“All Things Change, Nothing Perishes”—The Body in Annihilation

Spoiler Alert: This article contains mild spoilers for the book and movie Annihilation.

It’s been a long time since I’ve read a book in just one sitting. I don’t have that kind of time anymore. I’ve grown accustomed to nibbling slowly at big books rather than swallowing shorter ones whole. 

But a few Sundays ago I was sick, and my family headed off to church without me. So I curled up on the couch and devoured a novel in one go (or rather, it devoured me): Annihilation, the first book in the Southern Reach trilogy by Jeff VanderMeer. I read books two and three as well (Authority and Acceptance), though they took longer to read than a lazy Sunday. It wasn’t long before my teenagers picked them up too, drawn into this strange world that defies human attempts at understanding and, as one character puts it, “declines to be interpreted.”

Such Things Do Not Bear Thinking About

I’m no “book before movie” purist. I’d already seen Alex Garland’s 2018 film version of Annihilation back when it came out, and had added it to my very short list of movies so psychologically disturbing that I could barely finish them. But finish I did: we’d invited friends to watch with us, and a good hostess doesn’t pull the plug on the evening’s entertainment. As it turns out, the movie doesn’t spoil the books much at all, since Garland created more of a “subjective response” to his reading of the first book rather than a faithful adaptation of the trilogy’s arc. He takes the premise and a few key features and then runs off in a different direction. But what the film and book share is the feeling they create in your gut.

I’m fairly adept at emotionally metabolizing tragic tales. As long as there’s a deeper meaning to be found through the suffering, sad stories don’t scare me off. But Annihilation posed a problem: it wasn’t a tale of people making meaning out of tragedy or fear. It displayed instead the horror of the end of meaning-making. Garland does this by making his characters suicidal—an interesting take, but a narrow one that has much less to say to the majority of people who aren’t trapped in despair. 

VanderMeer portrays the end of meaning-making through the way the story’s antagonist—which is not a person but a place: “Area X”—changes human bodies beyond recognition. He plays with the idea that the shape we’re in is not arbitrary, and our bodies no mere vehicle for consciousness, but our bodies are in fact ourselves. If we do not simply have bodies, but rather we are our bodies, then we are something much more integrated, vulnerable, and susceptible to change than we want to believe (a fear at the root of why many Christians deny biological evolution’s role in making us what we are, a fear I once shared). 

As Annihilation’s main character says repeatedly in the book, in her efforts to stay sane in the center of a mystery she cannot comprehend, “such things do not bear thinking about.” And those who do think about them have little to show for it. Expedition members who journey into the dangerous unknown bear a cumulative psychological burden. This is symbolized in the book by the 12-foot-high and 16-foot-wide moldering pile of observation journals they leave behind in Area X, which over the years rots away, infested with silverfish and rats, a “collapsing garbage hill of disintegrating pulp.” So much for the power of human meaning-making: their words are food for worms; their interpretations, compost.

The horror of this story is the annihilation of identity, the erosion of a personal self that has boundaries, a recognizable shape, a coherent story—a self that can continue on with memories of the past and personal goals for the future. If you lose yourself, if that self is changed beyond recognition, if you have no words with which to articulate the story you are in, then what is left to be redeemed? 

That’s what gives Annihilation its existential edginess, putting it leagues beyond the gory, jump-scare, and creature-feature tropes often associated with the horror genre. Annihilation, in both book and movie form, evokes what Geoffrey Reiter articulates as the essence of H. P. Lovecraft’s writing: an “ambience of fear” and “gnawing dread,” the “existential terror” of “a world of matter in which people don’t matter.” Lovecraftian horror has its place, even for Christians, as a sharp jolt to wake us up from our society’s obsession with individual autonomy and personal preciousness. There’s nothing like Lovecraftian horror to remind you that the world doesn’t revolve around you. Far from being a unique snowflake, you’re more like an ant that just got stepped on. And nobody cared. 

Nobody even noticed.

Omnia mutantur, nihil interit

The first novel in the series follows a woman whose name we never learn. She is known to us only by her role (“the biologist”) on an expedition undertaken by the Southern Reach (a government agency), which is investigating a topographical anomaly in a remote coastal region of the southern United States: the mysterious, perilous, and pristine Area X, which is surrounded by a seemingly impermeable border. The story is told from the biologist’s perspective alone, creating a gnawing sense of dread that gradually becomes claustrophobic.

The presence of what we can’t see—or if seen, can’t comprehend—permeates the narrative, as the biologist and her team (a psychologist, an anthropologist, a surveyor, and a linguist, all likewise nameless women) journey into a landscape that has caused countless prior expeditions to either disappear, die, go insane, turn violently on one another, or return to the world changed—as empty shells riddled with cancer and with nothing to say. The biologist’s own husband was one of these (temporary) survivors, his mind wiped clean of memories, desires, goals, anything that marked him out as an individual person. When he returned home after months of being missing, the biologist was overcome with “the sheer directionless anonymity of his distress, his silence.” The only thing she discovers in him once he’s back is “a deep and unending solitude […] that was poison to him and eventually killed him.” 

The plot, which spans three novels, is too intricate to summarize, and I couldn’t forgive myself for spoiling the handful of mysteries which do in fact have answers. I want instead to circle around the questions of embodiment, identity, and the boundaries of the self that these novels raise.

The Southern Reach learned the hard way that Area X has a radar for human personality. The region notices when individuals find a “doorway” and cross through its deadly borders: like an immune response to an unwelcome pathogen, it asserts itself onto and into the intruders. The more people display their personalities and uniqueness (the use of names, the sharing of thoughts, the forging of personal connections on the team) and the more sophisticated the technology they bring in with them, the faster they are discovered and destroyed. Both the natural and artificial products of the human mind—selfhood and tools—register as red flags to Area X. Personality is a vulnerability.

But the destruction that awaits humans who flaunt their humanness, who display all the ways they have evolved above and beyond the rest of nature, is not typically that of an external violent attack (although that happens occasionally). This destruction rather takes root inside. All those people who “disappeared” into Area X and never returned aren’t dead per se; they are still there, down to their very cells and DNA, but their bodies have been changed almost beyond recognition. Occasionally the biologist catches the eye of another creature: “As [the dolphins] slid by, the nearest one rolled slightly to the side, and it stared at me with an eye that did not, in that brief flash, resemble a dolphin eye to me. It was painfully human, almost familiar.” In the broken remains of an old house, she notices “a few peculiar eruptions of moss or lichen, rising four, five, feet tall, misshapen, the vegetative matter forming an approximation of limbs and heads and torsos.” As Ovid wrote in Metamorphoses, which told the tales of human transformation into plants and animals: omnia mutantur, nihil interit. “All things change; nothing perishes.”

Garland’s film makes this chimerical transformation a universal feature of Area X, so that every creature within it is a genetic hybrid, a fate that will also befall the foolhardy humans who venture in. VanderMeer’s books, however, portray something quite different and frankly more disturbing. Humans alone are targeted for this deformation into plant life, fungi, animals, birds, or marine leviathans (or some misbegotten combination). The rest of the creatures in Area X are recognizable and normal species; the entire ecosystem is pristine, free of all industrial pollutants and human-caused contaminants. 

In the mind of Area X (if you can call it a mind), humans are the problem, and the apparent solution involves transforming human morphology. Put people into a different shape, and they begin to want different things, to do different things, to be different creatures. They align themselves with the ecosystem and begin to cooperate with it instead of trying to control it. The desire for comfort and control—achieved through technology that exploits and pollutes the environment, and pursued most by individualistic societies that promise every person the “right” to such freedom from natural limits—is neutralized by Area X. Flawed humans aren’t redeemed so much as de-fanged. Area X renders humans harmless to the biome by rendering them inhuman. 

Of all the people who enter Area X, the biologist is able to retain her form the longest, precisely because she had practiced “losing herself” in the ecosystems she studied and loved: “I melted into my surroundings, could not remain separate from, apart from, objectivity a foreign land to me.” She blends in better than anyone else; her willingness to be a limited creature in the present moment, to admit her vulnerability and relinquish control, is a kind of camouflage that keeps her safe (for a while). “My sole gift or talent … was that places could impress themselves upon me, and I could become a part of them with ease.”

Where do you end and the outside world begin?

Annihilation is a damning indictment of humanity’s self-absorption, of our dominion gone awry. In evolving cognitively and socially beyond all other creatures, and in coming to dominate the planet with our presence and our desires, we have gradually ceased to see the world around us as being part of us, or more fittingly, ourselves as part of it. As we grew in technological power we shrank our sphere of concern: the size of our self-conception dwindled all the way down to “just me.” This increased our sense of individuality and agency in the face of the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, and is a key feature separating modern industrialized man from the past. As a buffered self, I now stop at my skin; everything else is merely “my environment.” This means that whatever is not-me is not my problem; it’s just a natural resource ripe for the taking. Instead of relating to the world around me as full of fellow agents with whom I must cooperate and whose well-being depends upon my ability to live within limits, I objectify it and reduce it to “stuff.” And whatever stuff may be, it’s certainly not a self like me.

And here is where horror and science fiction meet science: I’ve been following the work of developmental biologist Michael Levin of Tufts University for a while now (feel free to fall down that rabbit hole, my fellow nerds). Levin is an expert on the way humans develop and change, and how collective intelligence is formed. He describes the way we begin as matter and grow into embodied minds—into the self-aware selves we are today. He follows this trajectory not only in evolutionary history (there is no hard bright line in the process of evolving from pre-human hominids to modern humans about which we could say, “This generation lacks a certain quality which the following generation now has”) as well as in the journey every single one of us has taken from being a fertilized blastocyst to becoming a full-fledged human adult (again, there’s no clear line between not-person and person in this process; any line we draw is arbitrary and pragmatic). Whatever we humans are, we cannot be understood apart from the cooperative parts and seamless processes by which we come to be. 

In his boundary-breaking book The Hierarchy of Heaven and Earth (which C. S. Lewis called “a work of the highest genius”), D. E. Harding embraced the ambiguity and strangeness of our beginnings: 

I was once a male and female germ cell; they united, and I was one; the one divided into two, four, eight … yet remained one; and now I am billions of living creatures who are nevertheless sufficiently unified to write their story here. Is it not curious that the collective genius or angel of this host, whose life has been one long essay in compounding, should come to doubt the possibility of compounding?

Evolutionary biology busts up the modern myth of the buffered self with its “thick skin,” its crystal-clear boundaries and autonomous individuality, and its skepticism of holistic unities (or as Harding says, the “compounding” of billions into one) as so much mumbo-jumbo. Levin holds that humans are an example of collective intelligence: “We are all made of a collection of agents,” or what he calls elsewhere “agential material,” which includes cells and organs and organ systems that all have preferences and goals (something which his lab has proven time and again: Google “xenobots,” and make sure you’re sitting down). “Each of these agents is solving problems in its own space” without being micromanaged by higher systems, enjoying a kind of competence proper to its scale, Levin notes. 

He then asks: What exactly is it that makes something full of millions of tiny parts and agents into “one thing”? It’s the commitment to the same story, he says, to having the same preferences and goals in anatomical space. We are a many-leveled hierarchy of teleological parts forming an organic goal-directed whole, an intelligent problem-solving menagerie sharing a singular story. In other words, each of us is an embodied group project. 

Harding described the social and moral implications of recognizing this “inner hierarchy” of intelligence that makes up our sense of self:  

It may be said with some justification that, just as it takes my twenty million million cellular world-views to build my mammalian world, so it takes my two thousand million mammalian world-views to build my truly human world. My only claim to this hand is that when it is hurt I am hurt, and what it touches I touch, and all its deeds are mine; and my only claim to Humanity is that I am responsible for my neighbor, wherever he lives and whatever he does. For until I am him I am not myself. To know myself I must study him, and to be at peace with myself I must love him: all my hatred is self-hatred.

A solitary organism is little use for thinking or doing, for understanding or willing or loving. We need millions. … [Man] requires his opponents for his completion, and is let down when they become like him. We need most those we understand least. … We are no good without our betters. 

All our stupidity is want of sympathy, all our weakness want of cooperation. Our self-sufficiency is suicidal, for living is loving. In sum, all lack is lack of others. We spend our lives forgetting that there is only one Man. …

In short, hierarchy no more threatens individuals than music threatens notes: it makes them. Only in the Whole is the fragment more than a fragment, and so much as a fragment. 

What Harding extrapolates to encompass human relationships and society (and later in his book, the whole physical and spiritual world), Levin insists on in his novel description of cancer. “Cancer is not selfish; it just has smaller selves,” he says. Cancer cells have not merely lost communicative contact with their cellular neighbors, but have opted out of that group project in anatomical space we call “the person.” The sphere of concern of the cancer cell has shrunk: it is acting like a tiny buffered self with narrow concerns—to feed itself and to reproduce. The cancer cell is the ultimate individualist: living its best life in classic you do you mode, it metastasizes throughout its “environment,” oblivious to the harms triggered by its deafness to its neighbors.

And while the traditional approach to treating cancer is to nuke it with chemo and radiation or extract it with surgery (assuming it is fatally flawed in its DNA), Levin is developing a new strategy: reconnect those isolated cells with their neighbors. Reestablish electrical communication; expand their sphere of concern; link them back up to the larger story (the human person); give each cell a “bigger self.” Levin’s lab is actually using electrical signals to influence cell behavior and restore cellular communication, bringing those wayward cells back into the fold—investigating the possibility that DNA isn’t destiny, that cancer can be healed and not just killed.

Do you remember reading Madeleine L’Engle’s classic A Wind in the Door when you were 12 or so? In that story, young Charles Wallace is deathly ill because a tiny component within his cells is “going its own way,” refusing to believe in this so-called “Charles Wallace” that it had never seen, and whose well-being required it to make unpleasant sacrifices. Meg, the little boy’s sister, goes on a microcosmic adventure within his body to convince that isolated, self-absorbed part to rejoin the dance, to resume the song of creation, to believe in the existence and value of the human person that was too big for it to comprehend, and to cooperate once again with its fellow organelles. She succeeds, and her brother recovers. L’Engle was writing fiction, and Levin is doing science, but what they both hit upon is this need for a flexible, expansive, porous boundary of the self, a broadening of care and concern—what we recognize on another scale as love. 

What do you feel in your gut?

Collective intelligence (problem-solving at scale) requires neighborliness, the inclusion of one’s fellows within oneself. This is as necessary at the macrocosmic level as it is at the microcosmic level. Truths like this are fractal and scale both up and down, providing us with ample moral metaphors and theological symbols. The earth-scaled picture is where VanderMeer takes his fiction, examining the lonely, buffered human selves that pollute the wider world and cannot connect with one another meaningfully, that bounce off each other like bumper cars instead of bonding—all because they live in fear and a desire for control. 

The main characters in the series are loners, drifters, estranged from family, unmarried, or unhappily married. They become targets for Area X’s metamorphic body horror, which in the context of the novels often reads like rape. The sense of violation of both the body and the mind is palpable when people who have experienced Area X’s power describe what it’s like to be noticed, explored, and coerced into a “story” not freely chosen. A linguist at the Southern Reach imagines it as “if the message were a knife and it created its meaning by cutting into meat and your head is the receiver and the tip of that knife is being shoved into your ear over and over again.” 

The biologist comes face to face with an indescribable and dangerous being whose attention makes her feel like she is drowning, pinned, helpless, and alone, as it probes into the back of her skull and into her brain, causing agony, “as if a metal rod had been repeatedly thrust into me and then the pain distributed like a second skin inside the contours of my outline.” After this “terrible invasiveness,” it tosses her aside, bruised and crumpled like an empty sack. It’s something akin to a psychological vivisection: a cold and pitiless penetration of her sense of self that disassembles her bit by bit from the inside out, and then—rather than changing her—copies her and creates a double. This is a different way of undermining human uniqueness compared to creating a chimera, but it’s just as effective.

The invasive violation of Area X was just as capable of being subtle as it was of being sudden. The newest director of the Southern Reach, a man whose nickname is (no joke) Control, experienced the coercive co-opting of his body “in little surges of panic.” He knew “that something was wrong, that he was more and more a stranger in his own skin, that perhaps something was beginning to look out through his eyes. Infestation was a thought that crept in at moments between wakefulness and sleep. … There was the sense of something sliding more completely into place, and the feeling confused and frightened him.” 

VanderMeer not only casts the fearful humans as threats to the natural world, but also makes clear that the abusive and incomprehensible power of Area X is a threat too, and not a savior. Whatever these flawed humans might need to bring them back into alignment with a larger sense of self that includes both the human and the non-human in its sphere of concern, whatever they need to move from cancerous to communal, it’s not Area X. Humans are just ants under its boot. It’s true that humans must be changed if we are to reconnect with one another and with the world before we make it uninhabitable, but not like this, not through coercion. 

Like the persistent lawyer in Luke’s Gospel, we are tempted to ask for a line in the sand that absolves us of personal responsibility for others: tell me exactly who my neighbor is, so that I know who my neighbor is not. Tell me the outer limits of caring; tell me who or what is “just my environment” and not a part of me. Jesus instead provides a parable of sheer contingency and surprise: a Samaritan encounters a wounded man by the wayside, feels compassion for him and acts with mercy. That verb—ἐσπλαγχνίσθην (splagchnizomai), which refers to the “inward parts”—is the yearning of one’s bowels in pity and sympathy for another. Jesus is telling us, quite literally, to love from our gut those we happen upon in the flesh. Don’t “pass by on the other side”: draw near, be present, recognize the flesh of the other as your flesh too, and bind up those wounds. This is how we become participants in the same story, members of the same body.

I Have Need of You

The body of Christ. It’s a saturated phrase with many meanings: the incarnate flesh of Jesus; the church; the Eucharist. The symbol of the body is a rich one, and hopefully a little fresher for you now, and more surprising.

For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ. 
…
God arranged the members in the body, each one of them, as he chose.  If all were a single member, where would the body be? As it is, there are many parts, yet one body. The eye cannot say to the hand, “I have no need of you,” nor again the head to the feet, “I have no need of you.”
…
But God has so composed the body … that there may be no division in the body, but that the members may have the same care for one another. If one member suffers, all suffer together; if one member is honored, all rejoice together.

Now you are the body of Christ and individually members of it. (from 1 Cor. 12)

I have no need of you. What is this sentiment but that of the shrunken self-sufficient self, the cancer cell? God knows we need to belong to something, and to Someone, bigger than ourselves. The church, the body of Christ (of which He is the head) is a many-leveled hierarchy of teleological parts forming an organic and spiritual goal-directed whole, an intelligent problem-solving menagerie sharing a singular story across continents and generations—the Gospel. The capacity for meaning-making resides in the body, in the communion of the members with one another and with the head. This is as true for your personal physical form as it is for the church. Salvation is a group project: no one is saved alone.

As Professor of Theology and Science Niels Henrik Gregerson writes, “The body of Jesus was not only skin-deep, but deeply entangled, since it was a body that included non-human bodies (i.e. microbes). In terms of the incarnation, the Gospel has a story to tell about the absorption of material particles and living creatures in the process of the incarnation, in which God says ‘Yes’ to and ‘assumes’ the entire material world, while cleansing the sinful aspects of human existence that can only say ‘Me’ rather than ‘also You.’”

If there is anyone in all the universe who could say, “I have no need of you” and be correct in saying so, it’s God. And yet He expanded His circle of concern beyond the Trinity. “What is man that you are mindful of him, and the son of man that you care for him?” (Ps. 8:4). This is the mystery of mysteries: why God cares at all. And the result of His caring is that we too will be changed, not into something less than human, but into something more: “And we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another” (2 Cor. 3:18).

Not all metamorphoses are the stuff of Greek myth, horror movies, and weird fiction. Christianity testifies to the most magnificent and improbable of all embodied transformations: the resurrection. “Flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable. Behold! I tell you a mystery. We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet” (1 Cor. 15:50-52, emphasis added). 

We are our bodies, and this resurrection transformation will not be an escape from the flesh, but a divinization of it; not the annihilation of the self but its perfection in love—a communion that includes all of the millions of members that make up the mystery of the body of Christ, from its smallest cells to each individual person, to every tribe and language and people and nation, to a new heavens and new earth (Rev. 5:9, 21:1). Salvation at every scale imaginable.

This is a mystery that does indeed bear thinking about. We will never come to the end of its meaning.