Annihilation, subtext, and pandemic
When Boris Johnson announced a nation-wide lockdown on the 23rd March 2020, I wasn’t surprised. Honestly, I just felt resigned and tired. Quarantine was, in my mind, an inevitability and a necessary one, but something that felt like it was happening around me, not to me. I am lucky enough to be able to work from home without any real issue, I enjoy spending time at home — the majority of my hobbies are things that only involve one person. Life, I thought, would be weird and strange for a while, but ultimately, I would remain relatively unchanged and unscathed. (And yeah, that assumption is a clear indication of my privilege.)
I turned out to be very wrong.
One of the first things I did was watch, Contagion, a 2011 film by Steven Soderbergh. It’s a film about how viruses can spread quickly and aggressively through populations and the biological and social impacts of such a spread. It was also a film I’d never seen before and I watched it out of some sense of morbid curiosity.
Consuming media that reflects the worst-case scenarios isn’t uncommon. We do it all the time — whether that be a compulsive checking of the rising daily death toll; searching out information about how governments approached the oncoming pandemic with a grotesque lassitude and general incompetence; or watching films and television programs specifically about how shit the state of affairs is.
I re-watched, Contagion, a few days ago and unlike the first time which was a strangely cathartic process, I was left feeling nothing. Just a general sense of numbness that’s become very familiar. Desensitisation to Bad Things is a well-documented phenomenon, that’s why news channels and adverts about starving children resort to more and more shocking visuals; it’s why people blame video games for real-life violence. But what we’re feeling right now isn’t just a numbness to the terrifying state of being right now, it’s also a societal sense of anxiety and fear and anger. Fear that everything we knew about the way things work isn’t true anymore, anxiety that nothing is going to be the same, anger about that very possibility.
Yesterday, I watched, Annihilation, a 2018 science-fiction film by director Alex Garland, starring Natalie Portman as Lena, and based on the novel of the same name by Jeff VanderMeer, for maybe the fifth time. Then, I hit replay the second it finished. I watched it again this morning.
Unlike Contagion, Annihilation, is not about a virus. It’s not about a pandemic. It could have been, I suppose, if Garland was the kind of director who wasn’t so preoccupied with metaphor and subtext, but he isn’t, so it’s not.
Annihilation follows Lena, a former soldier turned biologist working at Johns Hopkins University, as she and four other female scientists venture into the Shimmer, an unknown quantity that is slowly but steadily eating up the landscape of an undisclosed coastal location known only as Area X. Lena’s husband, Kane, played by Oscar Isaac, had been part of a previous exploratory group and the only survivor of anyone who had ventured inside the Shimmer’s parameters.
There was a lot of speculation when this film first came out about what the Shimmer was. Was it an alien lifeform hellbent on mutating and changing the world to fits its requirements? Did the ending of the film mean that the Shimmer continued in Lena and Kane, and if so, would the cycle repeat again? Those theories may be true, but they’re not what we should focus on. Annihilation is a film based so thoroughly in metaphor and subtext that reading the events of the film literally renders it meaningless.
It’s a film about loss, about grief, about how events in our lives (whether we are active agents in such events or not) change us and change how we relate to others and the world around us.
It’s a film about self-destruction.
Lena asks Ventress, the group leader, psychologist, and a woman dying of cancer why she sent Kane out on a suicide mission. Ventress tells Lena not to confuse suicide with self-destruction. ‘Isn’t self-destruction coded into us? Programmed into each cell?’ Is the response. On a biological level, you can easily draw similarities between Ventress’ statement and the current scientific theory that the people who are dying from Covid-19 are overwhelmingly dying from a cytokine storm, an overreaction of the body’s own immune system. The very defences that our bodies use to try and protect us, to keep us alive end up being the thing that kills us.
I can’t help but draw parallels that go beyond biology. On April 24th 2020, roughly 1500 people gathered in Madison, Wisconsin to protest the stay-at-home orders. Now, reports show that 72 ‘people who tested positive for COVID-19 in Wisconsin are reported to have recently attended a “large gathering”’. In the UK, the Boris Johnson announced a partial lift on the nation-wide lockdown measure (Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland notably rejected this reversal). Scientists have warned that by easing quarantine, the government is endangering the lives of essential workers and the poor and working class.
It’s awful to think that the government is actively sacrificing the lives of its citizens most in need of protection. I don’t necessarily think that anyone in the government actively wants these people dead. So why is the government wilfully engaging in mass self-destruction? We clap every Thursday for the NHS, the supermarket employees, the men and women who have been essential to the economy and the running of society, and still… And still, we are changing society and are thus being changed in ways that cannot be reversed. There’s no going back from this. There’s no pretending that it didn’t happen once the worst is over.
I think the reason I’ve been so drawn to Annihilation is that it asks us what happens and how do we carry on when our lives become unrecognisable? What happens when we are changed in equal proportion to the changes in the world we live in? I thought I would be relatively unchanged by the pandemic, but what I’m realising is that I will be fundamentally changed by this experience but so too will everyone else and society itself in equal measure.
