Mc Caffrey 1

Gabrielle Mc Caffrey

Professor Lisa Baird

ENG 311

16 April 2009

Lost in Adaptation: What Book to Film Adaptations Offer an Audience

In 1992, P.D. James released what would seem, to many of her fans, as a

deviation from her normal genre of English detective novels. Children of Men outlines,

in the form of a futuristic dystopia, a vision of the ultimate end of humanity. No child

has been born since the year “Omega” (1995) and the loss of fertility in men’s sperm

continues to be unknown. England, as much as the rest of the world, has fallen into a

state of psychological bedlam. The book is led by a character named Theo Farron, a

former scholar of Oxford whose cousin is the self-appointed Warden of England, who

has done away with a democratic government and has instead implemented an

egalitarian one. From the book to film adaptation there are many obvious differences.

As with any form of literary or entertainment intake, a person is automatically biased

based upon past personal experience, outlooks, and perceptions. A cinematic version

and a novel version of the same work can offer an audience different ways in which to

perceive themes and notions that the author, or authors, intended to convey.
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In both the novel and the book, due to his connection with the Warden of

England/ his cousin, Theo is contacted by a group of radicals who are invested in

restoring faith and democracy in a world plagued by the inevitable and quickly

approaching end of the human species. He then gets caught up in a scheme to protect

Julian; a miraculously pregnant member of the radical group entitled the Five Fishes in

the novel and Kee, an African “fugee,” in the movie.

In both the film adaptation and the book, Theo’s character represents two

different people. In the novel, Theo is a divorced, former historian who is childless and

responsible for his only child’s death; thus his existence in a world focused on finding

the cause for infertility is, essentially, useless. He is more interested in the past than the

future and is essentially unphased by the threats of conspiracy, terrorism, and illegal

immigration that is everywhere around him. In the movie, Theo is represented as a

drunken activist-turned-beauracrat who has inevitably become apathetic to the chaos

and dystopia that is the last civilization standing, Great Britain. Rather than being

portrayed as a scholar, Theo’s past is lined with a history of radical activism which is

revived by the entrance of his past lover and mother of his deceased child, Julian.

Instead of fighting against the system for what he once believed to be right, Theo avoids

confronting unethical injustices by hiding behind an all-too-accessible bottle of whiskey.

While these dissimilarities are obvious and, at times, blatant, there is a certain

effect to which an audience responds similar to some events and in different ways to
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others. When we read novels, the extents reached by the words of the author depend on

the lengths of the reader’s imagination. A person's imagination can range from

extremely expansive to incredibly small—this allows for flexibility within the story.

When we partake as an audience to a cinematic film we are forced to look through the

eyes of the director and producers who created it. Once we are exposed to this viewpoint

of a small group of people, such as producers and directors, it is increasingly hard to

return back to an imaginative view. We watch real people play the roles that otherwise

would be left to be assigned by our imaginations. In a novel, as one reads on, they form

a relationship with the characters that is personal and may differ from that of another

reader. In a film adaptation, if one has already read the original novel, then the actors

are supplementary to any preconceived notions of a character’s behavior, relationship

with others, status in a society, etc. If one sees a movie first before reading the novel,

the relationship becomes more intimate as a live person is put in place of an imagined

character. Regardless if a movie-goer has seen the exact same person in numerous other

roles, for roughly those 110 minutes, they live their life through the plot of another

(wo)man’s mind.

In the book, Julian would have been looked down upon as the potential savior of

the human kind due to the fact that she has a deformed hand. Additionally, Luke would

be left out of the potential gene pool to continue the race due to the fact that he suffered

from mild epilepsy as a child. The movie plays off of this theory of the dispossessed by

causing the first pregnant woman in two decades to be an illegal, African refugee. The
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significance of the deformities in both the novel and the film play off of the treatment of

humanity during that time. In the novel, anyone with a deformity was cast away as the

potential hope for the human race. In the film, foreigners were referred to as “fugees”

and were essentially outlawed from the entire country. Both James and Cuaron utilized

this as a means to convey the fact that humanity was to be carried on by the most

unlikely and least preferable person to be the proverbial mother (or father) of hope.

The theme that was continued most deftly in both the movie and the book is the

possibility of hope. In the film, it is the women who were no longer able to get pregnant

and who were continually suffering from miscarriages. Thus, the continuation of the

human race still had a light of hope when a fertile woman gave birth to a little girl.

Likewise, in the book, the men were the ones who were becoming sterile. As long as a

man was physically and mentally healthy, they were subjected to twice a year testings to

check fertility. When Julian gives birth to a baby boy, it signifies that he may be able to

carry on the fertile gene in which Luke, his father, had carried. Despite mental illness in

the book and race in the movie, the possibility of hope still remained with the birth of

both children regardless of society’s characteristic flaws.

Both the book Children of Men and the movie Children of Men were able to

capture the prospect of the continuation of humanity by utilizing the same theme while

executing both imperative scenes differently. In the book, the reader is exposed to a

vulnerable moment of Theo during the birthing of Julian’s child which could not

properly have translated to film—his internal struggle between bringing the first child in
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twenty years in the Earth while at the same time feeling the bitter pang of wishing it was

his own. This is a pure moment in the novel in which the reader is brought not only to

the situation, but directly to Theo’s viewpoint.

The movie, however, presents the moments in an arguable, equally compelling

scene which is brought to life before the audience’s eyes. Whereas in the novel, Julian is

not only older, but assisted by a midwife, in the movie the spectators watch a younger

woman who has never seen a pregnant woman before in her life, give birth with the

assistance of a man. In the novel, the reader is given the liberty to take the malleable

and subjective words of the author and formulate what they believed might have

occurred. The film adaptation of this particular scene, for better or for worse, leaves no

discrepancies to be wondered—visually we are shown what happens.

In addition to the power that a visual interpretation has on a reader is the

execution in which it is done in. For the movie Children of Men, Alfonso Cuaron decided

to employ the use of a hand held camera and many “continuous shot” methods to

convey the feeling of actually being in the room. The usage of this technique further

narrowed down a viewer’s experience with the scene and was accentuated by the color

tones, angles, etc that was used.

Both the book and the movie use recognizable figures, places and people as

references throughout the story. In the book, Theo lets the fishes know that he will help

them by slipping a note between the now-desecrated head of what once was the famous
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statue of Diadoumenos. Xan, cousin to Theo and Warden of England, wears the

Coronation Ring of English royalty for fun, not to strictly signify the power he possesses.

Additionally, Theo being a historian in the novel, there are many references to ancient

Western Civilization notions, artifacts, and information.

Historical references in the movie are never spoken about as they are in the book,

rather they are visually assimilated enough to catch anyone’s eye who is looking—and

who knows what to look for. However, the popular culture references coupled with the

historical references in the movie are more easily received by a wider age gap as well as

those interested in historical references as well as contemporary. The historical

references range from Picasso’s Guernica, which embodies the suffering of the Spanish

from Nazi bombing during the Spanish Civil War, to the possession of the statue of

David by the director of the “Ministry of the Arts,” Theo’s cousin. Additionally, Cuaron

has been sited saying that the woman holding her son across her lap was a reference to

La Pieta, the famous statue by Michelangelo of Mary holding Jesus.

There are, of course, many more contemporary culture references such as

Michael Cain’s rendition of the character Jasper, which was admittedly based upon his

real life friend, John Lennon; an inflatable pig which was a recreation of Pink Floyd’s

1977 record Animals and street artist Banksy who is world renowned for his political

street graffiti. While these elements all allude to a certain time period, it is not as old as

one might think. The refugee camp at Beckshill can most obviously be related to the
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nature of Auschwitz. However, contrary to belief, Cuaron explains that most of the

elements in the movie that can be referenced to are references in a modern society. He

says, “We never even thought of Auschwitz when we were doing that. We were thinking

Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, and The Maze. And those were our visual references. But in a

way that shows how the atrocities of humanity are ageless” (Vo). All these elements

create a sense of realism in which contemporary audiences—such as the one who would

have viewed this film when it first came out in 2006—would no longer be able to rule

out in the possibility of the near future or even now. Intentionally, many of the

references in the movie were made to act as familiar objects to a contemporary society;

things we may not recognize but can relate to because it is relevant to the reality we are

exposed to everyday.

As a detective author in 1992, there was no way that author P.D. James could

have estimated how truly terrifying her science fiction world of a “future far far away”

could resound for an audience in 2006. Themes of immigration concerns, terrorist

threats, faith, hope, illusion vs. reality and conspiracy theories that are explored in P.D.

James’ book Children of Men and the later full feature film adaption by Alfonso Cuaron

are not easily ignored in this time of continued post-9/11, economic unsurities. The

adaptation of the film, for some, may have left much to be desired due to its extreme

diversion from the original literary work. However, the elements of approach in both the

novel and the film leave readers and audiences alike question how far off the realities of

the year 2027 actually are. Because of the time period outlined by P.D. James’, we as a
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society in the twenty first century can find something eerie yet, intensely personal,

about the civilization of the not so distant future. Many of the high security warnings

that the audience watched scroll across the bottom of the screen were oddly reminiscent

of cultural norms today that would not have relevant fifteen years ago.

So where do these two adaptations of similar concepts of—infertility, war,

factions, disease, and immigration—leave the audience? We can examine these theories

through two different scopes when it comes to Children of Men, the book, and Children

of Men, the movie. In the book we are faced with disease, warfare, and government run

by a dictatorship. To some extent, all of these things are inevitably uncontrollable. No

one person can stop disease from plaguing a nation, end a war between countries or

overthrown a dictatorship single handedly. But, what we as a democracy can control are

issues such as the treatment of immigrations and discrimination against others as well

as this current generation’s lack of caring for the generations to come and our treatment

of the environment. What we get from the book is a possibility of hope for the human

race to continue under the power of Theo who would, assumedly, rule with less of an

iron fist than his cousins. The Quietus would end; faith in government would be

restored, and so forth. In the book, issues that can only be addressed by positions of

power are controlled by the main character’s acquisition of authority and control.

But just like reality, parts of the Children of Men film are hard to watch. To this,

Cuaron comments in an NPR interview that “Part of reality is really hard to watch. And
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that was the whole point.” At the end of the movie the conclusion of hope is left up to the

viewer. After all that has been laid out for them in a cinematic form, not left up to

imagination but before one as bold as day, the decision of the existence of hope for this

and the next generation is left up to the audience. Additionally, if there is hope, what

should one do with it in a time of harsh realities? Both the book Children of Men and the

film Children of Men expose to readers, in different manners, the possibility of hope and

optimism for a society not much unlike our own today.

Works Cited

Children of Men. Dir. Alfonso Cuaron. Perf. Clive Owen, Julianne Moore, Michael Cain,

Clare-Hope Ashitey. Universal Pictures and Strike Entertainment, 2006.

Cuaron, Alfonso. NPR. All Things Considered. Dec. 20 2006.

James, P.D. Children of Men. New York: Vintage Books, 1993.