How would you feel upon coming face to face
with that which you could not explain?
Annihilation, Director Alex Garland’s rendition
of a book by “weird fiction” and sci-fi
author Jeff Vandermeer, explores this type
of experience.
What happens when humanity encounters something
that seems to shatter the scientific foundation
we’ve built around us?
In Annihilation.
We follow a team of scientists into the shimmer,
they make observations, and formulate theories
about what’s happening.
But I think these theories, while they might
explain certain symptoms of the situation,
do not provide a complete understanding of
the situation.
Humanity ultimately falls short of understanding
what the shimmer is.
The anxiety and horror produced by these types
of encounters with the unknowable are the
foundation of the work of author H.P.
Lovecraft.
Lovecraft’s work describes human encounters
with things that are so beyond human understanding
that even attempting to comprehend them invokes
a deep sense of dread and a realization of
our own fragility as humanity.
Many of these stories produce the same sense
of unease that is experienced while watching
Annihilation.
One story in particular: “The Colour out
of Space” has many parallels with Annihilation.
In this story, an old farmer relays the details
of a horrible event that started with the
arrival of a meteorite.
“It all began, old Ammi said, with the meteorite.”
After it’s arrival, strange things begin
to happen in the surrounding area.
The wildlife begins to take on unnatural forms.“…he
was disturbed about certain footprints in
the snow… something not quite right about
their nature and arrangement.”
They describe a woodchuck: “The proportions
of its body seemed slightly altered in a queer
way impossible to describe.”
Organic growth changes strange ways.
“Never were things of such size seen before,
and they held strange colours that could not
be put into any words” … “All the orchard
trees blossomed forth in strange colours”
… “Strangeness had come into everything
growing…”
“everywhere those hectic and prismatic variants
of some diseased, underlying primary tone
without a place among the known tints of earth”
The mental states of the farmer’s family
living in the area, begin to deteriorate.
“Thaddeus went mad in September after a
visit to the well.
He had gone with a pail and had come back
empty-handed, shrieking and waving his arms,
and sometimes lapsing into an inane titter
or a whisper about “the moving colours down
there”.”
“Strange colours danced before his eyes”
Finally the farmer telling the story and some
other men from the nearby town witness something
of cosmic proportions.
“in a fearsome instant of deeper darkness
the watchers saw wriggling at that treetop
height a thousand tiny points of faint and
unhallowed radiance, tipping each bough like
the fire of St. Elmo or the flames that came
down on the apostles’ heads at Pentecost.
It was a monstrous constellation of unnatural
light, like a glutted swarm of corpse-fed
fireflies dancing hellish sarabands over an
accursed marsh”
“At this point, as the column of unknown
colour flared suddenly stronger and began
to weave itself into fantastic suggestions
of shape which each spectator later described
differently.”
“that alien and undimensioned rainbow of
cryptic poison from the well—seething, feeling,
lapping, reaching, scintillating, straining,
and malignly bubbling in its cosmic and unrecognizable
chromaticism”
in one feverish, kaleidoscopic instant there
burst up from that doomed and accursed farm
a gleamingly eruptive cataclysm of unnatural
sparks and substance; blurring the glance
of the few who saw it, and sending forth to
the zenith a bombarding cloudburst of such
coloured and fantastic fragments as our universe
must needs disown.
Many stories about alien encounters seem oddly
overconfident to me.
The aliens come as our peers.
Or as a challenging but, deferrable opponent.
Why is it assumed that alien life would behave
like we do, containing features fundamental
to humanity, like desire?
It’s likely because the stories about recognizable
forms are the easiest stories to tell, the
ones that fit into a conventional story structure
and re-assure audiences in humanity’s self-confidence
that it can overcome whatever the universe
can throw at us.
Perhaps alien life could be primarily plant
based, or a biology shifting consciousness.
Perhaps alien life could come in the form
of a space, an area in which biology and physics
bend.
In our primarily materialistic culture, these
ideas may often be rejected outright.
We emphasize that which can be measured by
science, and often reject even the idea of
that which cannot.
But I think storytelling is a powerful way
to explore the boundaries of what we imagine
possible, and to explore how we would respond
as individuals when faced with something we
could not explain.
It’s challenging to portray on screen the
indescribable.
But film is a powerful medium, and I think
Annihilation gives it a valiant effort.
To help it portray the unknowable, Annihilation
draws inspiration from psychedelic artwork,
and hallucinogenic drugs.
These experiences are often talked about by
the people who’ve had them indescribable,
so taking a page from how users of these drugs
attempt to portray those experiences makes
sense.
Psychedelic imagery is used throughout the
film.
The heightened sense of beauty, and the potentially
deep expanse of hellish darkness found in
a bad trip that users report on psychedelics
are reflected in the environment.
Rick Strassman, in his book, DMT, The Spirit
Molecule, describes the experiences of volunteers
administered DMT during a study.
“Subjects saw all sorts of imaginable and
unimaginable things.
The least complex were kaleidoscopic geometric
patterns, which sometimes partook of "Mayan,"
"Islamic," or "Aztec" qualities.
For example, "beautiful, colorful pink cobwebs;
an elongation of light," "tremendously intricate
tiny geometric colors, like being one inch
from a color television."
The colors of this imagery were brighter,
more intense, and deeper than those of normal
awareness or dreams: "It was like the blue
of a desert sky, but on another planet.
The colors were a hundred times deeper."
Background and foreground distinctions might
merge so that countless images would occupy
a volunteer's visual field.
It was impossible to tell what was "in front"
and what was "behind."
Many used the term "four- dimensional" or
"beyond dimensionality" to describe this effect.”
The feeling of losing a sense of existing,
described as “ego death” that is sometimes
induced by psychedelic drugs, relates to understanding
our own tendencies for self-destruction, one
of the themes discussed explicitly in the
film.
The elements of experience which are unique,
aberrant, other=than-average, remain outside
the pale of common language.
But it is precisely these elements of man’s
more private experiences that the literary
artist aspires to communicate.
For Aldous Huxley, a science fiction author
who was well versed in the psychedelic, literature
was the tool that was necessary to portray
those subjective, inexplicable experiences
that science could not attend to.
I think film can play a similar role.
In a way the ending is a Deus Ex Machina.
The term refers to the old tradition in greek
stage productions of ending a play by having
a God appear to get the characters out of
an impossible situation.
In Annihilation, a god appears.
The characters are traveling towards the center
of Area X and towards the end of the story,
hoping to find it’s cause, hoping to find
the explanation.
As the audience, so are we.
What do we find when we get there?
What explains everything?
Something we cannot understand.
The explanation is a non-explanation.
This is why I think the movie polarizes.
The lighthouse sequence, 12 minutes long with
no dialogue, has to produce that feeling of
awe and dread at the sight of the incomprehensible
in the viewer.
The viewer will have to “feel” that this
is the explanation of everything that is happening,
and that it is fundamentally not understandable.
If they don’t feel that as part of the ending,
it’s likely the movie will fall flat.
The washed out colors, and acoustic music,
give way to vibrant over saturation and overpowering,
droning synths.
The combination of visual effects and intense
soundtrack and sound design make a good effort
at inducing the proper feeling.
But movies are subjectively experienced, and
for some, it won’t do the trick.
The final shots can be read in two ways.
You can see it as shoving the story back in
line with a more conventional narrative.
The alien god has been defeated, and humanity
as learned how to overcome it’s own self-destructive
nature.
Or, as I see it, the alien-god, unable to
be truly harmed to defeated by humanity.
Produces and it’s own Adam and Eve.
The final stage in this new life form’s
gestation, hiding now in plain sight, but
containing something totally inhuman.
Annihilation is steeped in ambiguity.
Not everyone enjoys films that do more to
provoke and prod then they do to answer questions
or wrap things up.
But sometimes in life we face the wholly inexplicable.
Going into the unknown and coming out alive
can be a terrifying and beautiful experiences.
It’s these images of heaven and hell that
are representative of the extremes we are
able to experience in our lives.
And sometimes we have to be comfortable with
our lack of understanding.
We may have to learn to live with our inability
to explain what we experience.
