Here’s a five minute commentary on Children of Men by Slavoj Zizek that is packaged with the DVD. I watched this movie for a second time tonight and I was even more enthralled and impressed than the first go around (which is saying a lot). Zizek has a wonderful reading of the film, which he frames as an anamorphosis. In short, the film’s ability to obliquely capture the social oppression and the despair of late capital through the backgrounds constitutes its power as a political commentary. Good stuff…
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What blows me away every time I watch the movie is that the real story is entirely happening in the background. Rickshaws on London streets. Immigration camps in the outskirts. It’s the seemingly infinite layers of details that really tell the story.
What’s got me really freaked out is that if the fertility problem is replaced with the disappearance of cheap oil, this may be a pretty accurate picture of how society could degenerate. Scary stuff.
Agreed, the film is actually happening in the background. The dead son o the street of the fugee camp, th “terrorist” march around an ostensible martyr, the camps, the beating you see through the bus windows -just amazing stuff. The oil bomb you dropped yesterday has me bit freaked out, quite frankly- and watching this movie was oddly reassuring. Not sure how I can explain this adequately -I’ll have to think on it.
The stories I want to see involve what happens beyond Britain’s borders. What happened to the other 7 billion people who didn’t “soldier on” ?
I could listen to Zizek pronounce the word “film” all day. “Feel-lum”