ANNIHILATION AND BODY DYSPHORIA

CONTENT WARNING: BODY HORROR, SELF HARM, SUICIDE MENTION

Many people far more eloquent than myself have written and made videos about Annihilation, including Annihilation and Decoding Metaphor by Dan Olson and Annihilation & The Horrors Of Change by FilmCritHulk, which you should definitely check out.

So I’ll just get it out of the way: this movie fuckin slaps. I highly recommend watching it. It’s available on Netflix in most regions. 

My first exposure to Annihilation was the trailer, and I quickly bought and read through the books: Annihilation, Authority, and Acceptance, collectively known as The Southern Reach Trilogy. It follows the 12th expedition into The Shimmer, a mysterious and unexplainable region that seemingly distorts all matter inside. The team is a biologist, a physicist, a surveyor, and the team lead, a psychologist.

I feel very fortunate to have seen Annihilation in theatres, it had a very limited run (I believe for a week in my town) and I wasn’t sure if we’d get it at all. The theatre experience was memorable in itself not only for the movie but the handful of other people there, mid 20s guys who several times had to let out a “what the fuck?” and, probably my favourite, a guy taking off his hat and gesturing at the screen in disbelief.

I’ve never had such a physical reaction to a movie before, I can clearly remember getting up after the credits started rolling and finding it difficult to walk, I felt dizzy and like I was wading through deep sand. This feeling continued through the rest of the night and I lay awake thinking about the double and how truly alien it was. It disturbed me.

Many references to obvious, physical signs of change are shown and talked about throughout the movie. The effects of cancer on the body, mutated plants and animals, and later, the mutations among the expedition’s team members themselves. Lena’s (Natalie Portman) tattoos change. An alligator has shark teeth. Famously, a bear has a human voice and face melded with it’s own. Josie, (Tessa Thompson), a physicist, theorizes that Area X is a prism for DNA. Everything it touches is irrevocably changed on the deepest level possible, until you cannot tell or remember what it was like before.

One of the things that happens when you deal with a mental illness or addiction is that it becomes your new normal. You can no longer recall what it was like before it started. As fair as I know, I’ve always had depression. There is no “pre depression” me, there is only Me. Many of my self harm habits seemed alien to my friends when they noticed (even though I tried to hide them). To me it felt like the most normal and affirming thing I had at the time….I was taking control of my body. Something I could do to change it myself. It was mine and mine alone. Ventress, the psychologist member of the team, says ..almost all of us self-destruct. In some way, in some part of our lives. Josie is shown with clear self harm scars. In Tessa Thompson’s description of her character: “The idea was that Josie hasn’t been living, so cutting was a way for her to access pain,” she said. “It was like, ‘Now I know that I’m alive.’ But it’s healing to let people see her scars.” Later on I would realize ways to control and change my body in more positive and healthy ways, like tattoos and piercings.

The team comes across an abandoned village, with plants shaped like people. This is my favourite scene in the movie. Josie, after seeing everyone fight back or try to destroy what is happening to them, just…accepts it. She succumbs to The Shimmer willingly and peacefully. She has already become part of it in some ways and choosing the way she goes out was extremely powerful to me. I’m sure a lot of people see this as Josie committing suicide, but I see it as Josie accepting herself.

All of this to me relates back to feeling body dysphoria. Seeing myself in the mirror during the depths of my eating disorder, I felt lightheaded and upset. I had meant to buy clothes, I ended up leaving with nothing. I couldn’t deal with facing myself. Later in the movie, Lena encounters a completely alien being that copies her form. More human than human, they mimic each other’s movement much like a dance and end up fighting. Lena tricks the being into holding a live grenade as she flees. She destroys the Perfect Self, and becomes something new. Have you ever heard the fact that our cells replace themselves almost completely every 7 to 10 years? In some ways, you are a new person. A fresh start. I probably will never look the way I want to (unless someone teleports me into the Star Trek universe or something), but every year I do become more comfortable with my body and my Self. My scars are part of who I am now, and I often think of the quote “ours scars remind us that the past was real”. There is no version of me that I can imagine without them now. ※