Annihilation (2018): Animating the (non)human of the Anthropocene

Fig. 1 - Annihilation (Alex Garland, 2018).

Annihilation (Alex Garland, 2018), a science fiction film set in the present day, stands out as a compelling example of fantasy/animation through its representation of chimerical monstrous creatures. The film contains uncanny imaginings of alligator-shark hybrids, skull-faced bears that growl with human voices and flower patches spectrally arranged in the shape of the human body (Fig. 1). This article is interested in the environmental meanings inherent within Annihilation’s cross-species monsters, and will discuss what they can tell us about human/nonhuman relations in the 21st century. In particular, I argue that Annihilation’s use of digital imagery and CGI creatures to distort the human/nonhuman paradigm holds clear resonance with the ecological imperatives of the Anthropocene; a geological epoch marked by catastrophic human influence on the planet we call home. Rising global temperatures, unprecedented biodiversity decline and increasingly acidified oceans are amongst the global environmental crises that underpin this era of the Anthropocene. A recent WWF report unearthed that between 1970 and 2014, wildlife around the world had decreased by over 60% (2018). This staggering figure comes as a direct result of the various anthropocentrically induced eco-crises of the Anthropocene. While this era is etymologically ‘of the human’ it is in fact a time where humanity must reconsider its impact on, and relationship with, the nonhuman world. Annihilation, through its depiction of corporeally enmeshed monsters, visually narrates what happens when organic life is placed under extreme environmental pressures. In doing so Annihilation can be understood as an example of what Selmin Kara calls “Anthropocenema”, which is a term used to describe films relating to the environmental concerns of the Anthropocene.

In her article, entitled “Anthropocenema: Cinema in the Age of Mass Extinctions,” Kara argues that through the uses of new digital technologies, such as Computer Generated Imagery, films of this era “increasingly stretch the boundaries of cinematic time and space across deep pasts, vast futures, and previously unmappable topographies in order to project visions of humanity under constant threat by factors of its own making” (2016: 19). In an analysis of Tree of Life (Terrence Malick, 2011) and Beasts of the Southern Wild (Benh Zeitlin, 2012), Kara argues that ‘the two films establish a parallelism between extinct prehistoric creatures and mournful human characters’ (2016: 15). In doing so these films open up rumination on the deep-time history of human/nonhuman relations. Kara’s writing chimes with that of David Martin-Jones, who argues that CGI is used in Trollhunter (André Øvredal, 2010) and The Hunter (Daniel Nettheim, 2011) to “render visible humanity's excluded ecological other” (2016: 92). Kara and Martin-Jones’ writing effectively demonstrates that digital technologies allow for ways of rendering and resuscitating mythical and extinct beings. This helps us see how cinema responds to the dwarfing temporal scales of geological change, as well as how its use of digital imagery might help frame ethical consideration of nonhuman Earth-others’ entanglement with the Anthropocene debate.

However, each of the films explored in Kara and Martin-Jones’ work situate their nonhumans as discrete and separate entities from the humans that variously hunt or mourn alongside them. New branches of posthuman thought seek to take a view of life as a more immersive petri dish, with different bodies bundled up in interdependent knots with one another. Annihilation is a useful film in this regard, as it frequently using digital animation to blur the boundary between the human and the nonhuman. Where The Tree of Life, Trollhunter, Beasts of the Southern Wild and The Hunter use CGI to highlight the various exclusions of the ecological other from the processes of modernity, Annihilation instead uses such technology to show the human inseparably bound up with such ecological others.

Fig. 2 - Lena (Natalie Portman) studies the environment.

Set in the present day, Garland’s film details the exploration of a strange and alien realm that’s spreading across a patch of land in America. Referred to as ‘The Shimmer’, lead protagonist Lena (Natalie Portman) and a band of all-female scientists journey through this mysterious landscape, hoping to study the environment and discover what happened to the missing soldiers who disappeared there (Fig. 2). All of these scientists get rather more than they bargained for in their passage through this alien territory. The Shimmer morphs and mutates the genetic code sequencing of species specificity, producing dangerous chimeric creatures that are a constant threat to their survival. More than this, The Shimmer also quietly exerts this transformative pressure on the scientists’ bodies as they make their increasingly hesitant journey through it.

This blurring of species specificity finds grotesque form in a scene where videotape footage reveals one of the missing soldiers, Kane (Oscar Isaac), cutting open the belly of a comrade. In a sort of Videodrome-esque (David Cronenberg, 1983) window into this man’s guts we are greeted to a tentacular vision of faceless eel-like organisms wriggling around impossibly in the man’s torso. There is no sign of internal organs, only the constant squelching and writhing of these mysterious worms. The horror of this image only escalates when Kane places his hand around one of these fleshy tubes in his friend’s stomach. Apparently unphased by Kane’s intervention, it carries on with its wriggly diabolic business as Kane gazes back into the camera in shock and awe. A subsequent scene sees one of the scientists, Josie (Tessa Thompson), transform into a patch of flowers, which uncannily adhere to the shape of the human body. Indeed, not all of the cross-body creatures of The Shimmer (and achieved via computer graphics) are monstrous; translucent fish, ethereal deer and prismatic moss also adorn this strange zone.

These visions of organic bodies bound up, with and by one another seems of pertinence to the pressures and demands of the Anthropocene. As Donna Haraway reminds us, “human genomes can be found in only about 10 percent of all the cells that occupy the mundane space I call my body; the other 90 percent of the cells are filled with the genomes of bacteria, fungi, protists, and such, some of which play in a symphony necessary to my being alive at all, and some of which are hitching a ride and doing the rest of me, of us, no harm” (2007: 3/4). Annihilation’s CGI chimeras thrive on this sort of perspective on the body; framing the human figure as caught up in a swell of nonhuman life (Fig. 3). A scene with a bear that screams with the voice of a human is a haunting example of the horrors of this hybridity, while a quiet moment of contemplative gazing between Lena and a florally-antlered deer hints at the wonders it may contain. This view of the monstrous and the beautiful sides of such entanglement is attentive to the wonders and horrors that such immersed and enmeshed interdependency can have to ecological equilibrium.

Fig. 3 - Annihilation.

The monsters of The Shimmer in Annihilation are created by way of alien environmental pressures. Similarly, the chimeric entanglements of the human and the nonhuman in the Anthropocene are arrived at by way of unfamiliar environmental traumas. Stacy Alaimo’s notion of “transcorporeality” is an instructive window into this sort of cross-body thinking. Alaimo suggests a view of an “Anthropocene subject as immersed and enmeshed in the world” (2017: 103). In her book Bodily Natures she argues that “thinking across bodies may catalyse the recognition that the environment, which is too often imagined as inert, empty space or as a resource for human use, is, in fact, a world of fleshy beings with their own needs, claims, and actions” (2010: 2). Annihilation stands out as a compelling audio-visual extrapolation of this, repeatedly emphasising an uncanny ecological context to the corporeal morphing that occurs in The Shimmer. In doing so it foregrounds its pertinence to our own extreme environmental conditions, and the transformative pressures they exert on our own bodies.

The film’s ecomonstrous encounters confront who and what we are by paying attention to cross-species animals and bizarrely agential environments. Such a reconfiguration is of the utmost importance in a time of rapid environmental change, where the ties that bind the human and the nonhuman are transformed in manners mimetic of those in The Shimmer. Through the blurring of human/nonhuman boundaries Annihilation can be aligned with Kara’s category of Anthropocenema, whilst also expanding the scope of the term. CGI again seems to be one of the key contributors here to cinema’s capacity for imaging, and imagining, human/nonhuman paradigms in this Anthropocene era. However, Annihilation’s transcorporeal visions extend our understanding of cinema in the age of the Anthropocene, where stories need to be more attentive to thinking across bodies. Through the use of CGI, the film animates and gives experiential consideration to the (non)human entanglements that ground the reality of coexisting on a damaged planet.

**Article published: January 17, 2020**

References

Alaimo, Stacy. 2010. Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self. Bloomington, Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.

Alaimo, Stacy. 2017. “Your Shell on Acid: Material Immersion, Anthropocene Dissolves,” in Anthropocene Feminism, ed. Richard Grusin, 89-121. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Selmin, Kara. 2016. “Anthropocenema: Cinema in the Age of Mass Extinctions.” In Post-Cinema: Theorizing 21st Century Film, eds. Julia Leyda and Shane Denson, 750-785. Sussex: Reframe.

Martin-Jones, David. 2016. “Trolls, Tigers, and Transmodern Encounters: Enrique Dussel and a Cine-Ethics for the Anthropocene.” Film-Philosophy 20, no. 1: 63-103.

Haraway, Donna J. 2007. When Species Meet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Biography
Toby Neilson is an AHRC-funded PhD candidate at the University of Glasgow. His thesis, entitled “Imagining the Anthropocene: Science Fiction Cinema in an era of Climatic Change”, investigates 21st century sf films from an eco-critical perspective. His first peer-reviewed article “Different Death Stars and Devastated Earths: Contemporary sf cinema’s imagination of disaster in the Anthropocene” was published by the Science Fiction Film and Television Studies journal in 2019. Neilson lectures on ecocinema and film history at his home institution, and runs the website Anthropocene Cinema in his spare time.