This is an odd one, folks, and has nothing exactly to do with Montreal. Mea culpa. You’ve been warned. We’ll be back on our regular beat in 48 hours, though, so don’t lose any sleep.
Annihilation (2018) is a movie about how Natalie Portman and some other people venture into an area of land that is weird. It is weird for unknown reasons and weird in unknown ways. Portman et al. enter the weird place in order to understand it better. That’s it. That’s the movie. Watch it or don’t watch it. This isn’t an ad for a film that came out five years ago and isn’t even about the movie as whole. We only care about a scene at the movie’s end.
We think about this particular scene fairly frequently because it more or less perfectly captures our experience with the internet on most days. If you haven’t seen or don’t remember the movie, that’s OK. Seeing the whole movie doesn’t really help anyone understand this scene. It’s only a couple minutes long and shouldn’t even be considered spoiler-y because Annihilation isn’t really the kind of movie that can be spoiled. So, the scene:
In case you didn’t watch the clip, here’s what you missed: Natalie Portman sees her peer conflagrate (?) into a flurry of swirly mist (?) that resolves into light bubbles (?) that coalesce into an urgent, fractal cloud made of murky rainbow fluid (?????). Somehow a drop of her blood falls sideways into this cloud. This cloud thing, then, takes her drop of blood and, through a process that resembles cell divison (???), resolves itself into a shimmery person-type shape (!). She shoots at it and runs away.
You should have just watched the clip.
Now that no one is reading this essay any more, we can segue to what we actually want to talk about. Namely, the feeling of being bewildered by whatever is happening online on most given days. We are sometimes struck by this feeling immediately, but other times it creeps up on us. We’ll have been scrolling and scrolling for a while and then, out of nowhere, we will recognize that we have no idea at all what we’re looking at, why we’re looking at it, or what we’re meant to do after having looked.
The luminous, pulsing cloud of online discourse is made of different stuff all the time. The New Yorker profiled an obnoxious philosopher in a throuple, a celebrity is earnestly advocating disordered eating, an (apparently?) widely beloved actor died, people are rewatching and re-evaluating an old HBO show, the government is all sorts of corrupt, banks are failing at their single job of having money, water bottles are full of lead, and so on forever goes the amorphous cloud of nonsense. Every day or hour or minute the shimmering whatever of discourse takes on a new incomprehensible texture, color, and shape for reasons beyond our (and perhaps everyone’s) ken. Our questions about the discourse are as endless as the discourse itself. Why is the cloud this way rather than any other? Why is it showing us this? Why not literally anything else? Why anything at all? Just why? WHY?
The reason Annihilation comes to mind isn’t, though, because of the scary/pretty cloud. It is rather because of Natalie Portman’s reaction to it. She doesn’t, initially, react at all. She just stares at it dumbfounded. She’s forced into the position of blank witness. She doesn’t cry out or try to touch it. She just looks. Why? Because, well, it’s there and it almost begs to be looked at. There’s something almost hypnotic about it. Why wouldn’t you look? After looking for a short moment that feels long or a long moment that feels short, she takes a few cautious steps forward and - out of nowhere - a basic part of her gets pulled into and mixed up in that cloud.
As soon as the cloud gets hold of some part of her, it offers a vague schema of what it’s up to. The particulars of the process its engaged in might be obscure, but it is not hiding anything exactly. It is simply taking this information (i.e. blood), doing something with it, and organizing itself around it. It’s unclear why it is doing this or what it hopes to achieve by doing it, but it does it all the same.
This is, metaphorically, the same thing that various algorithms do with us. They take a bit of us - our online behaviors, say - and use it to morph into the shape of something we might like or at least recognize. We read and we watch and we listen and at a certain point a glimmer of something maybe meaningful emerges. The cloud is no longer chaos, but recognizable order. Things make a kind of sense. The momentary sense it makes isn’t satisfying or summarizable, but for a fleeting second or two it seems that all that time just looking yielded something personally significant. By looking and listening and looking and listening and inadvertently offering up a part of ourselves to the glowy, empty cloud - we are offered up an uncannily featureless version of ourselves in return. We are given a version of ourselves shorn of all the particularities that makes us unique and impossibly singular.
And what do we do, then, when met with this version of ourselves?
Natalie shoots at the bronze, featureless person-ish biped. We sympathize. The urge to treat something incomprehensible as a threat is probably instinctual. The need to repel some alienated version of ourselves, to swear it off somehow, seems almost automatic. An online and figurative version of shooting at the scary thing created of and with us is, we suppose, trying to describe, frame, or argue with it. We want the seeming threat to cease being threatening, so we try to address or attack the issue in a certain way, minimize its force or the feelings that force prompts. Those actions, though, do little or nothing. It just takes that information in. Those takes or bullets just get added to it. So, like Natalie, we want to run.
Running, though, isn’t really a viable answer. It catches up.
Natalie, then, fights and fails until she finds a way to - in essence - trick the cloud into self-immolating. In the process, the cloud comes to resemble her exactly. She recognizes, maybe, in that moment that the cloud was only doing what it knew how to do. There was no malice in it. It was just offering up what it had been given. It just became what it could become.
This scene - for us - is helpful in describing a certain dynamic we see ourselves enacting. We find ourselves intrigued and repelled by the discourse, interested in and horrified by internet culture.
This scene, though, doesn’t just serve an explanatory or heuristic purpose, but a practical one.
It provokes us to try to figure out a different way out of the fraught dynamic, to sort out a different ending. We don’t want to run away from all the algorithmic comforts we’ve become accustomed to, but also don’t want to feed the malignant devices that harm whole industries, etc. We don’t want to keep offering ourselves up for imperfect capture, but we also don’t (on some days) want to burn the whole thing down. We find this dilemma intractable and find ourselves caught up in it continually.
We can’t, though, see a different resolution other than annihilation. Us or it. [We mean this is a figurative, metaphorical way btw - nothing to literal to worry about here.] We cannot really conceive of a mutually beneficial relationship, a relationship that does not render one or the other party parasitical. Call this, if you want, a failure of imagination. We don’t know what it would mean to operate alongside tech that wasn’t, in its own ways, trying to harm or diminish or hamper our lives under the guise of just giving us what it (for better or worse) thinks we want. We don’t know what a different and better version of the cloud or ourselves might look like. But we’re trying to work through it or, at least, understand exactly what the consequences of not being able to work through it might be. There’s no tidy end to this because, well, we imagine we’ll be in this place for a while and there’s probably good reason there is not a word of dialogue in that whole culminating scene.
Bonus Behind the Scenes Content:
We legit don’t even really like this movie. It’s true. Not even a joke. Do not care for it. That scene, though. That scene does something.
To the Two Subscribers We Have Left:
Thanks for hanging in there! We’ll never mention another Natalie Portman movie again! Except maybe Beautiful Girls (1996)? Ok. Enough. Off to stare into the nebulous, blood-desiring cloud forever until everything needs to burn beautifully and totally.
Happy you used the movie for your little venture into the Cyber Zone... Vandermeer's trilogy is far superior than Portman's meager screenplay incarnation.
Thought provoking once more. Well done