Are we really living in Children of Men?

Two new features show a Britain in the throes of social fissures that feel both uncanny and emblematic of existential threat. There’s The Kitchen, directed by Kibwe Tavares and Daniel Kaluuya, which takes gentrification to its logical conclusion as London’s final social housing estate struggles to survive. And The End We Start From, directed by Mahalia Belo, showing a single mother’s quest to raise her child while the nation is overcome by biblical flooding, uneasily reminding audiences of Britain’s dilapidated and dangerous infrastructure. But the modern cinematic benchmark for this apocalyptic turn remains Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men (2006).

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As the years have passed since Children of Men’s release in 2006, it has only felt more real. Cuarón said that he simply looked at the visible trends in Britain at the beginning of the 21st century and predicted where they would go. While it hardly disturbed the box office upon release, almost 20 years later, Children of Men is widely cited as one of the best films of the Noughties. With its themes of ecological collapse and pandemic disease, the film became a cultural touchpoint during the Covid lockdowns, as scores of online commentaries declared: “It’s like living in Children of Men.” Were they wrong?

“The truth was,” writes Danny Dorling in Shattered Nation: Inequality and the Geography of a Failing State (2022), “the state was falling apart, with rising resentment in the ‘peripheral regions and nations’, a fall in Conservative support in the Home Counties, a tacit acceptance of huge levels of inequality as normal, and a general floundering about in the dark as one crisis morphed into the next.” Dorling, a geographer, applies his deceptively simple (but revealing) mode of analysis to Britain’s national decline, drawing on empirical studies to argue that the nation “shatters” when it fails to realise its full, messy existence. For Dorling, Britain’s high point of equality was 1973, and the country has been in free-fall ever since.

Speaking to Dorling, you sense his hope that things have to get better despite the observable reality around us. “I actually think it’s quite likely, because, historically, when a state in Europe does this badly and gets to this point, normally things do turn around. Unfortunately, it’s very slowly, so it could take 20 or 30 years, so it could feel quite bad for some time to come.