“Islamic, or the Fishes”
The other day I watched Children of Men, a movie starring Michael Caine and Julianne Moore, released in the U.S earlier this year. The plot of the movie, and I quote a plot summary posted on IMDb is this:
In 2027, as humankind faces the likelihood of its own extinction, a disillusioned government agent agrees to help transport and protect a miraculously pregnant woman to a sanctuary at sea where her child’s birth may help scientists to save the future of mankind.
I could not find the script of the movie online (probably because I am not in the mood for a cyber hunt), but there was one line in the beginning of the movie that made me uneasy throughout the one hundred minutes that followed. After an explosion takes place in London, in the year 2027 — remember this bit, one of the main characters of the film asks another main character about who he thinks was behind the explosion, to which the latter says:
Islamic, or the Fishes.
The movie was, what’s the word?, “stitched together.” The first 60 minutes or so were considerably challenging to fathom thanks to events and jargon the director and the cast know but devilishly conceal from us the viewers. I did not feel bored, except towards the end, and I did not feel unsatisfied, also except in the end. The ending of the movie was a total failure in my opinion, because it was beaming with hopefulness and other nonsense.
Back to the line that irritated me. Islamic, or the Fishes.It turns out it was the Fishes, if you’re curious, pretty much the same way it turned out McVeigh & Co. were behind the Oklahoma city bombing in 1995. In attempts to “analyse” my discomfort at the remark, I discovered it was because the movie was feeding the viewers with the idea that in 2027, the Islamic would be killing people.
Now I am not even going to start on the word Islamic and the word Islamicist, because the script is either notoriously oblivious to the differences between the two words or deliberately mischievous. But I am interested in knowing why the word Islamic was injected in the script, when the movie had nothing to do with anything related to Islam? As a matter of fact, never again does the word appear in the movie!
The question is, then, why project a futuristic image of 2027 that caters to the same Islamophobia that is plaguing the world today? Why make your viewers believe that the Islamic will be a threat to them in the future? Aren’t we fighting this battle of prejudice and injustice every day, now?
It would have been ridiculously easy to invent a name for some movement and insert it in the dialogue instead of the Islamic. I will show you just how easy that would have been:
A: Who do you think was behind it?
B: The Cats, or the Fishes.
B: The LSD, or the Fishes.
B: The Amoeba Brothers, or the Fishes.
B: The LNR, or the Fishes.
B: The Coalition of Self-Destructive Maniacs, or the Fishes.
You get my drift.
Interestingly, I came upon a BBC review of Children of Men, and the introduction of the review read:
Paranoia about illegal immigration and references to Islamic terrorism sit uncomfortably with the plot’s central crisis of infertility. The real power is in the simple contrast of despair and hope, the latter embodied in a pregnant woman who seeks protection from a typically world-weary Clive Owen.
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March 21st, 2007 at 3:58 pm
I really hated this movie - it depressed the hell out of me. It even made me want to go out and have babies NOW, which is absolutely ridiculous, considering how that’s the last thing I wanna do. But more than that, it underlined the bleak reality I believe our future will be, and for someone who likes to live in denial, I hate being faced with such thoughts.<br /><br />And you summed up my feelings about the first line perfectly. <br />
March 30th, 2007 at 10:40 pm
I have yet to see the movie, but a friend of mine from the UK commented on that exact same line. He thought it was a critique of present-day terrornoia, where any country that contains sand is (in the eyes of the West) chock-full of murderous, suicidal fanatics*. This is of course nonsense, and my mate thought that the movie was drawing a line between this sort of present-day mindless fear and tomorrow’s authoritarian state, which retains power through that same mindless fear.<br /><br />But what do I know until I actually see the movie? <br /><br />(* This would leave no room for all the engineers, doctors, lawyers, shopgirls/boys, bloggers, actors, singers, etc…)<br /><br />-Jordan (the person, not the place)<br />
May 16th, 2007 at 6:58 pm
OK, finally saw CHILDREN OF MEN. I really liked it, but the ending was indeed sort of weak. I found it to be a brutal indictment of Blair’s UK, particularly with the "militant" funeral march that took place within a Guantanamo Bay-Woomera detention centre as an allegory of what we reap when we sow "blame-the-foreigners" policies. So much in that movie is already happening, it really pissed me off. And Clive Owen is cool.