"if all these sociopolitical issues are where the film lives, so to speak, what's the point of a strategy that puts them in the background . . . and how do we account for the choices that ended up being placed in the foreground? . . .  the very act of foregrounding and backgrounding would i expect be part of some larger strategic move, and i can't find that one"

I think your question is spot on, Mike. If Cuaron's choice to invert the foreground and background is purely formal, then we are simply dealing with some decadent form of (post)modernist experimentation for (post)modernist experimentation's sake. For time's sake, I'll defer to Zizek's answers to this important question, and then I'll add a few thoughts of my own:

1) To overturn generic convention:
"In a Hollywood story, its rich historical background serves merely as the excuse for what the film “really is about” - the initiatic journey of the hero or of the couple. In _Reds_, the October Revolution is the background for the reconciliation of the lovers in a passionate sex act; in _Deep Impact_, the gigantic wave that inundates the entire east coast of the US is a background for the incestuous reunification of the daughter with her father; in _The War of the Worlds_, the alien invasion is the background for Tom Cruise to reassert his paternal role…not so in Alfonso Cuaron’s _Children of Men_, where the background persists."

2) To defamaliarize the present- the strategy of anamorphosis:
"In a typical Hollywood sci-fi, the future world may be full of unheard-of objects and inventions, but even the cyborgs interact exactly the way we do – or, rather, did in old Hollywood melodramas and action movies. In _Children of Men_, there are no new gadgets, London is exactly the same as it is now, only more so – Cuaron merely brought out its latent poetic and social potentials: the greyness and decay of the littered suburbs, the omni-presence of video-surveillance… The film reminds us that, of all [the] strange things we can imagine, the weirdest is reality itself. Hegel remarked long ago that a portrait of a person resembles it more than this person itself. _Children of Men_ is a science-fiction of our present itself....
"The true focus of the film is in the background, and it is crucial to leave it as a background." The art of the film lies in "the paradox of anamorphosis: if you look at the thing too directly, the oppressive social dimension, you don't see it. You can see it in an oblique way only if it remains in the background."

I would add...
3) For pedagogical reasons
For me, what separates the film from the baseness of propagada proper is that it refrains from directly making its political or moral message. The message artfully lies in the background in order to avoid direct polemics. There's an extra on the DVD called "The Possibility of Hope." It's one of these talking head documentaries that disusses the various systemic problems of capitalism, etc. The direct presentation of the ideas fails miserably; it's ridiculous. I can see my students' eyes rolling in the back of their heads. But I can imagine these same apathetic students engaging in a thought-provoking conversation about the ills of contemporary society after viewing the film (with a little prompting from me, of course).

I think that for Zizek, the "thesis" of the film, what it is primarily diagnosing, is the waning of historicity that is symptomatic of late capitalism. Without a sense of history, which also implies a lack of futurity, we slip into an 'ideological despair' (infertility as a metaphor for a lack of historicity). 'Last men' = solipsistic presentists, etc. I would generalize this thesis a bit: The film foregrounds the background to depict how seeminly disconnected crises (surveillence, deportation, inequity, racism, ethnocentrism, etc.) are systemic, and therefore part of the larger problem: capital. 

As for the foreground's contribution to this thesis or a different reading of the film, I'd love to hear some other people's thoughts. I've given readings of Theo and Jasper, but there's obviously a significance to Kee being a postcolonial subject. The escape narrative is also significant for reasons beyond generic action. What is the significance of who they are escaping, the places they escape to, and their final destination? 
Could the foreground story have been stronger? Probably, but for me it doesn't detract from the background narrative, nor do I think it contradicts it.  

kirk

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