Annihilation

[00:00:00] Speaker A: Creatures of the night, horrific bad movies, madmen, sorcerers, poets. Are you ready to taste the demon? [00:00:17] Speaker B: Toast. [00:00:25] Speaker A: It. I also love cats. Cats are great, you know. [00:01:01] Speaker B: You know what have something to say about cats being great? [00:01:03] Speaker A: Oh yeah, yeah. My favorite fictional character, alf, he loves cats too. They're delicious, you know, cats are great. We're recording. [00:01:09] Speaker C: Great. [00:01:10] Speaker A: We're recording. Yeah. So yeah. Hey guys, I'm King Loki, the editor of Death Wish Poetry magazine. And welcome to Demon Toast, the podcast of Death Wish Poetry magazine. Here we talk about horrific and gothic literature and art and the awesome people behind it with me are. Well, you know, it's kind of fun. We're a little short staffed. Co host CA is sick. Our tonight's discussion about the other Wolfman, the legend of Paul Nashi, will unfortunately be postponed. We will instead be talking about Tamagotchis and where they come from. I'm just kidding. We're talking about Annihilation tonight written by Jeff Vandermeer and it's accompanying movie directed by Alex Garland with a tiny, tiny bonus conversation about H.P. lovecraft's the Color out of Space. Classic short story by a very racist man. With me tonight are my co host, Adrian Painter, writer, and my best friend and my other best friend in the whole wide world, my boyfriend Justin, filling in for my other co hosts who unfortunately are not here. [00:02:19] Speaker B: We love Justin. Justin's amazing. [00:02:21] Speaker A: Yeah. Returning. Returning from the void, as it were. Where I keep him. [00:02:24] Speaker C: I'm not that interesting. [00:02:25] Speaker B: You actually are. And your commentary is amazing, so don't sell yourself short. [00:02:31] Speaker A: So Annihilation, right, is two things, right? It's a book, it's a movie, it's weird fiction. It's also the beginning of a trilogy. [00:02:38] Speaker B: So actually now it's four books. [00:02:43] Speaker A: Right, I literally just forgot. So, yeah, we have M. Annihilation, Authority, Acceptance and Absolution. Absolution. Very interesting that the new one has kind of a religious overtone to it. Right? Considering where we're gonna go with this book in particular. [00:03:01] Speaker C: It's weird too that it's even a quadrology or whatever it is you want to call it. Just because like after the second book there's no like actual like timeline. It just jumps around in time. Like I haven't read the fourth book yet, but I know it's essentially a prequel but also sort of sequel. [00:03:22] Speaker A: So I don't know, we should probably talk about what it is for people who haven't read it or watched the movie. Yes, we will be spoiling these things, so. [00:03:31] Speaker B: Well, this is an older movie. And quite honestly, it did not do great in the box office. Most people completely missed the point. Point. Or they missed the movie entirely. [00:03:42] Speaker A: See, when did the book come out? [00:03:44] Speaker C: 2014. All three of those books came out in 2014. [00:03:48] Speaker B: Yes, they did. [00:03:50] Speaker A: So fun fact, the movie. This is kind of a 2001 a space odyssey situation where the movie was optioned, taken, scripted, written, shot, directed. Well, okay, maybe not all those things all at once, but it was. It was optioned by Alex Garland while before it was published. So. [00:04:10] Speaker B: Alex Garland is magic. I will just tell you, this guy did Ex Machina. He's like. He did Civil War, which, you know, especially with where we're at right now, it's like, really appropriate. This guy has, like, his finger on, like, what it is to be human. That's what I'm going to say. [00:04:32] Speaker A: Good director. He's a very good director. I mean, like, you know, I have my issues with the movie, but, you know, if this movie was directed by like a Scott Derrickson or, you know. [00:04:42] Speaker B: Villanueva couldn't have done what was done in this movie. Like, I'm serious, like you asked me earlier, what if this movie was directed by someone else and the only other person I could think of was Villanueva, who's doing Dune right now, and it would not have been what this movie was. I thought this movie was beautiful. It's one of my favorites. I own it on dvd. [00:05:03] Speaker A: I'm just saying Nueva is a little overrated. I'll take him over like Ridley Scott. [00:05:10] Speaker B: I mean, I'll take him over quite a few. I think Alex Gard, like Scarland, knocked this out of the. [00:05:17] Speaker A: I mean, personally, I want to see Jim Wynorski adapt this book. [00:05:21] Speaker B: I mean, okay, I would be down for that. That might actually. I mean, if David lynch was still David Lynch, I could see David lynch directing Annihilation. It would be really fucking weird. [00:05:34] Speaker C: It's funny too, because just speaking of Jim Winorski, him having directed Swamp Thing, the whole issue where. Swamp where issue. In Saga of the Swamp Thing, when Swamp Thing and Abby finally get it on and it's weird and psychedelic and she eats a mushroom actually fits really well into Annihilation. [00:05:58] Speaker B: It. I'm gonna tell you, the visuals in this movie, as an artist, are one of the most. Like, I saw this movie before I started painting again because I didn't get to paint for like 10 years. And I saw this movie on like a special side quest of my life that was like, very important. And when I saw it, I left the Theater, crying. And it was so inspiring from the time I was in junior high all the way up through art school and everything else. Like, I always drew tree people and stuff like that. And the imagery was. It was so magical. But that's not even what got me about this movie. So, Daniel, do you want to talk about it? [00:07:16] Speaker A: Well, I'd like to talk about the book. [00:07:19] Speaker B: Let's do it. [00:07:20] Speaker A: So, yeah, the book opens up essentially, with a very small group. They've been sent into this area, which is referred to eponymously as Area X. They don't know what the deal is with it. Oh. So our main character is only identified as the biologist. We do not get her name. We do not get anyone's names because, well, they're told that names are unwise to be shared on this mission. They're not told why. The biologist. Well, her husband was part of an expedition to go into this area, and he mysteriously came back. He was the only one. Dustin, was he the only one to come back? [00:07:55] Speaker C: No, he was. He was the only one to come back in the movie. But other members of the expedition came back in the book. They all, like, meet, like, the quote, unquote, same demise as he does. Rapid cancer takes over. They all die, mysteriously shut down, all of that. [00:08:13] Speaker A: Yeah, right. So, yeah, that's the thing. So she's there. She's there, if only because her husband had been there. And, you know, like, right off the bat, like, the vendor's use of language is corrupting. It's. It fucks with your imagination. I'll read the first bit. The tower, which was not supposed to be there, plunges into the earth in a place just before the black pine forest begins to give way to swamp. And then the reeds and wind gnarled treats of the marsh flats. All this. This part of the country had been abandoned for decades for reasons that are not easy to relate. So, okay, there are two motifs. There's this tower and there's the lighthouse. The tower is a structure built into the ground, and it goes down and down in spirals, and they go into the tower. Now, there's a. An anthropologist, a psychologist, a biologist and a surveyor. I have it written here. Well, they go into the tower, and our main character, the biologist, sees that there's writing on the wall, and she. She's the only one who can read it. I believe it's very. It's unclear, but it's written in fungus and it's. It's. It's weird fucking writing. Where lies the strangling fruit that Came from the hand of the sinner. I shall bring forth the seeds of the dead to share with the worms. That. And it trails off and like, it's horrifying because there's something down there that's writing this. They hear it, you know, they hear it moaning and groaning. And there's an added layer of horror in that. The psychologist hypnotizes them. She says it's for their. It's. She says it's for their own good. They wake up a few hours later, deep in area X. And here's the fun thing. The biologist got real close to these mushrooms and she felt the spores go into her body. And when the. The psychologist tries to hypnotize her, saying, as you listen to my voice, you will see the structure beneath it is a tunnel. It is made from stone and rock. And you will not be stressed out. You'll be totally calm. And whenever you see a bird up ahead, up above, you'll know that everything's going according to plan. Our biologist is unaffected. And she's like, what the fuck? Because when they go into the tunnel, they hear it. They hear its heartbeat. Pretty horrific. Pretty interesting, too. And also, it's very weird that all of them refer to it as a tunnel except our biologist. She knows it's a tower, you know. [00:10:39] Speaker B: So here's the thing for me with this. So towers, you usually imagine going up, like, you look at tarot cards, buildings, everything, like, they go up like a lighthouse. But this tower goes underground. And I feel like there's, like, meaning in that. [00:11:00] Speaker A: Of course there is. The thing is, is that, like, it's very obvious that area X is not just like a chemical spill or something. Something more otherworldly is going on. Right. And there's. There's a. There's an intelligence at work here. And the thing is, is that with the tunnel being built underground like that, it's like in. There's an old cliche in movies where when things go bad. Yeah. The camera flips. We have the lighthouse with its light and we have the tower, which leads to down, down, down. You know, there's a bit where the biologist is Alice in Wonderland. Alice in Wonderland, sure. Yeah, absolutely. [00:11:36] Speaker C: It doesn't even lack its own light. There's a lot of bioluminescence down there. [00:11:40] Speaker B: Exactly. [00:11:42] Speaker A: So the next day, they find that the anthropologist is missing. And the psychologist is like, it's cool. People just sort of leave. We don't know why they leave. And they're like, that's odd. So without the psychologist, they go down the Surveyor and the biologist go down and they find her. You know, they find her. She's. Well, I'll just read this. Is. Is a body, the surveyor said. Perhaps she had expected something far stranger. Perhaps she thought the figure was just sleeping. It's the anthropologist, I said, and saw that information register in the tensing of her shoulders. Without another word, she brushed past me to take up a position just beyond the body, assault rifle aimed into the darkness. Gently, I knelt beside the anthropologist. There wasn't much left of her face, and odd burn marks were all over. The remaining skin. Spilling out from her broken jaw, which looked as though someone had wrenched it open in a single act of brutality, was a torrent of green ash that sat on her chest in a mound. Her hands, palms up in her lap, had no skin left on them, only a kind of gauzy filament and more burn marks. Her legs seemed fused together and half melted, one boot missing and one flung against the wall. Strewn around the anthropologist were some of the same sample tubes I had brought with me. Her black box, crushed, lay several feet from her body. I'm going to skip a bit. I shunned my light on the wall above the anthropologist for several feet. The script on the wall became erratic, leaping up and dipping down before regaining its equilibrium. The shadows of the abyss are like the petals of a monstrous flower that shall blossom within the skull and expand the mind beyond what any man can bear. I think she interrupted the creator of the script on the wall, I said. Kind of hilarious. So, yeah, it's this mounting tension of what is going on here. And like, here's the thing, right? You go into. It's an old trope, right? You go into the. Into the. The pyramid, right? And there's writing on the wall. It's the mummy's curse or whatever. And you're like, okay, well, what happens when that was just written that afternoon. The mummy's right there. You know, it's pretty cool. [00:13:47] Speaker C: I don't know. I would like, consider this whole scene, like, just even being underground and seeing the weird guy writing. Like, the analogous scene in the actual movie would be the climax where she falls into the hole under the lighthouse that. Like that. At the very least, that one shares more visual language than what? With what? Vandermeer like writing than this scene with the bear. At least that's what I think. [00:14:18] Speaker B: No, I agree with you 100%. It's completely different. It's almost like the movie kind of starts out as, like, this weird. I mean, it's like a hero's journey kind of thing. Yeah, you get to know the characters names, which they do not give you in the book. [00:14:35] Speaker C: Yeah, it's like Shepherd. [00:14:37] Speaker B: Shepherd's the one that gets. You know, they find her leg and all of that kind of stuff, and then find out that she's dead. But it's a completely different scenario. But you go on this journey with them kind of. So it's different. But I still feel like it's kind of effective. [00:14:56] Speaker C: It's funny because the. The movie actually pairs very well with the book. And, like, this just had. This has more to do with the way Alex Garland directed it and the way he described the. What area X is in that it reflects and reflect, refracts everything to mix things together. And it's just like. It's like filming something with a camera, essentially. And once you film it, it looks different than what it actually looked like in real life. So essentially observing the story through the lens of making a movie about it, or at the very least, filming what's going on fundamentally changes the story and what it's about. And it's funny, too, because I feel like the way Garland got his, like, effects people to make his effects paint his scenes, it does share, like, a lot of visual language with the way Vandermeer. With the language Vandermeer uses in his books. There's a lot of weird fungus and things. He has, like, a weird preoccupation with fungus, if you've ever read any of his other books. And the funniest part to me is, you know that scene in the pool with the skeleton? [00:16:13] Speaker B: He's, like, on the wall, and it's the fungus, and he's. [00:16:16] Speaker C: Yeah. [00:16:17] Speaker B: Yes. [00:16:19] Speaker C: Have you. Have you read or seen Vandermeer's book Born? [00:16:23] Speaker B: No. [00:16:24] Speaker C: It looks just like the COVID Like, almost. It's. It's. It looks like the COVID of that book. And I don't know if they influenced each other or if the way Vandermeer writes and getting into his headspace to direct this movie influenced the way Garland constructed these scenes. It gives me, like, the same kind of, like, vibe. I want to say. [00:16:49] Speaker B: That just makes it more beautiful to me. Like, I really feel like, as an artist at the time, when I saw this movie, who had not been able to paint for a very long time, it. It, like, it was everything I ever thought was, like, horrifically beautiful in my life. You know what I mean? Like, that's magic. [00:17:09] Speaker A: Sure. Yeah. I do think that. So cutting back in. I mean, like, I do think that. I do think Alex Garland was not interested in the tower as a motif because, let's be honest, movies are a limited medium. You have a limited amount of time to do things. [00:17:25] Speaker B: I'm gonna tell you, this is the only movie that I do not mind cgi. I think it's literally the only one where I found it beautiful. Like, the way that they did it, it actually, like, it's probably. It's already aged well because, like, I just watched it today again, and it's as beautiful as I thought it was when I saw it. [00:17:44] Speaker A: Well, the CGI is a tool. [00:17:46] Speaker B: It's gross. Most the time. It's gross. [00:17:49] Speaker A: It's a tool. It should be used effectively. I don't know if they filmed on location in a swamp. I highly doubt it. But, like, you know, the crocodile, there was probably something physically there. They did not build a crocodile. [00:18:00] Speaker B: It was awesome. And even I know they CGI the weird. What is it? Like, this, like the deer skeletal? No, the deer were so beautiful. Those were totally CGI'd, but they were so pretty. I kind of love them. It reminded me of the magicians, you know, with the white deer, it was super pretty with the like, but it has this whole, like, thing about, like, everything becoming part of, like, everything else. Right? Like, so, like, everything's refracted in compound X and, like, the DNA included, and so we all just become part of nature and all the things. [00:18:43] Speaker A: It's. [00:18:44] Speaker B: It's beautiful. [00:18:45] Speaker A: I want to fixate on the book a little bit more because the movie does do a lot of things visually that are interesting, but what the book is doing is more complex. It's. It's about, like. He plays with words in a way that only really well. I mean, lots of people do, but, like, in a way that H.P. lovecraft did right in many of his stories. So I marked off telescoping out from this context. Had several questions and few answers. What role did the crawler serve? I had decided it was important to assign a name to the maker of words, referring to whoever is putting the fungus on the walls. What was the purpose of the physical recitation of the words? Did the actual words matter or would any words do? Where had the words come from? What was the interplay between the words and the tower creature? Put another way, were the words a form of symbiotic or parasitic communication between the crawler and the tower? Either the crawler was an emissary of the tower, or the crawler had originally existed independent from it and had come into its orbit later, but without the damned miss Example of the tower wall, I couldn't really begin to guess. Which brought me back to the words, where lies the strangling fruit that came from the hand of the sinner. Wasps and birds and other nest builders often used some core, irreplaceable substance or material to create their structures, but would also incorporate whatever they could find in their immediate environment. This might explain the seemingly random nature of the words. It was just building material. And perhaps this explained why our superiors had forbidden high tech being brought into Area X, because they knew it could be used in unknown and powerful ways by whatever occupied the place. And interestingly enough, their names also no names. We can't have Area X learning your names. I don't know what that would do. Right. But yeah, it's like she refuses to call the tower a tunnel. And she gives. She calls the. The nameless shambler in the darkness the crawler, which I don't want to say gives her power over it. Right. But it gives her a degree of understanding. She can quantify it. It's now a thing. She knows what it is and where it is. She doesn't know what nature of creature it is or what it's doing, but she can identify it as a subject. Right? [00:20:48] Speaker C: Yeah. [00:20:50] Speaker A: Yeah. So, you know, that's the big thing that's missing from the movie. There is no crawler, and there's no mystery about what the crawler is, which is fine. Fine. It does other things. Yeah. My next thing is I marked off the tree people in the book. Before we get there, let's talk about the movie a little bit. So Natalie Portman helms the movie. Right. Oscar Isaac plays her husband who returns from Area X in a weird fugue state. Go ahead. [00:21:12] Speaker B: You have Jennifer Jason Lee, who I will say is one of the, like, best actresses, like, probably from, like the time I was like a child. She was literally in the Hitchers. She's the doctor that has cancer. [00:21:27] Speaker A: Okay. [00:21:28] Speaker C: Does she play the psychologist? [00:21:30] Speaker B: Yes. [00:21:31] Speaker C: Okay. [00:21:31] Speaker B: Yes. That's Jennifer Jason Leigh. She's. She's Jennifer Jason Leigh. I don't know what else to say. I mean, she gets torn apart by two trucks in the Hitcher. It's fine. [00:21:42] Speaker A: I hate when that happens personally, you know. Cool. [00:21:45] Speaker B: So the way that they made this movie, it's about the imperfection of being human and our need for self destruction, which is what the books are about as well. Well, Daniel, you are 100% right. They. In the book, it's way more evident. But the way that they play this in the movie is so like Artistically pretty. But we do, like all of us, we all do things that are unhealthy for ourselves. We self sabotage. We do like a hundred million things that are like, you know, like it's part of being human. And that's what this movie is like. In the movie, not the book, the whole reason she's on the expedition is because she's been cheating on her husband and she feels like he went off on this expedition to go kill himself basically so that, you know, he can end it because he's over and she feels like she owes him. And she keeps saying that over and over again like I owe him. It's all about the imperfection of humanity. And it talks about cells and cancer and how we have like aging even and how it's an imperfection in our cells. It's. It's really human. [00:23:10] Speaker C: So that's like another way the movie and the book kind of diverge. The movie itself is entirely human focused. All of the biology that they're talking about is literally just cell biology. They're talking about cancer. This is what cells are, this is how they divide. This is what DNA is. The book in itself isn't concerned with that. It's about environments. It's about ecology and ecological systems. Because the biologist in the movie, she's in the book, she's not a cell biologist. She goes out and studies different environments. She loves environmental transitions between things. She has a fixation on a pond in a vacant lot by her house where here she. They've adapted the character to work better in a film because more people can relate to more or less a doctor character than could really relate to like a straight up like hyper fixated biologist, like field biologist. Someone who studies plants, someone who studies insects, someone who studies birds. So you're right. This is like a very. It's a much more human story than the books are. And that's another big way that I verge. That's really more or less my point. [00:24:33] Speaker A: So, yes, this is also. So this. All right. This is a property about many things. What it's primarily about. Right. Like, okay, yeah, there's. There's the human element, of course. Sure. Right. But what it's primarily about is perception, observation, control, and our attempts to do these things with the unknown. Right. So for that to, to illustrate that. Right. There's a sequence in the movie where they see a bunch of trees that have grown in human shape with legs attached to hips and you know, and the, the one. The one. [00:25:09] Speaker B: And it's beautiful. [00:25:11] Speaker A: It's interesting. Yeah. I mean, it's. It's a creepy image. It's very. It's very striking. And the one is like, oh, my God, it's got human cells. Right? Okay, so I'm gonna read how the book handles this because it's very, very, very cool. And it illustrates the fragility of, like, the fragility of human habitation. So there's the tower, there's some woods, there's the lighthouse. But before you get to the lighthouse, there's a ruined village. Right? They reached the village. The deserted village had so sunk into the natural landscape of the coast that I did not see it until I was upon it. The trail dipped into a depression of sorts, and there lay the village, fringed by more stunted trees. Only a few roofs remained on the 12 or 13 houses, and the trail through had crumbled into a porous rubble. Some outer walls still stood dark, rotting wood splotched with lichen. But for the most part, these walls had fallen away and left me with a peculiar glimpse of the interiors. The remains of chairs and tables, a child's toys, rotted clothing, ceiling beams brought to earth, covered in moss and vines. There was a sharp smell of chemicals in that place, and more than one dead animal decomposing into the mulch. Some of the houses had, over time, slid into the canal to the left and looked into their skeletal remains, like creatures struggling to leave the water. It all seemed like something that had happened a century ago, and what was left were just vague recollections of the event. But what had been kitchens and living rooms or bedrooms. I also saw a few peculiar eruptions of moss or lichen rising 4, 5ft tall, misshapen, the vegetative matter forming an approximation of limbs and heads and torsos, as if there had been runoff from the material, too heavy for gravity, that had congregated at the foot of these objects. Or perhaps I imagined this effect. Okay, I'll read the next paragraph real fast. One particular tableau struck me in an almost emotional way. Four such eruptions, one standing and three decomposed to the point of sitting in what once must have been a living room with a coffee table and a couch, all facing some point at the far end of the room, where lay only the crumbling soft brick remains of a fireplace and chimney. The smell of lime and mint unexpectedly arose, cutting through the must, the loam. She goes on for some bit, and what I love about this is you see very clearly people made out of moss and lichen, and she's like, maybe made out of moss and lichen probably just some runoff, you know, looks like a person desperately trying to conform to what you would expect to see. Because, hey, that, that adventure in the tower was pretty fucked. Right? You know, I can't handle moss people right now. And like, what I like about how the book. Because the biologist is much more detached than she is in the movie. In the movie. Right. She's not just attached, she's very analytical. Science is what she has and science is what she trusts. There's a bit where the psychologist says, you know, trust your measurements, don't trust your eyes. And I like that because it kind of highlights how they're approaching the situation. It's the unknown. It doesn't make any sense. Right. Things are weird. People don't write with fungus. You know, it's not as like. It's not as like sci fi movie as the movie is, where there's like, deer with, like, more antlers than they should have and crystalline trees, flowers growing on them. Yeah, like, that stuff is really cool. In a movie you need shorthand to get your point across. You know, you can't. You can't. You can't build a sense of dread with the words you're choosing, you know? [00:28:48] Speaker B: Yeah. I feel like the book and the movie had two different goals. [00:28:52] Speaker A: Yes, they did, which is my point, but go on. [00:28:54] Speaker B: Yeah. So the book is going more from like a human environmental, alien. Like, it's very like, scientific. Like it's Lovecraft. Yes, it's Lovecraft. It takes the human element completely out of it. What Arleigh, what Alex Garland did with the film was made it entirely like, it's. It's about like the human experience and what's wrong with us. Like, not as like, genetics, although it does go there. It also goes from like an emotional like, like what we do to ourselves kind of thing and then makes it beautiful. And it has like this beautiful confrontation. And I'm going to tell you, the imagery of the crystal trees and even like the plaster lighthouse and then the hole with the tower, like, they do it completely differently than the book, but it is so emotionally powerful because it's like she takes power of herself because she realizes that this being is literally just doing to her what she is doing to it. It's a copy of a copy of a copy to cop, like, to copy Trent Reznor and Nine Inch Nails. Like, it's a thing. Like, it's beautiful. Like, her first instinct is to, like, hit it and it hits her. You know what I mean? Justin's nodding. [00:30:28] Speaker C: Well, it's. It's It's a lot like the. The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, where you fundamentally change something by observing it to the action of observing it. It's more applicable on, you know, when you're studying atoms and electrons and everything, because the photons that. That are coming from your eyes in order for you to visually observe something, are knocking out the photons and electrons that you're trying to look at. [00:30:55] Speaker B: Exactly. And honestly, light reacts differently when you're looking at it than when you're not looking at it. And it's totally insane. Insane. [00:31:04] Speaker C: It's a particle in a wave. [00:31:06] Speaker B: Yes, it's. It's crazy. So, yes, I 100 agree. But that's like the thing. It's like a reflection of her. [00:31:15] Speaker A: Oh, okay. So, I mean, like, you know, if we're gonna. Okay, so the movie, right, being a movie, it doesn't feel like showing all the journals because that's a pivotal part of the book. Because what are you gonna do, right? It's like in the Shining, right? There's the. There's a wonderful sequence in the book where Jack goes into the basement and he finds all kinds of artifacts from the decades of the Overlook, right? He finds, like, creepy dolls and pictures and diaries, newspaper clippings. And that's Stephen King's way of kind of filling you in on the, you know, the. The backstory of the Overlook and its horrific character and the things that have occurred within its walls right here. What happens in the book is she finds the journals of the previous expeditions. She was told there were 11 before her or 12 before her. She finds hundreds of journals, and it's like, how long have they been doing this? And once she starts reading them and I'll read a little bit. But the thing is, the movie's not going to do that. What? You're going to have a bunch of exposition. You're going to have her flipping through a book with, like, a voiceover going, oh, yes, this place sucks. You know, they. They do what you do. Logically. They find. They find a camcorder and it's Oscar Isaac cutting a guy's stomach open because he feels something moving in his body. And you see his large intestines. Is it his large intestines, Justin? [00:32:32] Speaker C: It might be his large intestines. He might have been infected by, like, a giant slug monster. You can't. You don't really know. [00:32:38] Speaker B: It felt like an eel to me. [00:33:12] Speaker A: It was moving and, like, they can't handle it. They're like, whoa, we can't afford this. When they see it, you know, like the one girl is just like. It was a trick of the light. Okay? Nothing. And it isn't. It's incomprehensible in the book. It's just the biologist that makes it there, right. And I'm just gonna read a little bit because there's a lot and it's. It's good stuff. To start with, I had to quarantine the lies and. And you can see, like, how she's using her analytical mind. She's using the process of scientific inquiry to keep herself sane. It's like when you find out your country's at war with a foreign power and you're like, oh my God, am I gonna die? And you just start sweeping to take your mind off it, you know? Now I don't know why I made that reference, though. No. To start with, I had to quarantine the lies and obfuscation of my superiors from data that pertain to the actual eccentricities of Area X. For example, the secret knowledge that there had been a proto Area X, a kind of preamble and beachhead established first. As much as seeing the mound of journals had radically altered my view of Area X, I did not think that the higher number of expeditions told me much more about the tower and its effects. It told me primarily that even if the border was expanding, the progress of assimilation by Area X could still be considered conservative. The recurring data points found in the journals that related to repeating cycles and fluctuations of seasons of the strange and the ordinary were useful in establishing trends. But this information too, my superiors probably knew, and therefore it could be considered something already reported by others. The individual details chronicled by the journals might tell tales of heroism or cowardice, of good decisions and bad decisions, but ultimately they spoke to a kind of inevitability. No one had as yet plumbed the depth of intent or purpose in a way that had obstructed that intent or purpose. Everyone had died or been killed, returned, changed or returned unchanged. But Area X had continued on as it always had, while our superiors seemed to fear any radical reimagining of the situation so much that they had continued to send in knowledge strapped expeditions as if this was the only option. Feed Area X but do not antagonize it. And perhaps someone will, through luck or mere repetition, hit upon some explanation, some solution before the world becomes Area X. There was no way I could corroborate any of these theories, but I took a grim comfort in coming up with them anyway. You know, she takes her husband's journal because she finds it and she's, she's more upset that she found it than if she had not found it because like now there's an account and, you know, she finds that he. He left and took a boat and went further deeper in Justin. Yeah. What'd you think of that? [00:35:58] Speaker C: No. Yeah. So as far, as far as, I guess like all of that in the book and the movie goes, Area X, we can conclude that in both productions, I want to say that it is a genius loci. It is an area with thought and intention. In the movie, it's an alien life form. Like you see it come down as a meteor right in the beginning of the movie. In the book. Well, not even in the first book, but in you, you get, you get more of a sense of it later in the second and the third book. Area X is a force of nature. Essentially. It was a weird place and something strange happened because people were fucking around with the nature of it. And it got bigger and it started doing things to the people and organisms that lived within its boundaries, much like any other force of nature or environment I've heard, and I believe Vandermeer himself described it as thus. The entire Southern Reach trilogy or quadrilogy now is considered like eco horror, where there is something going on with the environment that can't really be understood or controlled or anything. Area X itself, you can very strongly make the case that it's more or less a metaphor for human made climate change, because the Area X phenomenon doesn't happen without people mucking about. You learn in the second book that even though when it was first discovered, Area X was considered a threat and they were throwing resources at it as time went on and everything seemed more or less okay, they allowed the Southern Reach to essentially rot and deteriorate. That's more or less like what we've done with man made climate change. It start. It's much older than we get the credit for. Where we've done studies where we can start to see the effects of what we were doing to the environment as far as greenhouse gases, global warming, pollution, all the way back to the beginning of the Industrial revolution in the 1850s, 1860s. Climate scientists have seen the way the world works. The environment, our temperature, our climate starting to change. Even all the way back then we knew about man made climate change and greenhouse gases and the possibility of global warming all the way back in the 1960s. And the powers that be decided that, you know, we weren't going to worry about it. Maybe someone was going to come up with something down the line to fix it. But we can still keep, you know, drilling for oil, burning fossil fuel, all that fun stuff for however long we want. And then we also have this other competing force in the books of more or less man's hubris, in the fact that not only are we separate from the environment, we're above it. It doesn't affect us. It doesn't matter. We can ignore it. There's a lot of that in the second book. Because you have control, I believe. Like, his actual name is, like, John Rodriguez, but he goes by control and authority. As the new head of the Southern reach, sees all of these people going about their lives in the surrounding towns and cityscape from Area X like nothing's going on. Like, it doesn't affect them because they don't think about it. It doesn't affect them until it might someday. And it's funny, too, because it's true. In the real world, we like to believe that we're separate from nature and the environment. But, I mean, Adrian, have you ever been to Philadelphia? [00:40:03] Speaker B: Have been in the airport. And I'm going to tell you, I was named after Yo, Adrian from Rocky. [00:40:10] Speaker C: Dan and I, we live in Philadelphia, so we have our own impressions from living here. But, Adrian, when I say the city of Philadelphia, what's, like, some things about this city that come to your mind? [00:40:21] Speaker B: Lloyd Alexander, obviously, Rocky, my friend Dan Hodges production company that he started, like, it's weird. It's all art shit. [00:40:32] Speaker C: Because I'm an artist, I should be more specific. [00:40:34] Speaker A: Okay. [00:40:35] Speaker B: Also. [00:40:37] Speaker C: When I say the city of Philadelphia, what do you think about the cityscape? What do you think about, like, the land here is, like, walking the blocks of the city. [00:40:47] Speaker B: I figure it's a lot like Boston. Like, you have trash on the streets. You have really big skyscrapers, and then sometimes you have, like, beautiful little gardens. Places like that. Like, what I picture, I figure the suburbs or, like, the urban places where there's, like, trees and forests, because I know they exist out there. [00:41:14] Speaker C: Like, so Philadelphia, contrary to. I feel like what most people think is actually incredibly green. There are trees everywhere, the environments everywhere. Even, like, just around where I live. Like, we live in the middle of the city, more or less, but we're, like, down the road from one of the biggest parks. There's, like, overgrown lots and trees. There's trees bigger than my house, like, taller than my house on my street. And it's like a city that's more or less. It's urbanized, and there's concrete. But the concrete and the Asphalt. And the buildings are. And a constant struggle with the environment. [00:42:02] Speaker B: The plants grow up from the cracks. [00:42:06] Speaker C: Yeah. And it's funny too, because it gives me. It's part of the reason why I love living here is I just love the environment of this place. Like by our house, there are these really tall otherworldly radio cell towers with glowing lights. You can tell that you're close to home and close to the city. Not even by, like this, depending on where you're going coming from. Not just by the skyscraper, but by the glowing lights. But when you look at them, they're surrounded from where we are. It's almost like they're surrounded by trees, more or less. It's a. It's this weird, super, like, super positioning. I read like a short story from that was written like almost 30 years ago from a sci fi writer who lived in Philadelphia. Can't remember the name of the story. I can't even remember the name of the author. But he describes. But he describes. He calls the cell radio towers the Seven Sisters. There's eight of them now. And that's how I always think of them whenever I see them. And there's like this weird, like, unification of nature and urbanism in the city. The city is actually within the city of Philadelphia. This is one of the first places I've ever. And I grew up in the suburbs of New Jersey. One of the first places I've ever seen a live raccoon. The first place I've ever seen a live possum. First place I've ever seen live skunks. [00:43:35] Speaker A: Time out. Time out, Time out. [00:43:37] Speaker B: I ever saw a live possum. I thought it was a chupacabra in my trash can. [00:43:43] Speaker A: It might have been. [00:43:43] Speaker B: All I could see was the tail going all crazy. When I lived on beach in Wareham, it was crazy. [00:43:50] Speaker A: So I just wanted to say that he's saying all this and he's from fucking New Jersey. [00:43:54] Speaker B: I know he's from New Jersey. I'm from a lot of places. I don't even know where I'm from. [00:43:58] Speaker C: And it's. It's like I'm seeing so much nature here. I've seen herons catch fish. I've seen eagles take. It's not eagles. I've seen hawks take pigeons out of the sky. I've seen more nature here, living in an urban environment than I seen in my own. [00:44:16] Speaker A: Like, yeah, we even saw Gwar here. I mean, it's crazy. [00:44:21] Speaker B: Well, gwar is like the. The. [00:44:24] Speaker C: The last, like, one. One of the other, like, pictures I'd really like to paint for you is that there used to be a building here on the. The intersection of Erie and Broad Street. It's infamous because somebody spray painted on the side of the building Boner forever. And I used to see it every time I went to work as a pharmacy student. And the most interesting thing about it is that was that while the building itself was still abandoned, there were trees growing out of it on the 10th, 11th. Like, people like, to my point being, people like to think that we're separate from nature, but we're not. [00:45:09] Speaker B: I feel like people are starting to feel like we're less than separate from nature because we have shows like the Last of Us, for example, where it's literally nature takes over and we're just defending ourselves because that's literally like. That's actually like, if we're being honest, like, it's best case scenario because we're, like, in the middle of killing our world. I'll tell you, I read this amazing book when I was in third grade. It was called, like, Green Earth or something. And it let me know about the ozone and CFCs. And I tried to start this, like, group in my school to, like, save the planet. I had pins. I had pins. Save the planet. I made them. I drew them. I wasn't even an artist at the time, but it was like, a thing. But, like, nobody takes it seriously. And everyone's like, well, what about the homeless? Or what about this? But here's the thing. Nobody's doing anything about the homeless, and nobody's doing anything about saving the earth either. [00:46:12] Speaker A: I mean, you. You appeal to art, you appeal to fiction. For. To highlight, like, what you think people are thinking. I point you towards, like, the most popular animes. They're all Ice Case. That's a genre of anime where you go into a video game and that's your life. I just think that people. What? [00:46:29] Speaker B: You're too young. You're too young to understand, but it's basically brain scan, where you go into, like, a VR reality. [00:46:36] Speaker A: And what brain scan is. [00:46:38] Speaker B: Did you see the movie? [00:46:39] Speaker C: Yeah, I saw Brain Scan. We also read Ready Player One. It's the same thing too. [00:46:43] Speaker B: Okay. Yes. Ready Player Brain scanning first. [00:46:47] Speaker A: Justin, I'm gonna exile you from this planet for bringing that up on my show. How could you? [00:46:54] Speaker C: My larger point being is just that, like, you know, a lot. A lot of what the book is trying to say is people think that they're separate from nature and what's going on, but we're very much not. [00:47:04] Speaker A: Right? [00:47:04] Speaker B: Yes, it's like the Talking Head song, okay? It's. We're all connected. It's like a whole thing. Yes, there is a Talking Head song. I cannot remember the name of it. [00:47:16] Speaker A: There's a couple Talking Head songs, you know, they made, they have albums and stuff, they toured for years. And you may find yourself living in a shotgun shack and you may ask yourself, how did I get here? [00:47:27] Speaker B: Because he's superhuman. The difference between the book and the movie, the movie is highlighting the problems of being human and then giving hope to like human existence via alien intervention. Because apparently that's what we need. Because we're a fucking mess. Like, let's be honest, we need some aliens to come down and show us like how to get over our self destructive nature. [00:47:51] Speaker A: I like that. You think you know what the aliens were up to in the movie. [00:47:54] Speaker B: I mean, that's where it got us at the end. [00:47:58] Speaker A: Okay, so let's talk about the end of the movie. So she goes into the lighthouse, right? And it's like feeding into. I think you're the one that said that this was like a hero's journey, right? [00:48:08] Speaker B: It is. It's totally a Joseph Campbell, like straight up hero's journey. [00:48:13] Speaker A: So in any hero's journey, there's something very significant. This happens in any Disney movie. Happens in most Marvel movies and most stories in general, actually. There's what's known as the Katabasis, where the hero descends into the underworld and confronts either a specter of their father or as in Luke Skywalker's case, or in this movie themselves. [00:49:07] Speaker B: And that's the thing. She has to fight herself? [00:49:10] Speaker A: Well, no, because she goes into the basement, she goes into the meteor hole that the, whatever, whatever caused Area X has transfigured into, as you describe it, an HR Giger little dungeon, right? And like, here's the thing, right? Like it's not a good translation of the Tower. She confronts the psychologist down there who has been pushing them to get to get that far. And she's broken down into her component elements and transfigured into a mysterious ball of genetic light, right? [00:49:42] Speaker B: At first she's faceless. Then she gets her face again. And then she gives herself up and turns into all of these amazing, beautiful lights. So that was that. [00:49:53] Speaker A: Well, she's deconstructed and then some of Natalie Portman's blood goes into it. [00:50:29] Speaker B: Dividing. So it's like seeing her, like if you look at it, it's literally like eyes looking back at her and then turning and dividing. And then it turns into this weird. [00:50:42] Speaker A: Yes, well, that's the thing. It steals her face, right? And it, it struggles to become her. And, you know, like, Natalie Portman is able to blow it up. The question is, is. The question really is, is, you know, what was it doing? Right? Because before all that cool stuff happened, we see Oscar Isaac, she finds another camcorder and it's of Oscar Isaac sitting down by the wall and holding a phosphorus grenade in his hands. And he's talking to someone and he's like, yeah, go find my wife. You know, and the horror is that he's talking to his doppelganger. [00:51:21] Speaker B: It's him being honest with himself because he's ready to self destruct and he's about to commit suicide because he. The whole reason he went on the expedition was because he found out that she was having an affair and he did not want to come back. And he went through this whole thing and we don't even know what journey he went on. We just see clips of it through the movie. [00:51:49] Speaker A: That's true. [00:51:50] Speaker B: At the end, you don't know what he went through. In the tower with the creature. You just see the end of the effect where he gives. He blows himself up to give the creature. And at the end, Natalie Portman gives the creature the thing. She pulls the pin, but she's holding its hands and it accepts. Knows what she's doing because she's fighting herself the whole time. [00:52:18] Speaker A: Yeah, I kind of thought it didn't know. I. I kind of saw it as, you know, I kind of saw it as an. As an Odysseus moment where she, you know, she. She pulled one over on. [00:52:27] Speaker B: She did not. Because in the end, she and it were still the same. That's why her eyes had the shimmer. Which is. Instead of calling it Area X, they call it the shimmer in the movie. [00:52:39] Speaker A: Except. Except, except Natalie Portman doesn't get out at all. It's a doppelganger. Natalie Portman never gets out. She's a doppelganger. [00:52:47] Speaker B: Well, she's not. She kills the doppelganger. Theoretically, but she doesn't in the books. But we're talking about. [00:52:53] Speaker A: No, no, no, no, no, no, no. [00:52:54] Speaker C: No, no, no, no. [00:52:55] Speaker A: First of all, there's no doppelganger in the book. That whole sequence is invented by the movie. Secondly, she goes to her husband and the implication is that they're both, They've both been replaced. And she's like, are you Kane? And he's like, I don't know. And he asks, are you really Lena? And she Just looks at him and they hug and you see both of their eyes shimmer. You know, you keep saying exactly, but like, you know, you're making declarative statements about something that is. That is meant to be mysterious and confusing. [00:53:24] Speaker B: It is entirely mysterious. And you are right. [00:53:26] Speaker C: Well, because the other thing is, is that within the context of the movie, was that she was. Lena was being changed anyway. She saw the shimmer in her cells. [00:53:35] Speaker A: True, true, true. [00:53:37] Speaker C: She comes back changed. She can't really, like, answer if she's still Lenna. And it doesn't matter if her, the doppelganger come back. The shimmer is still gonna be there. [00:53:48] Speaker A: True. That's true. Okay. [00:53:50] Speaker B: It changed her no matter what. Like, she's not the same as when she left. [00:53:55] Speaker A: The movie is much less ambiguous than anything going on in the book. So I will concede that point. I think that's fair. And I think Adrian's summation, despite my vigorous pushback is at least a valid take. I mean, you know, you're a painter and, like, you know, why don't you tell us more about how the, you know, the visuals hooked you, you know? [00:54:15] Speaker B: Okay, so seriously? Yeah, the visuals are stunning. I don't even like cgi. I'm usually super against it. But the people, the tree people and the girl who agrees to become a tree person. Oh, my God. That, like, literally, like, brought me to tears when I saw it the first time. [00:54:33] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:54:34] Speaker B: Because I think if I were a character in this movie, I would probably be her. And the whole, like, fight about, like. Because let's be honest, okay? All of us have flaws. We're all human. We all have self destructive tendencies. We all do things that are not good for us. And sometimes we like, it's. It's just part of being human. Right. So having to confront that. And honestly, I feel like Lena kind of sees some of the beauty in it. The way that you find out in the books that it's an alien, but, like, the alien figure, like, mimics her and all of this stuff because it is her. Because it takes her blood like that, and it takes it like from her nose, like, where she was bleeding. But it's like it turns into like these eyes and then their cells, like the cancer cells. And it's beautiful. Like, it becomes her and it reflects her and it only reacts the way that she reacts. Like, this is. This is what being human is. We fight, we. We try to, you know, destroy things we don't understand. We try to ignore things we don't understand. It's Like a whole thing. And then at the end, she doesn't even understand herself. And it's, it's beautiful. And he does, he asks her, he's like, are you Lena? And she's like, I don't know. [00:56:05] Speaker A: I don't know. [00:56:06] Speaker B: Yeah, you don't know either. And that is the beauty of the movie. That is the most powerful point. And I feel like she came to this point where she became something bigger than herself and less like all of the self. And you see through the movie all of her self destructive tendencies and all of the harm she caused, which is why she's on this hero's journey in the first place, because she feels like she owes her husband because she was cheating on him and all of this stuff. But she did love him. And it was, it's a thing. Because humans do things that sometimes are inexplicable. We crazy things and we don't understand it. It's weird. Like humans are complicated and flawed and then it's like maybe it's fixed her in a way because like the biology, like, you know, like it made things beautiful. Like the deer that you see in the woods. [00:57:06] Speaker A: I want to ask you a question. [00:57:07] Speaker B: Yes. [00:57:08] Speaker A: Yeah. So, you know, focusing in on your analysis, right, that this is, this is a specter of herself, Right. Again, you're an artist. You know art. [00:57:20] Speaker B: I hope I do. I mean that's a, that's a complicated thing. [00:57:26] Speaker A: Well, I want to, I want to zero in on that. Because that's your expertise, right? Like a self portrait. Tell me about how, how that impacts you. Tell me about what a doppelganger really is. Like, do you have any. A concept of that? Have you thought about that? Because clearly you see that as being significant. [00:57:44] Speaker B: You know, every self portrait I have ever done, ugly because I take the ugliest parts of myself and I make them evident because I feel like those are the most obvious parts of it, I guess. [00:57:58] Speaker A: Okay. [00:57:59] Speaker B: I don't know, like seeing yourself as pretty or seeing yourself as anything else. It feels weird to me do that personally. Now when I look at other people, I can see their beauty and I love to paint them beautifully and I do that quite often, but as a self thing. And that's what this movie is like, as a self thing. Like, do you think in your novels, do you think you write yourself beautifully? Well, because you know, your splendor. [00:58:26] Speaker A: Well, it depends which. Depends which character I'm writing because I have, I have at least two characters based on myself. [00:58:33] Speaker B: Do you paint them pretty well? [00:58:35] Speaker A: I mean, there's some complexity there, but paint them pretty. [00:58:39] Speaker B: But do you? [00:58:40] Speaker A: Well, yeah, that's the thing, I think, in art. And the answer, obviously, is no, but that's because when I'm making art, I'm exorcising demons, you know, that's what it is. [00:58:49] Speaker B: And that's what this movie is. That's the entire point of this movie, I think, is exercising, like, the imperfection and the way that we see ourselves as being human, which is totally different from the book. [00:59:03] Speaker A: Do you think that there's some subtle, unspoken chemistry or alchemy between Lena and the doppelganger when that leads to her handing the grenade to it? [00:59:15] Speaker B: They're the same, and she finally understands that they're the same. [00:59:19] Speaker A: Why doesn't she blow herself up then? Why don't they die together? [00:59:21] Speaker B: Because it wasn't about her. It was about her husband. She owed him. [00:59:29] Speaker A: So someone else died that looked like her. [00:59:32] Speaker B: No, she had to make it back to him. [00:59:34] Speaker A: Okay. [00:59:35] Speaker B: That was the thing. That's why she didn't blow herself up. [00:59:38] Speaker A: Okay, then why blow up anybody? [00:59:41] Speaker B: Well, first off, if you could blow yourself up, would you? [00:59:44] Speaker A: Maybe, yeah. I mean, I'm, I, I, I, I just want to get to. Maybe I'm looking at it too penetratively. Maybe I'm looking too hard at it. But to me, and me, she was trying to get rid of this thing that was trying to steal her life. [01:00:01] Speaker B: You know, saw the video where it took over the life of her husband. [01:00:06] Speaker A: Right, right. [01:00:08] Speaker B: So that thing that she blew up killed her husband, but also it's the last bit of her husband, and she realized what went into it. Like, that was the last bit of him, but also that killed him. [01:00:23] Speaker A: Wait, wait, wait. So wait, you think that the shimmering light that the biologist that the psychologist became is the same entity that became her husband's doppelganger? [01:00:33] Speaker B: Yes. It's all the same. [01:00:35] Speaker A: Oh, hang on. No, no, no. I see where you're going. Because after she destroys that, that brings down the entirety of the Shimmer for some reason. Okay, okay, yeah, fair enough. So it is, in a sense, like, yeah, it takes her form and she. And she is confronted by, much like Odysseus in the abyss, right? [01:00:53] Speaker B: Where he could have chosen to die like her husband chose to do, or she could choose to go back and try to save him, which is she. The whole time, she kept saying she owed him. That's the whole. It's the hero's journey. He has to go. She has a mission. It's to save him. That's it. Even though I'm wrong and it's the human condition and it goes so much further than that. That's what it is. [01:01:18] Speaker A: Sure, sure, sure. Well, okay. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. I appreciate you going into that and bearing with me. [01:01:27] Speaker C: Sophisticated. [01:01:30] Speaker A: Just to wrap up Annihilation. So Adrian sees it as like what it really is is not as important as what is happening metaphorically, what is happening existentially in Natalie Portman's mind and the thing. Right. [01:01:43] Speaker B: Yeah. Well, it's not even just Natalie Portman. It's Jennifer, Jason Lee and all of the other characters. Like you have the girl who decides to become a flower person because she's like. She's already just trying to live. Like they talk about her not being able to wear like short sleeve shirts because she's been cutting herself to feel alive. And at the end, before she decides to become a flower person, she's wearing a tank top. [01:02:14] Speaker A: Sure, sure. [01:02:15] Speaker B: And you don't even see her scars because it doesn't matter. You just know that's who she is and where she is. [01:02:21] Speaker A: I think that transformation means different things in different contexts. Right. A cannabasis is usually. That's the moment. That's the. The hero's darkest moment when he's all alone and he confronts some big nasty in. In the underworld. And then he emerges fully formed. Right. There's this wonderful part where the psychologist. The philosopher. No, the philosopher. The psychologist. All right. Okay. So she comes on the psychologist, and the psychologist has jumped from the top of the tower. The lighthouse. [01:02:50] Speaker B: The lighthouse, not the tower, because the tower's underground. [01:02:53] Speaker A: The towers. That's right, yeah. So she's screaming annihilation at her when she sees her, because that's the. The. The. The psychological keyword to make her kill herself. It does not work because she consumed the spores earlier. [01:03:03] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:03:04] Speaker A: Anyway, anyway, she says, you know, they have a bit of a conversation because the psychologist is dying and the biologist wants answers and she will not get them, she says. You're still here, she said, surprising her voice. But I killed you, didn't I? Not even a little bit, you know. A rough wheeze again and the film of confusion leaving her eyes. Did you bring water? I'm thirsty. I did. And I pressed my canteen to her mouth so she could swallow a few drops, a few gulps. Drops of blood glistened on her chin. Where is the surveyor? The psychologist asked in a gasp. Back at the base camp. Would it come with you? No. The wind was blowing back the curls of her hair, revealing a slashing wound on her forehead, possibly from impact with the wall above. Didn't like your company, heh? The psychologist asked. Didn't like what you've become? A chill came over me. I'm the same as always. The psychologist's gaze drifted out to sea again. I saw you, you know, coming down the trail toward the lighthouse. That's how I knew for sure you had changed. What did you see? I asked to humor her. A cough, accompanied by red spittle. You were a flame, she said, and I had a brief vision of my brightness made manifest. You were a flame scorching my gaze. A flame drifting across the salt flats through the ruined village. A slow burning flame. A will o' the wisp floating across the marsh and the dunes. Floating and floating, like nothing human, but something free and floating. From the shift in her tone, I recognized that even now she was trying to hypnotize me. It won't work. I'm immune to hypnosis again. So it goes on for a bit. And, you know, I wonder if she really thought she was trying to hypnotize her, because I sure don't. [01:04:44] Speaker B: What do you think a will o' the wisp is? [01:04:47] Speaker A: Well, it's a. It's a. It's a. An eerie, possibly otherworldly flame. [01:04:52] Speaker B: What does it do? Tell me. It's supposed to get you lost. [01:04:57] Speaker A: Cool. [01:04:57] Speaker B: There you go. You're supposed to get lost with the willow. The wisp also. They're ghost lights. [01:05:03] Speaker A: Sure. [01:05:04] Speaker B: And also, do you think that translates in the movie at all? With the flames and everything else? Do you think he used that? [01:05:12] Speaker A: Not intentionally. [01:05:13] Speaker B: Justin, how do you feel about that? [01:05:15] Speaker C: How do I feel about the will of the wisp motif? [01:05:19] Speaker B: No, the flames and how that was used at the end of the movie. [01:05:23] Speaker A: I mean, the shimmer was going away. [01:05:25] Speaker C: The flames at the end of the movie were literally just cleansing flames. They were. It activated, like, to literally just like destroy whatever was left of the shimmer or Area X. Didn't really serve, like, a deeper purpose than that because the thing is, is that like Area X, the shimmer. Shimmer was not a wholly negative, like phenomena. It was just something that happened and something that just changes people irrevocably. So it's a clean. It's a cleansing flame. But maybe you're just trying to say that, I don't know, you see what the flame as them all getting lost and getting rid of Area X, like, stops them from like actual. [01:06:11] Speaker B: That's not. No. [01:06:14] Speaker A: Well then, elaborate. [01:06:15] Speaker B: She stopped herself. She set herself on fire. It wasn't about area X at all. When she put that thing in its hand, all right? It was about her own self destruction. It was personal. [01:06:29] Speaker A: Okay? [01:06:29] Speaker B: And that's what brought. But it didn't actually bring the shimmer down, did it? Because she was part of it. And at the end, her eyes were the shimmer, like, and so were his. And they accepted each other. Like, that's it. I think the shimmer actually was such a beautiful thing because it took nature and human and all of the things and it mixed it all up. Like, what if we were all, like, mixed up with nature? I mean, you have shows like the Last of Us where it's like the spore virus and we're fighting against this thing and it's like, whatever, but, like, what if it just made us more beautiful? And everything we saw, I mean, some of it was violent and some of it is literally like, on a horror scale. Right? Because you have the weird bone, like, bear, boar thing, you have the crocodile craziness with the shark teeth, but it's just combining everything together so we're all one. Yeah, right. [01:07:34] Speaker C: Really just getting back to, like, both works as a larger whole and I guess kind of like tracking back to like the whole, I guess, like, climate, like, Area X is like a metaphor for climate change that the book tries to run with. What are we most afraid of happening when we do talk about climate change? And what is gonna happen? [01:07:56] Speaker B: Dying. That's what humans are mostly afraid of. We're afraid of annihilation. [01:08:01] Speaker C: Yes. And we're also afraid of change. Change. And we're also afraid of a challenge to our supremacy over nature. So I'm gonna tell you like this. We are not the first organisms on this planet to completely change the environment of the Earth. We're not the first to cause a mass extinction. Probably won't be the last. [01:08:34] Speaker B: Well, it's gonna cleanse itself before it goes there. Well. [01:08:39] Speaker C: So have you ever, either of you ever heard of the Great Oxidation Event? Yes. No. [01:08:45] Speaker B: No. [01:08:46] Speaker C: So. [01:08:47] Speaker B: No. Bring it on. [01:08:48] Speaker C: It's the first ever mass extinction we actually have evidence for. It took place 2.5 billion years ago, before oxygen was ubiquitous in the atmosphere. And what happened was, was that a certain set of microbes evolved to conduct photosynthesis. The byproduct of photosynthesis is that it creates oxygen. Oxygen as a molecule for us in general is actually pretty toxic. We evolved to, like, breathe it in and use it as, like, a part of, like, our regular metabolism and cell respiration or whatever. But the microbes back then, they couldn't deal with it. They all die essentially, if they couldn't adapt to all of the oxygen in the environment. I mean, even now there are microbes that oxygen will just kill them. Like there's anaerobic bacteria, botulism is one of them. There's like the. There's the microbes that live in hydrothermal vents. None of them can like deal with oxygen. It kills them. And the other thing is, is that like, oxygen is toxic because it doesn't hold onto its electrons real well. And you get what's called free radicals and they end up binding to the electrons on our DNA and damage them and cause mutations which can cause cancer, which can kill us and blah, blah, blah. We evolved mechanisms for fixing that. But what I'm trying to say is that, is that even when you have. Even in the face of total annihilation and ecological disaster, we're afraid of that. We're afraid of dying. We're afraid of getting swept off the face of the earth. We hate being reminded that our civilization is only temporary, that we're literally in a constant fight in our most developed urban areas to try to essentially keep the plant life and the animal life down from affecting our day to day life too much. We hate being reminded of the fact that, that we are part of the food chain, which is something that the movie kind of explores a little more with like the bear monster taking some of the scientists away to eat them. But change isn't a wholly negative thing. In the books and the movie you have certain characters that are essentially changed and shaped by the environment. And they live on as part of the environment as they were more or less meant to. And it gives us a vehicle to confront the fact that what we are is temporary. It can change over time. It can change in an instant, but it's temporary. And the thing is that we're in a constant state of change. And it is beautiful. I wanted to say that the books introduced this concept of a terroir, which is apparently like a wine like tasting term, where it's just the environment in which the grapes were grown in affects the flavor of the grapes and the wine. [01:12:07] Speaker B: Are you saying that's what we are? [01:12:09] Speaker C: We are of where we not only were born, but where we grew up. We're also of where we choose to live now. That like all affects, like our own original unique flavor. I want to say. And the thing is, is that even if climate change completely changes the face of the earth and we have total annihilation of humanity as a species, we're living with change all the time. Now the world I was born into is gone. The world that I grew up in, it's gone. The world I first became an adult in is gone. If Dan and I decide to have kids one day, the world they're gonna be born into is different than the one we're living in now because we're in a constant state of change and we're in a constant state of evolution change. And it's actually not all that scary. I don't know, it doesn't really scare me. [01:13:14] Speaker B: No, it's beautiful. And that's the thing. That way it should be like, it's a magical thing. This is like we have this innate fear of change. We have this innate fear of, you know, death. Honestly, and quite honestly, like, I mean, let's be honest and really morbid, like, dude, we're all going to die. We're all going to die one way or another. Probably sooner rather than later with where the world is right now. Like, let's be honest. But there's a beauty in all of it. Like there's. I don't know, I don't think change is scary. I think change is magical. And I think this is one of those things that like, reinforces that. [01:14:01] Speaker C: And it's a hard thing. I mean, it's honestly, like, it's a hard thing to fight against on the day to day accepting change. Because, you know, we live in a society that likes to tell us that not only has nothing changed, what has changed can be reversed. We can go back, whether it's resurrecting a movie or like selling us nostalgia as a political ideology, which is so. [01:14:34] Speaker A: I'm sorry we've gone so far afield. It's just that, like, look, the movie can be used as a metaphor for self, like reflection or whatever, right? But what makes the movie interesting is it's approach to the unknown, right? Which is less aggressive than the book. The book gives you something that you really can't quantify. Like, yeah, I mean, like, listen, listen, Adrian. Like, that is a heroic, like, interpretation to take it and kind of make it about that. Right? Like, I appreciate that. I think that's very cool. But I think like digging deeper, like, it really is ambiguous what is going on at the end of the day, right? Because like, yeah, you, you can look at, you can look at a painting of a purple splotch and you can find yourself in that void. And that's the power of art. But what makes these interesting is, you know, they achieve what the first writer of Weird Fiction was aiming for when Weird Tales published their. Their stuff back in 1931. You know, I'm gonna read one more excerpt from the book, if you'll indulge me. Yeah, he's okay. What had manifested? What do I believe manifested? Think of it as a thorn, perhaps a long, thick thorn, so large that is buried deep in the side of the world, Injecting itself into the world. Emanating from this giant thorn is an endless, almost, perhaps automatic need to assimilate and mimic. Assimilator and assimilated interact through the catalyst of a script of words. Assimilator and assimilated interact through the catalyst of a script of words which powers the engine of transformation. Perhaps it is a creature living in perfect symbiosis with a host of other creatures. Perhaps it is merely a machine. But in either instance, if it has intelligence, that intelligence is far different from our own. It creates out of our ecosystem a new world whose processes and aims are utterly alien, one that works through supreme acts of mirroring and by remaining hidden in so many other ways, all without surrendering the foundations of its otherness as it becomes what it encounters. I do not know how this thorn got here or from how far away it came, but imagine. Oh, he's gone. In the expeditions 12 or 50 or 100, it doesn't matter that keep coming into contact with that entity, or entities that keep becoming fodder and becoming remade, these expeditions that come here at a hidden entry point along a mysterious border, an entry point that perhaps is mirrored within the deepest depths of the tower. Imagine these expositions and then recognize that they all still exist in Area X in some form, Even the ones that came back. Especially the ones that came back layered over one another, communicating in whatever way is left to them. Imagine that this communication sometimes leads to a sense of the uncanny, to the landscape because of the narcissism of our human gaze, but that it is just part of the natural world here. I may never know what triggered the creation of the doppelgangers, but it may not matter. [01:17:31] Speaker B: Can I ask a question? [01:17:34] Speaker A: You can, because there's a bit more I wanted to read, but Go on. [01:17:38] Speaker B: How human does that sound? [01:17:39] Speaker A: It doesn't sound human. It's not? Well, the biologist sounds human because she's trying to make sense of something she can't understand. [01:17:45] Speaker B: No, that entire thing that you just read, that sounds like, basically, like what it's like to be human, kind of. [01:17:52] Speaker A: But the point is that this isn't human. [01:17:54] Speaker B: I know. [01:17:55] Speaker A: It's trying to learn and what's horrifying is it's building a culture out of the things it finds. It's writing words, it's building structures. But it's adjacent to our society. And that's pretty weird and upsetting. It's uncanny. [01:18:09] Speaker B: But we have a bunch of things and we have a bunch of cultures that are adjacent to, you know, what we consider. I don't know, it's. It's just very human. [01:18:23] Speaker A: Adrian, Area X is not a Dracula. You can humanize and make treat like a pet. [01:18:29] Speaker B: Dracula is never a pet. Dracula will kill you. [01:18:32] Speaker A: But what I'm trying to say is that, like, we have, we have an instinctive love for monsters and an instinctive need to humanize them. Right. [01:18:40] Speaker C: It's still like, inhuman in its way. [01:18:45] Speaker A: Point is, we don't know what it wants. Yeah, she doesn't even know what it wants. She's desperately trying to make sense of it. And what it's trying to do is pretty fucking creepy. It's absorbing everything and spitting it back out, changed to do its bidding. There's a part where she's reading her husband's journal and the person. And her husband describes what he calls a ghastly procession of the dead, including himself, walking into the tower and descending its spiral staircase. And it's like, what are they doing? Why are they going into the tower? What is happening? Like, why is it consuming the world? Why does it want to do that? And the idea is that it's sending them out. Like, there's probably ones that didn't break down that are out there already, you. [01:19:31] Speaker B: Know, wants to become the world. It's crazy. I don't know. [01:19:36] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. And that's pretty creepy. [01:19:38] Speaker B: Yeah, it's pretty creepy. [01:19:40] Speaker C: Oh, it's, it's an unknowable intelligence and it's a thing that's so far removed from what we are, you can't even. [01:19:49] Speaker A: That. [01:19:50] Speaker C: You can't quantify it. You can't put yourself in a TED space. [01:19:52] Speaker A: You can't understand it. It's like, like, yeah, like, like, like granted, like, you know, Alex, Alex Garland made a movie about the unknown, literally doing this, right? And like. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He, he, he did an existential story about like, people cheating on each other and, and looking for dissolution within this. My point is that he made it about people doing things in a human sense. Right. The specifics are not important to me. I don't care about that. He made, he made a movie about people, but with the backdrop of this unknowable horror entity that steals your Face consumes you and spits the. The doppelganger out into the world, right? Like, that's great. But the point is that it's an alien intelligence. It just is. It's. It's more alien than Cthulhu because Cthulhu wants to crush his enemies and enslave mankind and destroy the world. You know? Or you also don't know what the color out of space wants. Well, my big point in. In addressing these is in how they approach horror, right? What makes Area X upsetting isn't just the fact that. That, like, there is a Spoogles in a pit underground that's writing spooky gospels on the wall in fungus. That's not scary. What's scary is the characters trying to understand it and desperately trying to make sense of it, because they can't. Their tiny human brains can't make sense of something that is truly otherworldly, something that is corrupting them at their base. And what's even scarier is their government sent them in to do that as sacrificial lambs. It's. It's multiple layers of fear. And it builds that through simple dialogue, simple language. Let's go to Lovecraft. Here's where he describes the color out of space, by the way, right? Like, there is an adaptation of this in Creepshow, starring the one and only Stephen King. Creepshow is cool. It's an anthology movie. It's a good anthology movie. It's not like those ones you see on Tubi. My point is that, like, the color out of space in that movie is green. The color out of space in the Nicholas Cage movie 2019 is purple. Usually some shade of purple. There are other adaptations of it, but let's look at how it's depicted here. This is HP Lovecraft, the Color out of Space. The grass had so far seemed untouched, and the cows were freely pastured in the. In the lot near the house. But toward the end of May, the milk began to be bad. Then Nahum had the cows driven to the uplands, after which the trouble ceased. Not long after this change in grass and leaves became apparent to the eye. All the verdure was going gray and was developing a highly singular quality of brittleness. He was now the only person who ever visited the place, and his visits were becoming fewer and fewer. When school closed, the gardeners were virtually cut off from the world and sometimes let Amy do their errands in town. They were failing curiously, both physically and mentally. And no one was surprised when the news of Ms. Gardner's madness stole around. It happened in June, about the anniversary of the meteor's fall. And the poor woman screamed about things in the air that she could not describe. In her raving, there was not a single specific noun, but only verbs and pronouns. Things moved and changed and fluttered, and ears tingled to impulses which were not holy sounds. Something was taken away. She was being drained of something. Something was fastening itself on her that ought not to be. Someone must make it keep off. Nothing was ever still in the night. The walls and windows shifted. Nahum did not send the asylum, but let her wander about the house as long as she was harmless to herself and others. Even when her expression changed, it did nothing. But when the boys grew afraid of her, it goes on for some time. She starts crawling on all fours and talking and speaking in tongues. She starts glowing in the dark, much like our biologist. And like, you know, the whole town falls apart. Like, the vegetation grows gruesome and massive. The animals start to fall apart even as they. They're still alive. It's. It's like a mutagenic plague. But, like, the way Lovecraft builds it, he doesn't sit and describe it in gruesome detail like some of his contemporaries did. He goes into how it made people feel. He talks about, like, you know, the mental influences of the thing. And you never get an explanation for what's happening. You get some really bad dialogue. But that's because Lovecraft sucks at dialogue. So, like, where I'm going with this is the unknown. And depicting the unknown is an art which Mr. Lovecraft, for all his faults, is championed for perfecting and doing the best in his day. Right. You know, at the Mountains of Madness is another fucking classic, which Area X owes a huge debt to as well, where a bunch of archaeologists find an ancient city in the mountains in the Antarctic, buried deep under the ice, and they find writing that depicts, like, the struggle of different alien species that came to Earth and waged war on each other and were supplanted by their servants, and they find their dead bodies and stuff, but it's the way it's described and it's the way it builds, you know, and the fact that it doesn't mesh with what we know about history. It contradicts everything. Everything. Another one that is very important, too. Specifically, the movie is the thing on the Doorstep, which, you know, Adrian, what's the movie called? Suitable Flesh with Barbara Crampton. [01:26:00] Speaker B: Barbara Crampton. And it had the Graham and the guy from doom generation who. Yeah, I'm not sorry. About him. I'm just gonna say that. [01:26:09] Speaker A: Yeah, it's cool. But, like, my point is that, like, you know, these. You know, I mean, like, okay, maybe not the thing on the doorstep, but these are stories about the unknown and about our inability to really face up to it when, you know. Because in Lovecraft's world, when you meet the unknown, what do you do? You scream, you go insane, and that's it, you're done. [01:26:27] Speaker B: You know, the same thing with Pope. Like, let's be honest, like, as a human, what's scary? [01:26:33] Speaker A: Well, the human mind, it's. [01:26:35] Speaker B: Well, I mean, you're not wrong, but it's. What you don't know. It's the unknown. The unknown is what's scary. That's the only thing that's terrifying. [01:26:44] Speaker A: Sucks. I do think that oftentimes when we make movies, we're not very good at keeping things unknown. Right. Case in point, the Nicolas Cage. [01:26:54] Speaker B: That one. I loved it when I saw it. And I will tell you, Nicolas Cage is actually pretty awesome in it. And Julie Richardson is amazing. I love that Lovecraft would roll over in his grave that they used people of color in that movie because, yeah, he was right. But, yeah, it's not great. It's not great. [01:27:19] Speaker A: It's not a good film. I mean, I like when Nicholas Cage starts doing the Vampire's Kiss voice. He's like, I told you to go in the. Mr. Lovecraft deserves his own episode. [01:27:32] Speaker B: Yes. And we will give that to him. 100. Because that's a whole other thing. [01:27:38] Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, you know, being another. [01:27:39] Speaker C: Kettle of antisemitism, like, so much. [01:27:42] Speaker B: Justin, you write you. Right. [01:27:45] Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, you know, yeah, as. As. As a Jewish poet, you know. You know. Yes, that's the thing. I mean, being a fan of Lovecraft is like being a fan of, you know. [01:27:56] Speaker B: But, like, less awful. I actually feel like being a fan of Lovecraft is less awful than being a fan of Neil Gaiman. [01:28:04] Speaker C: Well, dead, he can't hurt you anymore. [01:28:07] Speaker B: Exactly. That's it. [01:28:09] Speaker A: So that's our discussion of Annihilation and our very truncated discussion of the color out of space. Mr. Love, Mr. Lovecraft will get his own episode someday. He's very high on the list. So. Yeah. But yeah, do check out Authority. [01:28:27] Speaker B: Do check out Annihilation. It is a fantastic film. It has Natalie Portman, Ozakai, Oscar Isaac. [01:28:38] Speaker A: Yeah. It's got Poe, Dameron himself. Yeah. Do read the books. They're. They're readily available. They're, you know, at least I think the first one came out 11 years ago. You can buy a nice lovely edition just like this with all three. Yeah, it's. It's pretty rad, you know, you have the. What? The. I don't know, the foliage turning into an X. It's pretty cool. The fourth book just came out, but yeah, I mean, they're really cool. Justin, do you want to recognize this is part of a movement known as New Weird? Justin, do you want to recommend some books in this genre? [01:29:10] Speaker C: So Vandermeer wrote a bunch of other books that were really good. There's this one that I read about like a series city overrun by like mushroom people, colonizers called Finch. It's a sequel to a book called Shriek. And afterward there's also Borne, which is also really good. And Hummingbird Salamander. Another rather prominent author in the New Weird genre who probably also deserves his own episode is China Mieville. I haven't read too much of his stuff, but I did really enjoy Rail Sea and the Sea City and the City. But that's my recommendations for right now. [01:29:48] Speaker A: Yeah, Born is really good, by the way. It's about a lady who is living in a post apocalyptic world that had reached a point where they had a lot of biotech. Like you'd go to a restaurant and two little biotech guys would dance around for you to entertain you. And yeah, the world fell apart just because the economy got bad and, you know, overpopulation. There wasn't like a nuclear war as far as I remember in the book. It was just people like urban decay just sort of became the, you know, the zeitgeist, as it were. And what happens is she runs into a bit of biotech that takes the name Born. It's a, it's a, it's a giant like ectoplasm monster or giant slime monster. And you know, it talks and it thinks, it reasons and moves in with her. And that sounds adorable, except it's not. It's just a thing that lives with her and it's. She finds that it's eating people and it's, it's very cool, it's very existential and there's a lot going on. There's a lot of really cool world building, you know, but the focus isn't on that. It's not on the conflicts. It's about her relationship with this gelatinous inhuman thing that was created in a lab for who the fuck knows why. Who would make that? I mean, I would make that, but, you know, I would make a slime monster. [01:31:02] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:31:03] Speaker A: Name it Born. So, yeah, Check out New Weird. I mean, I'd love to delve more into it in the future. [01:31:07] Speaker B: Nothing But Flowers was the name of the Talking Head song I was thinking of earlier. I just thought of it. It just hit me. It's nothing but flowers. That's where the world decays and there's nothing but flowers. [01:31:20] Speaker A: Cool. That's awesome. Thank you. Yeah, do listen to the Talking Heads. They're pretty great. They've been around for a minute. [01:31:25] Speaker B: You know, they have burned for life. [01:31:27] Speaker A: It's like. Yeah. So, you know, Adrian is, of course, a painter. She teaches also. No, maybe. [01:31:41] Speaker B: I'm starting to. All right, well, I'm scared. It's fine. Cool. [01:31:46] Speaker A: Adrian, do you want to talk about the Horror Film Art Society that you. [01:31:51] Speaker B: Okay, guys. I do this crazy horror film, our society, where I pick a movie each month and artists all around the world watch the movie and create art based on the movie. And then we show it, and it gets published in Horror to Culture magazine. And it is so crazy fun. Like, it's my baby. Yeah, that's it. [01:32:20] Speaker A: There you go. Justin, would you like to plug anything? [01:32:23] Speaker B: No, Justin's cool. I'm just gonna say, you guys, Justin's one of the most intelligently amazing human beings ever. So there's that. [01:32:32] Speaker A: He's a professional, my boyfriend, and he reads a lot of cool books and he also has a blue tongue skin. [01:32:39] Speaker B: On a podcast with us, so that's saying something. [01:32:43] Speaker A: Yeah, he does appear on this podcast sometimes. [01:32:45] Speaker C: It's the most public exposure. This is the only artistic pursuit that anyone has access to. [01:32:51] Speaker B: Hopefully you do do more of this, because having you on, you're amazing. [01:32:56] Speaker A: He's a very talented writer, too. [01:32:57] Speaker C: Yeah, you are. [01:32:59] Speaker A: I'm, of course, King Loki. Read my books, buy my books on. You know, they're all listed on demonlandbooks.com. i also write movie reviews and I write the occasional essay over on Horror to Culture also where Adrian writes. That is not my website. I am not the run. I do not run that site. [01:33:15] Speaker B: That's Michael Dyer. [01:33:17] Speaker A: Yeah, he's a bad motherfucker, too. [01:33:18] Speaker B: He is a bad. [01:33:20] Speaker A: Yeah, we love him. [01:33:21] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:33:22] Speaker A: Special shout out to Ashley, our social media sorceress over at Tucson Media. She designed the excellent, excellent, beautiful graphic for this episode and designs all of the graphics for Demon Toast and also helps out with Death Wish's social media. She's invaluable. Thank you, Ashley. If you need help with, you know, social media promotion or image creation for your business or project at T U X n Media, that's Uxen Media on Instagram. Also do stay tuned for a 30 second also do stay tuned for a short message from Horror to Culture where I write Incidentally, over to you Michael. Thousands of years ago, something was born deep within in the earth that would one day rise up and devour humanity. It's horrorculture.com that's right. Www.hortoculture.com the Horticulture of Horror your 365 day 247 hub of all things horror. Original essays, articles, reviews, short fiction, our podcast archives as well as exclusive interviews over at www.horion. check out Death Wish Poetry Magazine. We're not open for submissions at the moment, but most likely in the summer we'll be open again and we are exploring a physical edition. So I don't know if you write short stories or poetry. Do check out the site and follow us on Instagram at deathwishpoetry. Links below for all these awesome things. Oh yeah, I. I might as well mention it. What the. I started a wrestling show. Me and my friends talk about wrestling in comic books. It's called Low Brown. So do check that out if that's your jam. If it's not, then oh well, can't help you. And yeah, that's about it. Write poetry. Make art. Love your demons. [01:35:19] Speaker B: Creepy. Love your monsters. [01:35:22] Speaker A: Love your monsters or they'll eat you.