VOICEOVER 1: So it doesn't even matter if she's the original.
In fact, this organism is a genius
because now it has an alibi from a survivor
who has let the government know and think that it's dead
when, in reality, it not only lives inside of Lena
but her husband.
VO 2: The film's primary question is: What is the Shimmer?
In the film's haunting finale, the two embrace as both of their irises fluctuate and change color,
signaling the continuing mutation and evolution caused by the Shimmer.
It now resides in Lena and Kane, who will live on to change the world even further.
VO 3: However, since Kane is a duplicate from the Shimmer,
the Shimmer still remains in him.
The glowing in their eyes is to show us that the cells' mutation process is starting over again
as it is once again affecting Lena.
VO 4: They're bound to have a kid eventually, who will be even more Shimmer-like
and continue on to evolve in this world
as it spreads its Shimmer-ness everywhere.
DAN: AAAAHHHH
[♪♪]
"Annihilation" is a 2018 film written and directed by Alex Garland,
based on the 2014 novel of the same name by Jeff VanderMeer.
It tells the story of Lena, a woman whose relationship
with her husband, Kane, has been brought to the brink of collapse
by dissatisfaction, infidelity, absence, and trauma,
and how she confronts questions of self in the face of
difficulty, depression, and the passage of time.
It is a movie about pain and identity.
The plot of the film revolves around an alien presence referred to as "the Shimmer,"
a mysterious field slowly absorbing swampland in the Florida Panhandle,
that serves as the stage for a journey into the self
when a team of scientists, including Lena,
ventures into the Shimmer with the goal of finding its source.
The question at the heart of "Annihilation" is:
How do we confront and deal with life-changing events,
particularly tragedy and trauma?
Are we all fated to seek self-destruction by the coding in our very cells,
to impulsively pursue our own annihilation?
Or, is it possible to come back from the brink of self-eradication?
VO 5: I'm a simpleton over here and I just want to talk about the aliens.
DAN: So I-I'm going to --
So, I'm going to maybe end up saying some unkind things,
and I just want you to know that this really just comes
from the primal place deep inside me, the core of my being.
I have nothing against any of the individuals whose work I've shown,
but the specific expressions mentioned just...hurt me.
Also I - I should speak first to the fans of these videos.
Hi, fans! Welcome.
I don't have anything against the people who watch these kinds of videos
because I get it.
You come out of a movie that impacted you -
whether it made you angry or ecstatic, it's a movie that has energized you.
It has activated your ideas and your emotions and you want more of it.
Maybe you need more to share in your rage and achieve symbolic closure,
or you need more because it has ignited a spark
and you want to keep that spark alive.
Either way, you get home
and you rush to YouTube to see what everyone else has to say about it,
to share in the desired energy.
I get it. I really do, because I do this too.
I come out of a movie that really engages me
and immediately I want to see what everyone else has to say about it.
I watch the videos my peers may have done,
I read professional reviews,
I talk about it on Twitter to get people to engage,
hell, I pull up a plot summary just to keep the events fresh.
I get it.
But these videos are bad.
VO 6: But then there's a lot of other people online who are loving this movie
and when you ask them what it's about
they just go, "Oh. I dunno."
DAN: The reason I dislike these so much
is that they are often a form of anti-intellectualism
operating on the attitude that ignorance is purity,
that an understanding of culture that rejects metaphor,
that rejects the symbolic and clings to the literal is more true.
It is part of the process of denying art the capacity for meaning.
Now, that's not to say that all of these reject metaphor in its entirety.
It is rare to find someone who will entirely reject the idea of approaching film
broadly from a thematic or metaphorical point of view,
but all too common to find people who will
lightly sneer at the actual attempts to do so
and suggest that it's overthinking things.
And by "suggest," I mean they will say it in exactly those words.
This is a consistent feature within modern film criticism
which, taken on the whole, is in a distinct phase
where the loudest voices in film discussion
are incurious, proudly ignorant, and approach plot
as a problem to be unpacked and solved.
VO 7: Reading. [ding]
DAN: So why do these videos about this specific movie bother me so much?
Well, it has to do with the movie itself.
If you want to talk about theme, metaphor, and meaning,
"Annihilation" is a great starting point.
Seriously, this movie would be a fantastic film to base an entry level unit around,
not because it is simple or simplistic,
but because it is dense and wears most of its themes on its sleeve.
It is, in a word, blunt.
Between the soundtrack and dialogue,
the film straight-up tells you what it is about on multiple occasions.
LENA: Okay. MUSIC: ♪ Oh, they are one person,
♪ they are two alone,
♪ they are three together. ♪
CASSIE: In a way, it's two bereavements.
My beautiful girl,
and the person I once was.
VENTRESS [offscreen]: If I don't reach the lighthouse soon,
the person that started this journey won't be the person that ends it.
I want to be the one that ends it.
LENA: You aren't Kane, are you?
KANE: I don't think so.
Are you Lena?
DAN: The movie goes to great lengths to tell the viewer
that it is not a story about literal events,
and trying to decode the plot like a goddamn puzzle box
isn't just missing the point,
It is willfully ignoring the story as it is told to you.
This isn't always the case but here, for this movie, metaphorical is textual.
But, you know, in order to fill out a video with what amounts to
little more than a linear retelling of the plot,
requires the video creators to ignore a substantial portion of the text
in order to get to the ending, where they can hypothesize on the fate of the alien
and miss literally the entire point of the movie.
VO 1: When in reality, it not only lives inside of Lena,
but her husband.
VO 2: It now resides in Lena and Kane, who will live on to change the world even further.
VO 3: However, since Kane is a duplicate from the Shimmer, the Shimmer still remains in him.
VO 4: They're bound to have a kid eventually who will be even more Shimmer-like.
DAN: Oh, my god!
If you were discussing the ending of the movie without discussing these scenes
and how they inform the meaning of the final shots,
you aren't actually discussing the ending of the movie.
You're writing fanfiction.
This is how you get "Jarhead" sequels
Do you want "Jarhead" sequels? Cause this is how you get "Jarhead" sequels.
VO 8: He trains for 70 consecutive days.
He gets to know every inch of his M16A4 rifle.
Then, he earns the right to be called a jarhead.
SPEAKER 1: Love being a Marine! Oorah!
DAN: At their elemental level, the themes and ideas
that "Annihilation" grapples with aren't exactly new.
Now, I'm not a huge fan of "The Hero with a Thousand Faces."
I think it tries too hard to flatten culture
and make an interesting observation about narrative patterns into a universal truth,
but it is fair to say that "Annihilation" is a journey in a very classical sense,
and borrows from the broadest strokes.
There is a call to adventure, a wizened sage,
a fellowship, and the crossing of a very literal threshold.
And indeed, change is central to Campbell's monomyth;
the hero returns home triumphant but in some way no longer belongs
because they have changed, home has changed, or both,
and the new is incompatible with the old.
Heroes return not as pig farmers, but as kings.
Luke can't go back to the farm because the farm has been destroyed,
and he's being swept up in a rebellion.
The Vault Dweller can't return to the vault because their time in the Wasteland
has filled them with too many radical ideas.
Frodo must go into the West because he no longer belongs in Middle-earth.
You've got a lot of loss of innocence, a lot of war,
and a lot of loss of innocence in war.
So, yeah, the idea that the very act of going on a journey changes you isn't new.
"Annihilation," however, rejects the prelapsarian ideal.
Lena doesn't start the movie innocent.
There isn't a state of grace to fall from, and she doesn't return home as
Campbell's Warrior, Lover, Emperor, Redeemer, or Saint.
Indeed, "Annihilation" asks a far more challenging question:
What if you return home and you're different, but you're still just you?
At the end of her tribulations, Lena has been changed,
has been altered, but is still Lena.
Indeed, counter to Campbell's Hero,
it is the very fact that home has changed in equal portion to herself
that enables Lena to return in the first place.
Before we go on, this is a good moment
to talk about the point of ambiguous endings
and narrative ambiguity in general.
The purpose of ambiguity is to frustrate the audience,
to deny a clean sense of diegetic closure
and thusly force engagement with the metaphorical.
Most ambiguous endings make perfect sense if you read them thematically,
and nine times out of ten, the diegetic answer is obvious
once you approach the ending from this direction.
If you approach the final shots of "Annihilation" thematically,
the meaning of this moment is very obvious.
But if you resist a thematic reading,
then you're going to get caught up in weird nonsense circles
asking if the Shimmer is an alien terraforming device, as though the next movie,
"Annihilation 2," is going to be a bunch of rainbow aliens coming down in spaceships,
getting into gunfights with Aaron Eckhart.
Okay, let's be honest, Gerard Butler.
On this journey, the fate of the five women reflects a variety of possible outcomes
in the face of catastrophe and pain, each an extension of their trauma.
Cassie is the victim of fate, killed through no fault of her own
when a bear drags her off into the night
and she is unwillingly consumed into the catastrophe.
This is an echo of Cassie's own words from earlier.
The person she used to be was destroyed by the loss of her daughter to leukemia,
itself an event that she could neither prevent nor escape.
At the end of the day, we are all a roll of the dice away from disaster.
Anya the addict is likewise consumed,
but where Cassie was the unfortunate victim of bad luck,
Anya provokes her fate, allowing her rage and paranoia to overcome her
before fully self-destructing at the hands of an outside force.
Josie, in contrast, gives in peacefully,
embracing her own oblivion and simply vanishing into the plant life,
content with never knowing the things she doesn't know.
She observes that Ventress wants to face the Shimmer and Lena wants to fight it,
but she wants neither of those things.
She is willing to trade closure for harmony.
In her final moments, she discards her long-sleeve shirt for a tank top,
wearing her scars honestly, at peace with revealing her secret self to Lena
as she first absorbs greenery into herself
before being absorbed seamlessly into the greenery.
Josie isn't just metaphorically in harmony with the Shimmer,
which is to say her damage.
She becomes one with the Shimmer.
Ventress is dying of cancer, a woman at war with her own body
and at war with the changes that confronting mortality impose on who she is.
When Lena catches up to her at the lighthouse at the epicenter,
the Shimmer, like the cancer, is already inside her
and here in the holy of holies,
at last Ventress and Lena confront the thing only to discover that pain
is ultimately an unknowable, indescribable thing, a consuming force
that refracts everything it touches
and turns us into dark reflections of ourselves where,
left unchecked, it becomes the singular thing, consuming everything
until even the component parts are no longer recognizable.
VENTRESS: Our bodies and our minds will be fragmented into their smallest parts, until
not one part remains.
DAN: Ventress is destroyed from within by her own cells betraying and consuming her.
Finally, in Lena's confrontation with the being,
she first tries to run
but is unable to escape and is nearly suffocated.
It is not until she accepts that the being, that the pain and trauma is a part of her, a reflection of her,
that she is able to confront it directly and destroy it,
allowing her to escape and reunite with Kane.
The horror of "Annihilation" is existential
and rooted firmly in the ordinary.
It is film confronting the gradual ways that we are changed
by the things and people around us,
the ways that we slowly drift from one state into another,
the terror of waking up one day to realize that we've become someone else -
someone we don't recognize.
It is about life-changing events,
both the big and dramatic and the slower, subtler kind:
the pain of losing a child
and also the relationship that gradually slides into alienation.
References to cancer are particularly important in the film.
Lena teaches pre-med students about the biology of cancer.
Cassie's daughter died of leukemia,
and Ventress has some unspecified but terminal cancer.
The opening monologue ruminates on the idea of cancer as immortal,
cells that have had their self-destruct code turned off.
Healthy, productive cells die, while toxic, deadly cells live forever,
consuming, devouring, absorbing and corrupting.
This extends into the metaphor as an irony.
Why is it that everything we live for dies
while our pain gets to be immortal?
The Shimmer itself is a stand-in
for trauma, depression, terminal disease, addiction, alienation, grief,
and every other moment in our lives that leaves us unmoored from ourselves.
This absorption is realized literally,
with characters physically absorbing elements of each other as the film progresses.
No better is this encapsulated than in the ouroboros tattoo,
Anya has a tattoo of an ouroboros on her left forearm,
a detail that's present from the beginning of the film
but difficult to catch until later,
as the film gradually calls attention to it.
The key turning point comes when the expedition
reaches the former headquarters of the Southern Reach.
In one of the film's few overtly horrifying scenes,
the women come across a data card left behind by the previous expedition.
On the card is a video file showing the team flaying one of their own,
a solider with an ouroboros tattoo just like Anya's,
revealing his intestines writhing like a coil of snakes.
The final remains of this soldier are then found
encased in lichen and mold growing into the wall of the pool.
[♪♪]
Anya and the soldier are of the same.
That is the meaning, or at least a meaning, of the shared tattoo.
In the soldier, she sees herself.
She realizes this fear, references it explicitly
when she later ties up the surviving members of the team.
ANYA: If I let you go and you tied me to a chair and cut me open,
are my insides gonna move like my fingerprint?
DAN: Her fear is that she has become like and as the soldier on the wall,
but really she already was.
Then, in Lena's darkest moment,
her absolute nadir following the deaths of Cassie and Anya,
Ventress' departure, and Josie's transformation,
when she is the most alone, the tattoo appears on her arm.
Lena has absorbed something of Anya, something that she will carry for the rest of her life.
This is a good place perhaps to postulate on whether the solider
already had the tattoo before entering the Shimmer, or if it is in some way a
manifestation of the Shimmer, and the answer is
that it doesn't matter.
Because no matter what the diegetic answer may be, the symbol has taken on meaning
through its association with each of the characters.
Where it came from is irrelevant next to what it indicates.
The impact individuals have on one another,
how we become impressed into each other and entwined,
the ways that we see ourselves, our fates, in complete strangers,
a cycle of exchange without beginning or end.
Life changes us in unpredictable ways.
We absorb our environments and the people around us
and as horrifying as that sounds it's -
SPEAKER 2 [offscreen]: Nightmarish?
LENA: Not always.
Sometimes it was beautiful.
And this is the note that "Annihilation" chooses to go out on,
recognizing that there is an existential horror to the nature of intimate relationships,
that opening ourselves to others, allowing them in,
brings with it an annihilation of our singular self.
We merge, we reshape, we combine and replicate and mirror,
and on a level that is terrifying.
To be with someone is to sacrifice something of who you are.
But it's also beautiful.
In the final moments,
Lena and Kane confront the fact that they are no longer the people they used to be.
They have both changed dramatically, radically, since their relationship began.
Their slow drift apart, Lena's infidelity, Kane's absence and his nearly fatal illness
have compounded and altered both of them down to the core of their very being.
But even if they are no longer the Lena and Kane they used to be,
they are still a Lena and a Kane,
and their shared experience,
the way they have absorbed one another into their identities
has made them into the same.
They are still one person and two alone.
PUPPET: Yeah, but do the aliens fu--
[♪♪]