Modern Transcendence in Movies: Annihilation Ventures Beyond Reason – Christ and Pop Culture

This is the third entry in a series investigating the transcendent impulse in contemporary films. Following Charles Taylor’s exhortation in A Secular Age, we should expect to find that our art and entertainment reflects a constellation of offered meanings, where each point is a different guiding light for various individuals. But finding a secure source of meaning in a universe full of options is tricky. In Taylor’s words, everyone is crosspressured and aware that other options exist out there.

My previous articles looked at David Lowery’s Mother Mary and The Green Knight, in which crosspressured characters find their buffered worlds suddenly pierced by inexplicable powers. Mother Mary’s pop venues felt familiar enough, but a strange spirit haunted those arenas. Meanwhile, The Green Knight placed us in a world on the border between enchantment and disenchantment, a world far more susceptible to supernatural powers than it understood.

There’s one facet of modern transcendence that I haven’t yet touched on too clearly. It’s an aspect that’s present in both Mother Mary and The Green Knight, but it becomes immense and unavoidable in Alex Garland’s Annihilation: In a disenchanted world, the supernatural is threatening. Because our vision of the world precludes powers beyond our rational understanding, any occurrence that refutes or exceeds our rational grasp is initially perceived as a danger.

Our discussion of The Green Knight noted that persons are formed by the world they live in: Gawain is not prepared for the forces he encounters on his journey because his world taught him that control, authority, and power are in his own hands. Our world feels far away from Gawain’s medieval England and the walls of Camelot. We’re even more structured by reason. Even more buffered. But many of those same fears—loss of control, an encounter with powers beyond our grasp—haunt our world today.

Annihilation is based on a novel by Jeff VanderMeer, and the story enters a region of the American Southeast that is home to increasingly bizarre ecological behavior. For the dual purposes of safety and study, the government has cordoned off this region and sent teams of trained scientists to record and investigate what’s happening. Unfortunately, the teams that venture into the zone referred to as the Shimmer (or Area X in the novel) are never heard from again. The one person who’s ever returned is biologist Lena’s (Natalie Portman) husband, Kane (Oscar Isaac). But the Kane that came back doesn’t seem at all like his old self.

In some fusion of marital concern, curiosity, guilt, and scientific instinct, Lena decides to join the next team of researchers. Alongside her are a psychiatrist, a physicist, a geomorphologist, and a paramedic. The five women are all scientists, trained to study and to measure and to document and to explain. That is the goal of their mission, after all: to take this unknown, expanding phenomenon and envelope it within our human rationality. As Dr. Ventress (Jennifer Jason Leigh) instructs, their job is to determine what the Shimmer is, be it “a religious event, an extraterrestrial event,” or something else entirely.

Ventress’s goal is an understandable one in our world, for “the colossal success of modern natural science and the associated technology can lead us to feel that it unlocks all mysteries, that it will ultimately explain everything.”¹ Scientific reason is not the enemy, but Taylor describes it as “an engine and beneficiary of disenchantment.”² One result of this engine is materialism. (Another is the dynamic of instrumentalization that Martin Heidegger critiques in The Question Concerning Technology.) As this engine churns along through history, Taylor notes, it “doesn’t just displace lived experience, it also alters it.”³

Things don’t go as planned for Lena and her team. They quickly lose grasp of time—and therefore, of distance, too—and don’t know how far they’ve journeyed into the Shimmer. Their discoveries befuddle their accumulated knowledge as the world around them seems to take pleasure in subverting their theories and training. At first, the alterations are sensed more than consciously realized, like diverse flowers blooming from the same plant. Soon the alterations become more extreme, the world more hostile: a video recording from a previous expedition shows a man with a living creature writhing where his stomach should be. And then a mutant bear shows up to drag one of them off.

The scientists’ steady rationality is unable to reconcile what their senses are telling them. As the psychiatrist states, each piece of data “makes the phenomenon less explicable.” Or, in a less technical exchange between characters: “That’s literally not possible.” “That’s literally what’s happening.” The encounter of Annihilation forces the question: What does one do when scientific explanations falter? And how is one affected by an encounter that takes place beyond the horizon of reason? There is no explanation that Lena’s expedition can use to understand the Shimmer. To understand would be to encompass, to tame, to anticipate, to subsume within one’s ability to reason. Instead, they are the ones subsumed, encompassed by the Shimmer’s palpable radiance, and transformed beyond the sensible. Knowledge can only be founded upon the familiar, and the Shimmer refracts every familiarity into an unknown.

The brilliance of Garland’s adaptation is in the ways the uncanniness is communicated to the audience. The edits between scenes that we typically take for granted are weaponized as a source of confusion; we don’t understand the length of time between events, because the characters themselves are losing sense of time. Temporality becomes harder to maintain as interludes depict Lena outside of the Shimmer. Some of these are flashbacks, but others appear to be flashforwards, such that the audience is always on their heels trying to put the sequences in place. Visually, the Shimmer radiates with color, as if the atmosphere inside it was prismatic. The scientists don’t comment on this phenomenon, but the tints of blue, pink, and orange are sensed by the audience.

There’s a beauty that pervades Garland’s film—which is perhaps what keeps drawing me back to it years later—but even its softer moments are deranged by a ubiquitous sense of danger. The mutant bear and the Shimmer’s other lifeforms don’t seem hospitable to humanity. Instead, the Shimmer seems intent on transforming humanity despite and beyond the government’s attempts to control it.  “We get trained to see ourselves from the outside, as it were, as objects of science,” but the Shimmer doesn’t permit such an objective stance.⁴ It permeates those who enter it, changing them from the inside out. Annihilation unveils a power that dismantles what we know about the world. As in The Green Knight, Annihilation’s world is a far stranger and far more charged place than we assumed, but unlike Gawain, Lena and her colleagues are armed with the full weaponry of modern rationality. Nevertheless, their buffered selves are made more porous, and they must learn to see the world beyond their measurements.

Taylor acknowledges that rationality and openness to the inexplicable don’t have to be mutually exclusive: “There always have been a great many people who have been cross-pressured between the two basic orientations; who want to respect as much as they can the ‘scientific’ shape of the immanent order… but who still cannot help believing that there is something more.”⁵ Again: as with the characters of Annihilation, so with its audience. The movie shapes us to consider what powers lie beyond our tools of description and control.

In some ways this can actually bring us closer to the world of the Israelites and the early Christians. As various scholars have explained, the world of ancient Judaism and early Christianity was a world dense with spiritual powers, from angels to demons, from sorcerers to prophets with visions, and from the ineffective gods of other nations to the almighty Yahweh. We see this throughout scripture, be it Saul’s reliance on the medium of Endor (1 Samuel 28) or Jesus’s exorcisms (Mark 5, Matthew 12, and elsewhere). Warnings against witchcraft stretch from Deuteronomy to Galatians while Acts 19 records instruments of sorcery being abandoned. One throughline of all of these passages, so foreign to our modern ears and eyes, is that the world is home to a plethora of powers. And yes, some of them are indeed threatening.

The Israelites and early Christians perceived real power in spiritual entities, many of whom were evil and threatening. So there’s something to the possibility that not all transcendence, not all spiritual power outside of ourselves, is benevolent. What scripture is adamant about, though, is that Yahweh stands above these powers. The biblical texts and contexts reveal views of an enchanted world. Our contemporary world feels drastically removed from these passages, but films like Annihilation may offer strange prisms. The film takes the ambiguous sense that our rationality can’t account for everything in the world, and it refracts it, making it partially visible to us. Annihilation infuses our atmosphere with something we can’t explain. It gives color to re-enchantment.

Next up, we’ll consider a parallel journey beyond the limits of scientific reason—if one with considerably fewer bear/scientist hybrids—with Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar.

1. Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Harvard University Press, 2007), 548. ↩︎
2. Ibid., 271. ↩︎
3. Ibid., 740. ↩︎
4. Ibid., 740. ↩︎
5. Ibid., 548. ↩︎