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Mexican filmmaker Alfonso Cuarón has remained preoccupied with questions of how globalization shapes identity from his art-house success Y Tu Mamá También(2002) to his Hollywood-financed films Children of Men(2006) and Gravity(2013). Perhaps the most overlooked project in Cuarón’s filmography is his 1998 adaptation of Great Expectations, which shifts the narrative to the Gulf Coast and New York City in the 20^th century. Though failing to connect with critics and audiences upon its release, the film’s renegotiation of the imperial centre and focus on a setting once colonized by Spain makes the adaptation a cogent commentary on immigration and class mobility within a globalized United States. By paring down the narrative to focus on Pip and Estella’s romantic and sexual liaisons, Cuarón exposes how the waning Empire embodied by Ms. Havisham (now Dinsmoor) uses the young people’s emotions and sexuality to further its agency. Employing the camera’s seemingly objective gaze to dilute Pip’s first-person narration, Cuarón depicts his protagonist as a powerless spectator in the world around him whose status and sexuality are defined by Empire’s authority.1010

This chapter introduces Alfonso Cuarón's Children of Men, which was loosely based on the 1992 novel of the same name by P.D. James. It analyses Children of Men's dramatization of a world in violent turmoil with humanity hurtling toward extinction after eighteen years of infertility. It also mentions the plagues, environmental degradation, violent rebellion and war that have shattered the world into a battleground of military rule, ethnic tribalism, high security Green Zones, and internment camp Red Zones seen in the film. This chapter points out how the Children of Men novel from 1992 seems to have been torn from today's headlines, noting the shock of Brexit, the U.S. election of nationalistic fear-monger Donald Trump, and the spread of xenophobia in reaction to the global immigration crisis. It talks about how Children of Men offers up resistance as a means to fight oppression and despair amid injustice and brutality.

This chapter looks at Alfonso Cuarón's Children of Men in terms of one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse — Pestilence. It explains how Children of Men is described between apocalyptic and dystopian, two concepts that are often used interchangeably, but are actually different. It points out that dystopia suggests the perfection of a pernicious order, such as the rise of a dictatorial regime and oppression of minorities, while the apocalypse suggests the End-of-the-World. The chapter discusses the End-of-the-World fiction that exploded in the wake of 9/11 as it revealed breaches in security. It mentions Kirsten M. Thompson, who states that apocalypticism has a close connection to the science-fiction genre.

This chapter details how Alfonso Cuarón's Children of Men eschews the glamorous production values of the standard Hollywood film and moves into the transgressive realm of simulated reportage. It elaborates Children of Men's realism by Cuarón's incorporation of the handheld camera with uninterrupted long takes, complex compositions with multiple planes of action, and an emphasis on medium and long-distance shots rather than close-ups. It also analyses Children of Men's visual style that reflects the aesthetic of French film theorist Andre Bazin. The chapter discusses how Cuarón takes a 'present-in-the-future' approach to the mise-en-scène and insistently cross-references the nightmarish state-of-siege future with staged versions of historical, politically charged imagery. It examines Children of Men as a transhistorical critique.

This chapter reviews Alfonso Cuarón's Children of Men as a radical film that centralizes criticism of racism, xenophobia, white nationalism, and corporate technology. It examines how Children of Men subverts the conservative politics of the global capitalist entertainment industry by co-opting and castigating the system that produced it. It also points out how Children of Men does not derive its politics from its production context, but rather from the values it urges through its story and style. The chapter discusses Alfonso Cuarón's exploitation of mainstream mechanisms of the multinational entertainment machine by acceding to some mass audience expectations. It analyses the political importance and human value of Cuarón's artistry that is fortified through the vision of Albert Camus and his conception of fascism.

This chapter talks about the underground cadre of militant freedom fighters called the Fishes as the mostconspicuous organized resistance group portrayed in Alfonso Cuarón's Children of Men. It discusses how Children of Men disparages the Fishes and their mirage of revolution as the film condemns the fascistic actions of Britain — a modern democratic state turned savage. It also analyses how Children of Men rejects the Fishes as a treacherous goon squad, even though their political goal — the liberation of oppressed migrants — is worthy. The chapter examines Children of Men's main protagonist Theo Faron, who resembles the central character Meursault in Albert Camus'most famous novel The Stranger (1942). It mentions how no organized political groups are championed in Children of Men except for the vaguely defined Human Project, noting that the only source of hope for the future is Theo.

This chapter details how Alfonso Cuarón's Children of Men fuses its political critique of xenophobia, disaster apartheid, and nationalistic ideologies with transreligious allusions to Christianity, Eastern mysticism, and other spiritual traditions. It discusses Cuarón's suggestion on the establishment of an evolutionary shift that naturally exterminates the unfit creators of the old biopolitical order and gives rise to a new all-female species of humanity. It also talks about Children of Men character Kee and the Human Project that represents a utopian hope that motivates rebellion. The chapter mentions some critiques of Children of Men that argues that the film inadvertently supports the current biopolitical hierarchy. It highlights several critics that viewed Children of Men as a modern-day nativity story.

This chapter discusses the influence of French New Wave on new punk cinema. It presents an analysis of a new punk film that exemplifies the legacy of the New Wave at its best, Alfonso Cuarón's Y Tu Mamá También (2001). The film rejects the overheated, ‘crazy-love’ narratives of youth-oriented films, preferring a more contemplative, hesitant mood.

The fifth chapter uses Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity to offer an in-depth theoretical discussion of the term “proprioceptive aesthetics,” and offers a schematic discussion of the main aesthetic problems of the proprioceptive cinema. Taking Gravity as an exemplar and developing proprioceptive aesthetics in terms of its fundamental aesthetic problems, the chapter argues that in the locution proprioceptive aesthetics, the term proprioceptive is not merely some qualification of a previously understood aesthetics, but a modular adjective specifying a region of aesthetics. Rather, proprioceptive aesthetics entails the sense of aesthetics in which it names how we resonate with the world and attune ourselves to it.

This chapter discusses Alfonso Cuarón's method of layering richly detailed background information that serves as exposition of the Children of Men's totalitarian and xenophobic social landscape as well as articulation of its political and technological critique. It details how Children of Men compels the viewer to recognize how a tyrannical system dehumanizes and ostracizes people. It also analyses Children of Men's connection of the rise of British fascism to nationalism, xenophobia, and the public's complacency. The chapter explores the biological apocalypse that provokes geopolitical fracturing in Children of Men. It describes the Middle East wars and European immigration crisis portrayed in Children of Men.

Building on the melancholia of the films analysed thus far, a comparison between Alfonso Cuarón’s 2006 Children of Men, based in a world in mourning for its future, and the space opera Serenity (Joss Whedon, 2005), which concludes the story arc of Whedon’s TV series Firefly, gives an opportunity to further the discussion of history through an analysis of two mythic formations of hope, the redeemer and the frontier respectively. The chapter rounds off the theme of personal redemption versus the redemption of the collective, and the theme of obligation to the past necessitating a politics not of a deferred future but of redeeming the present in the name of the numberless dead, by an analysis of what does and does not count as human in the two films.