thoughts on Children of Men

I came across the following quote on a blog about film:

"the infertility and social upheaval in Faron’s world is not a pretext for an ‘adventure’ or ‘cathartic journey’ that the classical hero would be expected to have. On the contrary, it is the fate of this individual anti-hero which serves as a prism through which the background is seen more sharply. Specifically, Žižek states that the oppressive social dimension of the story can only be experienced on a level that is beyond the superficiality of the cause-and-effect first impression if it remains in the background. He calls this Cuarón’s “true art”: that he is able to achieve the communication of catharsis in an oblique fashion—one that is necessarily subtle and essentially ambiguous." (http://philosophyoffilm.blogspot.com/2009/05/children-of-men-and-richard-kearneys.html)

I think the first part of the quote can be worked in with our previous discussion of the Public sphere in which the ontology, or lived experience (that structures one's current state of being) of one's self is put aside in favor of metaphorical space where only one's utterances create one's identity. It is interesting to note that the power in the film, that is, the fact that it is able to elude to contemporary social and raced issues (thus necessarily abstractly?) is due to a "prism" that focuses the fundamentally unnmappable totality of human society/interaction in a way we can experience. It is interesting to see the world of "cause-and-effect" word as superficial because I feel like we've been taught, through scientific method and celebration of the Enlightenment, to treat that as the deepest level of understanding. This lends well to our discussion of the power and use of affect in world which is still Modernist (as opposed to modern) in many ways.