Discuss Annihilation
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Why the all woman exploratory team?
posted by MongoLloydSTAFFMOD on March 13, 2018 at 2:27 PM
Maybe I missed something, but what was the point of the all female team?
Reply by Renovatio
on March 13, 2018 at 6:22 PM
tl;dr... I think it has to do with reproduction as a theme of the film...
Long version...
I haven't read the books, but it kinda works in the movie... Both in story terms as well as philosophically and metaphorically..
(spoilers, clearly... 😉) Some duplication from the other thread... sorry...
We're told that the Shimmer refracts the DNA of whatever is inside of it, manipulating and altering it...
Notice in the military crew that was sent earlier, the masculinity/warrior spirit (Nietzsche?) is being expressed as a destructive nature of the original all male crew manifesting itself in the environment and refracted onto one another... They can't process what's going on due to their lack of scientific knowledge...
The all female crew are the only ones capable of birth, i.e. creation, thus they are successful at reproducing the new form... It's not co-incidental that the lesbian, the mother who lost her child (also lesbian?), the damaged self cutter and the cancer afflicted women do not make it. Yet the healthy, fertile one, Lena, not only survives, but does so in a new form... The other women are not ideal for reproduction...
Tied to Lena, is the reproduced model of Kane (biblical reference?) who has also survived the shimmer having overseen the death of the original (biblical brother Abel?)... Kane is now destained to create decendents together with Lena and pass on their new mutated/refracted genes... Natural selection in action...
In this way, like Ex Machina, Garland is surprisingly and refreshingly "traditional" because he is serious about the different nature of female and male biology, in a way that matters, reproduction... In Ex Machina it was more about identity and sexuality (albeit in it's stunted stereotypical male nerd form)... The creation there was asexual and non-biological. This is not common nowadays as movies and pop culture tend to overlook or play down the biological differences in men and women and tend not to think about reproduction as a theme... Prometheus and Covenant did, but not many other films...
It was an interesting movie (not a masterpeice) and the use of an all female crew seems to be more than just representational in an identity politics sense...
I'd be interested i hearing what others have to say...
Reply by drjekel_mrhyde
on March 13, 2018 at 6:39 PM
Eye candy. Sci-Fi nerds eat that up.
Reply by MongoLloyd
on March 13, 2018 at 9:55 PM
It shouldn't matter though, since the refraction process seems to work on any living thing regardless of sex. And besides, I'm more interested in their actual reasoning for sending a bunch of women because I can't remember hearing that there was such a reason to do so.
Reply by MongoLloyd
on March 13, 2018 at 9:57 PM
That was my initial thought but I was kind of hoping I was wrong, haha.
Reply by Renovatio
on March 14, 2018 at 8:22 AM
I meant female reproduction as a theme of the film, rather than being important to the story or the plot... Notice that the introductory dialogue scene, Lena is giving a lecture about the origins of celcular life and uses a cancerous cell from the cervix of a female (early 30s) patient as an example... It's not coincidental...
I'm surprised feminist groups have not attacked this movie for objectifying women as tools of breading 😂 ... but they tend not to think that deeply about sci fi and only consider the surface level... (yes, I'm being facetious...).. 😁
Aparently, there have been three years of expeditions, so this isn't even a "B" or "C" team... it is who they have left over... Some recent physics Ph'd, a paramedic, a psychologist, a biologist who tags along and a geologist... A couple of more years and they'd have to start pulling in Clint Eastwood from retirement together with a few of his buddies... 😉
Reply by poit57
on March 14, 2018 at 9:30 AM
I'm pretty sure Ventress explained it in the movie. The previous teams have pretty much been made up of all soldiers, and this time they are sending a science team. She's leading because she's been there so long that she wants to see it first hand, plus she's dying of cancer, so she doesn't care that she probably won't return.
It's probable, though I don't think it was explicitly stated, that the teams of soldiers were all male. With the exception of Lena who volunteered at the last minute, the rest of the women have been working on the base for a while. Within the movie's narrative, I don't think that they were chosen for this mission because they were women, but the scientists available at the base just happened to be women. The assembly of the team was also likely voluntary. Sheppard explained to Lena how each of them had suffered loss of some sort before they came to work at the military base.
Reply by Jedan Archer
on March 14, 2018 at 10:44 AM
They wanted to make good on the female Ghostbusters by providing an original story with female protagonists.
But seriously, why does it even need an explanation if not raised in the film? If they had sent an all male team nobody would have asked. The scientist team hapens to be female, so what? No deeper reason, just females - deal with it.
Reply by Horus Mazinga
on March 14, 2018 at 6:09 PM
This was exactly my take on it. But ....
This is a compelling idea. Although we don't necessarily know that cutter/flower girl or the others are/are not fertile. Still, the fact that the only one to get out with her wits intact is a "creator" is fascinating.
Did you notice that they each started manifesting the tattoo on their arm that the initial intestine-male had? Sort of a figure eight Ouroboros thing. Like they were all becoming some amalgam of the life within.
Reply by Geff
on March 14, 2018 at 8:11 PM
You are completely wrong, in my opinion. There is a reason for why they are all female, as in it's a device to make the audience understand something. But, there is no plot relevance to them being all female. I will explain:
There is a theme that is pervasive throughout the film. That is, people trying to understand causal links where no causal links can ever be found.
Repeatedly you see attempts to understand the alien object, its motivations for existing and and its "purpose" but there is no purpose for its existence.
The woman with cancer while she is inside the cave says: "I don't know want it wants, or if it wants"
The interrogator at the end asks: "What did it want?"
Girl says: "I don't think it wanted anything"
Interrogator: "But, it attacked you." (refusal to accept no causation)
Girl: "It mirrored me - I attacked it. I'm not sure it even knew I was there."
Interrogator: "It came here for a reason. It was mutating our environment, it was destroying everything." (continuous refusal to accept the truth)
The alien is just like us, or like bacteria, or like anything in the universe, or like the universe itself. There is no reason or purpose for any of it, it just is. Evolution did not have the "goal" of creating humanity, humans were created out of the compounding of millions of instances of random chance.
Here is the reason why the team was all female: It is a subversion of normal human expectations. It is there to reveal the natural human tendency to want to find causal links where none exists, when they are confronted with an unusual scenario. The fact that the question is asked "why are they all women" and the fact that you came up with a wild theory is exactly the expectation from the human audience. This is just like how the human interrogator came up with a wild theory about the motivation of the alien where there is no motivation in reality. You would not ask the question "why are they all men" if they were all men, because it's not a subversion of expectations.
Early in the movie the main girl says something along the lines of we are women going into the shimmer. To this the physicist responds "we are all scientists". The fact that they are women is pure happenstance, it's completely random they they all just happen to be women. Yet, it is unusual enough that you want to find a causal link for "why". There is no why. It just is. It's pure happenstance that an X chromosome containing sperm entered the egg rather than a Y chromosome containing one.
Also notice that pragmatically there is absolutely zero difference between the all male team and the all female team. Both ended up with the same outcome. In both cases everyone died except for one who came out. Was the motivation for one returning in both missions a motivation of the alien, or was it the motivation of the two individuals becoming mirrored in their mutant counterparts? I think the latter. The alien has no motivation just as evolution has no motivation.
Reply by Renovatio
on March 15, 2018 at 4:29 AM
@Geff I'm not concerned with the minutia of plot, but rather the themes of the film.
The fact that the alien process of altering the DNA of anything in the shimmer is indifferent to our needs as human being, or to the feelings, needs and wants of the characters in the movie doesn't mean there is no thematic purpose in the filmmaker choosing an all female crew. That it is just a movie-long red herring. Quite the opposite.
If there is any subversion in the movie, it isn't that the all female crew is meaningless, rather the idea being subverted is the contemporary idea that women are soley responsible for reproduction... By tying the characters of Lena & Kane together, the filmmaker is showing us the necessity of the female/male bond in our evolutionary success... Man has not been replaced by the state in the world of Annihilation. This is a deeply controverstial idea to have in 2018, in the UK, where Garland is from.
Whether or not you agree with my interpretation of the movie's themes, do you really think Garland would waste the rare opportunity that he has to make a movie of this scale by spending it on a wild goose chase just to say that aliens are indifferent to us? We already know that non-alien evolution is indifferent to us. Why would such an intelligent writer/ director behind movies like Ex Machina pursue such a bland idea? It's nihilism 101, without anything interesting about it.
The first scene after the opening credits (not he first in the movie) has Lena explaining the origin and structure of cellular life on earth by using a cancerous cell from a woman's cirvix (in her early 30s). This is not a red herring, the following scene is talking about her lost lover... These two intertwined concepts are held to the very last frame of the movie, through all the permutations that the movie throws at it... Including Lena's affair and the all female crew for the majority of the movie...
There is even a scene where a lesbian's advances are ignored and a latter one where she is violently destroyed by a mutated bear... Incidently, the mother who lost her child was also destroyed by the bear and it is alluded to in the movie that she is also lesbian. This is not because the director hates gay women, rather it is representational of the harshness of the evolutionary process on humans that do not reproduce and on the sexual male/female nature of human reproduction. In the past gay people had to play straight in order to reproduce, now they rely on science. The movie dramatises this for us... The two other non-gay women are annihilated by being turned into beautiful flowers or burst into sparkly CGI light... They don't die violently screeming for their lives... Also, these are the two women who have nihilism as their mental mode. One is self loathing, numb a self cutter resigned to the meaninglessness of the world. The other is a cancer sufferer who is resigned that the end of her life is near... They simply dissapear, whereas the non-nihilists either die violently, or succeed in reproducing... If it was directed by Christopher Nolan we would hear Dylan Thomas "rage against the dying of the light" and organs blaring in the background 😉
Thus, just because evolution is indifferent to us, does not mean we should be indifferent to it and to our survival. Camus took it further by showing that we create meaning for our lives, but that is a topic for another movie...
P.S. Not to nitpick, but a paramedic is hardly a scientist (the we're scientists comment made by the physicist is just her characterisation as a recent Oxford Ph'd). The team is whats left after 3 years of expeditions. They end up with these few women.
Reply by Horus Mazinga
on March 15, 2018 at 12:12 PM
Nice. A clash of world view. Desire vs lack of. There is a short story by Bruce Sterling that addresses intelligence not being very high on the list of survival traits.
I like and mostly agree with your take on the film but I do like the thought experiments available from Renovatio's perspective. This film's strength seems to be its fertile ground for interpretation. The little details breed points and counter points.
Reply by Geff
on March 15, 2018 at 11:15 PM
I'm not saying that everything is arbitrary. I'm just saying that the fact that they were all women scientists is arbitrary.
Yes, the lecture on cancer cells reproducing in the cervix is non-arbitrary. The cancer cells don't necessarily have a will to survive in the same way that humans appear to have, but they are chemically conditioned to survive and reproduce and therefore pragmatically they are similar to humans. The fact that it's in the cervix gives the indication of competition, each evolutionary organism survives and reproduces at the cost of other evolutionary organisms. The patient cannot reproduce any longer. Note the cancer cells didn't choose to make the patient infertile, it is only caring about itself. The patient is simply collateral damage. You correctly pointed out this theme represented in the predators as well, the bear and the alligator. They just want to survive just as humans want to survive but there is conflict because both cannot survive, one must feed on the other. There is competition.
All that has nothing to do with the team being female.
Note the bear didn't "choose" individuals based on their sexual preference or will to live, it chose whatever was close at hand and vulnerable. Remember at one point the bear was attempting the eat the nihilistic physicist, why would it choose her instead of the supposedly non-nihilistic biologist who was tied up next to her? You can continue to attempt to find a pattern in its choices, but I don't think a pattern exists. It's just choosing the path of least resistance for survival just like any evolutionary organism would.
On a symbolic level, your arguments about the lesbian deaths are compelling. You might be right. Although I'm not entirely convinced that the woman who lost her children is a lesbian. Based on her dialogue she was had no intention of having another child. She says "In a way, it's two bereavements, my beautiful girl and the person I once was". Person she once was referring to the type of person who would want to have a child. So, your analysis still has merit regardless of whether or not she is a lesbian.
Note that the nihilistic girl shows an uncharacteristic fear of death throughout the film until her final submission to it. Although it's a visceral bodily fear granted by her evolutionary genes. When she finally dies, it's her first "free" action which is simultaneously an act of rebellion against her genes.
The question of "why go in" was mentioned over and over throughout the film. There is a good amount of evidence suggesting that the biologist's husband went in in order to commit suicide because of his wife's betrayal. At some point the biologist mentions that she wants to go in because "I owe it to him" or something along those lines. She clearly suspected, even before her husband went on the mission, that he suspected her infidelity, or even found out about it and that was his motivation for going. Later, the alien version of the husband confirms that he knew. Maybe she went in in order to find out the truth about his motivations. Eventually she finds out that he did commit suicide.
Here is how I view the ending: When the biologist is defending herself against the alien creature, it is an automatic evolutionary response to the evolutionary fear of death similar to the fear responses demonstrated by the physicist. When she is finally trapped at the door, there is a swapping of consciousness. There is a mind swap, which is the same as saying a body swap. The alien, now inhabiting the biologist's old body, has inherited the evolutionary fear response as well. The alien version of the biologist is now lucid and unshackled by the evolutionary will to live. It finally accepts death next to her husband in a kind of Romeo and Juliet moment. This moment mimics the physicist's final submission to death as well as the biologist's husband's submission.
The new alien versions of the biologist and the biologist's husband can start anew unburdened by the betrayal of the wife. An option that is never available in reality. If you think about it allegorically, the burning of the watchtower with the old version of the couple is a burning down of of the corrupted past relationship.
Ofcourse again, we are hugely off topic by this point and none of this has anything to do with the the team being all female. I still hold that the team being all female is arbitrary. They could have been mixed sex or all male and it wouldn't have mattered, as long as there is a central couple that is returning from two separate expeditions.
Also, I still hold that the "alien" is an unthinking, unmotivated entity. All of the actions undertaken supposedly by it are not its actions. Instead, the motivations of the couple were mirrored. The "new thing" the alien was purportedly creating was not a goal driven creation by the alien itself, but is instead a creation of the two individuals, the biologist and her husband. The thing that was created was a purified form of themselves without the loss of love and without the infidelity.
Reply by MongoLloyd
on March 17, 2018 at 11:13 AM
None of that explains anything. Who cares if each of them "suffered loss"? What's that got to do with anything? And what are the odds "the scientists available at the base just happened to be women?" SIX women!
Reply by poit57
on March 17, 2018 at 2:31 PM
The loss that they had suffered (which was intentionally brought up by Sheppard) is just a clue as to why these specific women who were available also happened to be willing to be part of Ventress's team.
In a real world situation, the odds are probably pretty slim, but not impossible, that a scientific team from a single military installation are all female. Within the movie it was a coincidence, which was the entire point of my reply. It don't think it requires much analysis as to "why," and it certainly shouldn't cause a viewer to take offense or be upset that the core group that the movie focusses on are all women.
By the way, who is the sixth woman? I only count five: Lena, Ventress, Sheppard, Radek, and Thorensen.
Reply by volkstraum
on March 25, 2018 at 9:03 PM
Ventress, who was in the position of authority of selecting the teams, was riddled with cancer and riddled with guilt.
At that point, by virtue of the scientific method or personal mania or perhaps both she decided to send in four women who weren't soldiers. Lena was a participant by circumstance and became the fifth member. She was a soldier, a woman as well as a scientist, and she was able to succeed where everyone else had failed.
It's also worth noting that whereas everyone else in her team was broken mentally or physically, she embarked on the crusade thinking she had someone worth fighting for, in a bed back at the base.