On the Eve of Self-Destruction: Annihilation

Annihilation was another winter Blu-ray purchase for me and I finally watched it recently. Released in 2018, it is based on the novel of the same name by Jeff VanderMeer which came out in 2014. I do not recall how I first heard about the novel but I immediately fell in love with it and was excited to hear that it was being adapted for the big screen by someone who had written and/or directed science fiction tales that were more cerebral than shoot 'em up.

The book is often categorized as weird fiction and, while I am less than certain what criteria are used to define that genre, Annihilation is very weird indeed. It tells a story of four women who are never named and only known by their occupations: a biologist, a psychologist, an anthropologist, and a surveyor. They go on a mission into Area X, an area free of human inhabitants and blocked off from the general public. (Very much like Tarkovsky's Stalker.) Other expeditions have preceded this one – it's the 12^th – and they have all ended disastrously. What happens in Area X stays in Area X. Those who return suffer from amnesia and virulent cancers that cut their lives short.

I think the best way to explain my affection for the book is that it appeals to my love of unheimlich, a German word that denotes, as I understand it, discomfort and fear. I don't take it to mean sheer, abject terror; more like low level dread. I was uneasy reading every page of that book. Sometimes the unease was slight while at others it had been transformed into something more like terror. Annihilation has definite Lovecraftian sensibilities. VanderMeer doesn’t gives us much certainty in his world – characters don't have names, Area X is on planet Earth but we're not sure where, we don't know the genesis of Area X, et al. So much is unknown in the story. What we do know is that humanity is dealing with a force that it does not and perhaps cannot understand much less exercise even a small degree of control over. We are at its mercy. And while it may not be malicious, it certainly poses a threat.

And, honestly, the tower scared the crap out of me. Inside a structure is a tunnel with a spiral staircase ominously leading down which the biologist calls the tower. On the walls writing consisting of a plant-like material spells out a lengthy phrase that makes me imagine what T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land" would be like if he had co-written it with Lovecraft. It begins:

"Where lies the strangling fruit that came from the hand of the sinner I shall bring forth the seeds of the dead to share with the worms that gather in the darkness and surround the world with the power of their lives while from the dimlit halls of other places…"

And, down in the dark depths of the tower was the Crawler. Let us not go there.

For his film, writer/director Alex Garland took VanderMeer's novel as the basis of a story and went off in his own direction. Despite the changes he wrought, Annihilation the movie kept me uneasy almost the whole time and I descended into terror on the odd occasion as well.

There is much more clarity here as we find out at the beginning that a something from outer space crashes on Earth, more specifically, into a lighthouse. Four intrepid adventurers becomes five with the addition of a medic. And they are given names: Dr. Ventress (psychologist), Lena (biologist), Radek (physicist), Sheppard (geomorphologist), and Thorensen, the medic.

Here in the film, Lena's relationship with her husband is more fleshed out and the central motivation for her entering the Shimmer, Area X in the book. Instead Ventress, a cold, stoic face to a nameless bureaucracy is perhaps more like the novel's biologist.

Whereas VanderMeer focused on the fellowship's descent into madness and dissolution, Garland emphasizes body horror. The Shimmer is where DNA gets shoehorned where it not only just shouldn't be but where it cannot be. It's almost a Dantean journey but instead of going deeper into hell and meeting souls who committed ever more heinous crimes, we see relatively minor feats of genetic splicing and dicing become more severe until finally our protagonists destruct.

The first step is a single vine sprouting a variety of disparate flowers and this is followed by an alligator with shark-like teeth. The gator, which briefly threatens our adventurers, is almost a cheap horror movie trope. As Lena says during her debriefing/interrogation after emerging from the Shimmer, the mutations got more strange and severe the closer they got to the lighthouse and that's when things get really creepy.

For me this is because human bodily integrity is breached as categories of creatures are violated. Plants take on human shapes which leads the physicist to declare that they contain human hox genes, the genes that direct the development of an embryo into the bilaterally symmetrical, bi-pedal shapes that we humans have. Did the plants grow that way? Or are the results of some horrific human transmogrification? Then there's a bear with no flesh on its head that is able to mimic the death screams of its last victim, who just happens to be the geomorphologist. But is it mimicking or has it somehow absorbed part of Sheppard? After all, we see that her body has had its throat mangled. How do we know that it didn't appropriate her vocal cords in some grotesque manner? I have to say that watching a bear with a bare skull scream like a human being is deeply disturbing.

Even more disturbing for me was the section of the film at the Army base. They come across an abandoned Army base and discover that a previous expedition had bivouacked there. A memory card from a camcorder was left to be found and on it is footage of Lena's husband cutting open the gut of a fellow solder to reveal a worm-like parasite writing in his abdominal cavity. They find the setting of this video – in a pool – and see that the poor guy's body had been ripped apart and stuck to a side of the pool via the rainbow moss that is seemingly everywhere in the Shimmer.

In addition to enjoying the feeling of unheimlich, I had fun trying yet again to figure out the film's ending. Who is the Lena that emerged from the Shimmer? During the debriefing scenes, we see that she has a tattoo of what appears to be the symbol for infinity on her left forearm. Later we see that same tattoo in the same spot of the medic's arm. It also appears on the arm of the soldier who ends up plastered on the wall of the pool but not in the video - rather on his remains. I tried on this viewing to pinpoint when it is first seen on Lena's arm chronologically in the world of the story but failed. I'd swear we see it on her at some point as she's making her way to the lighthouse. The film makes no attempt to answer how it got there. Since tattoos aren't encoded in DNA, it seems likely that the tatted Lena is a doppelgänger just like the Kane that emerged from the Shimmer. But the scene in the lighthouse seems to show that the "real" Lena gives the phosphorous grenade to her doppelgänger.

The left forearm is the site of, not only the tattoo, but also a bruise on Lena. Plus it is where we notice plants growing out of the physicist's body. It's the place on the body where markers reside, markers indicating something is wrong. Ultimately, though, it's just a leitmotif with little inherent meaning. I suppose the tattoos themselves are much the same. There's no discernible pattern to their appearance but viewers come to understand that their presence means something is amiss. Its purpose is to induce a certain sense of unease rather than give a definitive explanation of how the Shimmer works.

Lastly, I have been thinking about the theme of self-destruction in Annihilation. The psychologist tells Lena at one point:

Almost none of us commit suicide, and almost all of us self-destruct. In some way, in some part of our lives. We drink, or we smoke, we destabilize the good job... and a happy marriage. But these aren't decisions, they're... they're impulses.

After Lena cops to not understanding, the psychologist answers:

Isn't the self-destruction coded into us? Programmed into each cell?

There are many examples of self-destruction in the film. The physicist cuts herself while the medic is an addict. We learn that the psychologist has cancer – her body is literally killing itself. And Lena has an affair which jeopardizes her marriage. Plus there's that tattoo which is the Ouroboros snake in the shape of the infinity symbol perhaps saying that self-destruction is a never-ending process.

But these are all from our viewpoint. The being behind the Shimmer seems to think otherwise.

During her debriefing, Lena's interlocutor describes the genetic mutations happening within the Shimmer as "nightmarish" but Lena retorts, "Not always. Sometimes it was beautiful." Later she says of it, "It wasn’t destroying. It was changing everything. It was making something new." I am reminded of something F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in "The Crack-Up":

A man does not recover from such jolts—he becomes a different person, and, eventually, the new person finds new things to care about.

The movie seems to argue that, at least sometimes, self-destruction is really out with the old and in with the new.

None of this is to say that I think the film is a visual disquisition on the theme of self-destruction. It's more of a meditation.

So that's why I love Annihilation. It's sublime in a more Burkean sense for me, that is, since so much is unexplained or obscure, it evokes potent and terrific feelings of confusion as well as the uncanny and I use "terrific" here in its old meaning of causing terror. There's trauma here but it transcends the mundane. It makes the horrible beautiful in its own way.