Films which centrally deal with climate change and ecological issues- for example Acquaria (2003, Flavia Moraes) and Tank Girl (1995, Rachel Talalay) depict universes where water is scarce due to climate change.
Twenty five years ago Tank Girl was ambitiously adapted for the screen by director Rachel Talalay. Restricted by the expectations and fears of the nineties studio system, Tank Girl might not be an ‘accurate’ adaptation of the irreverent RiotGrrl inspired (but male written) source comics, but does that mean that it deserves its reputation as ‘a frenzied mess that’s dull in the extreme’? Rewatching for the first time since I was a teen, it’s an exhilarating watch that constantly bombards the viewer with layered textual references, a perfect nineties soundtrack, and an oft-confusing visual aesthetic that blends comic-book animation with the stylised action sequences and a no f****s given approach to narrative verisimilitude. And then come the occasional oddly traditional shootout fight sequences, which often took me out of the pop cult-ure, pomo, riot grrrl reality that makes up the majority of Tank Girl.
“Obviously Tank Girl was [a passion project] – I had to make the ultimate Grrrrl Movie, until the studio intervened… Tank Girl [was my favourite film to direct], until the studio intervened in their useless wisdom about the ‘morality of America.’” – Rachel Talalay
Tank Girl is set in a dystopic, resource-starved Australian desert in 2033. In terms of plot – which frankly isn’t that important (but I’ll give it a go) – it doesn’t rain on Earth anymore after a catastrophic event (comet) that disrupted the weather patterns (ignore the ‘science’), water becomes scarce, valuable, and controlled by an evil corporation called ‘Water & Power’ run by Kesslee (a super campy Malcom McDowell). Our anti-hero Rebecca Buck/Tank Girl (Lori Petty) is an outlaw who scavenges for water and supplies for her commune, until the Water & Power goons find and burn her hideout, kidnap some orphaned kids, and kill her then-boyfriend (he’s fridged – the first of several disruptions to misogynistic comic book tropes). Tank Girl escapes from Kesslee with the help of Jet Girl (Naomi Watts) a W&P jet engineer (#WomenInSTEM) who had all but given up on escaping the company. With the help of military-experiments-gone-wrong animal-human-hybrid ex-soldiers called Rippers (because, of course), Tank and Jet Girl plan to save the children (yeah, I forgot about them too) and take down the corrupt system.
Honestly, this doesn’t cover even half of what happens to the audience in Tank Girl. But the plot really wasn’t that important to me as I whole-heartedly bought into the characters, chaotic world-building, and general tone of the whole experience. This explanation of Tank Girl, posted by director Rachel Talalay, from alternative bi-weekly newspaper Portland Mercury sums it up pretty perfectly:
I think my recent (and probably ongoing) obsession with Birds of Prey (and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn) (Cathy Yan, 2019) and my current binge on the women-led, women written, directed, and created (from a woman written comic) TV show Vagrant Queen (2020- ) makes me far more open and excited about women-led comic book entertainment and their disruption of the limited expectations. Both Birds of Prey and Vagrant Queen play around with genre and characters that don’t fit into comic book women tropes, their highly choreographed and playfully filmed fight sequences (Vagrant Queen uses bullet time) are part of what make these examples so vibrant and fun.
Less focussed on action violence, these recent examples alongside other women-led action films like Wonder Woman (Patty Jenkins, 2017) and Captain Marvel (Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck, 2019) are indebted to the visual and narrative styling of Tank Girl. As one IMDB user review neatly suggests, Vagrant Queen is best understood as ‘Tank Girl meets Killjoys’. Notably, Killjoys also has a woman creator, executive producer, and showrunner: Michelle Lovretta.
Slo-mo, bullet time fight scenes are a recurrent and joyous stylistic choice in Vagrant Queen (“In A Sticky Spot”, episode 4, season 1, director: Danishka Esterhazy, writer: Mariko Tamaki)
Violence is not the focus in the majority of Tank Girl’s action sequences. For example, the grisly demise of the movie’s villain Kesslee is shown through an animation and references to The Wizard of Oz’s melting Wicked Witch of the West, as his partially digitised and prosthetic body dies away. But when the film does fall into the more traditional shoot outs – more at home in trad male-led action movies – I did start to lose focus.
Fight scenes are key sites of spectacle and spectacularised masculinity in traditional action movies – think of the bullet time fights in 1999’s The Matrix (now parodied by Vagrant Queen) that dissected the power and control of Neo (Kenau Reeves), or the hard bodied John McClane (Bruce Willis) in Die Hard (1988) where he survives falls, explosions, and shoots outs and almost single-handedly subverts the plans of foreign-terrorists.
Traditionally, women are positioned to the side of the spectacle, but in Tank Girl the titular character is right in the middle of the action, improbably surviving. Yes, both Ellen Ripley (Alien, 1989) and Sarah Connor (Terminator 2, 1991) had been there before – but in very clearly defined narratives fighting for survival not fun. Tank Girl explores the gap between the idea and image of what women are expected to do, and what they actually can do. It exposes the artificiality of gender and patriarchal power structures that surround this both on screen and in society.
Tank Girl’s fights are not really about showcasing physical power, but rather feminine ingenuity and characters unafraid to use their sexuality and the limited expectations their enemies have of them to succeed. The movie actively and perhaps problematically promotes the sexualisation of power, but I would argue that many of anti-feminist stereotypes about women that are presented are used to make satirical points about their absurdity. Tank Girl pseudo-seduces a W&P henchman so she can pull his grenade pins, Tank and Jet kiss to cause a distraction, and there’s a literal song and dance routine in a brothel as part of their surreal rescue plan.
Tank Girl’s parched post-apocalyptic setting, lengthy action sequences, and lead woman character mark it as a funny, feminist forebearer to Mad Max: Fury Road. Even if you’re not sold on the movie, you can’t deny the visual impact that Tank Girl has had on US pop culture. Look at contemporary Riot Grrls like Imperator Furiosa and [the Robbie/Yan] Harley Quinn. Talking of Harley Quinn, or rather Margot Robbie… her production company – LuckyChap Entertainment – have optioned the rights for Tank Girl from MGM. I would be totally sold on a Margot Robbie Tank Girl – especially as it would be more likely get a woman director.
Making Tank Girl in the post-Wonder Woman era (now) would be an entirely different experience to Hollywood in 1994. Watching Gal Gadot’s Wonder Woman battle her way through No Man’s Land (both literally and metaphorically) brought me to tears in the cinema. As the first woman to direct either a Marvel or DC franchise movie, Patty Jenkins had to deal with countless tone-deaf articles that suggested she and Wonder Woman were huge gambles for Warner Brothers. Even after the film proved to be a critical and financial success, reviews and reporting continued to question the wisdom of a woman director. Director Rachel Talalay has spoken out about the misogyny of the industry and the difficulties she experienced in making the Tank Girl she wanted to make – more than twenty years prior to Jenkins’ success.
“It’s not a meritocracy. It’s a business, and it’s an art form. If you aren’t talking about it, and you aren’t pushing to give women opportunities, how are they ever going to show that they can do it?” – Rachel Talalay
But Jenkins was levied with the burden of representing not only herself but the hope of every woman filmmaker and future woman-led genre movie projects. Her perceived failure, as with Talalay’s Tank Girl and the Halle Berry-led Catwoman (Pitof, 2004), could have been used to justify not making women-led movies or working with women filmmakers. Jenkins quit as the director of Thor: Dark World saying there were “creative differences”, but has since stated she didn’t want to make a movie she didn’t believe in (it is the least critically well-received Marvel movie), and have its poor reception explained away as the sole fault of its director being a woman.
Talalay did survive what she calls “the dark ages” of the 2000s, post-Catwoman, but did not become the movie directing maven she should have been. Tank Girl was Talalay’s third feature, a follow up to the 1993 Ghost in the Machine (which I’ll be watching at some point as part of the #WomenMakeSF project). Her career is impressive and she has worked on lots of my favourite genre TV shows over the years, but Tank Girl should not have been the end but the start of Talalay’s movie directing career. Male directors are just allowed to fail in a way that women directors are not.
Is Tank Girl a messy movie? Yes. Is it a messy movie that 1990s Hollywood just wasn’t ready for? Also, yes. I really wish I could see the movie that Talalay had wanted to make. Tank Girl is a revolutionary bit of cinema, just twenty five years ahead of its time.
Listen below to our podcast episode Defining SF is Hard where we discuss Welcome II the Terrordome(1995), Tank Girl and Évolution (2015).
What to watch next from Rachel Talalay: Ghost in the Machine (1993)
Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare (1991)
Doctor Who (2014-2017) – 8 episodes. Highlights: ‘Dark Water’ (8:11) where the true identity of ‘Missy is revealed, and ‘Death in Heaven’ (8:12) where Missy resurrects the dead as an army of cyborgs.
Talalay was also a producer on John Waters’ Cry Baby (1990) and Hairspray (1988)
Makeup Dept: Steph Smith (hair/makeup design)and Frances Murphy (makeup trainee)
Assistant Director: Tanya Rosen (second AD)
Floor Runner: Galéna Murray
Lead Modelmaker: Eleonora McNamara
Underwater Camera Operator: Christina Karliczek
Script Supervisor: Eva Kelly
Post-Prod. Coordinator: Noreen Donohoe
Available to stream/rent/buy:
This review contains **SPOILERS**
Review:
In Neasa Hardiman’s Sea Fever we get a woman scientist, representations of science, science fiction, discussion of science and superstition, and it’s all topped off with a woman director AND writer! It is a bit of a dream movie for this science and screen studies scholar. This, of course, all made me very nervous that I wouldn’t like the film. This was especially highlighted after the director Neasa Hardiman, who has a film studies PhD, kindly responded to my DMs and sent me a video intro for the screening event. Thankfully, I genuinely loved the movie and the way it engaged with all the parts of my research that marvellously converge in Sea Fever.
Set in contemporary Ireland (ROI), Sea Fever follows marine-biologist/microbiologist Siobhán (Hermione Corfield- left) who is introduced as an icy and antisocial scientist (she refuses birthday cake – surely she is a monster!). As part of her PhD research on oceanic faunal behavioral patterns Siobhán books a berth on a fishing trawler called Niamh Cinn Óir, expecting to endure a miserable week with its close-knit crew of six: skipper Gerard (Dougray Scott), his wife Freya (Connie Nielsen), ship’s engineer Omid (Ardalan Esmaili), Johnny (Jack Hickey), Ciara (Olwen Fouéré), and Sudi (Elie Bouakaze). The skipper navigates the trawler into an exclusion zone far out into the Atlantic Ocean, eager to illegally increase his catch, but instead the ship and crew become ensnared in the tendrils of an alien/undiscovered creature. The crew become infected and die off one by one after making contact with the creature’s parasitic goo. Siobhán has to gain the trust of the superstitious crew, quarantine the infected, and try to stop the contagion reaching the mainland before all is lost at sea.
Since Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas: A World Tour Underwater (1872) there has been a flow of science fiction with a nautical focus. The sea merges myth and science – both a source of deep fear (and thus myth) and massive rewards (and thus science). It offers a fluid storytelling space that holds many contradictions as it can be local, safe, bountiful, and homely, and/or alien, perilous, barren, and unwelcoming. Its danger and its beauty are often intertwined. Calm waters can hide dangerous undercurrents, and as Verne correctly guessed, a storm raging at the surface of an ocean lies over an eerie calm in the depths.
Women are also a site of superstition at sea, with their hidden depths that are beyond male experience. Siobhán is red-headed and identified as an omen on the ship as soon as she boards. The trawler is named for Niamh Cinn-Óir – the flaxen haired Irish folklore character who comes to Ireland from the sea on a white steed, and falls in love with and takes her lover Oisín to the otherworldly realm of Tír na nÓg (Land of Youth). He returns to Ireland, with the promise to Niamh not to touch the land. But of course he does; so he ages and dies, never to see Niamh again. Always follow the women’s instructions on avoiding sudden death (see also: Ripley in Alien and Siobhán in Sea Fever).
Maritime myths have been used to help people understand seafaring tragedies – people are lost at sea, their bodies never recovered, and so warnings are woven into myths that make the sea a creature to be tamed and feared. Mermaids, the Kraken, Davy Jones’ locker… Stories about the sea are an early form of maritime science communication as sailors (and their wives) pass on their wisdom through fiction, thus explaining ‘science’ (knowledge) in a memorable and accurate/believable way (as understood at the time).
My favourite scene in Sea Fever is a conversation between Freya and Siobhán as they watch the blue glow of the ocean. Whereas Siobhán marvels at the wonder of science and identifies the glow as bioluminescent phytoplankton, Freya sees the golden glowing hair of Niamh and recalls the Irish myth that the trawler is named for. Rather than a moment of conflict between science and myth (faith/religion) there is a calm acknowledgement of each other’s perspective and the acceptance of beauty regardless of its source or reason. The sea is a space that can be explained by both science and storytelling as we imagine futures, explore the oceanic frontier, and try to understand what can be explained and what cannot.
The artistic bioluminescence of marine dinoflagellates or the tendrils of Niamh Cinn-Óir [photographs by Iyvone Khoo, 2016. (L-R) Blue Noctorne,Millions of Photons; Flow; and Cosmic Island.
Sea Fever makes reference to and was repeatedly linked in our live tweet to other stories of unknown depth and creatures such as Jaws, The Thing, and The Abyss, all of which see characters underestimating the sea and its hidden depths and creatures. For the crew of the Niamh Cinn-Óir, the calm of the glowing sea soon shifts as the trawler strays into the exclusion zone and the grasp of a huge and unknown sea creature. After blue goo (don’t lick the science!) starts to enter the ship, Siobhán , as the only person on board who can dive (see: sailors who don’t swim), discovers that the hull of the ship is surrounded by glowing tendrils of a deep-sea creature that remains unseen and whose scale is unknown.
But the creature and its creepy Upside-Down-Demogorgon-style tentacles infect the gorgeous underwater photography, recalling the ethereality of Mikael Salomon’s underwater photography in The Abyss (note similarities in the promotional images with the backlit diver) and the Cousteau-esque beauty achieved in Évolution. Beauty and danger (beasts), and myth and science are closely entwined throughout Sea Fever. In stories where mythical creatures like mermaids are the cause of shipwrecks, storms, and drownings as they lure men to their deaths, their beauty is what makes them particularly deadly.
It is impossible not to connect Sea Fever to the current pandemic and how its use of quarantine and isolation are so central to the characters’ experiences. Despite the visual power and vast presence of (parts of) the creature in the underwater sequences the real danger is microscopic and unseen. The mysterious blue goo oozing into the ship and its water system is full of parasitic larvae that infects human hosts, driving them to madness and death.
The intentionally groan-worthy romance plotline that emerges early on – a classic way to make a woman scientist character easier for audiences (she must be a sister, mother, or lover) – is soon cast aside after Siobhán’s male love interest dies. We don’t remember his name, and we’re not supposed to. It’s Siobhán and sea beastie’s story. Her attempts to quarantine and save the remaining members of the crew is not a motherly action – but rather one of ‘science’ with her concern being isolating the infection from the mainland. Notably she does not see the creature as a monster; it is an animal that belongs there, the ship is out of its depths and invading its space. Perhaps the exclusion area is not just in place to protect fish stocks…
There are so many contemporary narratives that can be read into Neasa Hardiman’s debut feature film Sea Fever. It’s an eco-fiction (is this a consequence of the anthropocene? Have changed sea temperatures and ecology led this creature to the surface?), it’s horror, and it’s science fiction. But instead of saving humanity we are left with a young woman scientist essentially donating her body to the creature (rather than science). She sacrifices herself and hopefully stops the infection reaching Ireland, but she also doesn’t want the creature to suffer.
Siobhán (marine biologist) gives herself to the creature
Although Sea Fever deserves to be seen at the cinema – it’s so beautiful – the global pandemic gives the film an eerie relevance. A relevance that I hope gets people to rent or buy (or both in my case – nerd alert) Sea Fever – an indie production that has been released straight to VOD while big budget movies can hide in their shells.
As the saying goes, I feel all at sea at the moment. But, hey, at least I’m not on that boat.
Editor Contribution by Ursula Cuckston-Fenn– The title ‘Sea Fever’ may come from Irish poet John Masefield. The infamous poem was adapted into musical form in 1913 and has since become one of Ireland’s defining 20th century folk ballads. The lyrics speak of a cosmic pull towards the sea- Masefield wrote extensively about his love for being at sea, making it a space for infinite freedom from the political, spiritual and physical restraints of land-living. Feminine monstrosity in Hardiman’s Sea Fever juxtaposes the traditionally masculinist sublimity of the sea which is purveyed in Romanticist art.
‘I must go down to the seas again, to the vagrant gypsy life,
To the gull’s way and the whale’s way where the wind’s like a whetted knife;
And all I ask is a merry yarn from a laughing fellow-rover,
And quiet sleep and a sweet dream when the long trick’s over.
Caspar David Friedrich’s ‘Wanderer Above the Sea’, (1818)
If the masculine voice in the original poem can be read as an inherent yearning for freedom from the male perspective, Hardiman codes the sea itself as a feminine entity. The self-sacrificial trajectory reaches outside of the state of yearning for the sea as an ‘other’ but rather for full realisation of the self. Siobhán is not just ‘drawn’ to the sea’s feminine power- she is the embodiment of it, reclaiming her power that is demeaned at the start of the narrative by the judgmental anti-intellectualism of her colleagues and in turn recentering romantic oceanic narratives.
What to watch next from Neasa Hardiman: This is Hardiman‘s first feature film, but she has directed episodes on major shows including: Jessica Jones; Inhumans; Z: The Beginning of Everything; and popular British drama Happy Valley
High Life is European art house director Claire Denis’ first English-language film and surprisingly fronted by international Hollywood star (and former sparklepire) Robert Pattinson. The film was released a few weeks after I completed teaching a course on women in science fiction and began my own journey into the world of women-directed science fiction. High Life is not an easy watch, especially on its first viewing. It is a space movie that purposely disrupts expectations, but its focus on nature, orgasms, sexual politics, isolation, and (lack of) bodily autonomy mark it as part of Denis’ existing cinematic oeuvre.
Denis’ work is often considered difficult to access with its tendency towards slow-paced, nonlinear narratives (she writes in ellipses, often “with a piece missing” from the story). and her often ruthless revisioning of popular genres. It could be argued that this is not her first dabble in SF: Trouble Every Day (2001) is an erotic horror based around a science experiment gone wrong, an experiment that creates humans for whom desire for the flesh becomes literal (cannibalism). Similarly to High Life, we wonder whether Denis intends to contribute to the chosen genre or if these genre interventions should be understood as arthouse/auteur parodies of the boundaries and expectations of genre fiction.
High Life works outside of many of the conventions of mainstream science fiction but it is immersed, as Trouble Every Day was, in iconic horror, in references to major genre-defining visual SF texts. Tarkovsky’s Solaris (1972) is a major touchstone for Denis both visually and philosophically—the story of a dingy, battered future and unknowable other revels in the mundanity and madness that long-term space habitation must inevitably entail. This is an existential gloom that Tarkovsky explored as rejection or perhaps a reply to the utopian sterility of the future of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and the fleeting dystopias of mainstream space operas of the 1970s.
High Life is set on a spaceship on a one-way mission to gather data from black holes as a possible alternative form of energy. Here, space is literally a prison as the inhabitants of the ship have all been convicted of violent crimes and have traded death row for this government-sponsored experiment. The elegant lo-fi sci-fi aesthetic allows for a more existential exploration of the psyche in isolation. The human mind unoccupied in the void of space is the ultimate prison when there is no hope of return. Where the elastic cosmic nothingness of time and space was too much for the people on the Aniara in Aniara (2018)—theirs was meant to be a finite journey from Earth to Mars—it provides a curious comfort for much of High Life. The tender scenes with Monte (Patterson) and his daughter Willow (baby: Scarlette Lindsey, child: Jessie Ross) show their routine and frustrations, but these are occupied minds unexpectedly growing, learning, and loving together.
Juliette Binoche with Claire Denis at the European Space Agency’s European Astronaut Centre
Monte is a murderer; as a child he took revenge on the friend who killed his dog. We assume from the little given away by Monte in flashbacks that he has been isolated all of his life, given a life sentence as a minor. It is hard not to read the film as a critique of the US prison system where sentences can be handed out that do not allow for redemption and juveniles can be sentenced to life without parole. The spaceship prison offers Monte a greater sense of freedom, and later purpose and hope with the unexpected delivery of his daughter.
One of the few areas of the ship that doesn’t replicate the dilapidated images of humdrum space travel is the garden allotment—like Solaris, High Life’s ship is more dingy public transport chic than sparkling Kubrickian luxury. The garden offers another reference to a classic text, here Silent Running (1972), in which the last of Earth’s forests are jettisoned into the relative safety of space in giant geodesic domes (I adore the opening scene). The garden seems to be part of the experiment for long-term survival in space.
The forest of the Valley Forge in SILENT RUNNING (1972) and the garden with baby Willow in HIGH LIFE (2018)
André 3000 [aka André Benjamin] plays Tcherny who tends to the garden that ultimately becomes his gravesite. He commits suicide and, per his request, Monte commits his body to the garden; Monte, as the last surviving prisoner, takes over as gardner. In one striking conversation these men talk about why they joined the mission: for Tcherny it is about giving his family something to be proud of (redemption), whereas Monte’s isolation and social separation has been lifelong until he goes into space.
Tcherny: “I’d rather sink into the Earth after I’ve lost you than to sit around and grieve once you’ve gone off into your destiny.” Monte: What are you talking about? Tcherny: It’s what my wife told me. I told her I was doing all this for her and our son, to turn our shame into some type of glory, you know? She says that this mission was like burying her twice and that my idea of glory was bullshit.
Denis did work closely with astrophysicists and astronauts to ensure that space in High Life was “as close as possible” to reality. The startlingly accurate images of the black hole that are created—Denis refers to the image as the crocodile’s eye—makes this an interesting approach to representing space as both science and art. Part of the inspiration and test space for the yellow-tinged but beautiful lighting and visual design came from a collaboration with visual artist Olafur Eliasson for his 2014/15 exhibition Contact (Foundation Louis Vuitton, Paris, France). Their short film/installation is also called Contact where the artists creatively and abstractly explore ‘their common fascination with phenomena that have not yet been fully explained by science – such as black holes’.
The visual design of High Life is also stunning, much like the visual contemplative storytelling of Lucile Hadžihalilović’s Évolution (2015) where audiences must fill in the gaps and create the narrative from the fragments that Denis deigns to offer. Amongst the scenes of violence and sex there are beautiful images of the garden and the tender relationship between Monte and his young daughter. As Willow grows the audience is given flashbacks to a time when Monte was one of many prisoners but was perhaps far more insular—both sexually and socially celibate.
The opening of the film which appears almost as surveillance footage of Monte (Pattinson) raising his daughter and repeating the routine of survival on a spaceship. It is just them and this close bond that is our entry point into the High Life. In flashbacks—the sense of time is lost—the other characters die off one by one, either from murder, suicide, or natural(ish) causes. Chandra (Lars Eidinger) develops leukemia due to radiation and has a stroke, but is then euthanised by the ship’s doctor, and the pregnant Elektra (Gloria Obianyo) delivers a baby who dies and then dies herself soon after.
The death-row prisoners have donated their bodies to science while they are still alive. Not only in the experiment of the one-way exploratory voyage and self-sufficiency, but also as subjects for the onboard scientist child-murderer/insemination specialist Dr Dibs (Juliette Binoche). She too is a sentenced criminal but has been charged with her own exploratory mission into intergalactic insemination and childbirth. Any surviving children will be collateral damage: their survival is punishment for the sins of the mother and father (and their doctor). Sex between the prisoners is forbidden and all but the celibate Monte seem to use the efficiently named Fuckbox for sexual release (and collection of samples). The need for sexual pleasure in space is paired with the need for sustenance provided by the garden. Interestingly, they are the only two spaces that deviate in terms of design from the rest of the utilitarian prison ship.
Dibs/Binoche in HIGH LIFE
Eleckra and later Boyse’s (Mia Goth) pregnancies are the result of experiments by the witchy Dr Dibs who is obsessed with making and stealing children (even though she killed her own biological children). She inseminates the female prisoners with sperm taken with or without the consent of the male prisoners. Dibs increases prisoner sedatives following an attempted rape and murder, but her motivations are predatory rather than protective as she rapes Monte and steals his sperm while he is unconscious. Boyse carries the baby to term but is not her mother beyond biology—her story is not altered by the child, choosing a risky and ultimately deadly mission over staying onboard. Willow’s parentage is a revelation from a dying Dibs; Monte was unaware that he had contributed to her creation but, unlike Boyse, he does choose to become a father rather than rejecting the innocent infant. The ‘present day’ scenes show Monte’s acceptance, trust and love for Willow, and their final act together is as beautiful as it is baffling.
Illustration by Dadu Shin, published in The New Yorker (15 April 2015)
What to watch next from Claire Denis: One of the few women directors of SF to have an extensive filmography filled with critically acclaimed cinematic masterpieces. She did not start directing feature films until she was 42 with Chocolat. I clearly enjoyed (if that is the right word) High Life and I think it is a pretty good entry point for someone who hasn’t seen her French work. This is only a small selection of Denis’ feature films (13 fiction, 2 in production + shorts, TV work, and documentaries): Chocolat (1988) Beau Travail (1999) Trouble Every Day (2001) 35 Shots of Rum (2008) White Material (2009) Bastards (2013) Let the Sunshine In (2017)
The Aniara is a commercial spaceship that goes off-course, on a journey to Mars and then off to nowhere, transporting a lost group of humans who were already forced to leave their poisoned Earth. Aniara is ‘Solaris on speed‘ as woman co-director Pella Kågerman explains. It is a philosophical space movie that asks: what is it be human in a future without the Earth? What happens when Earth is no longer a place we can return to or even save? Is an Earth-less future a future-less future?
Pella Kågerman and Hugo Lilja’s Aniara is an adaptation of an epic poem of the same name by Harry Martinson (1956), a Nobel prize winning Swedish poet of the atomic age. The poem is a collection of 103 cantos (songs) that have previously been adapted into a 1959 opera by Karl Birger Blomdahl, a 1960 Swedish TV movie production directed by Arne Arnbom, and translated for broadcast on BBC radio in 1962. Songs recur throughout the film adaptation for comfort, devotion, and mourning. Martinson was writing in response to Hiroshima and Cold War nuclear proliferation and his future forecasting lyrics recount the tale of an abandoned ship of people who have lost their past and have no future. Kågerman was given permission to adapt Martinson’s poem with the agreement of the poet’s daughters, Harriet and Eva who asked her to retain the poem’s dark original ending.
Mimaroben (in white) from the 1959 Opera
“…entombed in our immense sarcophagus we were borne on across the desolate waves of space-night, so unlike the day we’d known, unchallenged silence closing round our grave…’
Canto 103, ‘Aniara’ by Harry Martinson (1998 trans. Klass & Sjoberg)
This eco-SF film begins with a near future imagining of the culmination of the sixth extinction. Humans are forced to leave the planet they have destroyed. News reports show mass ecological devastation as the opening credits roll and any remaining humans (or rather those who can afford to do so) have left for new Martian settlements. But there is an ‘incident’ at the beginning of their 3-week cruise to Mars and the Aniara is pushed off course and her fuel supply jettisoned to avoid a fatal collision with space debris. But this means that the ship’s crew are unable to change their course and are thus forced to journey on into nothingness. They give the passengers false hope as they suggest that on contact with the gravitational pull of a celestial body they will be able to get back on course. But in truth their current trajectory will not bring them into contact with a planet for almost 6 million years.
There are parallels to extinction event narratives like Battlestar Galactica, The 100, and even Wall.E, where a limited human colony is forced into space on a potentially endless wait for Earth to recover or in search of a new settlement. In Aniara the threat to human survival is isolation, time, and the self rather than Cylons, depleting resources (air and algae), and even apathy. The film asks us to contemplate what we would do if our future was futureless? What if we were forced to leave Earth? If our survival doesn’t mean anything (these are not the last humans), is it worth carrying on?
Opening credits from ANIARA with documentary footage of eco-disaster
The main character is MR (Emelie Jonsson)—a skilled engineer and the ship’s the mimaroben who hosts/operates the MIMA, which is an immersive virtual reality (VR) experience. Her given name is simply a nickname taken from her job title. In the original poem the mimarobe is a servant (human interface) to the MIMA, defined by his fealty to the machine that assumes the consciousness of the voyagers. In the 1959 opera adaptation of the poem, MIMA is a more definable computer that controls the Aniara, but becomes inert when the Earth is destroyed. In this modern AI-focussed adaptation, MR—defined only by her job title and not a name—can resist MIMA’s somnolent effects and (believes that she) communes with it. But rather than being connected irrevocably to the passengers of the Aniara, this sentient VR chooses its own path into the future.
“I am of Mima and so am called no more than mimarobe.” Cantos 34
MR shares a bunk with another employee/passenger: The Astronomer (Anneli Martini). At first I had thought that this was a nod to or parallel to Annihilation, where the women of STEMM are defined by their expertise rather than a gendered name. But Aniara offers no such feminist potential; instead it just adds to the sense of futility and isolation that the passengers and crew experience. The misanthropic astronomer is villainous only in her desire to tell the truth. The truth that the ship is going to be the only place they and their descendants are likely to ever experience. The ship is self-sustaining, but can the humans on board go on living knowing that this is all there is for them? The Astronomer’s revelations lead to suicides, depression and addictive delusions aided by the ship’s MIMA.
MIMA is a little bit holodeck, a little bit Obsidian Platinum, and a little bit of a Samantha. Intended at first to allow passengers to feel and experience ‘the Earth as it once was’, MIMA draws upon the memories of the people who connect to it. MIMA allows them to return to the simplicity of a now-destroyed natural world—dawn choruses, babbling brooks, and the salty air of the coast. MIMA is a super-advanced VR attraction on a cruise ship to a new life on Mars, placed alongside other distractions/attractions including a shopping mall, a food court, and entertainment arcades: a way of passing the time. But as the time that must be passed becomes potentially endless, the passengers become addicted to the MIMA experience and their once entertaining reveries become nightmares.
The MIMA – VR escape to feeling the natural world that humans destroy in ANIARA
VR becoming addictive is a popular trope in contemporary SF such as the Obsidian implants in Supergirl and Reverie in Reverie. But these stories tend to focus on saving humans from the VR that they don’t want to and sometimes can’t leave. Often choosing to remain in the virtual world to avoid the pain of their reality (e.g., bereavement), concerned family, friends, and specialists must draw them back to reality with the promise that life will get better.
MIMA is an AI designed to develop and grow with the memories and experiences that it comes into contact with through its users, a record of the natural world created through unfiltered lived experiences. At first MR is shown struggling to pull in participants for the VR experience as other commercial and communal activities draw the crowds. But over the first three years passengers need a greater hit of distraction and so they turn to the MIMA. Flooding ‘her’ with data (the memories captured) that is both tranquil and traumatic, MIMA intimately experiences the destruction of the world she was developed to ‘remember’ and ‘recreate’. MIMA becomes increasingly self aware, but unlike Samantha in Her, MIMA is not connected to an infinite network of other AIs that it can escape to and separate from the needy damaged humans. ‘She’ is as trapped as the rest of the people onboard.
MIMA has the potential to turn against the humans (like the Machines in The Matrix)—they willingly give themselves over to the machine—but instead chooses to self-destruct, refusing to serve as solace for a species that failed to conserve the irreplaceable pale blue dot. The apparent safety of the dreamstate provided by the MIMA becomes unstable as forests burn and birds fall from the sky. MIMA seems to lose ‘her’ mind and, as members of a techno-cult that emerges following MIMA’s ‘death’ explain, she dies from grief. ‘She’ mourns a world and set of experiences that cannot be substituted or recaptured even by advanced technology. MIMA struggles to separate the images of macro destruction that humans are perhaps almost numb to (new reported images of fires, flooding, extinction, starvation…) from the pleasant individual daily experiences of nature that we don’t always connect to the larger eco-disaster that we face.
MIMA ‘dies’ relatively early in the film’s run time. They are only three years into the journey when the system is overwhelmed. They have created, as Captain Chefone (Arvin Kananian) remarks, their ‘own planet’ on the Aniara: a system that produces enough oxygen and foodstuffs (algae will save us!) for survival. At first memories of the world they destroyed and left behind become taboo as those in charge fear that even images of nature will devastate the fragile human residents. MR wants to use her expertise to build a beam-screen to help the depressed (and mainly her lover Isagel [Bianca Cruzeiro]), a 3D rendering of some of the natural images perhaps found amongst MIMA’s corrupted memory space. But she is instead conscripted into teaching, although eventually and with the support of her students she does create her 3D projectors that offer a glimmer of hope in the darkness of deep space. But flickering hope and uncanny natural scenes cannot help Isagel.
MR’s Beam-Screen that acts as a substitute for the MIMA that was a substitute for ‘real’ nature
MR has hope. The Astronomer tells her she is delusional and lying to herself. But it is there throughout the film. The seemingly out of place dance sequences show her letting go, feeling, and allowing herself to experience everything she can. She falls in love with Isagel (the woman pilot; the original Isagel was also a woman and like MR her ‘name’ is just a ‘code word’). In a search for connection and hope they investigate the cults that emerge only a year after MIMA is lost. In an orgy that follows one of their experiences with the cults Isagel becomes pregnant. A possible symbol of hope (children are our future, etc.)? They raise the child together. But as the value and purpose MR has found in teaching and developing the beam-screen technology makes her life seems worth living, she discovers that Isagel and their child are dead in a tragic murder/suicide. MR continues on. We see her for the last time at an awkward 10th anniversary event where she is awarded a prize for her beam screen. Time passes, 25 years later, and then a blink later the film’s closing shots show the Aniara in the year 5,981,407, dead and floating above a planet in the Lyra constellation.
The Aniara finally gets to the planet that once offered them hope. But in that distant future the ship is just a piece of space debris, a celestial sarcophagus for a part of the human species that was lost and soon forgotten. They are not humanity’s last hope, they are little more than debris lost in the vastness of space. Our world is worth saving: it is a home, a purpose, a gift. Hope and wishful thinking can only get us so far—our individual contributions matter, but in the face of massive institutional and corporate greed and destruction we can only manage so much. As MR exclaims in a moment of frustration: their experiences on Aniara are not better than those on the cold desolation of Mars and suggests that their survival is not just individual but collective and even generational. MR has hope beyond her own life and experience. The Aniara could have become a generation ship that would have meant keeping this journey going across generations born on the ship until a destination was reached. But instead of thinking of the future, the crew and passengers are (quite understandably) focussed on their own immediate experiences. They give up hope (by year 4 techno-sex cults emerge, obvs).
What happens if we give up hope and fighting for the future? What if we completely desensitise ourselves from the reality of the Anthropocene and our broken planet? Why, despite being fully aware of the facts and the urgency of the climate situation, don’t we (as a global human race) really do anything to radically address our present-day environmental disaster? What happens when we lose eco-empathy and embrace eco-apathy? Let’s find our ecological hope and empathy because I (and future generations) really don’t want to end up on the Aniara.*
What to watch next from Pella Kågerman: Aniara is Kågerman’s first feature film as a director. She co-wrote postapocalyptic zombie film The Unliving (2010, 28 min) with Hugo Lilja, which he also directed.
She has also directed some short films: The Swedish Empire (2014) Stormaktstiden (2014) The Swedish Supporter (2011) Body Contact – a segment from Dirty Diaries (2009), which includes 12 shorts directed by young women artists, directors and feminists to create ’12 propositions to rethink pornography.’
