Children of Men: The future is a mirror for the present | Hacker News Reader

Children of Men: The future is a mirror for the present

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86 pointsspeckx77 comments

I went to the Biennale in Venice last weekend and thought about the movie intensely after visiting the Japanese pavilion. If you don't know about it - the Biennale features artists representing specific countries as they transform a fixed pavilion building into their vision. When you walk across the Giardini site, you walk through themes of the globe. Often these themes are overly political and identity-themed, but the simplicity of the Japanese pavilion this year was refreshing.

This year the Japanese pavilion was full of 11lb baby dolls, which a user could adopt and walk around with and interact with in changing stations and sleep and play areas. The intro said: "Babies are born anywhere, regardless of wars, terrors, and boycotts." It made me think how they used to be everywhere and now that birth rates have declined significantly they have become rare, expensive and often parents handle them like some luxurious pet, when they should be 'renewables' of ourselves.

I keep marveling at art's capacity to elicit deep thoughts and feelings, universally

Especially installation and concept art- as its obviously hard to package and sell for the parasitic art market.

YouTube short of the space: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/Gww1RtyEwww

Babies have always been expensive. The expense just happened to not be fully accounted for until recently.

Although, perhaps it could be better framed as the short term expense was not accounted for, whereas now, the long term expense is not accounted for.

Short term being less than a few decades and long term being more than a few decades.

There is also a collective vs individual expense aspect.

> Babies have always been expensive.

They have always been expensive, and they have never been as expensive as today.

More than any other resource, babies require time. Talking purely from a US perspective, inflation adjusted income has never been higher.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/mehoinusa672n

When we earn more, the time spent to care for a baby 'costs' more because it's time not spent working. It's time not spent continuing your education. It's time not spent doing some expensive bougie luxury like paying someone else to cook you a meal.

It's a similar reasoning as to why working hours have only dropped a bit. When we earn more per hour, we can afford the same quality of life with fewer hours worked. However it also means each hour we choose not work is costing us more in opportunity cost. So we choose to work more.

Still, considering how many years we spend in education with little to no employment, and how many years we are currently able to live after we have retired, the % of our lifetime spent working has never been lower.

They only require lots of time if you want to be a good parent. We should be celebrating the fact that there are fewer latchkey kids and more involved mothers and especially fathers today.

I also just feel like the basic calculus of this aspect for parents has changed as economies move up the value chain — I have relatives and childhood friends who grew up on farms, and they regularly helped out during busy times from a relatively young age (even if today they do all the schooling they are supposed to and don't go work full-time early one); meanwhile many people today will be in education with limited earnings until well into their twenties

This depends heavily on what time frame you're talking about.

For much of history people would often have children to work on farms and support the parents when they're older. Sometimes this support system was nuclear. Sometimes it was broader in society. So how do you account for "expensive" here? I honestly don't know.

But a lot of people focus on more modern times, particularly post-WW2, because the trend here is pretty much straight up. Education, housing and medical expenses have far exceeded inflation and real wages.

In more developed Asian countries (eg South Korea, Japan, China) the number of children has gone down in part because it is so expensive. In South Korea, so much is spent on tutoring to get into a good university to get a good job. The entire family's income is devoted to that. In China, for a man to be marriageable he often needs to pay the bride's family, have property, have a good job and so on. China has actually tried tackling some of this by popping the real estate bubble and outlawing private tutoring. Still, competition is intense and the bride price is still very real.

I think about the Fermi Paradox. What if the answer to why there are no galactic civilizations is as simple as "because capitalism"? Birth rates in developed countries are generally falling off a cliff as the barrier-to-entry gets increasingly higher.

One difficulty is that "accounting" is not a neutral thing. Rather, once something becomes legible to the paperclip maximizers, it is something that can be optimized away in favor of more paperclips. And sure, we can make the case to the paperclip maximizers that perhaps their accounting isn't correct, and that there could actually be more paperclips in the long run by not optimizing away this one particular thing. But that is still a Faustian bargain, in that the paperclip maximizers may very well just find a different way of creating paperclips that simply sidesteps the need for humans in the first place - rendering your last-ditch attempt at appealing to their interests irrelevant.

> "Babies are born anywhere, regardless of wars, terrors, and boycotts."

One thing people never get about fertility crisis: people always have more babies in crisis and uncertainty. Simply matter of reproductive strategy: when you're not sure about the future, push for quantity, as fast as possible. When you have stability, you can accumulate resources, and not be afraid to invest them into fewer offspring. I don't think that people realize that they're doing this choice, but there must have been enormous evolutionary pressure for this to evolve, and a lot of data shows exactly that.

> One thing people never get about fertility crisis: people always have more babies in crisis and uncertainty. Simply matter of reproductive strategy: when you're not sure about the future, push for quantity, as fast as possible. When you have stability, you can accumulate resources, and not be afraid to invest them into fewer offspring.

I don't think that's true. There's a lot of crisis and uncertainty today, but fertility is still going down. Many people are investing their resources in zero offspring.

I don't think this is true. Steady employment causes people to get more kids. Just take a look at Korea, its new administrative capital with most public workers has the highest fertility rate.

One of the best movies I've ever watched, and one of the few that I could only watch once. It alternates between a gut-wrenching view of a very plausible future and scenes that have you sitting on the edge of your chair. To call it roller coaster would be an understatement.

If you haven't watched it: don't read the rest of the comments here, go watch the movie, then read the comments.

Seconding, I caught it late one night on HBO when I was a bit too young to understand what was going on and follow the plot but the movie stayed with me for many years until some time ago where I rewatched it and came to really appreciate it.

It's the best movie of my life, I watch it about once a year (that's all I can bear to do), and I see the modern world reflected from it constantly. We're living in that universe right now.

Not quite, but it's getting there. You're braver than me. I didn't sleep for days.

There's just so many good scenes? And the long takes are truly art in every way.

Also, the bit where the kid is just scrolling / playing on his device while his dad yells at him is some kind of crazy fever dream from right now.

I think I dragged my family to see this movie on xmas day, and felt bad for depressing everyone. But it's stayed with me ever since. One scene regularly comes to mind, the one where the rich guy's kid is just on some futuristic version of the iPhone at dinner. Too real.

Also the fact that humans mysteriously lost the ability to have children always seemed to me some unimaginable sci-fi trope, but given many countries now have negative population growth, I can see that too is very real. Growing pockets of humanity where entire towns have more old people than young. I remember when I lived in San Francisco, that's how the whole city felt.

Watching the movie before kids: Wow, so gritty, so depressing, great worldbuilding, what will become of us?

Watching the movie after kids: My heart is outside of me bleeding on the floor and yet I am still alive and must watch myself suffer forever, this pain that I feel has no place inside me anymore and it burns darkly bright, is this the future my children will have?, what must I do to prevent this for them? I will prevent this for them, as firm as granite I will prevent this, I should have another child and love it and hold it and kiss it and wash it and clean it and smile at it in the warm dark and cozy places of our home and keep a garden with bright red tomatoes and fresh greens and I will feed these children and keep out the bad and the evil and teach them how to survive and love and care and never ever let that world I have just seen come to pass.

This is a great movie. There's more tension in the low-speed car chase scene than any high-speed chase I've ever watched.

Also an incredible long shot. Adolescence did amazing work with the technique recently, too.

There is also imho one of the best one-shot scenes ever made

https://youtu.be/g2vX7IHg_SE

Sits on the throne with the one in True Detective S01E04

https://youtu.be/vnRTITzYnXs

It appears as one take, although I think it's actually several different scenes with a seamless transition.

To me it's one of the best scenes if not the best scene I've ever seen in a movie: from a small intense escape scene to a full battle, followed by a revelation that brings people to their knees. All shot basically first-person, with extremely complex action and emotion. Absolutely gutting.

The car chase scene mentioned above https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pOyAXPn1V9k

I only watched this movie once, maybe 15 years ago, and that scene has stuck with me. Rewatching it brought tears to my eyes again after all these years. That was some of the best, gut-wrenching movies ever made.

The single shot action sequence in the immigrant camp is my fav scene.

Haha, funny. Do all articles these days end with the appeal to engagement? I shall try it.

A couple of things I like about the film are the fact that babies are wonderful and children are wonderful, even if that world realizes it only through their absence. I think the practice of this is going to be simply people substituting this experience with other things they consider luxuries, and then supporting a shifting tax burden so that the few productive and reproductive carry the weight of the machine.

The shift from relying on one’s own children to take care of one in one’s old age to other people’s children doing so is that fewer people need allocate any of their effort into it. Free-riding off other people’s children is now fairly typical. Simply having paid someone else’s social security isn’t actually good enough. The agreement only worked when you did that and created the means in aggregate for your generation’s social security to be paid for by successors.

But the old parasitise the young in the West (at least, not exclusively). “Tax exemptions for the rich” primarily takes the form of older people just being free of various forms of society’s needs. Already the median French pensioner has a higher income than the median French worker, with the latter eager to try to make his way into the formed class so that he too may transform from the stepped on to the stepper on.

The other thing I like is that the movie is unambiguously hopeful. Kee and her child reach the rescue ship, hurray! Movie’s a bit bleak so nice to have a happy ending.

But I really wonder about what happens afterward. Is it Kee’s responsibility as the only fertile woman to have as many children as she can? Mother of Modern Man she’ll be remembered as. Fun thought.

So what do you think about what the movie implies and about the factors that bias society against the young?

It's a real gem. I've only seen it once, but I still reference this movie at least a couple of times a year. With world fertility rates seemingly all in decline, it only becomes more relevant.

> With world fertility rates seemingly all in decline

As much as various folks like to bang on about declining birthrates, the global birthrate is positive (i.e. >2.0 children per woman), and birthrates are only really low in very affluent demographics.

There's nothing particularly sinister going on either - since most children with access to adequate nutrition and healthcare now survive into adulthood, these societies are not losing a ton of population to wars, very little reason for reproducing above replacement rate.

Yeah, it is very weird to me too. It's only a problem in a handful of countries that have really, really low birthrates and can't/won't attract immigrants.

In 2024, 171 countries had birth rates below replacement rates. That's gotten worse since then. 70% of people live in countries with birth rates below replacement rates.

So not just a handful of countries.

It’s a handful of countries that have 1) “really, really low birthrates,” i.e., not just below replacement but very below replacement AND 2) do not have relatively permissive immigration policies.

That most countries are 3) below replacement rate by some amount is a separate third thing.

> very little reason for reproducing above replacement rate.

But reproduction is below replacement rate.

And? It's only a few years since folks were deeply worried about overpopulation, and whether the earth could support 10 billion people...

Yeah, I don't understand how we can be worried about both things at the same time. In my view, it's good that reproduction is below replacement. Yeah, pensions won't be great, but at least we won't spread like a cancer onto a strained planet.

That's one of the weirdest realizations I had in the Northern Territories of Canada. There are people living everywhere. Of course they must have looked at me the same way, so I can't really complain.

What is worrisome it's not the instant figures. It's the trend.

Are Ireland and India considered affluent now?

> Is Ireland considered affluent now?

Ireland is the richest country in Europe by GDP-per-capita[1] (apart a few uber-rich city states).

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_in_Eu...

> India...

India has been struggling to get its population growth control under control for decades. I think we can excuse a brief overcorrection as they stabilise.

Ireland's figures are wildly unbalanced compared to other EU countries because so many companies decided to formally register their headquarters there. They don't pay as much tax as they should so the income stats are way up there but the positive effects are not as you might expect from that (if they weren't actually negative).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_Sandwich

This is now mostly a thing of the past but there are still lingering after-effects.

> They don't pay as much tax as they should so the income stats are way up

What do you mean by "the income stats are way up"?

That the GDP stats are skewed but the taxes aren't there. So it looks as if Ireland is doing much better on paper than what is happening in reality. Normally with that kind of GDP you'd also have a solid tax base to go with it, here it is the opposite, Ireland has that GDP because their corporate taxes were super low.

Yeah, I mean, all the city-states on this list are playing this game too - Monaco, Lichtenstein, and Luxembourg aren't paradises for the poor either.

The rates are declining everywhere, although still positive.

I saw the movie soon after it came on Netflix. At that time, Netflix would mail the DVD. I found the movie soon after interesting back then but thought population collapse could never happen given the size of world population. Now I see so many countries in Europe where the population is decreasing and they need to shutdown schools because of low count of students. I remembered Children of Men and how prescient it was. I feel the same about the movie Her. We will be so lonely that it will no longer be shocking to have fall madly in love with an AI bot and mourn when the bot gets shutdown on the cloud somewhere.

Not that it matters but it feels closer to historical fiction than science fiction. Yes, this history happens to be in the future rather than the past, but in either case there is a lot of speculation about a culture or context removed from the present day. I suppose the difference is that there's an implied message of, "this can still happen if we let it" vs assuming that humanity is currently too enlightened to ever fall back into whatever old way of being. It feels like a failing of how we teach history that kids come away from youth thinking things like, "well nazis were bad but that was the olden days, now we all know better."

I'm just at beginning of the article, but I immediately have to disagree with something :) "...this remains one of the absolute best sci fi movies of the 21st century."

I'd say it's not just one of the best sci fi movies, it's one of the best movies of the 21st century, period. Definitely one of my all time favorites, despite some of its flaws, it wastes no time, has great pace, is a fully contained story and gets its point across very well. And I'm not even talking about how relevant some of its themes are.

...anyway, back to reading.

Children of Men was released very early here in Australia. There was very little prior buzz for the movie, almost no advertising at all. Hype was minimal, there was a little bit of buzz from the Venice International Film Festival but it was barely advertised and I had only vaguely known about it in passing based on reading some film discussion forum posts at the time, the concept sounding interesting to me. No one in that discussion had actually seen it.

I didn't even go to the movies to see it specifically, I went for The Departed, but I saw that Children of Men was showing and figured, what the heck.

Imagine going into that movie with zero expectations. I felt shellshocked afterwards. I go online, no one is talking about it. I watched what I still consider one of the greatest movies ever made and over the next few months it's like it doesn't exist.

I did eventually see The Departed, it's pretty great. I think I made the right choice though.

Interesting how the article is not mentioning the (inverted) Christian allegory as if that doesn't even exist. It's not even subtle if you actually watch the film, like that's almost the point of it.

The original book is even more explicit about that, like Theo does a makeshipt baptism on the infant amidst all the fighting.

I was going to say the same thing, there is so much Christian symbolism in the film that to not mention it at all makes me think the author is just not aware of the things the film is referencing.

One thing not mentioned in the write up, is that there is an animal in (almost) every scene of the film. Guess with no children attentions turned to pets. For me, helped to reflect that humanity continued to want to care, if not for themselves/immigrants/‘others’…

I loved that in the movie the high level ranking official, the cousin, works/lives at the Battersea Power Station, the same place in Pink Floyd’s Animals album cover :) makes a lot of sense when you listen to Pigs.

Also, now the building has been converted to expensive condos.

I’ve been saying this for over a decade.

The parallels between that film and the UK as it currently is are harrowing.

I always joked I was going live in a house like Michael Kanes character, only to end up doing it.

A connected rural hide away, where we can weather the UK’s rapid decay and decline.

The way the film depicts the treatment of immigrants was what always got me, I would joke (half) just wait till climate change makes southern Europe too hot to live in…

I hate being right!

> A connected rural hide away, where we can weather the UK’s rapid decay and decline.

A nice idea, if it weren't for the fact that the tax man can still get to you.

Not if I can hide our lane with bushes lol!

Meanwhile Southern Europe (especially Spain and Portugal) is complaining about all the UK immigrants.

Don’t worry about them, they’ll be back when having a Sunday Roast in 45c heat isn’t fun anymore!

It's a nativity story; faith overcoming nihilism. Explicitly in the book, obliquely (but frankly obviously) in the film.

All my life I've been interested in dystopias. Firstly post-nuclear annihilation dystopias as I grew up in the 70s and read books far beyond my age group. Then Crichton's "science-gone-wrong" dystopias in book and film form. 2000AD ethnosectarian block-wars and quasi-religious cults. Since the millennium, biohazard/pandemic/pathogenic dystopias. I suppose I've waited all my life for the collapse. Now I think that for the most part T.S.Eliot had it right in The Hollow Men. "Not with a bang but a whimper". I might not have to wait that much longer.

Tangent time:

I love Children of Men, I think its dark, prescient, moving and a fantastic technical achievement. Easily one of my top five movies.

I found myself nodding along with everything until I hit these lines:

> Many excellent movies are chase movies! The Terminator (1984) is a chase movie. Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest (1959) is a chase movie. One of the greatest movies ever made (according to me), George Miller’s Mad Max: Fury Road (2015), is the purest distillation of a chase movie.

Why do people love Fury Road so much? I watched it in the cinema, and I enjoyed it. I thought it was very colorful, had great stunts, etc. A bit derivative of the second and third movie but whatever. George Miller has a format that seems to work. I was shocked when it was nominated for best picture. Best Picture! Years later I listened to a podcast on the making of it, and got a lot of insight into the struggle behind the scenes, and how difficult it was both on set and in pre-production. I had new found respect for everyone involved. I watched it again with new eyes, and... nope. It's fine. It's got some great set-pieces, but I just don't understand the hyperbole. It is, at best, the 3rd best Mad Max movie

It was the first intro to Mad Max for a lot of people is why.

OK, now that we're here, isn't Mad Max a pretty weird revengeish movie? I watched it a few years ago, trying to get into the vibe, and it was nothing like what I remember, and nothing like Fury Road.

I know the other movies were what made Mad Max Mad Max, but the first movie was just a weird "child gets killed" revenge film, if I remember correctly?

I remember seeing Fury Road in theatres with tempered expectations. It was a phenomenal experience. We were very surprised at how good of a movie it was.

Mad Max is big shoes to fill, and Fury Road managed it in a way that was so fresh I barely thought about the previous films. It truly stands alone and that's no easy feat. I do not find it derivative at all. If anything it pulled the franchise in a new direction.

Everything is just awesome. They made an awesome movie. The cars are awesome. The characters are awesome. The sounds and practical effects are awesome. The pace is awesome. It's just great stuff.

It surpasses mediocrity across all metrics. That's why it's more than "fine".

Sci-fi has always been the perfect vehicle for social commentary, because it does not instantly trigger anything inside people. It is an impossible story in an impossible world, so relax. If you want to write something about black and white people, you should write a story about purple and green people instead. That's how X-men escapes all the woke allegations.

I wonder if this is why people don't consider it a sci-fi story, no high tech and no stand-ins for real societal issues (like aliens in District 9)

> One particularly brilliant aspect I keep thinking about is how the movie ends. We don’t know what will become of Kee and her baby. [...] We want to think Kee and her baby will change things, but we don’t know for sure because the future is—quite literally, in the final scene—shrouded in fog.

When I first saw this movie, I think the last scene was just her with baby and dead protagonist in a boat, in the fog.

But when I rewatched it more recently, there was also the ship they were trying to reach appearing out of the fog.

Did this movie have two different ending versions? Or did I just misremeber or watched a damaged copy? What ending have you seen?

The movie always ended with a ship appearing and the sound of children's laughter over the credits, it's less ambiguous than people make it out to be

Mandela effect. The ship was always there, there are no alternate ending versions

https://www.reddit.com/r/movies/comments/iea5it/children_of_...

That's amazing. I think the ending without the ship is just better. So that's why brains of many people, including mine, made it to be that. I reject your reality and substitute my own.

"There was an interview with the cinematographer who had argued for a more open ending with the two of them in the boat and you don't see or hear the rescue ship. So that was under consideration for a while. Maybe you read the director or someone taking about it?"

It's entirely possible that I didn't even come up with the better ending to remember on my own.

IMO it would be perfect to turn into a series, they could update it with references to the billionaire class, drones, AI, asymmetric warfare, immigration, pandemics, celebrity and the attention addiction economy!

Apple if you don’t mess up Neuromancer, please make this next!

Off top of my head, Silo has many of those things, eventually, the attention economy gets skewered a bit in Upload which is not from TVplus. Combat is so expensive for good live action maybe the best one can hope for is the depiction in something like Pantheon.

Please, no. Stories like these work because they are timeless. One of the reasons that TV nowadays is so boring is because every show runner wants to use it as a platform for their own social commentary.

Isn’t that what all stories are about though?

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