Because of a discussion on another post I ended up watching Folding Ideas' video Annihilation and Decoding Metaphor, which is about the 2018 movie Annihilation
The video is definitely worth a watch if you like that movie because it's a good analysis and it pointed out some things that I did not notice at all when I watched Annihilation (I didn't notice that the ouroboros tattoo infected more characters as the film went on! That's a killer detail!) but he talks like his interpretation of Annihilation is the correct one, as though the film clearly "means" one thing and anyone critically analyzing it should Understand that this is the meaning.
Specifically, he insists that the movie is not supposed to be understood literally and that a purely literal interpretation is anti-intellectual. He argues that the Shimmer (the weird alien disruption that is mutating everything in Area X) is a metaphor for personal and interpersonal pain: grief, trauma, mental illness, etc.
I agree that this is a possible way to interpret the movie, but I strongly disagree that the movie is "clear" that the Shimmer is a metaphor for pain.
To me, it's frustrating when people refuse to engage with sci-fi as anything other than a metaphor. It has the same short-sightedness as the purely literal interpretation he is angry at.
Sometimes sci-fi is saying "What if this happened?" and encouraging you to think about that.
Like, say there's a story about a character who was turned into a cyborg assassin, and they faced a choice between removing their cyborg parts or having their freedoms restricted because their body was legally considered a weapon by the government.
If you said "Hey, you could interpret it like the cyborg parts are a metaphor for the behaviors they developed to survive their trauma, and now getting rid of those makes them feel like they're tearing themselves apart and making themselves weak, but they can't enjoy their life if they don't" I would say wow, cool analysis.
If you said "The story is clearly not supposed to be understood literally, the cyborg parts are not literal and are a metaphor for the toxic behaviors resulting from trauma" I would want to smack you.
Sci-fi stories encourage us to think through ideas and conflicts about stuff that doesn't actually exist in real life, because thinking about "what if it did exist in real life" expands our minds.
The story about the cyborg creates an issue that doesn't exist in real life that connects to disability, bodily autonomy, violence and who gets to wield it, and government power. Thinking about a scenario that doesn't exactly match to real life helps us explore, expand, and clarify our thoughts and ideas about disability, bodily autonomy, violence, and power.
The cyborg parts can be read as a metaphor for behaviors resulting from trauma, but dismissing the literal reading erases, for example how the character's literal body is being criminalized, which connects to a lot of totally different things.
The metaphorical reading simplifies it. It makes it less uncomfortable, less ambiguous. It's a way to avoid thinking.
Back to the movie Annihilation: Olson interprets the movie as "clearly" a metaphorical story about human pain. But Annihilation has such strong themes of otherness and ambiguity. The Shimmer is a place where boundaries and categorizations stop applying, ultimately unknowable because once you enter it, all frames of reference for understanding the world slowly dissolve.
I think the analysis is kind of weak because Olson is kind of all over the place on what he thinks the Shimmer represents specifically. I'll quote: he talks about it as "a stand-in for trauma, depression, terminal disease, addiction, alienation, grief, and every other moment in our lives that leaves us unmoored from ourselves." [15:22] This is very vague. It could mean "anything that sucks."
He also flip-flops on HOW the Shimmer represents the thing that sucks: at different points, it's the direct cause of the bad thing (his mention of Kane's long absence and sickness being part of Lena's trauma and how they were driven apart), the inner journey to confront and heal from the bad thing (his discussion of the final scene in the lighthouse), and the intimacy between people that carries inherent risks of a bad thing (the ouroboros tattoo being infectious), at different points in the video.
He seems to interpret the ending as much more straightforwardly positive than I personally did, interpreting Lena hugging Kane as her accepting how she has changed and reaching out toward intimacy again. But when I watched the movie, I found the final scene uncomfortable and unnerving, and I feel like it's supposed to be. The clip in the video shows the clinical setting, the cold blue laboratory lighting, Kane's blank stare and half-lidded eyes, it doesn't feel intimate or comforting at all.
I remember watching this analysis a couple years ago and being so perplexed. The interpretation of the Shimmer as a metaphor for human pain is definitely meaningful, but it's not more correct than understanding the unknowable cosmic horror to be a literal unknowable cosmic horror.
I don't have a super good interpretation of what Annihilation is about, so I shouldn't be criticizing.
I think there's definitely something about the interiority of human experience, which fits with Olson's interpretation, the way what goes on inside people is unknowable. This is supported by the way the previous expeditions couldn't explain what was in the Shimmer and they just kept sending him, the way all the women are private and closed-off and slowly reveal the pain they have as they mentally and physically fall apart, the way the men on the video camera have to literally cut open a dude to show what's inside him and he became a gruesome bloom of fungus, the way that Lena can't know if Kane is Kane.
But I think it's also about the otherness of nature and our own bodies, and our own bodies being part of nature, and the ways our bodies and the natural world can give us opportunity for joy and pleasure but also betray us and kill us in horrible ways, and the way we make sense of this reality is kind of a house of cards that easily falls apart.
I don't know! I disagree with the analysis on the video mainly because he argues that the film is clearly communicating that it means something metaphorical, but it is so much a film ABOUT ambiguity that this seems wrong.
Like, the movie is saying, "here, look at this thing that is unknowable, ambiguous, and impossible to describe or explain" and Olson is like "the movie about the thing whose defining characteristic is that it is unknowable, ambiguous, and impossible to describe or explain, is knowable and clear, let me describe and explain it to you."
