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Saw the new film 'Children of Men' last night.
Whoaaa……. Maybe the most important flim of the decade. That and An Inconvenient Truth by Al Gore (oh please run oh please please please!) Not so much that it's a brilliant artistic statement, although it has plenty of that. Not in it's wonderment, it's vision, it's tetherless dream of human potential, although it's got that too. Underneath.
Well hidden.
The film is set 20 years in the future. And what really creeped me out, after I crept carefully home in driving rain and read a few reviews, is that many of the critics simply seem to assume that this is, indeed, our future in some basic sense! They never say 'possible' or 'alternate'. It's almost as folks, unconsciously, just sort of accept this as our fate; a world torn between Security State Fascism, terrorists, hard core fundamentalist religious cults, and masses of hungry, dirty people in degraded and degrading environment.
That's what spooked me the most- the way people just seem to accept this. God we've been trained well- to be passive and well-numbed or at least kept so busy there's no time for contemplation.
Yeah. Well, this film will give you a vision of that world. Where women cannot give birth (did you know that male fertility rates are plunging in the western world?
Did you know that autism, a developmental problem where a kid cannot relate to people or his environment, was found in 1 in 10,000 births in 1995.
The rate now?
1 in 166 births. Mostly boys. Think about this. A syndrome ony found in industrialized environments. No one knows exactly why. A syndrome that presents as the very caricature of the the Masculine out of balance. Heads are literally bigger- no one knows why. Minds often brilliant at mathematical skill, yet utterly unable hold, to hug, to look deeply into another's eyes and relax. At all. Babylon- the Tower run amok. One guy who loved and made it a loving place.
You might not want to know these things.
What are we going to say, looking back? We're seeing every kind of brain related disorder skyrocket- bipolar, OCD, ADD, autism, depression, anxiety disorders. Skyrocket- and not just because they're only now being diagnosed correctly. If they are, which they are not- but they are being recognized with a growing sense of dread and greed in the psychiatric world.
All these disorders point to one thing- the Head. the Head is screaming it's, well, head off. We, as a culture, are sick in the head. Caught in it. Conditioned by it. Commanded with it. Through every TV, every multi-task event.
Because the head is overwhelmed; stressed out every day as we grapple to answer our cell in varied traffic. We are forced to conceptualize every query, including security, survival issues- we have to think about them- or deny them out of overload- because we think that only thinking will do. Deemed 'Reality' in our Book- the only one that really matters.
I'm all for good thinking. Putting the cart behind the horse.
So, I ask because I don't want to live in such a world, and if you do, god bless but could you go somewhere else?
Like, uh, really, really soon?
So, I'm doing all too much thinking myself. I'm going outside, and try to put my money where my mouth is. The clouds still blow through a windy blue sky out there. and the birds still sing, the flowers bloom…………
Which is pretty freakin' weird- it's January for crissakes!
Anyway, a line in the film said it all, in terms of our time.
“Keep her close to you”
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