The Horror of Othered Nature: Climate Anxiety and “Annihilation”
Lola Chamberlain
My emotional reaction to the catastrophe of climate change is an intense and complex mix of dread and guilt. It seems that there is the looming possibility at all times that something disastrous will happen––storms, tornadoes, droughts, floods which climate change intensifies and increases in frequency. At the same time, as a citizen of the country perhaps the most responsible for these disasters and likely able to withstand them the most, my everyday actions become bearers of guilt––driving to the grocery store, throwing away those leftovers I never ate, surveying the bulging trash bag as I lug it out to the bin. There is a strange doubling effect at play here, I am both the potential victim and the cause, the environment no longer seems like some outside material world independent of me but rather becomes a malevolent copy of my self and my actions.
It is in these fertile psychic grounds that Jeff Vandermeer’s 2014 novel Annihilation takes root. The novel follows four women scientists known only as the biologist (who doubles as the narrator), the anthropologist, the surveyor, and the psychologist. This group volunteers to enter and study the mysterious Area X—a region of land currently uninhabited and wildly strange around which an inexplicable border appeared thirty years ago. Eleven previous expeditions had set out on the same mission, with widely varying outcomes–some went mad and died from suicide, some were killed by mysterious creatures within the Area, some returned as shells of themselves. The story is infused with a kind of creeping dread as the members of the expedition encounter increasingly inexplicable things–an immense yet unseen moaning creature wandering a marsh, a spiral staircase leading down into the earth covered in fungal text, a dolphin in a river with human eyes. While each of these encounters with external beings brings with it terrible fear, perhaps the most unsettling aspect of the novel is the blurring divide between the strangeness of Area X and the explorers themselves––they become absorbed and reimagined by the environment itself. However, by the end of the novel, the biologist has reached some precarious acceptance of her fate. The biologist realizes that she cannot destroy Area X, nor completely understand it, and must instead go on living in the world she has been given, a world of which she forms a vital part. This allows the novel to create an uneasy peace, and ultimately accept sthe interconnectedness of human beings and the environment. Importantly, the monsters encountered by the biologist are all originally human beings, “becoming fodder and becoming remade” (Vandermeer). At the same time, there is the presence of some different being, “one that works through supreme acts of mirroring and by remaining hidden in so many other ways, all without surrendering the foundations of its otherness as it becomes what it encounters” (Vandermeer). There is a sense of dialectic between humans and Area X: the being responsible for Area X “becomes what it encounters,” is affected by the human beings who seek to understand it, but in turn, humans are also transformed by it. There is no longera clear distinction, in the end, between the otherness and the humans. They have been combined into one entity which is not equivalent to either part. It is to this end that the Biologist decides “I can no longer say with conviction that this is a bad thing. Not while looking at the pristine nature of Area X and then the world beyond, which we have altered so much.” She decides to continue to live in Area X and accepts her transformation into something new and different. Instead of the usual happy end to a horror book or movie, where the hero emerges triumphantly and victorious, the biologist “loses.” Or rather, she realizes that there is no way to maintain the separation. We must accept that we will have to change, inevitably, in order to survive in a radically different world, just as the world is changed by us. If this seems horrifying, both in reading the book and as a person living through climate change, it is just because I have been conditioned to think as a colonizer, who views land and the environment not as something which both offers me sustenance and requires attention but as a dangerous and valuable resource to exploit.
It is here where I want to bring in Alex Garland’s 2018 film adaptation of the novel because I think the disparity between the two forms brings my point into sharper relief. The film is what I would call a very loose adaptation, in that it maintains the basic premise while changing almost every plot point. This in itself does not bother me, much of what takes place in the book is explicitly visually unrepresentable, and Vandermeers’ refusal to explain anything fully makes his version of events unsuitable for a Hollywood blockbuster. Yet, I think changes in the plot reveal a fundamental difference in the film’s treatment of nature: specifically, its reduction of the relationship between humans and nature as a violent battle. From the beginning, The Shimmer (the film’s far less cool name for Area X) is treated as a malignant foreign presence. The first shot of the film is an asteroid hitting the Earth which immediately informs the audience that the Shimmer arose because of an invading alien body. This directs the fear of the zone towards the Other, something completely unlike and incomprehensible to us which seeks to take over and transform our world. When introducing the biologist (Natalie Portman) to the Shimmer, the psychologist (Jennifer Jason Leigh) says ”In a few months the area will have grown to where we are right now. And then we’re talking cities, states, and so on.” Not only is the Shimmer a foreign invasion, but it is also one that is spreading. The mission of the government is not to understand so much as it is to destroy the Shimmer. Almost immediately upon entering the Shimmer, the group is attacked by various mutated animals, and their reaction is always to shoot and kill. It ends with the destruction of the Shimmer and the restoration of relative order: the humans ultimately triumph over the corrosive power which seeks to change them. The conceptual framework of the movie presents our current climate crisis as a war to be won like so many other wars the United States has fought. It tells us that the destruction of another being is justified if it protects our existence in our current form–the destruction of the environment is only bad if it will affect human lives. Most importantly, it underlines the distinction between human beings and our natural environment by pitting one against the other.
Importantly, the idea of inherent tension or conflict between human beings and nature is the attitude of European colonizers and contradicts indigenous knowledge about the necessity of a mutually beneficial relationship between humans and nature. The writer and filmmaker Jade Begay describes the goal of the radical NDN collective as “to allow indigenous communities to take back the power of having a mutually beneficial relationship with our land“ (Begay, “An Indigenous Systems Approach to the Climate Crisis“). She goes on to explain how European colonizers created conditions of artificial scarcity by burning seed storage and killing hundreds of thousands of buffalo that Indigenous people had relied on to live, in order to make them reliant on colonial food supplies and ways of living. Thus, the idea that the environment is terrifying and fundamentally opposed to human interests is not a natural idea, but one deliberately created as a tactic to subjugate and murder indigenous people. I think that the movie adaptation of Annihilation naturalizes a relationship of conflict between humans and the environment which erases the possibility of indigenous ways of living in mutually benefice with the environment. The book, on the other hand, calls into question this framework of opposition. What it misses, though, is that the acceptance the biologist feels at the end of the book about her inevitable integration back into Area X is not some new innovation, but simply relearning what indigenous people have always known, and have been fighting for ever since European settler-colonization began. The anxiety that I mentioned at the beginning of this essay, about my dual role as both perpetrator and victim of climate change, can be assuaged by engagement with Indigenous-led climate resistance and decolonization movements which seek to establish such a “mutually beneficial relationship” with their land. It’s not an impossible task to imagine a world where humans live in nature in this way, since indigenous people had lived this way for thousands of years. Begay writes, “Indigenous people know what it takes to save our planet and the life-giving resources it provides” ( Begay, “An Indigenous Systems Approach to the Climate Crisis“). Since the knowledge is already out there, it is up to me and anyone else who lives in this world to listen, learn, and fight with the indigenous people who hold it to gain autonomy again in order to apply it.
Bibliography
Annihilation. Directed by Alex Garland, Paramount Pictures, Skydance Media, Scott Rudin Productions, 2018.
Begay, Jade. An Indigenous Systems Approach to the Climate Crisis. 2021, https://doi.org/10.48558/DQWT-XQ29.
VanderMeer, Jeff. Annihilation. New York. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014. Internet Archive, http://archive.org/details/annihilation0000vand.
