I find it curious, watching Children of Men, to see the position of Kee and to consider why the film portrays her as it does. As I see it, she is a conventional character, and a fairly empty one at that. She is almost totally dependent on others for survival, and would be nowhere without her two white European companions. Her presence in the film as the first woman to concieve and give birth in two decades places her in the position of the dark-skinned symbol of fertility somehow unsullied by Western industrial pollution, and her general lack of character does not seem to elevate her above this.
Granted, she is young and has not grown up around children, but it bothers me that Children of Men is still a white man’s story. I would not wish to essentialize Kee’s character further by suggesting she should have been the instinctual mother figure, but in making Theo the source for much of the parental wisdom the movie further eroded the potential for Kee to be a powerful woman in her own right. She ends up little more than a talisman of motherhood, passed from one group of (primarily) men to another. While she needs Theo to tell her she can succeed in giving birth, Theo soldiers on without so much as a wince, after being shot in the stomach, until Kee becomes hysterical thinking the blood is her’s—which sounds like Harry and Wesley in To Have and Have Not.
Kee is at the center of a pivotal struggle (which could change the fate of the human race) that is nonetheless not about her so much as it is about Miriam and Theo and the others who risk themselves to protect her child. It seems to me a poor choice to make Kee almost invisible from her own story, and I wonder what we should attribute it to. Is this the color bias of Hollywood? Or is something deeper going on in the writing of her character?
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