Children of Men Styliani

Giannitsi

…. What you do realize, what you do embody, what she [Kee] is carrying is, sort of, the salvation of human kind which is very quickly going to pieces.

It is not a movie that says “this is what you should think, this is what we want you to think.” It’s like, you watch it and you take all you want from it, and you “see” what you want from it. – Clair-Hope Ashitay playing Kee in Children of Men (REELS video interview with the cast of Children of Men)

Alfonso Quaron directed and produced Children of Men in 2010. He crafted an audiovisual product of

exemplary artistic quality, experimenting with hand-held cameras, unusually long takes, and dialectical

approach to the dystopian foreground and a cryptic background. Audiences around the world (as ticket

purchases and various interviews strongly indicated) and critics alike embraced the film for its

sophisticated craftsmanship, aesthetical appeal, all-encompassing gaze, and its message of hope and

potentiality of universal cooperation.

It is 2027. The youngest human being in the world, Diego, has just died at the age of eighteen. Infertility

threatens the human race with imminent peril, amidst a world slipping into oblivion. British government

has made fertility tests mandatory, and it promotes suicide by taking Quietus to those who feel

depressed and alone. “I can’t really remember when I last had any hope…. Since women stopped being

able to have babies, what’s left to hope for?”, the protagonist thinks aloud. Poverty, discrimination,

hunger and violence rage among non-British subjects, a reminder of Foucault’s idea on state racism as a

biological problem (biopower). The film points toward the nature behind the preservation of certain

populations by those in power (eugenics for example, or the extermination of Jews and the Roma,

Armenians or indigenous peoples among so many others). The idea of hope (both for the infertility cure

and for humanity) is personified in a team of scientists, the Human Project, who hide and try to find a

cure for infertility.

Theo (Clive Owen), the protagonist, is a former urban rebel and currently a bureaucrat who is

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approached by the revolutionary group The Fishes, who believe they know how to defeat the regime in

power: they hold an illegal refugee, Kee (Clair-Hope Ashitey), the first woman who became pregnant in

twenty seven years. Jasper (Michael Caine) is Theo’s old friend, a passive revolutionary who helps Theo

and Kee. As civilization descends into chaos, Theo almost unwillingly escorts Kee in a dangerous journey

that aims to find -and join- the Human Project.

The narrative of colonialism, Buescher and Ono write in Civilized Colonialism: Pocahontas as neocolonial

Rhetoric, builds the audience as a “sympathizer with acts of vengeance”, thus becoming, instead of a

source of resistance, rather an accomplice to the very crime they are fighting against, therefore also

becoming an “enablement of social power.” In a similar manner, the audience in Children of Men is led

to sympathize with the Human Project, Theo, the Fishes, and consequently with the oppressing regime

in power (at least in the following respect) all of which have the same telos: to perpetuate biological life.

In this very sense the narrative of resistance becomes complicit to the narrative of the powers in

control.

Thus, Quaron attempts to construct a holistic/all-encompassing universal proposition of attaining

freedom (pan-cultural without globalized capitalism) but with the means (continuation of human life)

that, instead, perpetuate bio-politics (in the sense of Foucault’s concept of biopower); therefore, the

director repeats the narrative –and practice- of the hegemonic status quo that he fights against.

Quaron’s filmic aesthetic approach is indeed exemplary, his fidelity to –his notion of - resistance against

the dominant hegemonic powers is continuous throughout the film (logos), and his appeal to ethos

seems genuine and sincere. However, his logos, although intended to achieve the opposite to the

audience, coincides with the logos of his “enemy”: perpetuation of human life is the objective, and

consequently the indisputable motive behind all the filmic action. What is not explored in Children of

Men, and I believe it should have been explored, is the “why” of this motive, this very plane of

immanence that could offer some propositions to why the director believes that, by placing the power

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of life continuation in the hands of the dissident Human Project, this would not be the beginning of

another cycle of bio-politics, similar to the one exercised by the “enemy” system. In other words,

Children of Men manifests an intellectual stasis by attempting to establish a meta-narrative (by situating

its narrative as a meta-code) which, in the end, is nothing other but a repetition and an endorsement of

the bio-politics and hegemony it tries to deconstruct.

In order to analyze this underlying stasis in Children of Men, I use Kenneth Burke’s dramatist pentadic

system, and particularly the prominence of purpose and agency, as the appropriate tool to discern

motivation and creation of meaning in the film. Through the pentad, I will show how Quaron’s claim to

truth (logos), although it pretextually seems to coincide with the audiences’ idea of what is true,

acceptable, appropriate for living, he but appropriates the narrative of what both Quaron and –most-

audiences are rejecting (hegemony via, among other means, biopower) into an enduring, indisputable

meta-narrative of freedom.

Burke’s Dramatism and the Pentad

K. Burke developed dramatism as a critical technique, the foundation of which is human motivation. The

notion of intentionality, for Burke, is essential and comprises all human action. Burke believed that our

lives are nothing other than fictional drama; thus one can unfold motives by examining one’s motives in

both discourse and literal action. CR Burgchardt, in Readings in Rhetorical Criticism, writes that, Burkean

dramatism is a tool for the analysis of human interaction, mainly concerned with philosophical,

psychological and sociological questions about motivation, action and linguistic reality (Burgchardt, 237).

Dramatism’s prime feature is the pentad. Burke’s five key-elements of drama are

• Act• Agent• Scene• Agency, and

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• Purpose

“Imagine”, Burke writes, “that one were to manipulate the terms, for the inputing of motives, in such a

case as this: The hero (agent) with the help of his friends (co-agents) outwits the villain (counter-agent)

by using a file (agency) that enables him to break his bonds (act) in order to escape (purpose) from the

room where he has been confined (scene). In selecting a causistry here, we might locate the motive in

the agent, as we were to credit his escape to some trait integral to his personality, such as love of

freedom.” (Rhetorica)

The pentad is essential in the building of dramatism’s claims to be an ontological system that focuses on

the “substantiality of the act” (Burke, Linguistic Approaches, 259). This way, dramatism “makes literal

statements about the nature of human symbolic action.” (Anderson, 3) Burke wrote, in Dramatism and

Logology, that human beings are animals marked by their drive for symbolic action, “which is itself a

literal term.” (DL, 91) Thus, a dramatistic rhetorical approach is literal, not figurative. (Burke, LA, 260)

Furthermore, for Burke in order to have an act, there also has to be an agent; similarly there has to be a

scene (in which agents act); the agents have to assign means in order to act in a scene (agency). Finally,

we cannot have any act unless there is a purpose (Burke, Dramatism, 446) Since the pentad comprises of

“literal” descriptions, these five forms represent “the nature of the world, as everybody necessarily

experience it.” (Burke, Grammar of Motives XV)

Perhaps the most important task of the pentad, according to Burke, is to affirm perspective as the

“complete approach” to motivation (Crable, 329) Burke correlates each of the five pentadic terms with

one of the seven modern philosophical schools:

• Agent idealism

• Agency materialism

• Act realism

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• Scene materialism

• Purpose mysticism

Rationalism and nominalism, may correlate with any of the pentadic terms (Grammar, 128-9, in

Anderson). Burke asks, what is truly involved when we say what people do, and why they do it? As

pentadic analysis is interested in the “basic forms of thought” which are exemplified in human

motivation (Grammar xv, in Anderson), it can help critics as a “generating principle” in exploring Burkean

questions (Questions and Answers, 332 in Anderson) The five pentadic terms guide the critic what to ask

about a given text. An answer to any of these questions has implications for answers to all of the other

questions, as “terms share certain formal interrelationships….. by reason of their role as attributes of a

common ground or substance.” (Grammar xix, in Anderson)

The five terms do intermingle in literal interactions and discourses, thus Burke assigns them in various

word pairs, correlations, “analogies” or ratios, an important concept for Burke, as motivation is formed

in the presence of ratios (Grammar 440, in Anderson, 5) There are, initially, ten ratios according to

Burke: scene-act, scene-agent, scene-agency, scene-purpose, act-purpose, act-agency, act-agent, agent-

purpose, agent-agency, and agency-purpose (Grammar 15, in Anderson 5) Agency-purpose is the

prominent ratio that reveals and interprets motivation in Children of Men, which I am analyzing in the

following section.

Burke’s theory of symbolic action is foundational for his method of dramatism (and particularly the

agency-purpose ratio in the pentad) I am utilizing for exploring motivation in Children of Men. Catherine

Fox, in Beyond the Tyranny of the Real, talks about Burkean symbolic action (his theory of language) is a

rather salient concept for scholars because it coincides with critical theory assumptions that language is

not neutral “nor is it completely deterministic.” On the contrary, it is “a tool with which subjectivities

(and agency) are constituted and reconstituted…. Language is a site of struggle for competing

representations of reality and subjectivity.” (Fox, 368) With his own term “naïve verbal realism”, Burke

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rejects the notion that language is a representational tool for reality. Language “is always addressed to

an audience” he contests; language is a “form of action”, it is never neutral, it is a “symbolic means of

acting on the world and moving an audience to identify with the communicator” (369) This part of

Burkean theory of language, elegantly complimenting his dramatism and the pentad, assigns some

agency to communicators to shape reality (here, to both Quaron communicating via Children of Men,

and I that I communicate via this paper in reference to the film); thus, the “drama” (as Fox describes it)

is not entirely pre-written by dominant discursive relations; “hegemony is not complete.” (Fox, 369) At

the core of dramatism, Fox continues, is Burke’s pragmatic intent to propose a logical method for not

only understanding motives, but as Timothy Crusius has argued, dramatism indeed is an appeal to

praxis, it “does not offer a special revelation of Truth….”; it is Burke’s attempt to understand why people

act the way they do, and to offer means of “negotiating conflict.” (Fox, 370)

So, coming back to the ratios of the dramatist pentad, Burke clarifies that the significance of the ratios

are “their dialectical relations to one another and the ways in which they offer various terministic

screens” (how our attention is directed) to comprehend people’s actions and the reasons behind these

actions (Fox, 371). Although occasionally misconstrued, Burke’s method is not, as Fox contests, a

method for inventing ideas; it is a method “for critically analyzing and understanding a text” (371) And

that is why the terms of the pentad become so important when paired together as ratios, instead of

being understood as individual principles (371).

The pentad “is synoptic in the sense that it offers a system of placement, and should enable us, by the

systematic manipulation of the terms, to generate, or anticipate the various classes of motivational

theory. And a treatment in these terms…. Reduces the subject synoptically while still permitting us to

appreciate its scope and complexity (Grammar xxii-xiii, in Fox 372)

“What we want is not terms that avoid ambiguity, but terms that clearly reveal the strategic spots at

which ambiguities necessarily arise.” (Grammar xviii) Thus, the pentad is the tool through which we

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expand our horizons, our perspective. Nevertheless, there are always constraints. Utilization of the

dramatist pentad to analyze a film in these Burkean terms –or any other setting for that matter- does

not mean we are not bound by the specific terministic screens, as Fox puts it, through which we, via

personal “preferences or institutional constraints”, choose to select, deflect, and reflect our perception

of reality on the “research site” (here, Children of Men) we opt to examine (Fox, 372). On the other

hand, “in providing a variety of terministic screens to critical researchers, the pentad moves us away

from reductive representations of reality and into a space that reveals ambiguities, offering a way of

locating modes of resistance to dominant discourses (the discourse of the film and our own).” (372)

As I mention earlier, in Children of Men there is prominence of agency-purpose within the framework of

the dramatist pentad. In order to elaborate why agency and purpose are significant in unfolding my

argument, I need to talk about two key themes in Burkean dramatism: substance and circumference.

Burke notes, Ronald Kimberling writes in Kenneth Burke’s Dramatism and Popular Arts, that substance

“in and of itself is ironic” because “thought used to designate something within the thing, intrinsic to it,

the word etymologically refers to something outside the thing, extrinsic to it” (Grammar, 23 in

Kimberling, 17) The context of a “thing” which surrounds it “extrinsically”, is necessarily what the thing

is not. So Burke constructs “dialectic substance”, which “derives its character from the systematic

contemplation of the antimonies attendant upon the fact that we necessarily define a thing in terms of

something else. “Dialectic substance” would thus be the overall category of dramatism which treats of

human motives in terms of verbal action.” (Grammar, 33 in Kimberling, 18)

Now, although “act” is, according to Burke, the ancestral term for the dramatist pentad (“ancestral” in

the sense of the term that prominently reveals substance in a text; also, “derivative terms” are those

which stand in rational relationship to ancestral terms, “transforming them by revealing a multitude of

terminological possibilities” [Kimberling 19]), I argue that in Children of Men it is agency and purpose

that play these roles (agency ancestral, and purpose derivative), because Agency, in the particular

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filmic context, assigns dialectic substance upon the characters in the film, as it treats human motives

(continuation of biological life as the means to freedom) in terms of verbal action (Agency exegesis in

Children of Men as “escape from oppression”, “attribute hope [future] to the Human Project”, “kill

or/and die in the name of freedom [hope]). Furthermore, and in the same terms, Purpose functions as a

derivative term (of the pentad) to agency, as it transforms agency “by revealing a multitude of

terminological possibilities” to it (as in “infertility”, “culture”, “hope”, “freedom”). Here is where

Burkean “circumference” comes into play.

Act (for my purposes, agency) Kimberling writes, is not self-evident, as the pentad “must always be

places within a certain circumference which circumscribes the stage upon which the drama is being

acted out.” (18) Circumference [for Burke] is the “scope of the analytic enterprise, the range of interest,

the breath of the study to be undertaken.” (Feehan in Kimberling, 18) Thus,

• on one hand we may assign circumference on the lead characters in Children of Men as to what

they say (and how they will achieve it through action), and do in terms of agency (“infertility is

hopelessness”, “Human Project is the solution, future”, “escape from our circumstances”, “risk

our lives for life itself”), and

• on the other hand, expand the same scope in order to reveal, perhaps, an agency of biopower

re-assignment (onto the Human Project instead of the “government”), or engrained hierarchies

of what constitutes freedom or hope (as purpose clinges upon agency), or even a re-assignment

of meaning itself (dialectic substance overarching the method)

So, what I will end up with, by practicing this method, is reveal an involvement (of the agents) into a

completely different act –in the film-, thus, assign a different agency, after all, onto them, which could

prove their purpose a disappointing, an ironically altered telos; and the characters themselves, puppets

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in a pre-determined game that they simply perform their pre-assigned roles; thus, no substantive

agency, and no substantive purpose.

Children of Men and agency-purpose

…. this is the way the world ends

Not with a bang but a whimper.

--- Hollow men, T. S. Eliot

"Colonialist practices today" Buescher and Ono write, "operate.... under the conscious threshold of the

contemporary popular imagination.... Neocolonialism is contemporary culture's willful blindness to the

historical legacy of colonialism enacted in the present.... neocolonialists depend on.... forgetfulness that

colonialism continues, and the therapeutic public stories [here, Children of Men] to quell and lingering

dis-ease with continuing practices of disefranchisement." While managing a population (or populations)

with biopolitics, immigration and, more importantly, fertility are mirrors of stability and security (central

theme in the film).

Revisiting the plot of Children of Men, we are in 2027 where much of the world is in chaos, with the

exception of Britain. Infertility, worldwide, threatens human race with biological extinction, so the

British government mandates fertility tests, and promotes suicide by taking Quietus, to those who feel

depressed and alone (pointing toward desperate immigrants segregated in the "red zone"). It is

interesting that these two crucial elements in the film (mandatory fertility tests and medicine for

suicide) are never explicit; they are slogans, advertisements only seen if carefully spotted in the

background (TV screens on streets, in buses, billboards); and they appear in split seconds. The scene is

fragmented in what seems to be a transcendent gaze on the act (in the sense of witnessing both

foreground and background in a complimentary manner, as one derives from the other, as one explains

the other; as a transcendental uplifting after a collection of dialectical moments)

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The scene (realism –“where is it happening”, “what is the background”) dominates with its audiovisual

power, assisting the act (realism – “what is happening”, what are the characters thinking”) so the

audience can situate the plot and identify with the film’s figurative propositions.

Resistance, in the film, toward these hegemonic biopolitical practices is personified in a team of

scientists, the Human Project, who hide and try to cure infertility. What we have here is the trinity:

Human Project (resistance as agency), fertility cure (purpose) and the only newborn child in decades

(resolution as both agency and purpose). The scene is powerfully There, imposing itself upon both the

characters and the audience, often aggressively (when Theo gets out of the coffee shop and there we

have a bomb blast, or with the burning of dead bodies in the red zone -for people to get warm-, where

refugees are segregated; the military attacking the building where rebels and Theo-Kee-baby are hiding;

or with the attack on the car on the country road, where Julian –Theo’s estranged wife and leader of the

rebels- is killed), and subtly (as with all textual or visual signs as symbols in the background: messages on

billboards: Suspicious? Report All Illegal Immigrants; AVOIDING FERTILITY TESTS IS A CRIME; Quietus:

I am Free to Decide My Own Destiny; INFERTILITY IS GOD’S PUNISHMENT; WELCOME TO THE

MINISTRY OF ARTS. PLEASE EMPTY YOUR POCKETS AND STEP THROUGH (the metal detector); REAR VIEW

MIRROR FEED (perhaps evoking McLuhan’s idea of looking through the rear view mirror we achieve two

things: we see the past, but more importantly we see what is coming); TERRORISM: TRUST NOONE ;

KIDNEY 3000 pounds INSTANT CASH.

The background in Children of Men is at constant interplay with the foreground, in tension with it and in

accordance with it. How does circumference act upon agency and purpose in order to achieve dialectic

substance in the film, through the collaboration of scene?

The act and scene around the agents are oblique and so rich of references, often post-modern reversals,

often –what it seems to be- unadulterated (straight-forward) universal signs/symbols. The exposition of

imagery abounds: refugee camps evoking images of known detention centers (the infamous “red zone”

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in the film), urban fight scenes (CNN imagery from the first war in Iraq; the “objective” gaze transmitted

by the allies), rounding-up of immigrants evoking WWII. There is a Libertines song, Arbeit Macht Frei

(the entrance of Auschwitz) in the background. Single-shot scenes, hand-held cameras following the

characters from behind force the audience to participate; as witnesses with more than a glimpse at

stake.

An old woman embraces her dead son outside a building in a Russian neighborhood (reference to the

famous photograph of the Yugoslavian mother; also, reference to La Pieta'). The environment is

degraded, adulterated, destroyed (reference to Marx's bourgeois dichotomy-concept of the social

human separated from nature: alienation, loss of essence; also a “universal” reference). The old woman

that helps Kee have the baby and later escape is from Egypt (Old Testament and the Jews). Theo and

Kee with the baby (drawing from the nativity scene) get out of a building under fire, and the soldiers

stop shooting (reversal and straight reference: the anti-hero as God, the African woman as Mary; “I am a

virgin” Kee says to Jasper, and then she laughs). Temporality, situated in universals -or the potentiality

of universals- is no longer relevant; or in necessity to be resolved or situated... So says Quaron.

The foreground images evoke real-life circumstances that audiences are familiar with (they identify

with), as in wars, catastrophes, globalized economy and rhetoric over multi-national corporations (Iraq,

Afghanistan, tsunami in Japan, swine flu, illegal immigration, atomic rector failures, pro-life rhetoric,

Iran). The background images, in the same manner, evoke the narrative of states that hold most power

globally (USA, EU, China, Russia –at least in its Cold War era) to warn, protect their citizens against the –

now globalized- ambiguous, logically indiscernible Other (immigrants, terrorists, instability,

commodification of the human body, instability, fear).

Is Burkean substance to be found amidst agency and purpose, interpreted within this particular

circumference? Critics and audiences implied that “yes”, as language was used as a globalized set of

signs that are discernible to wide (geographically and culturally) audiences, as well as similarly

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interpreted. Thus, the appeal (of the film) to “truth” has been achieved; there has been dialectical

substance created by the director, which coincided with the one created by the audience. At the same

time, with the film’s ambiguous ending (the ship Tomorrow, where the Human Project resides and

experiments on curing infertility, appears amidst the mist to receive Kee and her newborn daughter,

equally ambiguously to disappear in the mist allowing the audience to assign their own version of “what

could happen now”). However, purpose has already been pre-determined but both the film and the

audience: the indisputable telos is continuation of human life; the indisputable motive is liberation from

this chaotic environment and freedom (purpose), which the perpetuation of biological life (agency) will

ensure. So, what seems to be occurring here is, on one hand, dialectics through stories, and emergence

of substance via the particular interplay of agency and purpose within, however, a very particular mode

of circumference: one of complicity between the agents who resist, and those who impose the objects

of resistance (between rebels and regime). This is pure biopower having encompassed, conquered and

devoured the world in its entirety: the ones who consciously employ it for hegemony, and those who

resist it in the name of individualism, self-expression and (an indefinable notion of) freedom.

This is a problematic position if we see it through a different circumference, a more enlarged

circumference if you will, within which agents do not simply adhere to the essentialist claim of life

continuation (or taking one’s own life at will and leisure, rendering the imperative of continuation of life

absurd in the first place), thus liberating themselves of the predicament that forces them, in the film, to

be the kind of agents they were, and assume the particular agency they did, for the same mystical

purpose (the purpose does not change here: it is the loosely defined “freedom” to, and more obviously,

“freedom” from) that our alternative proposes. But, while we briefly explored scene (in the pentadic

Burkean framework) we haven’t discussed the agents themselves; or part of the act. What kind of

agents our characters are, indeed, in Children of Men, and what are they thinking in the midst of what is

happening around and within them?

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Theo (Greek word for "God") is –what it seems to be- a round character: conflicting, contradicting (he is

an ex rebel, currently a bureaucrat whose best friend is an old hippie, Jasper -a flat character, consistent

from birth to death with his persona of the unconventional spirit, and leftist ideology-). Theo is an anti-

hero, transcending from a lost soul to humanity's symbolic savior (“God” is his name after all) -universal

references here to salvation through religion, perhaps a bit more situated within a Christian narrative-.

Kee is the black girl, the only pregnant woman for almost 30 years, an illegal immigrant from Africa

(single-origin reference here, and a negation of Christian linearity in favor of cyclical concepts of Time -

"we all come from Africa, we will all return there and find salvation" [this is where the Human Project is

heading to: Africa]) whom Theo is entrusted to deliver to the Human Project.

Children of Men was shot –in most part- as a documentary: the camera, often handheld for immediacy

and –audience- virtual participation, follows both raw action and actors from behind, as a witness, a

commuter, or a pedestrian; and still hidden; part of the background; or rather, part of the background’s

background; mirrored (since we can still “see” the background independently).

Finally, another agent is London itself. The metropolis is its own roundest of characters in the film: the

heart of a nation that upheld its principles by never having to guarantee them by a Constitution;

simultaneously wretched, divided, "lost", de-centered, barren; and full of life.

There is a particular scene that I wish to elaborate upon a bit further; the Arc for the Arts. Here we find

ourselves riding along with Theo in a Bentley (the car's hood and Bentley emblem of two open wings

reign the shot). In the background is the open market, thickly crowded with people walking, on bicycles,

selling merchandize, policemen on horses, rikshaws serving as taxis. We see on the clean windows of the

Bentley reflections of people looking in, dissatisfied, shouting; but not too aggressively. The scene is

prolific with textual signs, transcending foreground and background into their elevated fusion.

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The Bentley cuts through a grand government building courtyard toward an avenue where the Royal

Guard, on horseback, ride in the middle of the road as we, “passengers” inside the Bentley, are blinded

by a -rare, if you visit Great Britain often, or are observant when watching British films- sharp,

penetrating sunlight. The contrast is alluded also by association: Great Britain is in chaos - Great Britain

does not have a Constitution as "it does not need laws to abide by its long and enduring traditions." This

scene could only maximize its potential (symbolically) in Great Britain. This scene exemplifies the

Burkean dialectic substance: “a thing’s context, surrounding it extrinsically, is by definition that which

the thing is not.”

The Bentley crosses an old bridge, barricaded and guarded by soldiers; and a German Shepherd. Now

everything is grey, thick overcast. At the end of the bridge there is a massive construction, a stern

building, perhaps a vague reminiscent of Russian architecture during the Cold War era. At the very back,

in the air, there is a floating pig. Now, the metaphor should be very clear to those who have been

involved with western music and literature of the 20th c. With the fear of sounding pedantic, I will dare

say that both Pink Floyd and George Orwell are considered "classic" representatives of their respective

genres, as Animals (the name of the Pink Floyd Album) and Animal Farm (1984 too) (Orwell's book)

actually are. Thus, the pink pig alludes to both the Animal album (it was the cover of the album) and the

pig-leaders of Orwell's Animal Farm, with all the consequences of the pigs ending up in power, in the

book. A proliferation of signs as symbols here, all conspiring toward an agency-purpose result, which

once again, in its result, in its dialectic substance coincides with the essentialist claim of the agents’

“enemy”: both in Animal Farm and 1984 biopolitics are exercised as a means to ultimate control and

hegemony.

Bentley and Theo enter the Ministry of Arts, and Theo has to pass through security. Everything looks

impeccably controlled, clean, well-arranged; except a piece of wall with a figure on it; in the background.

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Theo passes through security and surrenders in the plastic container his keys, his whiskey, his cigarettes.

his lighter, a bill and his pills.

- “This is a non-smoking facility" the government agents tells Theo.

- "You have something on your teeth" Theo replies.

Theo enters the heart of the Arc: the entrance is a glass door and the walls are white and bare. There is

a naturally well-lit -equally bare- corridor that leads, as we again follow right behind Theo with a hand-

held camera, to Michelangelo's David, imposing in his own presence facing against a glass wall that

showers him with light that is soothing to the eye. Part of David's left calf is missing. At the statue's base

there are two dogs that stand up as Theo approaches; they growl. His cousin Nigel appears and says:

"Couldn't save La Pieta… Smashed up before we got there!" He hugs Theo. Theo does not respond.

They move in a spacious and equally minimalist but obviously luxurious dining area where Nigel's son,

Alex, is sitting on the dining table, his right hand being wired in a computer-game, with impeccably

decorated/presented food in front of him. Alex is not eating or drinking; his gaze expressionless is stuck

on the game's screen. There is the word CRAZY tattooed on his neck. On his left, on the white brick wall

there rests Picasso's Guernica (a sharp contrast between the despair, agony and chaos depicted in

Picasso's masterpiece, and Alex’s expressionless but not motionless presence; on the other hand, what a

parallel between the painting's grey, irrationality of war and the tatto, CRAZY, on the boy's neck!)

The act in this particular part of the film is evident of the well crafted collaboration of scene, agents and

agency in order to launch it as a powerful element within the pentad. Text, sound (opera) and visual

signs, both in foreground and background work relentlessly in accordance with exemplifying the act, just

for a few minutes, so the consequent pair of agency-purpose can emerge, and even more clearly be

situated later in the film as the source of (dialectic) substance.

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- "We only gonna hold on two Goyas" (commodification of the artistic expression of the human

spirit) Nigel says.

- Why did you come, Theo?

Behind Nigel is an all-glass wall with the floating pig in the air, and Thames underneath.

- Well, the thing is... I met this girl.

- Cute? (as in "reasonably attractive to extract pleasure?")

- Beautiful! (as in "pregnant, the embodiment of hope, of life" –agency-)

- Is it serious?

- Very (-purpose-).

Theo asks for transit papers (for Kee) to get to the coast. "Highly controlled" says Nigel. He turns to his,

still playing, still expressionless son:

- "Alex, take your pills... Alex... Alex?" Then Nigel screams: Alex!!! And Alex takes his pills without

taking his eyes off the game. Nigel sighs, and then smiles.

- I'm really sorry, Nigel. I just don't know how else to ask.

Nigel offers pills to Theo. Theo refuses. The two men are standing by the glass wall with the floating pig

in the background.

- Why care? A hundred years from now there won't be one sad funt [sic] to take a look at any of these

(here is the –rejected by the film- proposition that could have altered the rhetoric of Children of Men.

Instead of a complicit, redundant essentialist claim to purpose (freedom, liberation) complimented and

assisted by agency -continuation of biological life at all cost- for the purpose of giving birth to dialectic

essence [:o)] through the quite narrow circumference of “life of and in itself”, Children of Men could

have grasped onto that sentence, and divert from the mistake of presenting an audiovisual construction

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dedicated to a universalized notion of resistance to what, indeed, they are themselves dedicated

carriers of: the essentialist claim of biopolitics that, continuation of human life –as agency of biopower-

is the answer to humanity’s purpose of freedom; thus peace, co-existence, an all-encompassing global

community, generically expressed). What is absent, is a set of questions exploring what, for example,

the purpose of the agents is, thus who is the creator of meaning, and how this “meaning” is created

(which would automatically expand the circumference of the pentadic terms exponentially).

- What keeps you going? (Theo asks Nigel)

- ... I just don't think about it.

Nigel points outside the glass wall and he turns toward it. The floating pig is in the background. Fade

out.

This part of the film represents Cuaron's message in a sophisticated, almost lyrical manner: the lack of

meaning (displacement –disconnection of the agents from the act revealed by the scene, informing their

agency –in the case of Nigel- , questioning their purpose), the despair in the absence of any ideology

rooted in common principles, of common "meaning" among human beings that share some sense of

community and history. David, La Pieta', La Guernica... What "meaning" is left in them when they are

deprived off their context? When they are stripped off the world that shaped them? This "lack" is, in the

film, transformative in the observer's gaze. The spectacle of these pieces of Art in that space is the

background that describes absolute infertility.

In the same manner, “infertility" in the film is a symbolic reversal: it is not infertility in its physical

manifestation that is at hand here, or the metaphorical infertility of the characters that foil the

protagonist. It is the overarching, absolute lack of symbolic exchange in the form (here) of arbitrary signs

that function as symbols: arbitrary signs because they are not commonly shared, and when shared

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among small groups they have lost their binding reference, so they no longer adhere to anything that

even remotely resembles one's tradition; they are simulacra, open to interpretation, multiplicities of

disconnectedness that only attract what can only remind of nostalgia; indefinitely ready for anything to

occupy them(scenes of a disintegrating, crumbling Babel, where symbols are incomprehensible signs --

God, immigrants, refugees, soldiers, rebels, pieces of Art, children and their lack thereof, guns, animals -

that in the film are the only creatures that are never harmed-... )

However, this very proposition of Children of Men is also the affirmation of complicity with the “enemy”

(biopower/biopolitics), and of how narrow Quaron’s circumference is in interpreting the framework, the

locus if you will –because Quaron imposes a locus-, trying, so ironically, to liberate humanity from any

sense of locality, specificity or static, conventional, fragmented visions of freedom.

Let us revisit the excerpt: "The colonialist narrative constructs the audience as a sympathizer with acts of

vengeance; the audience becomes an accomplice to the crime of colonialism, an enablement of social

power." (Buescher and Ono) So, the audience in Children of Men sympathizes with the Human Project,

Theo, the Fishes (the "rebels" that initially discovered and hid Kee, the sole pregnant woman), all of

which have the same telos: to perpetuate biological life. In this very sense the narrative of resistance

becomes complicit to the narrative of hegemony and of the powers in control. Why do the "dissidents",

those who oppose the corrupt system of oppression round up their forces toward the very same

narrative of their enemy (perpetuation of biological life is the ultimate goal)? Both the Human Project

and the fertility cure themselves function as forms of biopolitics: they both are (one is already and the

other is potentially) fertile ground for politicizing/commodifying/quantifying human life. Both the

Human Project and the fertility cure are of and in themselves a form of biopolitics, having

transformed the old rituals of birth and death into static, quantifiable, commodifiable (alas!) political

concepts.

Tomorrow, the ship that hosts the Human Project is but a ship: transcending, with no roots, floating in

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the world in its quest for freedom; Tomorrow (and the Human Project) is the personification of hope.

The resolution (the ending) of the film is ambiguous. Quaron, as it seems, gives the audience the license

to make up their own "stories", to find themselves in the film; and create their own story. While this

concept of "public moral argument" comes into play here, referring to "good reasons" and "inferential

structures" in the narrative paradigm, as described by Fisher, and as utilized by Quaron in order for the

audience to collaborate with Quaron’s claim to “truth”. Therefore, this public moral argument "is

attentive to argument as product and as process." (Wenzel in Fisher) So, the audience of Children of

Men, by constructing their own arguments, and by shaping their own meanings treat this very idea of a

public moral argument as both a means and an end.

Once again, the same problem arises: it juxtaposes with the Burkean pentad, the dialectic substance,

and any circumferential framing. The film situates the argument on freedom onto the essentialist claim

of attaining it only by continuing human life (thus, achieving the telos of freedom) and by assigning that

responsibility upon another locus, not unlike the one the agents in the film sacrifice their lives to

demolish (Human Project in opposition –or in accordance with- the British government).

Conclusion and Thoughts

Children of Men, although it attempts to structure a critique on contemporary societies, as they are

being forced to integrate themselves into a universal system run by globalized capitalism, it ends up

making similar claims with the ones it tries to deconstruct. The film assigns meaning by employing the

essentialist claim of a notion of freedom concretely situated into the dynamics of biopower and

biopolitics, which coincides with the very locus of the film’s polemic attitude. The agency (pentadic

term) in the film subscribes to humankind surrendering their hope blindly to the Human Project, in the

exact same way they condemn the British government for having been assigned to (or having taken the

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license to the same) perform the same task (biopower/biopolitics). Purpose (pentadic term) perfectly

assists agency in this sense (and in the Burkean sense of rhetorical analysis), both collaborating in their

ratio primacy compared to the other three elements of the pentad, as in a subordinate function do the

film’s act, agents and, all so artistically presented, scene. However, the circumference through which the

agency (replacing Burke’s act for the purpose of analyzing the particular film) is interpreted, is quite

narrow, and more importantly, statically situated in an essentialist claim; an immovable axiom

(continuation of life blindly trusted in another “body”) which does not allow the assignment of different

circumferences by the audience so more fertile conversations to begin. Thus, Burke’s concept of

dialectic substance (“… attendant upon the fact that we necessarily define a thing in terms of something

else… Dialectic substance would thus be the overall category of dramatism which treats of human

motives in terms of verbal action.”) is compromised in the film, while at the same time, Children of Men

implies that dialectic substance is what it really reaches for. Children of Men suggests a form of

resistance against hegemony, which is nothing other but another –very probable- form of hegemony

through, also, the same agency (biopolitics). The film fails to address the –very contemporary and very

serious- issue of biopolitics (sterilization of black and native American women until the 1960’s in the

USA, the French government policy against the Roma in 2010, the Khmer Rouge massacres in Cambodia

in the 1970’s, the massacres of the Sudanese as we speak, to name a few examples) that is determining

our biological, political and social lives today. The film fails to impose on the audiences a powerful, clear

message –the way it so masterfully imposed the scene on us- of what is biopolitics, what it can be, and

most importantly, how we can transcend our attitude toward biopolitics into action (utterance). In this

respect, Children of Men is complicit with the enemy it swore to symbolically slay._

…. There is no act, no event that would not be refracted on a screen or in a technical image, nor any action that would not be photographed, filmed, recorded, that would not be reproduced in the virtual eternity of the artificial memories….. There is no freedom any more. There is no choice, no final decision. All decisions are serial, partial, fragmentary, microscopic, fractal. The fascination of all this comes from the void and the vertigo of the black box, from this progressive fading of the real world, from this approach to the vanishing point of our freedom. --- Jean Baudrillard, The Vanishing Point of Communication

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SOURCES

Buescher, Derek & Ono, Kent A. (1996); Civilized Colonialism: Pocahontas as Neocolonial Rhetoric; Women’s Studies in Communications, vol. 19 – Issue 2; pp. 127-154

Burgchardt, CR (Ed.) (2010); Readings in Rhetorical Criticism (4th ed.); Dramatistic Criticism, ch. IV; pp. 235-6

Burke, Kenneth (1985); Dramatism and Logology; Communication Quarterly 33, pp. 89-93

(1969); A Grammar of Motives; University of California Press, Berkeley

(1955); Linguistic Approaches to Problems of Education; Modern Philosophies and

Education; ed. Nelson Henry; University of Chicago Press; pp. 259-303

Fox, Catherine (2002); Beyond the “Tyranny of the Real”: Revisiting Burke’s Pentad as Research Method for Professional Communication; Technical Communication Quarterly, 22:4, 365-388

Godamunne, Vishitra K.S. (2011); Biopolitics in Science Fiction Films: An Exploration of the Representation of the Contemporary Politicization of Human Biological Life in Cinema; Electronic Theses and Dissertations, ScholarBank@NUS; http://scholarbank.nus.edu.sg/handle/10635/27921

Kimberling, c. Ronald (1981); Kenneth Burke’s Dramatism and the Study of Popular Culture; AAT 0535580, DAI-A vol.42, issue 3, p. 1223; University of Southern California

Rhetorica; Burke’s Pentad (Dramatism); http://rhetorica.net/burke/htm

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