’s the cool thing these days though, so.

0:45:10.1 Paul Meany: I’ve been re-​watching… I watched the new version of RoboCop. That’s my one thing. But I really love the old version, but I’m not watching it at the moment, or absorbing it.

0:45:19.3 Natalie Dowzicky: Aaron has been trying to get us to cover RoboCop. And Trevor. Didn’t you suggest that one too?

0:45:24.8 Trevor Burrus: Absolutely, yeah, yeah, yeah, it’s a classic.

0:45:26.2 Natalie Dowzicky: Yeah. [chuckle]

0:45:26.9 Paul Meany: We should. We should.

[chuckle]

0:45:28.9 Natalie Dowzicky: Well, I guess for me the only new stuff I’ve been doing, I just started reading Firefly Lane. That came out as a Netflix show, I wanna say a few months ago now, and I already watched the show and then realized it was a book, which I hate doing it in that order, but here we are. And then, there was… Oh, I watched the… There’s a new horror thriller film on Netflix with Amanda Seyfried, I think that’s how you say her last name, Things Unseen and Heard, or Things Heard and Unseen. I don’t know, but it’s kind of your typical horror thriller. It’s in the ’80s, a family moves into this big farmhouse and the house is haunted, but it was actually pretty good and had some more layers to it than just like, demons jumping out of closets type thing. [chuckle] But yeah, that’s kind of all I’ve been up to.

0:46:28.1 Landry Ayres: I have been playing more video games recently. I finished The Last of Us, which I believe I recommended on the last episode, and I have found that…

0:46:36.5 Trevor Burrus: Huge parallels to Children of Men, huge parallels, yeah.

0:46:39.0 Landry Ayres: That’s exactly what I was gonna say. As I’m now playing the second one and watching it… Playing this game and then happening to watch this movie, it is undeniable how much Neil Druckmann took from this movie, and he has specifically said so. So you can see it is undeniable, the parallels both in plot and aesthetics. You’re like, sneaking behind cars, like when Clive Owen is trying to steal the keys and get the car jump-​started. The opening menu to the second game is a boat lilting on water that is literally a mirror image of the final shots of Children of Men. It is crazy, and honestly, it’s so good. Play the first one, it’s really good, but make sure you play the second one, because I think it is even better. It really complicates the story. The mechanics are even better. It’s a beautiful game. Highly recommend The Last of Us 2.

0:47:35.5 Trevor Burrus: So you’re still in the middle of the second one, because the second one is…

0:47:39.1 Landry Ayres: I think I’m towards the end. I have made this sort of big turn in the story.

0:47:44.1 Trevor Burrus: Okay. It’s insanely heart-​wrenching. I’ve never wanted to not play a game and finish a game at the same time. I didn’t want to keep playing the game because it was too much, but I had to finish it.

0:47:56.9 Landry Ayres: I’m also listening to a podcast called Stay Away from Matthew MaGill, that is produced by Pineapple Street Media, who did Missing Richard Simmons, and a few other big podcasts, that is sort of I think influenced by a series… If you listened to S-​Town, which was a production of Serial by Brian Reed. Just this mysterious figure that fell into this guy’s life and moved into a small town and nobody seemed to like him, and he had all these sort of big fish outlandish stories, and everybody thought he was faking it, and it turns out a lot of them were true. And you’re sort of going to explore what happened to this gentleman, and it sounds really, really interesting, and I like it so far. And I played the board game Sagrada for the first time about a week ago, which is a fun little dice pooling puzzle game where you’re trying to make patterns and little challenges of making like a stained glass window out of all these different multi-​colored dice, and it’s really simple and fun and easy to play, and I highly recommend it.

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0:49:04.1 Landry Ayres: Thanks for listening. As always, the best way to get more Pop & Locke related content and to connect with us is to follow us on Twitter. You can find us at the handle @PopnLockePod. That’s pop, the letter N, locke with an E, like the philosopher, pod. Make sure to follow us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. We look forward to unravelling your favorite show or movie next time.

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0:49:33.7 Landry Ayres: Pop & Locke is produced by me, Landry Ayres as a project of lib​er​tar​i​an​ism​.org. To learn more, visit us on the web at www​.lib​er​tar​i​an​ism​.org.

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