Need for re-presentation?

Let me add a couple more comments to Erik's nice analysis of Children of Men. Since I am having trouble weaving those comments into one coherent post, I'll just list them.

1. I find Kee almost a cinematic cliche. She, just like Navis from Avatar, embodies everything about the overused Hollywood binary of:

Colored - White

(Mother)Nature - Culture

Primitive - Civilized

Life - Death

Pure - Tainted

Past - Future

Genesis - Apocalypse

Accented - Fluent

Nostalgia - Present

and so on.

Both the movies color-code such binary with visible colors such as black and blue. Rather than attempting to embrace both sides of the binary, the movies situate "us," human beings living in the over-civilized society that is to demise, and imagine the color-coded "others."

2. Children of Men, ironically, struggles to send messages such as "after all, we're all humans" or "life is all created equal and sacred" and so on. But the movie needs to have a separate representation of life, of human-ness, of fertility, to convey the message. In the utopia in a true sense -- and Mr. Gilroy would agree with me -- we would not need visual signification of such values. Every living beings, regardless of gender, can be symbol of fertility. Us, for simply existing at this very moment, represent life.

3. Some might say this irony is a sort of Derrida-esque tactic for deconstruction, that is, to speak the language of the system to deconstruct the system from within. I am quite skeptical of the strategy. As we have discussed many times, for us to think outside of the common sense, we need the moment of explosion. How can we break outside of the rigid binary of you vs. me, us vs. them, etc., when we utilize the cliched representation of such binary?