The (Im)Possibility of Adaptation in ’s Annihilation Emmanuelle Ben Hadj

A 2018 article about Alex Garland’s science-fiction film Annihilation (2018) asks the question: “is

Annihilation the first true film of the Anthropocene?”1 The answer is most likely no. The

Anthropocene is a term created in 2000 by scientists Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer to signify the importance of environmental change caused by humans. For decades, and even centuries, humanity has become a geological agent capable of reshaping planet Earth according to their own needs and desires. Our actions have altered the planet’s climate for the worse to the point of hindering the natural course of evolution. For this reason, scientists—though disagreements within the scientific community still exist—have felt the need to suggest the existence of a new geological era, the Anthropocene, that would follow the previous era of the Holocene.

Selmin Kara coined the term “Anthropocenema” to talk about the trend of and other genre films depicting the consequences of anthropogenic actions on Earth.2 I would argue that it would be unfair to call Annihilation the first true film of the Anthropocene when the science fiction genre has been so prolific in tackling environmental disasters, with recent films such as Interstellar (Nolan, 2014), or older films like Andreï Tarkovski’s Stalker (1979) to which

Annihilation is often compared. However, Alex Garland’s film certainly stands out in its refusal to compromise with humanity’s fate, hence its particularly negative and pessimistic representation of man. The new ecology of cinema that no longer hesitates to feature human-made disasters, as well as the creation of fictional alternate worlds for pleasure and escapism, could be read as a way to

1 Lewis Gordon, “Is Annihilation the First True Film of the Anthropocene?”, Little White Lies, March 13, 2018 (accessed January 23, 2020). https://lwlies.com/articles/annihilation-alex-garland-anthropocene- era/ 2 Selmin Kara, “Anthropocenema: Cinema in the Age of Mass Extinctions,” in Post-Cinema: Theorizing 21st- Century Film, eds. Shane Denson and Julia Leyda (Sussex, UK: Reframe, 2016), https://reframe.sussex.ac.uk/post-cinema/6-2-kara/

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cope with the frightening reality of climate change while at the same time ringing the alarm louder and louder.

The growing interest in environmental humanities, an interdisciplinary area of research connecting environmental and ecological disciplines with the field of humanities, only reinforces the urgency to consider man as a participant in a larger ecosystem. The geological era of the

Anthropocene and its consequences on the planet invite the necessary deconstruction of human centrism and exceptionalism where man acts as an all-powerful subject upon a subdued and objectified nature. Annihilation finds its place within the field of environmental humanities since the film plays with the sense of loss that has become prevalent in today’s world because of climate change and its consequent disasters: what used to be familiar has now become estranged and dangerous. Among the many science fiction movies of recent years using climate change as background, what makes Annihilation distinctive and worth analyzing is its depiction of the unapologetic disintegration of man at the cellular level, a transitional adaptation that will eventually lead to a new life form.

Annihilation is the first volume of the written by author Jeff

VanderMeer. The two following books and were published back-to-back the same year in 2014. Director Alex Garland (who also directed Ex Machina [2014] and wrote 28 Days

Later [2002]) adapted the first volume into a film released in February 2018. The film is only loosely based on VanderMeer’s novel: as Garland explains in interviews, he decided to write the screenplay based on his own memory of reading the book and his own interpretation of the story.3 In the end, the original novel and the film have little in common, as I will briefly develop later in this

3 Alex Garland explains: “And the most defining thing about [the novel] was its atmosphere; the specifics of plot were not as crucial. Tone was very important. I didn’t reread the book, which was a dreamlike, slightly hallucinatory novel. I did an adaptation of my memory of the novel, a slightly odd conceit.” Anne Thompson, “‘Annihilation’ Director Alex Garland Speaks out on Screwing with Genre and Studio Panic Attacks”, Indiewire, April 8, 2018 (accessed January 24, 2020). https://www.indiewire.com/2018/04/annihilation-director-alex-garland--television-1201950154/

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article. For the purpose of my argument on the (im)possibility of adaptation, I will focus on the film rather than the written work.

Garland’s loose filmic adaptation tells the story of an all-female team of scientists sent inside a mysterious energy bubble, the Shimmer, that formed along the coast and keeps expanding, threatening to engulf nearby cities. While the spectator witnesses an extraterrestrial impact at the beginning of the film, the characters have no idea what created the Shimmer, and even worse, the previous expedition teams didn’t make it back, but for the exception of one man who is now suffering from memory loss and organ failure. Once inside the Shimmer, the women discover an environment where strange mutations occur between human, fauna and flora. They will discover that the magnetic field of the Shimmer scrambles all DNA before rearranging it into new life forms. The film raises many questions including: what does it mean to be human if all DNA merges together to form new creatures? How willing and capable is humanity to adapt to a new environment where they no longer have the upper hand?

The extraterrestrial force that landed in the Shimmer and triggered the mutations does not act as a destroyer, but as a transformer. The progressive and yet uncontrollable disintegration of the human body and psyche inside the Shimmer allow the concept of adaptation to be read through biological and psychological angles. If humans are well aware of being programmed to self-destruct at the cellular level with aging, the rapid mutation of human cells within the bubble opens the door to paranoia and dementia where the self becomes unrecognizable. While the open-endedness of the film offers multiple readings, I only choose to focus on the place of adaptation within Garland’s work and its reflection on contemporary society. Considering that the film is itself an adaptation,

Gary Bortolotti and Linda Hutcheon’s article “On the Origins of Adaptation” that compares the notion of adaptation in biology and in culture will also prove useful to argue against the fidelity

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discourse—the idea that adaptation is synonymous with imitation.4 Indeed, Annihilation confirms that adaptation is more accurately a form of replication with change.

“We’re all damaged goods here”

Unlike other recent films that only reemphasize human centrism by placing a hero or group of characters in a position to save the world, there is no Manichean hero or villain in Annihilation. The usual dichotomy—human versus alien—does not stand in the film: the alien force causing the mutations is far from being villainous since it transforms living beings beyond the categorization of human, animal or plant. Not only does the film reject the simplistic good versus evil binary, but it also twists the very concept of heroism because humans cannot be saved in the Shimmer.

Instead, the conflict takes place within the self, in other words, within each character’s capacity to biologically and psychologically adapt to the new rules inside the bubble.

To begin with psychological adaptation, each scientist in the expedition has a troubled backstory that threatens the collective wellbeing of the team and ends up altering their individual death in the Shimmer. The first part of the film anchors the characters in their own individuality, giving it a melodramatic undertone that will thankfully disappear with the thickening of the plot.

The main protagonist Lena (played by ) is an ex-military biology professor, married to Kane (), the only survivor of all past expeditions. When the latter comes back with no memory and multiple organ failures, Lena makes the decision to join the newest expedition and hopefully understand what happened to him, saying “I owe him.” When the spectator is informed that Lena slept with another man while her husband was gone, the sacrifice for love turns more into a sense of duty riddled with guilt. The team leader, Dr. Ventress (Jennifer

Jason Leigh), is a psychologist at the Southern Reach facility. Later in the film, we find out that she has terminal cancer. Anya () is a paramedic and former alcoholic. Cassie (Tuva

4 Gary R. Bortolotti and Linda Hutcheon, “On the Origin of Adaptations: Rethinking Fidelity Discourse and ‘Success’-Biologically,” New Literary History 38, no. 3 (2007): 445.

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Novotny) is a geomorphologist who lost her daughter to leukemia. Finally, Josie (Tessa

Thompson) is a physicist with a history of self-harm. As Cassie says early in the film: “we’re all damaged goods here.”

Ventress eventually admits to profiling the team members when she explains that not only do all humans have self-destruction coded within them biologically, but also that many of them self-destruct psychologically. By selecting women with a troubled past, and, for some of them, with nothing to lose, Ventress minimized the high risk of the expedition which, she knew, was more of a suicide mission. According to Freud, “trauma is for our internal life what catastrophe is externally,” which would justify that the women seem at first more driven by their personal story than by the actual fear of the growing Shimmer.5 The question is: how can one connect personal and environmental trauma? In her book Climate Trauma, Elizabeth Kaplan introduces the idea of

“pretrauma” and the potential impact on spectators to see their future selves on the big screen. In other words, science-fiction films can trigger a trauma that has not yet happened in real life.

Our crippling attachment to the past and how things used to be can be read as humanity’s attachment to their own comfort, which raises the question of trauma serving an enabling or disabling function. Although the prospect of climate change and environmental disaster can create denial and fear, it can also serve as a productive warning, what Kaplan calls “memory for the future”: knowing what we once had can prevent us from risking to lose it.6 When faced with their own ongoing mutation in the Shimmer (for instance progressively losing their fingerprints), the characters of the film react differently: some try to fight it while others accept the adaptation, knowing all too well that a higher force is making them powerless. In that sense, Annihilation exemplifies the passage of nature from object to subject. Nature is no longer the passive object of the human gaze, simply here for contemplation. Kaplan defines nature under threat as a newfound

5 Elizabeth Ann Kaplan, Climate Trauma: Foreseeing the Future in Dystopian Film and Fiction (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2016), 6. 6 Ibid., 18.

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“negative force, a violent presence, oftentimes an actor in its own right.”7 In cinema, the environment has often served as a backdrop while human passions were at the center. Although

Annihilation starts as a melodrama with an emphasis on trauma, the eventual scrambling of DNA literally annihilates human exceptionalism by the final scene of the film, which brings me to the topic of biological adaptation.

In Green Screen, David Ingram argues against the conception of nature as pristine but also against the idea that nature would be in harmony and at peace if humans disappeared. The very term of Anthropocene could be questioned, Ingram suggests, for not all anthropogenic actions are necessarily negative for the environment: “natural systems should be more accurately thought of as dynamic phenomena which are more often than not the product of an ongoing, complex history of interactions with human cultures.”8 Human management and human intervention do not have to be synonymous with toxicity, as long as they respect the value and existence of all organic matter. In the film, once humans enter the Shimmer, they become yet another species at the same rank than the already existing creatures. Impacted by mutations just like the plants, alligators or bears that have been living in the bubble, the female team is knocked off their alleged biological pedestal and is forced to find their place in the adaptative cycle created by the extraterrestrial force.

In a similar argument, Charles Elton brings forward the notion of ecological invasions and explosions, that is to say the introduction of foreign species and the increase in numbers of new organisms.9 In the dispersal and adaptation of new mutated specimens that often prove more resistant, the competition for space can create interference and eventually lead to the replacement of weaker species. To repel invasion, Elton lays out the options of quarantine, counter-pest or eradication if the invasion can still be accounted for and kept under control.10 To draw a parallel

7 Ibid., 40. 8 David Ingram, Green Screen: Environmentalism and Hollywood Cinema (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2000), 19. 9 Charles S. Elton, The Ecology of Invasions by Animals and Plants, University of Chicago Press ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 15. 10 Ibid., 110.

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with Annihilation, the Shimmer keeps the mutations contained within the bubble, but its unstoppable expansion threatens to spread the invasion. If the characters can progressively explain what is happening in the Shimmer, they fail to understand the ultimate goal of the alien force. By the end of the film, spectators come to realize that the extraterrestrials were only waiting to find the most efficient way to transform humans, which they achieve with the cloning of Lena that they can now use as a vehicle for propagation. The final step in adaptation is to turn matter into energy, which will then be used to fabricate clones who can pass as human and invade the outside world.

When Lena returns to the outside world, quarantine within the bubble has failed, and eradication will prove difficult as humans and clones are now undistinguishable.

Many critics have read the film as an overall metaphor for cancer. Though I will not explore the cancer metaphor specifically, it is still worth mentioning in connection with Elton’s notion of biological invasion.11 In addition to Ventress having terminal cancer, the first time we see Lena, she is teaching her students about the division of cells on a female patient suffering from cancer.

Besides, the alien force landed on a lighthouse that will act as the propagator of mutations, the same way cancer spreads from one cell and makes other cells mutate. The invasion of cancer as a virus in Ventress’s body is similar to the invasion of the aliens in the Shimmer, and again to the invasion of human clones in the outside world.

“It’s not destroying. It’s making something new”

To fully understand the extent of biological adaptation in Annihilation, I will now go deeper into the analysis of the film and the timeline of mutations. Upon stepping into the Shimmer, the women lose sense of time and wake up with no memory of the past few days, only to find out that their radios are not emitting outside the bubble and that their compasses are demagnetized—we will

11 For further reading on this topic, see Matt Goldberg, “Annihilation Explained: Unpacking Alex Garland’s brilliant, Tripper Sci-Fi ”, Collider, January 4, 2019. https://collider.com/annihilation-movie-explained/#alex-garland, and Mike X. Nichols, “What My Experience With Cancer Helped We Understand About Annihilation”, Film School Rejects, March 16, 2018. https://filmschoolrejects.com/cancer-annihilation/

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later understand that the magnetic field of the Shimmer refracts and scrambles electromagnetic waves the same way it scrambles and mixes any organic DNA. The team then notices different species of flowers growing from the same branch that they compare to a “pathology.” They are then attacked by a giant albino alligator with shark teeth. This creature baffles the scientists as crossbreeding is usually only possible between closely related species (for instance from reptile to reptile). The protagonists then find video footage of the previous team where they are seen cutting up a living man’s stomach to show his intestines moving like worms – the sign of an uncontrollable internal transformation.

The most disturbing mutation happens when Cassie is killed by a bear. When the bear reappears to attack the rest of the team, its face is a mix of its own skull and Cassie’s, from which

Cassie’s voice can be heard screaming for help. Cassie and the bear have merged, and her consciousness is now trapped inside the bear’s body. After the monstrous bear kills Anya, the other team members have no other choice but to shoot it to protect themselves. The three surviving women, Ventress, Lena and Josie, come to understand what the Shimmer is truly doing to their bodies when they find flowered trees with human shapes: the trees grew following a human body plan. This scene marks a turn in the plot because Josie, shocked by Cassie’s tragic merging with the bear and now fully aware of the inevitable, makes the decision to control her own adaptation. From one moment to the next, she disappears, and we are led to understand that she turned into one of the human-shaped plants. Her adaptation is not only biological but also psychological because she chose her own transformation. The possibility or impossibility for the human psyche to accept adaptation will now shape the characters’ fate. Even though Josie was depicted as the weakest and most anxious character due to her history of self-harm, her capacity for adaptation allowed her to choose her final form. As far as Lena and Ventress are concerned, their determination to unveil the mystery of the Shimmer motivates them to move on to the lighthouse, the cradle of the alien force.

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Once inside the lighthouse, Lena finds more video footage of her husband Kane, this time talking to his doppelganger before committing suicide with a grenade: the man who came back from the Shimmer is a clone, it is not Kane. Going down an underground tunnel, Lena finds herself in the middle of what resembles a spaceship, where Ventress seems subjugated by a mysterious force. The latter explains that the Shimmer had been progressively disintegrating them into tiny fragments. After her final word—“annihilation”—she suddenly starts spitting flows of light until there is nothing left of her. Ventress has undergone the transformation from organic matter to energy. Hers is the only instance of complete annihilation that we see in the film—maybe because she was sick with cancer and could not adapt—as opposed to the other women who transformed into something else. The bubble of energy from Ventress’ disintegration magnetically attracts drops of Lena’s blood, merging Lena’s DNA with alien matter. The energy slowly turns into a human shape that chases Lena around the lighthouse. There begins an eerie choreography between the human woman and her cosmic doppelganger, a game of imitation and mirroring to confuse their identities. Progressively, the shape adopts Lena’s facial features, body and clothing to the point where we no longer know who is who. The spectators witness one version of Lena leaving the lighthouse while the other version burns it down in an act of suicide. The destruction of the lighthouse leads to the disintegration of the Shimmer. Has the invasion come to an end?

When Lena comes back to the outside world, she is interrogated. Like her husband-clone

Kane, she has little memory of what happened, but she insists on one thing: the extraterrestrial force “is not destroying. It’s making something new.” When she is reunited with Kane, she asks him, “are you Kane?” to which he replies, “I don’t think so.” When he asks her the same question,

“are you Lena?” she stays silent but her glistening purple irises leave two options: either she is a clone as well, or she is still human but altered by her experience in the Shimmer. The film ends on this awkward reunion, without giving a hint as to what the couple will do now. Are they going to multiply and continue the invasion outside the bubble? Is this the beginning of a new species? Or

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was it just a one-time extraterrestrial experience with no further consequences, at least for now?

The open-endedness of the film makes most scenarios possible.

If Ventress suffered the annihilation that makes the title of the film, the other team members underwent (in)voluntary transformation depending on their ability to adapt and accept their new environment inside the bubble. In the end, Lena was the best candidate for the creation of the doppelganger: she was the healthiest physically and the most psychologically resistant because she still had her husband to hang on to, while the other women were introduced as independent characters. Because no one suspects a thing when she comes back to the real world,

Lena—or her clone—is the most successful and deceitful mutation of all. However, it would be wrong to think that adaptation is a simple process of replicating what already exists.

Biologically speaking, the goal of the replicator is not the survival of the current species but the adaptation to a new environment. To do so, the replicator needs a vehicle to ensure its preservation. In Annihilation, the extraterrestrial force uses the human body as a vehicle to invade the outside world. Against the concept of survival of the fittest, Joseph Meeker claims that

“organisms must adapt themselves to their circumstances in every possible way, must studiously avoid all-or-nothing choices, must prefer any alternative to death, must accept and encourage maximum diversity…”12 More often than not, smaller creatures prove more capable of adaptation and thus more resistant in new environments. In the film, the only woman to truly master her own fate is Josie, whose decision to turn into a plant was her best option to avoid destruction. The bodies of all other women—if we assume that Lena has been replaced with a clone—have been mutilated or annihilated. We could say that their failed mutations were part of a transition process striving to find the best DNA combination for the alien force to expand, which they eventually managed with Lena.

12 Joseph W. Meeker, The Comedy of Survival: Literary Ecology and a Play Ethic (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1997), 166.

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“We had so many other problems”13

Considering the importance of biological adaptation in Annihilation, and the film as medium adapted from a book, it is thus relevant to draw a parallel between adaptation as narrative practice and adaptation as biological evolution. Adaptation in media is often seen as “secondary and derivative” compared to the original, amplifying the sacredness of what comes first.14 However, this fidelity discourse ends up constraining the creativity of narrative adaptations, enclosed in a system of recognition solely based on the original.15 In other words, the adaptation should resemble the original in order to gain validity. Against this idea, in their article “On the Origin of

Adaptation,” Gary Bortolotti and Laura Hutcheon explain that “biologists do not evaluate the merit of organisms relative to their ancestors; all have equal biological validity.”16 Likewise, while adaptation has been a common practice for decades, from novel to play or novel to film, nowadays the development of new media such as television shows, graphic novels and video games have expanded the reach of adaptation to the point where original content is no longer a priority for production companies.

Annihilation is a striking example of creative freedom applied to narrative adaptation. As previously mentioned, director Alex Garland wrote a screenplay based on his own memory of reading VanderMeer’s book, which resulted in more differences than similarities in the final cut of the film.17 To name the most explicit digression, the original plot of the novel centers around an underground tower, not a lighthouse, whose inside walls are made of moss and living cells: the tower is actually a living and breathing organism. After losing her team, the unnamed character of the biologist comes face to face with the Crawler, a creature that can take any shape. Once

13 As told by the character of the biologist in Jeff VanderMeer, Annihilation, (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014), 94. 14 Bortolotti and Hutcheon, 445. 15 Ibid. 16 Ibid., 446. 17 Anne Thompson, “‘Annihilation’ Director Alex Garland Speaks out on Screwing with Genre and Studio Panic Attacks”, Indiewire, April 8, 2018 (accessed January 24, 2020). https://www.indiewire.com/2018/04/annihilation-director-alex-garland-devs-television-1201950154/

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contaminated by the tower’s virus, the woman progressively mutates and her capacity for adaptation makes her more resistant physically and psychologically. Faced with her internal transformation, she eventually chooses to stay in the bubble to look for her missing husband who has not returned from a previous expedition. In addition to this contrast in the plot, Alex Garland’s film also gives more space to trauma and magnifies the role of the human psyche to accept or resist adaptation. Consequently, the film cannot be perceived as a secondary retelling or a pale imitation of VanderMeer’s original work. Existing and expanding beyond its original source, the film stands as one more example of adaptation as a process of change and transformation, far removed from the fidelity discourse.

Nevertheless, the complex biological and metaphysical plot and ending of the film did not seduce audiences during a test screening, which drove the head of the production company to ask director Alex Garland for revisions. When Garland refused, the decision was made to release the film in theaters and on a couple weeks later, a rather peculiar distribution deal at the time that is becoming more commonplace now.18 As a consequence, the box-office results were poor, but the film was met with critical success for a variety of reasons. Annihilation stands out from the long list of recent science-fiction/disaster movies by shifting the focus from heroism to a more pessimistic view of humanity where adaptation becomes inevitable for survival—if we can still call it survival when the human species does not survive as is. In the world where we live today, individual heroism and exceptionalism cannot provide long-term solutions to help the planet and ensure the preservation of existing species.

When Selmin Kara coined the term “Anthropocenema,” she defined it as a cinema where

“what used to be regarded as fictional end-of-the-world scenarios have become fact-based speculations on the foreseeable consequences of the Anthropocene.”19 We are no longer in a time

18 See Borys Kit, “'Annihilation': Behind-the-Scenes of a Producer Clash and That Netflix Deal (Exclusive),” The Hollywood Reporter, December 7, 2017, https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/heat- vision/annihilation-how-a-clash-between-producers-led-a-netflix-deal-1065465. 19 Kara, “6.2 Anthropocenema,” 11.

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of apocalyptic sensationalism; what was regarded as disaster movie entertainment is now either a reality (for example with the film The Impossible about the 2004 tsunami in Thailand) or a potentiality

(with Interstellar and the search for a new habitable planet). Although Annihilation follows the trend of the world-without-us narrative that already exists in many disaster or even zombie movies, the difference here is that humans have nowhere to go to save themselves. Indeed, saving the world and saving themselves is no longer an option once they enter the Shimmer, for they undergo the transformation whether they want it or not. Because humans are being partially transformed, replaced with clones or annihilated, Annihilation does not fit the survival narrative or last-person narrative of many apocalyptic films. In times of acceleration where humanity is facing a dead-end, the fast mutation process of Annihilation opens a window to an alternate world where humans must accept a more humble position in a changing environment.

Film has always created artificial worlds, realistic or not, to entertain spectators. However, in the epoch of the Anthropocene, the challenge for science-fiction and fantasy films has changed.

Although both genres could be read as metaphorically escapist—taking spectators to alternate worlds for pleasure—nowadays escapism can be taken quite literally: how does humanity escape its own extinction? When Jennifer Fay claims in her book Inhospitable World that “cinema helps us to see and experience the Anthropocene as an aesthetic practice,” I argue: do the aesthetics of cinema draw us closer to or further from the reality of the current epoch? Does cinema serve a cathartic or alarming function?20 As for any subject matter in any film genre, the connection the spectator makes between what they see on screen and what is happening in real life is far too subjective to be generalized. Even though Annihilation is neither a realist nor an activist film, it is safe to say that it strikes a chord in its bleak representation of humanity, not only with the flaws and traumas of the characters, but also with the failures of all missions in the Shimmer leading to the adaptation, annihilation or replacement of humans. The uncanniness of the Shimmer can easily

20 Jennifer Fay, Inhospitable World: Cinema in the Time of the Anthropocene (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 4.

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be connected to the environmental changes impacting our sense of place in today’s world. The environment we have always known becomes uncanny because it looks familiar and yet different.

Fay explains that “home has been replaced with an artificial substitute that resembles it; a feeling that leads to a disintegrated psyche and perhaps also to death.”21 By describing the lost familiarity of humans with their own environment, Fay ends up summarizing the plot of Annihilation: the treacherous mutations of the Shimmer coupled with the progressive loss of self-identity led indeed to a psychological and physical disintegration for all characters. To some extent, what the team underwent in the Shimmer might be representative of what humanity will soon be facing (if not already) with the threat of climate change and species extinction. As an organic participant in nature, humans must realize that they are equally subject to extinction, a notion that is not always emphasized across media.

Not only does Annihilation remain anchored on Earth (playing with the uncanniness of its alternate world inside the bubble), but the film also makes technology useless to survival. In other films, technology, physics or mathematics eventually contribute to the survival of the hero (Gravity) or even to the survival of the human species (Interstellar). On the contrary, in Annihilation, the moment humans enter the Shimmer, they become powerless and so does any of their technology and knowledge since the bubble refracts electromagnetic waves and scrambles DNA. There is nothing humans can do, and even worse, there is nowhere they can go. Whether in Interstellar or

Valerian (Besson, 2017), filmmakers and spectators can fantasize about fabricated planets that would stay under human control, unlike planet Earth whose natural forces are too unpredictable and dangerous: “the fancy for flight is a fateful repudiation of an earthbound human ontology […] a man-made planet and forms of test tube procreation promise to eliminate the contingencies of evolution and connections to nature beyond our control.”22 The Shimmer and its mutations embody the human fear of the unknown and uncontrollability. By imagining man-made planets,

21 Fay, 3. 22 Fay, 9.

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cinema is reinforcing human exceptionalism where man and nature remain disconnected. Can we really talk of adaptation if humans leave Earth? Annihilation draws a strict line between adaptation and escape. No matter how comforting the thought of a distant controlled planet can be, the reality of mankind today is in much greater need of adaptation than escape. By leaving humans no other choice but to adapt or disappear, Annihilation hits much closer to home. “That which dies shall still know life in death” VanderMeer writes, “for all that decays is not forgotten, and reanimated shall walk the world in a bliss of not-knowing.”23

Emmanuelle Ben Hadj is a PhD candidate in the Film and Media Studies program at the University of Pittsburgh. Her dissertation is titled "Making Room for Horror: The Adversity of Genre in the French Film Industry" and analyzes the difficulties that French horror films meet in their production and distribution. Emmanuelle has published articles on cinema in France and in the United States. She also writes film reviews for the French Webzine Fais Pas Genre.

23 Jeff VanderMeer, Annihilation, (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014), 114.

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