After I saw Children of Men in the theater as a sixteen-year-old in 2006, I fell into a depression and cried in my room for three days.

While that may not exactly be a glowing review, the movie both touched and unnerved me deeply.

Its beautiful cinematography was at once breathtaking and heart-rending, with the camera slowly panning over a landscape of a broken society scrambling both for survival and humanity.

The images I saw on screen felt like a premonition.

Set in a not-so-distant future in which the human race has become infertile, the film opens on a scene of the protagonist, with social and political themes already dominating headlines.

Between the threats of environmental degradation, fossil fuel wars, the then-prominent narrative of terrorist hostility toward the U.S., and resulting animosity toward immigrants and minorities, I couldnt help but feel as though what I saw in the film was more than fiction.

It was like looking into a crystal ball and seeing the future. As a thoughtful and sensitive person, I felt so little hope about the world I was inheriting.

And yet

In her book, Hope in the Dark, writer Rebecca Solnit characterizes hope as giving ones self to the future, thus making the present inhabitable. Good thing, because our present reality is often times nearly uninhabitable.

Our children are killed in their schools. Innocent people face police brutality for their race, gender, or sexual orientation. Womens rights are being openly threatened in industrialized nations in a way they havent been since the work of the suffragettes. People are getting sicker. Food is getting scarcer. Our world is getting hotter.

It would be so easy to excuse ourselves as we fall into despair. Yet some of us hope, if only to make the present inhabitable.

Hope stems from a darkness as much of the womb as of the grave, Solnit writes. To hope is to balance on the edge between symbolic birth and death, to assert existential freedom as well as the recognition of infinite variability.

As real people in a real world, this means that, yes, we may now find ourselves plunged into darkness. Butwe are the ones who choose what we see when we turn on the light.

Solnits description of dual-natured hope resembles Nietzsches concept of nihilism. Nihilism for Nietzsche was a response to the inevitable contradiction of the Christian-Moral worldview: a will to truthfulness that eventually finds its metaphysical foundation to be untrue. This realization culminates in the onset of metaphysical uncertainty; the death of God.

For us, we sense intrinsically that the direction weve been going, the assumptions weve been making, dont hold the promise ascribed by our predecessors. Although we feel this awareness subtly gnawing at our consciousness, we are afraid to stop, turn, and look it in the face. To do so would be very literally to look in the face of death.

What would we see there? The corpse of manifest destiny? Of industry? Of unending growth and prosperity, every man the master of his castle? The death of a vision of perpetual convenience and ease? The official death knell of monotheism and the comforts we still cling to in its wake?

Fundamentally, Nietzsche argued that we would see the death of our identity itself. No longer can we be passive receivers of culture, resources, and ontology. There is no one above us manufacturing it for us. Our truths are no longer self-evident.

Modern individuals are thrust into a central antagonism in that we are notto esteem what we know, and not to beallowedany longer to esteem the lies we should like to tell ourselves (10). That is, we are so frightened by the sudden realization that we are masters of our own reality instead of subject to the omnipotent paternal figure on whom we previously relied that we are temporarily barred from social and moral agency.

This is the stage of paralysis we face when the lights have just gone out.

For Nietzsche, this is nihilism.

In its most positive form, nihilism is a coping stage, a mourning period in which we pine for the metaphysical certainty of unconscious devotion to divine will. We can see this so clearly in the schism in American politics; one side clings to order and meaning, the other eschews it, offering nothing to replace it but relativism.

This stage can be a path into despair and further existential paralysis, or it can be the jumping-off point for engaging in the creation of a transformative, emancipatory, and participatory reality.

In other words, not God, not government, but we as the collective creative consciousness determine our fate. If a movie can communicate this much wisdom, its seriously worth a watch.

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Children of Men Is the Movie We Need to Get Us Through Turbulent Times - Goalcast