Both this week and last, images of the city as a place of apocalypse are ideas which have been perhaps most provocative to me. In both Watchmen and Children of Men, the city is the site of the apocalypse at its greatest (worst?) expression; it is in the confines of the urban environment that these secular apocalypses are to be most feared, and it is the escape from the city that can provide an escape from apocalypse, or at least the worst conditions of it. Why the urban space is the place best fitted for a secular apocalypse is something that has troubled me: is it because the urban space is inherently crowded, or perhaps because technology, and the use of such, seems at its greatest presence in the city? Or does it play on notions of the person of the city dweller, as already occupying the role of the other, the modern who has strayed too far from tradition (in whatever context that may be).
London and Bexhall (the refugee camp) provided the two urban apocalypse locations for Children of Men; juxtposed to this was Jasper’s refuge, off the grid, hidden by what appeared to be massive movable rhododendrons on a desolate roadside. This forest setting—as disconnected from means of communication and transportation as possible—was the one location that for most of the film, the apocalypse could not touch. It was colorful, it was filled with Jasper’s laughter, and though not perfect (his wife appeared disabled or otherwise sick), it was certainly not the grey, violent streets of London. London is a zoned, surveilled space, that even with police nearly omnipresent, is still exceedingly violent, crime and graffiti filled, and a future which makes one yearn for the simplicity of the malfunctioning-machine world of Brazil.
Bexhall, as a city now turned into a massive refugee camp, was certainly the city as apocalypse taken its furthest. The city has become a war zone; it is where a fearful British populace, residents of the only country left on earth under some sort of rule of law (albeit a repressive police state) have sent all of their unwanted others. Yet as the violent, fully broken, near-destroyed site in the film, it is also the gateway to escape: through a city sewer, Theo, Kee, and the baby are able to leave by a rather inadequate canoe, to the waters of the Channel and a rescue by a ship which will find care for the child, the first baby born on earth in 18 years. For such a relentlessly bleak film, this does offer a moment of hope. In this apocalyptic future, hope has a very definite place in which it can appear: not in the city, not even in the forest, as eventually even that is penetrable, but only through a movement through the worst of places that goes into the purifying, fully new site—the water, a new frontier, and a place fully detached and separate.
