Hell And Its Prophets
Annihilation (2018)
“Do not fear those who kill the body but are unable to kill the soul; but rather fear Him who is able to destroy both soul and body in hell” — Matthew 10:28
Spoilers for Annihilation (2018, dir. Alex Garland)
There is always an element of the religious in any good science fiction story. Both religion and sci-fi are concerned with the big questions that are probably unanswerable for good enough reason and what happens in pursuit of answers.
Annihilation is about the abject horror of learning these answers. I think its fair to interpret the movie as having a lot to say about climate change or as a metaphor for humanity changing the world, but what seems most interesting to me is about how it interacts with the “divine” so to speak.
To me, Annihilation is about encountering God or, more correctly the absence of God, and how truly and completely terrifying an experience that would be.
I grew up Catholic and I’m pretty familiar with the traditions and dogmas, but I’ve since fallen out of it for a number of reasons. But I still believe in God to some extent and I think I am able to pick up when religion is present in a story.
In Annihilation, there is an unmistakeable influence of stories from the Bible and religious mythology present. Some of them even read like warped parodies of Bible stories — making my mind think back to the Binding of Isaac or the verses referring to Gehenna.
Gehenna is a real place close to Jerusalem, but is also frequently referred to as cursed and a place for the wicked. In many modern translations, Gehenna is usually translated to “hell.” I think a lot about the idea of hell in the Bible because it’s so ill-defined. In scripture, total separation from God is probably the only consistent aspect of hell along with various verses that refer to fire or the “gnashing of teeth.”
But what would such a separation look like? I’d argue it would look something like The Shimmer.
…
The plot of Annihilation kicks off with biology professor Lena (Natalie Portman) unexpectedly encountering her husband Kane (Oscar Isaac) who returns home after apparently disappearing on a classified government mission. Kane quickly lapses into a coma and soon Lena and her husband are taken into government captivity –– where she then decides to enter the Shimmer to find answers for her husband’s condition.
The structure of the film jumps back and forth through time, with Lena getting debriefed after her mission, getting to know her squad-mates (Jennifer Jason Leigh, Gina Rodriguez, Tessa Thompson, Tuva Novothy) and finally journeying into the Shimmer.
Once Lena’s team enters the Shimmer, objective reality quickly falls to pieces –– none of the squad remembering how they managed to travel so deep into the area and spend three days there despite only just entering the Shimmer to their recollection.
They encounter strange animals mutated by the area and disturbing plant growths that are either plants trying to look like people or people that have turned into plants. They even encounter the horrifying evidence of what happened to Kane’s team: a grisly video showing Kane cutting open a squad-members stomach to reveal his intestines have been replaced by eels. (this scene in particular was what made me think of the Binding: committing violence to learn truth).
The group starts to lose their cohesion/sanity and eventually dies one by one: with Novothy and Rodriguez’s characters killed by a mutated bear and Thompson’s character apparently vanishing among a field of the plant people.
Leigh’s character Dr. Ventress and Lena are separated until they reunite in a sense at the Lighthouse: the center of the supposed infection that created the Shimmer.
Though at that point it is questionable if Ventress is even human any more, as she appears to have been hollowed out by whatever alien presence created the strange landscape of the Shimmer and later destroys Ventress’ body.
Lena herself manages to escape the presence, which briefly takes her form in a struggle, and manages to burn down the Lighthouse –– which apparently destroys the Shimmer according to the debriefing scientists. She reunites with Kane, who says he thinks he’s not really her husband anymore after his encounter in the Shimmer.
Lena is unsure as well, as we see some color out of space swirling in both Lena and Kane’s eyes as the movie ends.
The question that lingers is if Lena and Kane are still actually human or if they’ve been subsumed by the presence that created the Shimmer. I sort of take a mathematician’s stance on this: the answer is yes.
…
My best approximation for what Lena has become is a prophet of sorts, alongside Kane, to spread the word about the hell that is the Shimmer. Both of them fulfill their role of evangelizing and drawing someone else to understand what the Shimmer is: a message to humanity, that Lena relates to her study of cancer in her original field of work (The cancer motif is omnipresent throughout the film).
She ultimately concludes the Shimmer is just showing humanity refracted onto itself an infinite number of times, inevitably self-destructing like humanity may be fated to do to itself over a longer course of time (this is where the climate change metaphor is very clear in most close readings, constantly changing the world until it is no longer viable for life).
But Lena (and Kane) essentially had to go through the hell that is the Shimmer to learn this horrible truth and try to spread it. They’re still themselves but they’re not ‘right,’ if that makes sense.
Lena now bears tattoos that were seen on a squad-mate and has gaps in her memories. This is often interpreted as her lying to the debrief but I believe her mind was taken apart with a bunch of different jigsaw puzzle pieces from her squad put back in its place. The only thing Lena seems acutely aware of remembering are her own personal failings in her marriage with Kane.
Likewise a video of Kane in the Shimmer shows him with a thick Southern drawl, which isn’t present in his interactions with Lena outside the area. Though that might just be the function of being annihilated and put back together by the Shimmer with various bits and pieces of the dead like Lena was — just not as efficiently. The rest of the bits were left to become part of the scenery.
Both Lena and Kane were broken down and are now not only separate from humanity, but also their own sense of what is real.
Much like the feeling hell is supposed to engender, in my opinion.
…
I don’t really know what hell is and I don’t like to entertain the thought of it, but I think it’s real and I don’t know if its something I’d be able to comprehend much like how I don’t think I’m actually able to comprehend a “divine.”
Hell, or Gehenna, would be a lot like the Shimmer then: life refracted on itself to the point of nonsense your brain couldn’t really wrap your head around.
Everyday horrors like bears turned into actual horrors of existence, like a bear seeming to absorb the pain and terror of its victims in their last moments of life.
Your churning stomach turning into something actually churning in your stomach.
The unknowable other of other people parodied to its extreme in them being un-communicating tree people that merely seem to be imitating life. Or are you imitating them, you may wonder as time goes on.
Your memories failing you except for the memories of failure being as clear as day.
And when it ends –– it doesn’t really end.
It goes on and on and on forever, like a bad dream you always feel like is on the verge of ending –– the moment when you realize something is not quite right with the reality you are present in. Even leaving the place of abject nonsensical horror leaves one wondering if the seemingly sane world will just give way to the nonsense again without warning one day.
Not many people would be able to survive an experience like this, and in the film many of them don’t — all of Lena and Kane’s squad-mates are absorbed by the horrors of the Shimmer and become a part of the landscape itself and its nightmares in recursion. Only Lena manages to break out of the cycle and escape with some semblance of sanity; Kane seems to be alive but lost in his own body which he says may not be his own.
Someone like Lena who goes through an experience like this would have things to tell the people that didn’t, some sort of bitter truth. And she does to the best of her ability.
But what then? Annihilation doesn’t say and I don’t have any answers either. If the Shimmer is truly hell and hell is just life folded in on itself to the point of Lovecraftian horror –– it doesn’t inspire much confidence in life itself.
