On terror, and transformation
A ponderance on what it could be that we truly fear in the face of sublimity
Beauty, awe, closeness, oneness, the disappearance of the self, the blending of time into a nonlinear expanse, the realization we know nothing which leads to both great wonderment, and great terror, amidst a cosmos in which we are just one part.
The beauty of the film Annihilation is that it is about all of this (warning, some spoilers ahead). I haven’t researched anyone’s analysis of the film (and I still haven’t read the book) because I’m in deep contemplation of the way that film left me feeling—which is to say the film left me feeling as if I was teetering at the edge of a great expanse of something so incredible, and important, that it was incomprehensible. And I keep returning to the banality of the arrival of the meteor that set off the event of the Shimmer and all within its field. That it wasn’t necessarily purposeful. It was just an event of the cosmos, intersecting with the Earth, and introducing something new. Such incidents are the spark behind all formations of material, matter, and energy.
Certain key moments occur in the film that lead me to what I want to talk about today, in regards to the terror of the sublime; which, if not about the fear of actual death, is at least the fear of the loss of self. As our protagonists move through the enveloped field, they start to notice strange blends, hybridizations of species that should not in any way cross or connect, let alone propagate. Things begin to get weirder as they come across beautiful corpses, whose remains are pushed apart by tectonic forces of the new plant and fungal life that replace them. An agonized bear attacks a crew member and then absorbs their mind and their voice to scream out in uncanny horror. Another crew member has a psychotic break after observing their shifting fingerprints—a signifier of individual identity. Who are they now, without this characteristic marker of self that distinguishes them from all others? A third crew member observes the changes all around them and in noticing the physiological changes to their own body, willingly chooses to walk into the field dotted with a veritable orchard of human-shaped flowering shrubs and disappear among them. In what I find to be the film’s most sublime moment is the moment another of the crew becomes a shapeshifting fractal cloud, hypnotizing the main protagonist with shattering sound and undulating form, drawing blood to eventually create a doppelganger of her. Who is she, now; which of these, is she? The terror lies in the title of the film: annihilation, describing the explicitly human fear of complete and utter disappearance into the unknown.
Terror is explicitly spiritual, because it is existential, in that through the experience of terror it is of no question that the end is possible, or imminent. Do I, do you, know true terror beyond fear, beyond dread? Do you know what it is to face your imminent death, right then, without question? Embedded within the word is the presence of awe, eradicating all other possible emotions that remain present in our cognizant mind. Terror is different. Terror cannot be intellectualized. Terror is the vanishing of thought and a loosening of the bowels, all of it vacating our bodies at once. There is no greater presence of terror than in facing our destruction.
Of course we can all imagine terror, if we haven't been through it. We can imagine what it feels like to face our mortality in the face of the incomprehensible. Our lives are in many ways defined by the inevitability of our potential death because we live in fear of it. I think in contemporary westernized society this is because we’ve been trained to view destruction as a terminus into oblivion. But what if we re-learned and reclaimed our ancestors' ability to contend with death as what it really is in the world: transformation?
I can’t help but return, again, to the urgency of reconnecting to and repairing our perceived severance from nature. Transformation and transcendence to me, in this case, implies a sort of reintegration, a loss of “humanness” as a point of center, or supremacy; a dismantling of the construct of dualism; a return to the acknowledgement that all things transform—seen and unseen, animal and insect, plant and fungi, stone and soil, air and water; all bodies, material and immaterial. This is the transformation described in the film Annihilation, where all things merge to create something new; all things reintegrate and reemerge. If integration back into the soil, air, waters, and sky of the earth is the sublime of the 21st century then it solidifies my belief that the sublime is and could be reframed as the presence of intimacy, the blurred line and potential disappearance of permeable barriers, the hybridization and thus queering of a great many things. What are we really afraid of when we fear losing ourselves to awe, beauty, relationality, reconnection?
Further reading and watching for those interested:
Annihilation, Directed by Alex Garland, Screenplay by Alex Garland, Paramount Pictures 2018
Arrival, Directed by Denis Villeneuve, Screenplay by Eric Heisserer, Paramount Pictures, 2016
Emily Harwitz, A Growing Fear of Nature Could Hasten Its Destruction, The Atlantic, 2023
John R. Platt, An Emerging Threat to Conservation: Fear of Nature, The Revelator, 2020*
Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, Columbia University Press, 1982
Masashi Soga, Maldwyn J. Evans, Takahiro Yamanoi, Yuya Fukano, Kazuaki Tsuchiya, Tomoyo F. Koyanagi, Tadashi Kanai; How can we mitigate against increasing biophobia among children during the extinction of experience? Biological Conservation, Volume 242, February 2020*
Ricardo Correia and Stefano Mammola, Biophobia: search trends reveal a growing fear of nature, The Conversation, 2023*
Sweet Tooth, TV series, Netflix, 2021-present
The Fountain, Directed by Darren Aronofsky, Screenplay by Darren Aronofsky, Warner Bros Pictures, 2006
*All of these asterisked resources are interconnected and cross-referenced around the Soga team’s paper featured in Biological Conservation, and I actually came across all of them in August 2023 after writing the essay in June. I’d written that piece with an introspective hunch that there was some sort of either latent or emerging fear of nature and it wasn’t until August that I started looking it up. To no surprise, there is, and it’s called biophobia, and it is certainly growing—the highest rate seems to be found in Eurocolonial countries, as shown in the map in the Conversation article. I have yet to concretely draw the connection to abjection, a loss of self, and fear of permeable boundaries in a truly comprehensive way but I do hope to continue working on that to bring it together but to be clear, I’m no academic researcher, I’m just curious about the patterns from a few very non-scientific lenses.