THE END IS ALWAYS A LIE

Children of Men was one of the most egregiously overlooked films of 2006;  it happens to be one of the best near-future dystopian movies of recent memory too.  But the reason I bring it up is because I'm going to talk about it a very little bit, and seeing as how very few people... um, saw it, you should know that there's a spoiler here, but I'll presume that by now you've actually seen it or don't care to.

The quick and dirty:  the not so-distant future where for some reason it turns out that humankind is no longer able to reproduce and as a result civil society is crumbling to pieces.  At first blush it may seem a puzzling premise but the more you think about it the more it makes sense:  humanity is going out not with a bang but rather with a long, drawn out whimper, a war lost by attrition, one geriatric person at a time.  So one of the movie's emotional apices, near its end, is a scene in which the first baby is born in something like 19 years;  Clive Owen's character, who'd presumably given himself up to alcohol, midwifes this infant into the world - it's quite a stunning part of the film, a real emotional high point.

Well, the movie ends a bit thereafter, with the new baby and mother found by a Greenpeace-like group organized to research human fertility that had threatened all along to be nothing more than a MacGuffin but turns out, ta-dah, to be the real deal, and like most works of fiction the story ends there at this high point.

What I always ponder about these tales is what happens afterwards, the climax hits and then what happens?  What Children of Men doesn't go into is the countless sleepless nights listening to see if the baby is going apneic or just snorting, if she's throwing up Jimi Hendrix-styles or just spitting up like the baby she is, nothing about the boat full of old people who strain to remember what newborns are like after 19 some-odd years of the absence of infants from the world, all of the pressure to treat and not to treat this child differently, how not to spoil them, how to change their diapers and what to do if there's a rash, how to feed them, teach them, that is, all of the stuff that parenting is all about but isn't in the movie which, after all, is Children of Men, not Parents of Men, which, come to think of it, is the movie that I really wish I could see now 'cause I could use some advice, it being late and with me trying not to fret if the baby runs out of nappies again.

And for now, some nicknames that we have for the baby:  Baby, Chicken, Chucken, Baby-Cakes, Penny-Jao (after one of the children in the documentary Babies, Ponijao).