Theo Faron: The Anti-Gatsby

            Anamorphosis, (morphosis meaning “a shaping” and ana meaning “back, again”) was an early Renaissance art form that manipulated perspective.  Anamorphic designs were marked by image distortion requiring them to be observed from a specific vantage point, rendering standard viewing conventions inadequate.  Philosopher and social critic Slavoj Zizek assesses that the background throughout Children of Men is anamorphic and elicits a paradoxical viewing.  Citing the Renaissance phenomenon, he argues that “the true focus of the film is there in the background, and it’s crucial to leave it as a background.”  Extracted from the background are themes of infertility and despair, but, again, they can’t be viewed as a foreground in themselves or they are devoid of their meaning.  Focusing on the balance between foreground and background in the mise-en-scene of anti-hero Theo’s reunion with Julian, we find credibility to Zizek’s claims and extend them to probe the film for meaning. 

The opening shot doesn’t aim to merely establish the setting as The Fishes’ interrogation chamber.  Instead, it slowly pans across a wall lined by vaguely apocalyptic news clippings, a technique of cinematography that develops as a motif throughout the film (ie Jasper’s journalism shrine).  The only legible portions are the bolded headlines, which prove insufficient in providing information beyond that offered by the ominous train propaganda: “the world has collapsed.”  We discover, as the camera settles on a bound Theo surrounded by his captors, that the entire room is lined with these clippings reading ambiguously: “US Troops Full Attack,” “Extremists Explosion,” and “Immigrants Protest Against Government: New Racist Policies.”  While they provide minor pieces of information to supplement the plot, meanings become muddled when we try and construct the plot around the background itself; this idea solidifies taking into consideration the creative choices made by Alfonso Couron in concern to lighting. 

The intense, artificial, frontal lighting that initially illuminates the newspapers creates an opaque, insular perimeter in the mise-en-scene that entices us to attempt a perusal of the clippings.  However the editing jerks into a point-of-view shot that forces the viewer to accompany Theo as a deer in the headlight.  When a switch is made to a softer, more natural lighting, the newspapers take up a translucent quality: they aren’t quite invisible or transparent, but they are a thin layer covering glass windows.  The now semi-transparent thickness of the background diverts attention away from the background and returns it to the foreground.  The lighting technique itself encourages the reading of the background as anamorphic, paradoxically pulling us into and pushing us out of an analytical treatment of the background as a second foreground.    

Children of Men’s control over the background’s legibility occurs through allusions to a future dystopia’s significant historical events that we are not permitted to fully comprehend.  As soon as we begin to grasp their gravity they fade and become unattainable.  A similar conundrum arises in allusions to an intimately familiar past at Nigel’s art-littered mansion.  Picasso’s “Guernica” and Michelangelo’s “Statue of David” stand as testaments to a historically rich and increasingly irrelevant past.  In a sense, they are infertile as pointed out by Zizek.  He states that art “only works when it is signaling a certain world, and when this certain world is lacking it’s nothing.”  What the film may be suggesting is the self-destructive nature of a society’s obsession with a fleeting past/present that causes it to overlook the persistent approach of the future.  The film ends in an oceanic vacuum, in which Theo and Kee float completely isolated from the anarchy that has erupted.  This could be extended, as Zizek encourages, to an existence detached from the past, with the arrival of the Human Project aboard a ship named Tomorrow.  In a sense, this offers treatment to the F. Scott Fitzgerald’s diagnosis of the tragic human condition.  In the closing lines of The Great Gatsby, he poetically coos "So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."  Theo candidly debunks the beauty of this thought, mumbling: “A hundred years from now there won’t be one sad fuck to look at this.”