Traversing the American Desert: Political Barrenness and the Hope of Renewal in Hannah Arendt and Alphonso Cuarón's Children of Men (original) (raw)

2019, Society for Cinema and Media Studies Conference, Seattle, Washington

American politics seems to be reaching its end. Partisanship has devolved into tribalism and populist forces with authoritarian tendencies threaten to undermine American democracy. This political pessimism views the American political landscape as a wasteland where political life is no longer sustainable, but a more optimistic view sees it merely as a desert, a place of political barrenness to be sure, but where life-giving oases still exist to renew American political life. In the spring of 1955, Hannah Arendt concluded a course on the history of political theory at the University of California–Berkeley by describing modern politics as a “desert-world.” She employed this metaphor to analyze the American political landscape of the mid-1950s—the height of the Cold War—when Americans found themselves increasingly divided over the development of nuclear weapons, racial segregation, the threat of Communism, and military intervention in Vietnam. By “desert-world,” Arendt meant to describe the modern human experience of alienation from a common world that joins human beings together and distinguishes them as individuals, a condition she referred to as “worldlessness.” America was not yet a wasteland for Arendt; it was a desert with oases of philosophy, art, friendship, and love that allowed human beings act in concert to renew the world, making politics possible again. Alfonso Cuaron’s film adaptation (2006) of P.D. James’s novel The Children of Men (1992) dramatizes the political barrenness described by Arendt and serves as a cinematic touchstone for thinking about the renewal of American politics. Although the film has consistently been interpreted in nihilistic terms—departing significantly from the redemptive theme of James’s novel—and depicting a hopeless, oppressive, and meaningless post-9/11 world that is beyond redemption, the film lends itself to a more politically optimistic interpretation. As I argue, Children of Men is not film about a political wasteland; it is a film about a desert-world where oases of human relatedness still exist and make the renewal of political life possible. In this paper, I deploy Arendt’s conception of desert-politics as a hermeneutical lens for interpreting Cuaron’s Children of Men, which can serve as map for navigating both the promises and perils of the contemporary political landscape in America. In the first part of the paper, I introduce the concept of Arendt’s desert-world and examine it in the context of the film’s desert-aesthetics (e.g., barrenness, dryness, dust). Next, I explore the themes of separation and alienation in the film and how these experiences render politics impossible. In the final part of the paper, I highlight the neglected instances of human relatedness within the film that constitute “oases within the desert” and open-up the possibility of building a new world.