Children Of Men is a great film, released in 2006 based on the novel by P.D. James, it is about a near future where no children have been born for nearly twenty years. The world has been ravaged by terrorism, war and disease, leading to huge numbers of refugees who are brutalised by the government, with the end of the human race in sight a terrible and awful sadness had seized the world. Clive Owen played Theo, a former political activist who, like nearly everyone else had given up. Reconnecting with his old activist girlfriend Theo met a young woman, who amazingly turned out to be pregnant, and the film became about safeguarding this woman and her unborn child. Despite having about as an upbeat ending as this story was going to get the film was incredibly bleak. But here's the thing - it was incredibly bleak back in 2006, a world still reeling from 9/11 and the War On Terror but in 2017 with a refugee crisis gripping the world, Brexit and, of course, Donald Trump, it is about the bleakest thing I've ever seen.
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| Clive Owen's Theo barely missing being killed by a terrorist bomb |
Time and politics have made Children Of Men a bleaker film, the previous holder of the title of bleakest film in the world was The Road, and it's odd that it lost it's title to a film I saw before it. The Road, based on Cormac McCarthy's novel of the same name was about the apocalypse and focused on a nameless father and son trying to survive in this world. As apocalypses go it's about as bad as it gets and while it's never explained exactly what happened all the animals and plants have died, leaving only scavenging humans, this, of course means, that once there is nothing left to scavenge that will be the end. The other alternative was, to be blunt, cannibalism and there was a fair amount of that going on. Again, the ending of the film was about as happy as it was going to get, after the father died the boy was taken in by another family. Stewart Lee and Richard Herring used to have a joke on one of their shows, about the secret final scenes of films that were cut, such as in Trainspotting where Renton spent all of ten minutes off heroin before buying more and I think The Road was perhaps another such film, where this new family are actually cannibals and kill the son but that was just too much. I should read the book and see how that ended but I can't bring myself to do it. The film was chock-full of bleakness, from what happened to the mother, to the fact that the father had saved his last two bullets to kill his son and then himself before things got too bad and let alone what they find in the basement of a supposedly empty house.
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| Viggo Mortensen trying to decide whether or not to use one of his last two bullets on an enemy or save them |
Bleak books are harder than bleak films. There's something in the act of reading that you, as the reader, are active in the process, whereas watching a film is more passive. I am currently reading The Stand by Stephen King, another apocalypse scenario, and a foreword by King explained that this was the extra-long version with even more bleakness. It's an odd book in that there's a lot of time spent on boring things, people alone or in small groups, trying to get to other places. Then every so often there is a well-written truly horrific event, getting into the truly awful things that would happen in this scenario. Nothing, from The Walking Dead, The Girl With All The Gifts or Mad Max: Fury Road has come close to The Stand in capturing how bad things could get.
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| Stephen Kin'gs level of success means his name gets to be really big on the cover |
But for bleakness in books the winner for me was Never Let Me Go, written by Kazuo Ishiguro, the book was the story of an odd boarding school with children seemingly without parents, where their schoolwork is carefully assessed by visiting dignitaries and there was some awful and huge secret lurking in the background. Slowly, over the course of the book it was revealed that these children were created to serve as living organ donors, once they reach adulthood they are gradually harvested for their organs. The creeping knowledge that these intelligent, thoughtful children, who have the same dramas and worries of any children, exist only to give up their bodies to others is devastating. The final quarter of the book where the characters are aware of what is going to happen to them but don't rebel or try to escape was unbearably sad. What was perhaps worst was that they didn't meekly accept it their fate, it was more that they made a conscious decision that they were okay that this was going to happen, As well as being bleak it made me incredibly angry, with every page I willed them to rebel and try to escape. But they don't.
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| Made me sad AND angry |
To end with how about two bleak television shows. Utopia was a very weird thriller on Channel 4, where a secret organisation moved forward with their sinister plan. At first the assumption was that their plan was to unleash a plague that would kill most of the population and they are frighteningly effective and ruthless in carrying out this plan. They are happy to murder innocents, including children, undertake horrific torture and corrupt every institution they encounter. And then you find out that their plan isn't to kill most of the population, no instead, they want to make most of the population infertile. Back in the day a few clever scientists realised the problem was that there was simply too many people as one particularly brilliant scientist put it in 1900 there were a billion people on the planet and in 1980 it was up to six billion, how would the world cope with more? They see their plan as the only alternative to the wars, starvation and other destruction that would come as the world's resources ran out. It's pretty bleak when you realise you sort of see their point. It also featured Arby, an emotionally flat assassin who looked a little ridiculous but was so terrifying that even seeing his distinctive bag was enough to induce fear.
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| I was originally put off by the bright colour choices used in the adverts |
The second tv show an arguably the bleakest of everything mentioned is cult American sitcom It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia and the only comedy amongst them. The show is about four friends Mac, Charlie Dennis and Dee (well, four friends and the dad of Dennis and Dee played brilliantly by Danny De Vito) who ran an Irish pub in Philadelphia called Paddy's. Most importantly the five major characters are amongst the most deplorable people ever shown on television. These are the sort of people who decide what side of a protest to join by working which will have more attractive women, or who discover that an old man was in SS and think about how they can profit from this information, or sell watered down overpriced beer to underage children and convince themselves this is them doing a good thing. The show is replete with characters whose lives they've ruined, the recovering alcoholic waitress they push back into alcoholism, the child they bullied who joined the priesthood and they then convinced to leave the priesthood leaving him with nothing, let alone the people who've actually died. Ten seasons of this programme are on Netflix and I used to watch them over breakfast but had to stop because it was just so bleak it was a really bad way to start the day(it is also very funny), Unlike the other films, book and tv shows I've mentioned there is an awful squalor in the bleakness and although the show has regular flights of fancy into unrealness there is something believable in their small-scale schemes.
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| Arguably the worst characters ever portrayed on television |
So some books, films and tv shows for when you want to feel really bleak.
