In the film Arrival, human exploration comes in the form of empathetic engagement by linguist Louise Banks. Such empathy could prove fatal, if she is wrong, and she is being gamed by the ETs, which is what the military, whose mission is to protect, fears. We saw such beguiling in the classic episode of Rod Serling’s Twilight Zone, “To Serve Mankind,” which turns out to be a recipe book. But their fear proves to be projection onto the Other. But empathy, as risky as it is in the circumstance, is human; while the conservative reactionary posture of the military closes off empathy and communication and settles for power and control.
Empathy as a supreme human quality becomes the object of predation in the film Annihilation (2018). It may be the key prized quality we have, allowing for the development of language and the achievement, thereby, of negotiated reality. Arguably, dialectical empathy is the key to consciousness and humanity. It’s what makes the Cogito possible. It’s what made God possible. If you were an alien from outer space looking on, you might decide that empathy is also the Achilles heel of the human being.
The IMDB description for Annihilation tells some of the story: “A biologist signs up for a dangerous, secret expedition into a mysterious zone where the laws of nature don’t apply.” Are the laws exhibited in the zone even possible for humans to understand? So far, anyone who has entered the zone has not returned, although that changes as the beginning of the film sees a survivor Lena tell the story of her expedition in flashback. She hopes to find her husband there, who has disappeared there on an earlier foray. Lena leads a team of women into the zone; the team includes: a biologist, an anthropologist, a psychologist, a surveyor, and a linguist. Their trek is into the heart of a new kind of horror, humans turned into vegetation, for instance, and wild exotic beasts, including one that uses the last screams of a victim to lure other humans, running empathetically to the rescue, to their deaths.
It’s an invasion film, and the zone is expanding, and there is a crisis, and one is again reminded of what Stephen Hawking says above about humans suddenly getting some comeuppance from alien colonizers. Annihilation awaits if some solution is not discovered. It’s a film that does a solid job representing the spirit of our times. Arguably, such zones already exist. There are labs all over the world delving into exotic biology and technology without any public oversight or sense of accountability, because the work is the product of private enterprise. Not much can be done about ultra-rich people experimenting with CRISPRs or gene-splicing or human cloning or cloud-seeding to thwart climate disaster; nothing to stop Elon Musk, for example, from sending spaceships to Mars with humans who’ve volunteered for the one-way trip.
In the next 20 years, humans are entering an annihilation zone, containing an incoherent and perhaps toxic mixture of quantum speed hallucinations and AI that think so differently from us that we face an eschatological event that taunts us with a logical extension and end of our evolution. With an essentially all-female cast sent into the zone one gets the idea quickly that men have finally gone too far and lost the plot—literally.
The quietude exuded by these films is especially prevalent in the film I Am Mother (2019). The IMDB blurb tells us, “In the wake of humanity’s extinction, a teenage girl is raised by a robot designed to repopulate the earth. But their unique bond is threatened when an inexplicable stranger arrives with alarming news.” There is simply very little human-to-human communication at the start. The “daughter” is being raised by the “mother.” It is as if she were being raised by Siri or Alexa embodied in an oversized robot powered by AI. The “daughter” is awakened to her humanity by a human stranger that arrives from the wilderness of the outside world, creating a tension between “mother” and “daughter” that didn’t exist before. It’s an existential threat.
I Am Mother suggests a world of superior AGI-driven robots who tolerate what’s left of humanity for the sole purpose of re-populating the Earth with humanoids who don’t possess the frailties or the emotional brilliance of humans. It’s an ultra-correct world, not one built on evolutionary adaptation or recovering and learning from the mistakes of power and egotism. But the “stranger” helps the “daughter” learn about the beauty of human vulnerability—and empathy, which is only artificial with the “mother,” who, beyond the fake persona, is clearly psychopathic.
These four films are, again, of real value because of the silence included in the soundtrack, allowing for thoughtful analysis and natural responses to the depiction of characters in tension and the resolution of stories. They are replete with philosophical themes crucial to an understanding of the zeitgeist. One could build a philosophy class around the teachings of these films.
John Hawkins
John Hawkins is a freelance journalist and poet who writes mostly about culture, politics, and the arts. He is currently pursuing a PhD in philosophy at the University of New England (Australia) and, simultaneously, a masters in humanities at Cal State Northridge. He blogs at his Substack site, TantricDispositionMatrix.
