Annihilation as Segregation Philosophy: White Spaces of Law/Power/Desire

Abstract

In this article, I investigate the spatial dimensions of the law and their relationships with desire and power. Annihilation, in my view, presents conceptions of white spaces of Law/Power/Desire that are threatened by interracial relationships associated with nightmare spaces of difference. I examine strategies of how space is conceived of and controlled in this white supremacist mindset and how categories of bodies that move through areas to form relationships are controlled. In particular, I expose how the segregation philosophy of the film relies on the control of white women and the prohibition of their connection with black men.

I. Introduction

It was a while back. I had decided to pick up some easy money modelling for the institution I was at. I arrived at the meeting point. We went into a room, a very ordinary room with a table where we were to position ourselves freely, spontaneously. Around this virgin space which we colonized, an uncannily regulated effect unfolded which I had noticed all throughout my life. The table became organized around skin color. Those with black skin sat with those with black skin. Those with white skin sat with those with white skin. When performing for the camera, in an unspoken but authoritative manner, the pigments in the skin-controlled space and the insertion of bodies within it, although there was no central authority that imposed this rule. I myself had become a victim of this spatial-visual organization as the world changed around me and, somehow compelled, sat with those with lighter skin. The black side of the table had little communication with the paler side as we talked to our immediate neighbors rather than those further away. There was distance and isolation. I had noticed this self-imposed segregation time and time again in educational institutions, nightclubs, parks, anywhere really. I remember when I went to group interviews for certain prestigious firms, and all of us Asians were banded together against another group that was composed of others of lighter skin pigmentation.

Perhaps, I was tired. Perhaps, I was irritated at the absurdity of our existence and the rules we had formulated to govern it. Certainly, I felt somehow tainted, as if there was something wrong. I remarked on the occurrence, with a little jest. The impact was surprising and immediate. The photographer said that this would not do at all for the promotion, and we were each asked to change our seating arrangements. It seemed that the rule of self-imposed segregation was perfectly valid until it was recognized, pointed out, criticized. On an unconscious level, the organization worked and was accepted. But only unconsciously. Because, after all, such segregation went against our conscious, modern, and idealized conceptions of space, where there was a multicultural unity and diversity, where there were interactions between bodies and spaces that were not meant to be decided on racial lines. As we settled into the new organization, there were different interactions between bodies, different conversations, a different atmosphere. . .

That experience around the table is one that I want to bring to an analysis of how self-imposed segregation in the film Annihilation (2018) is presented. I argue that the film presents spaces of segregation in the same way us models at the table presented it at first through our bodies and the spaces they created. What are the ideas behind this spatial organization and visual representation, its philosophy? How is it that such ideas form an unrecognized law, which frames our body and our existence? What is the nature of this clandestine, absolute, and undeviating power which, despite all good intentions and free will, reductively determines how space is laid out through bodies? If I point out and criticize such a power and the notions behind it, can I again change the positions around the table which we all sit at in our society?

Annihilation (2018) explores space and how it shapes bodies, which makes it a particularly fertile mine for answering my questions. As in other films of the sci-fi genre, the characters travel into an alien site, here called the Shimmer, which threatens to overtake notions of normality, including bodies. Hence, rich comparisons emerge between areas and bodies conceived of as normal and extra-terrestrial and disorienting. Unlike the original book upon which the movie is based, the journey into the Shimmer by key characters is motivated by an interracial relationship, which takes place outside of marriage, or outside of the law. Correspondingly, race, space, and the law form a complicated knot in the film, the unravelling of which reveals the key features of a power and control over land and the body. To an extent, critics amongst the general public have implicitly recognized the existence of segregation in the movie. Thus, there have been claims that the movie is an example of “whitewashing” since mixed-race characters from the original novels were cast as white women, such as the lead character Lena who Natalie Portman was cast as. As an effective and knowing metaphor, “whitewashing” indicates how a segregationist space is created in the film through bodies and, indeed, the movie literalizes this act of whitewashing in the context of the law, race, and space, when Lena paints her bedroom white. Yet, there has been little academic attention given to Annihilation when such an analysis, I contend, can further reveal and make contestable the existence of oppressive, historical, untenable frameworks of thinking in contemporary American society. In this article, I will argue that Annihilation is an example of segregation philosophy since the interracial relationship outside of marriage, and the law is understood through ideas of a white space of power and its other. The interracial relationship threatens to destroy the marriage between the two white central characters Lena and Kane and forces them both to explore the space of difference in the Shimmer, to court their self-destruction or annihilation. This is understood as the annihilation of whiteness. I will show that the movie aims to control and subjugate white women in line with the historical aims of segregation law. I aim to expose largely unconscious and unrecognized guides to thought in how bodies are understood in space and how such conceptions construct conceptual fields of the law and power.

II. Divided Desires: The Historical and Political Context of Annihilation

In a significant flashback in the movie, the lead character Lena remembers cheating on her husband with her black colleague Dan. As the legal institution of marriage is constantly referenced, the stress is on the idea that the affair between the black man and the white woman is illegal. Thus, the film incorporates the historical legal discouragement and prohibition of mixed-race couplings in America through “the legal form of adultery and fornication.” ¹ This interracial relationship outside of marriage, and the law is presented as the motivation for both husband and wife to go into the alien space of Shimmer: Kane because it is implied that he learns of the affair, Lena to make amends for the affair and for forcing her husband away. Kane’s motivation is suggested when Lena tells her black colleague Dan that Kane knows of the affair. Announcing an obligation to her husband because of her mistake, Lena says that she goes into the Shimmer because she “owes” Kane and is therefore paying him back for his sacrifice. Through techniques of implication and suggestion, the movie represents the mixed-race relationship as the black invasion of white space and marriage, or the law. Natalie Portman (Lena) and Oscar Isaac (Kane) seem to me, at first, to represent the whiteness of the law of marriage and its basis in white bodies. Certainly, as is well known, Portman is of Jewish ancestry while Isaac is of mixed-race descent. Yet, as demonstrated in the claims of whitewashing in the movie because of the casting of Portman, and despite the fact that the actors are stars and their backgrounds are widely publicized, these actors are largely seen as white by audiences because they pass as white. In fact, the movie presents this apparent whiteness of the couple as peculiarly open to invasion by blackness, suggesting that an appearance of whiteness is deceptive and unable to maintain exclusion and centering, and perhaps that the actual non-white background of the actors contributes to why, ultimately, they cannot maintain white spaces and a white law of marriage in the filmic narrative. That is, the movie holds the actors and characters up to a standard of pristine whiteness but they can only play at this before revealing their lack of this “ideal” state, in line with the horror of the movie in which, as we will see, “uncompleted” or “fragmentary” white spaces and white bodies mix with black spaces and black bodies. The actors are then participants in “passing” for white. As David Delaney summarizes, “passing involves “complex notions of deceit, betrayal, suspicion, and anxieties concerning threats to white purity.” ² Passing is also a spatial metaphor, which involves the idea that “one crosses, or passes over, the color line dividing white and black,” and we shall see that the participant of passing is recruited so as to transgress and explode the boundaries of racial segregation in the movie. ³ Elaine Ginsberg elaborates this subversive potential of passing in “The Politics of Passing”:

such an individual crossed or passed through a racial line or boundary—indeed trespassed—to assume a new identity, escaping the subordination and oppression accompanying one identity and accessing the privilege and status of the other. Enabled by a physical appearance emphasizing “white” features, this metaphorical passing necessarily involved geographical movement as well; the individual had to leave an environment where his or her “true identity”—that is, parentage, legal status, and the like—was known to find a place where it was unknown. ⁴

In the movie, as participants in passing, both Portman and Isaac move from known white geography into the unknown black space, subverting the color line, before the film finally outs them as bearers of fraudulent white identity and radical alien difference in the ending.

The film relates space and race to the law via ideas of marriage. Marriage itself is a legal institution and representative of the law and its rule. The black invasion of marriage is a central, structural motif that repeats itself in the film and allows the critic to unpack the implicit chain of associations being made around legal relationships, space, and race. Such associations appear to derive from the historical context of segregation in America, which, through both law and government policy controlled individuals and their relationships through the categories of space and race. ⁵ While racial segregation superficially appears to be a thing of the past, contemporary scholarship recognizes that racial segregation, or implicit ideas of white space and black realms still continue to structure recognized categories of area in American society, as George Lipsitz argues in “The Racialization of Space and the Spatialization of Race: Theorizing the Hidden Architecture of Landscape” (2007). ⁶

Racial segregation is about delimiting spaces of racial power. As Reginald Oh writes, “the systematic physical and social separation of the white and black races was fundamental to maintaining a social system of white supremacy and black inferiority.” ⁷ An important aspect of governing spaces of power is to control racialized bodies and their interactions through the control of space, specifically possible romantic relationships. Hence, Oh analyses segregation laws by concentrating on the interaction between racial segregation in public schools and anti-miscegenation laws. He argues that the aim and purpose of racial segregation is to prohibit the formation of interracial relationships. As he writes,

Just like laws prohibiting interracial marriage, a central purpose of racial segregation was to prevent the development of intimate social relationships between blacks and whites. Segregationists believed this was necessary to prevent the production of racially mixed children and thus preserve white supremacy and white racial purity. ⁸

In particular, segregation aims to curb relationships between white women and black men, the interracial relationship which is problematized in Annihilation. ⁹ Oh terms this a system of racial and gender subordination, which seeks to control women by “protecting” them from “succumbing” to sexual desires for black men. ¹⁰

Natalie Portman who plays Lena “passes” for white in the movie’s racial logic, but she is also represented as a white woman attracted to a black man (before the ultimate “failure” of her whiteness in the ending). Scholarship asserts that white women who transgress sexual color lines threaten white supremacy in a number of ways. ¹¹ First, the obvious point made by Marilyn Frye is that, historically, white women have been expected to keep the white race pure and to produce white babies, or that they are bound in “reproductive service” to white men. Thus, “white men’s domination and control of’ white women is essential to their project of maintaining their racial dominance.” ¹² At the same time, as Richard Dyer explains, “interracial heterosexuality threatens the power of whiteness because it breaks the legitimation of whiteness with reference to the white body.” The issue is that “if white bodies are no longer indubitably white bodies . . . then the ‘natural’ basis of their domination is no longer credible.” ¹³ Thus, Lena’s interracial relationship threatens the white male strategy of sexual control and power. Second, as Cornel West writes, the white woman in the film may be seen to be “overwhelmed” by the power of black sexuality, which “makes white passivity the norm—hardly an acceptable self-image for a white-run society.” ¹⁴ As I will argue, this “overpowering” of Lena is understood as an overpowering of white power and the inculcation of white passivity more generally. Third, as Franz Fanon argues, by evaluating her black lover as “worthy of white love,” Lena equates him with—and therefore transforms him into—a white man. ¹⁵ The white woman therefore subverts the principles of white supremacy and racial hierarchies through the power of her lust. The film’s title alludes to these perceived dilutions of power as it refers to Lena’s “annihilation” of herself and, with it, her “annihilation” of whiteness and white supremacy.

As I will show, Annihilation adheres to the purposes and aims of segregation, which aim to prevent interracial mixing through ideas of space and to control the racialized and gendered bodies that move through space and give it identity. As in white supremacist thought, the movie presents interracial mixing as a nightmare, apocalyptic scenario, which results in the defeat of white racial purity and white supremacy, a scenario illustrated most clearly in the space of the Shimmer and its monsters and mutations, a culmination of a journey away from marriage and the law.

The historical context of segregation unites with the contemporary political context in the movie. Donald Trump had just taken the reins of power when the movie was released. The movie is sited in the move away from the previous administration. Barack Obama’s earlier presidency, which had already aroused a veritable renaissance of racism, appears formative to the conceptions of the law, power and race presented in the movie, as a foil. Barack Obama was a mixed-race president and the product of a coupling between a white woman and a black man, the very relationship that is depicted as a destabilization of space, being, and body in Annihilation. He was a mixed-race man in the powerful white space of the White House, perceived as an unsettling and subversive presence by white supremacists. The movie does not allude to this directly, of course. How could the movie openly acknowledge such thoughts? Overt professions of white supremacy are unacceptable, one hopes. And the racism in the movie is unintentional or “unconscious” (which is by no means meant to excuse it). But there are hints and nudges. The “invasion” of blackness is consistently conflated with the color blue, which is associated with Democrats, Obama being a Democratic president. In the blue bedroom, the interracial affair takes place. Then later, this blue returns to unsettle white state space in the ending of the movie through a shot taken through tinted blue glass. While the mixed-race origin of an American president provoked open tears of joy from the likes of Jesse Jackson, the civil rights activist, it seems to have provoked secret tears of a very different kind from those involved in the film. As I will show, the movie aims to curtail, pre-empt, undo the intermingling of white and black bodies and spaces that results in a Barack Obama, every strategy to prevent the white space of the White House being “invaded” by blackness. Yet, strangely, ironically, Obama himself listed the film as amongst his favorites of the year. ¹⁶ Which demonstrates that the implicit connections that the movie makes operate as a “dog whistle” form of racism, which provokes tacit acceptance because it defeats recognition and scrutiny. It is these covert strategies that I will undo by showing that the movie is thoroughly a vehicle for white supremacist ideas. What is perhaps most abominable and insidious about the discrimination of the movie is that it is so taken for granted that it has become invisible, normal. Hence, its absolute power.

III. Space in Theory: Lust and Lawscape

Tortuous equations abound in Annihilation and form the substance of its segregation philosophy. To me, most obviously, marriage and the law are equated with white bodies in the coupling of Lena and Kane: Law = white bodies. At first, this union of what appear as white bodies is unproblematic, but the movie goes on to suggest that the whiteness is illusory, and therefore it becomes open and threatened by blackness, perhaps a pedantic statement as to the non-white background of the actors playing the roles. A climactic, determining (and thus powerful) white space of desire where the resolution of the film is enacted is also equated with the white body: The White Lighthouse = the white phallus = the object of desire = the powerful male white body par excellence (Space = Power = Desire = The white body). How can one reduce this down into a formula? Spaces = Bodies = Desire = The Law = Power. But how to understand such odd, seemingly counter-intuitive and arbitrary equations? Especially since each of the terms in the equation seems to be latched onto the other as in the phallic lighthouse image, which adds another opaque layer to the film’s philosophy of space?

Pioneering and adventurous theories advanced by Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos in Spatial Justice: Body, Lawscape, Atmosphere (2015) shaped my initial viewing and subsequent conception of Annihilation, allowing insight into these tautologies between power, space, the law, and bodies all under the ambit of desire. Fortuitously, I studied for my doctorate at the University of Westminster, where Andreas is based and where he makes a great contribution to the graduate school. I therefore came to hear of his innovative ideas and slowly realized their potential for cultural criticism. Here, I will simplify this thinking in the interests of parsimony and show its relevance and importance to my viewing of Annihilation.

Andreas asserts that “the law and space cannot be separated from each other.” ¹⁷ As he elaborates, “they are constantly conditioned by each other, allowing one to emerge from within its connection to the other.” ¹⁸ Even when one thinks one is free of the law in space, this is not the case. In contrast to a prison, an art gallery appears free from legal interference and seems to allow unconstrained movement. However, immersion and being in its realm is structured by seemingly invisible rules and prepared rituals, just like when the models’ spontaneous choice to sit anywhere resulted in a very structured positioning around the table. The art gallery, and our photoshoot table, is an instance of a lawscape, and furthermore (I will describe this in a moment) an atmosphere. ¹⁹ The lawscape is “where space, bodies and law are folded together.” ²⁰ It is where bodies generate and become space. ²¹ The law here is

co-determined with the space between bodies (as in a social interaction or a multinational treaty or the slave trade); the space that is produced and is occupied by bodies; the movement of bodies; the desire of bodies; and the withdrawal of bodies for another law. ²²

In the photoshoot scenario, the law is co-determined with self-imposed segregation, as is the case in Annihilation.

Everywhere and everything is a lawscape, even though we willfully forget it, as we are subject to an absolutism of the rule of the law and its control over space and body: our bedrooms, our streets, the table around which us models sat in our modelling assignment, especially intensely private spaces like the toilet, which are directed by a plethora of sewage, water and health and safety rules. This is where the idea of an “atmosphere” comes into the theory. Even while we are mercilessly controlled, we feel the beautiful illusion of independence and freedom. This is because the law which controls dissimulates itself or “invisibilizes” itself: it doesn’t appear as a lawscape but as a “free” atmosphere. After all, in the art gallery or the toilet, one does not think of oneself as at the mercy of the law. Indeed, there, one desires invisibilisation and this desire creates such atmospheres:

The main issue with the lawscape is that its constituent bodies themselves want to lawscape (one wants to invisibilise the law when walking about in a shopping mall, wants to forget money when paying by direct debit or credit cards, wants to invisibilise the human landscaping hand when creating an English garden), and their desire is ontologically the lawscape. ²³

The lawscape and where it dissimulates itself as atmosphere is therefore desire materialized, a place that is “pleasant, familiar, protective.” ²⁴ We are ruled by spaces of desire. Or spaces of Law/Power/Desire. Such spaces intend to maintain themselves and keep on producing a specific type of body and desire through the concept of conatus, which Andreas borrows from Deleuze:

the conatus defines the right of the existing mode. All that I am determined to do in order to continue existing (destroy what doesn’t agree with me, what harms me, preserve what is useful to me or suits me) by means of given affections (ideas of objects), under determinate affects (joy and sadness, love and hate. . .)—all this is my natural right.

This right is strictly identical with my power and is independent of any other ends, of any consideration of duties, since the conatus is the first foundation, the primum movens, the efficient and not the final cause. ²⁵

In Annihilation, where the lawscape becomes the atmosphere is in the space of white marriage and the white law created between white bodies and white desires. This space is represented in the recurring image of white hands seen through and in a prism of a glass of water, which are contrasted with the colorful Shimmer which is also called “a prism.” First, Kane and Lena hold hands in this “atmosphere”; then toward the ending of the movie, when it appears that Lena has vanquished the alien and its territory, the prism returns, showing Lena’s hand, which wears a wedding ring. While rigorously engineered as an atmosphere, through racism, this marriage appears “spontaneous,” the product of free choice, consent and will, rather than a control of bodies “to move in pre-specified ways.” ²⁶ However,

The atmosphere is perfectly engineered to appear as a space filled with bodies that are guided by preference, choice, opportunity, freedom. Scratch the surface and you will discover that all these preferences are nothing but corridors of affective compulsion. ²⁷

Thus, while marriage represents the seemingly natural and unrestrained unfolding of desire, it is really a rigorously controlled and racially sanitized space. A space of Law/Power/Desire. And of perceived white supremacy.

In the film, the conflict is that the atmosphere of a white law, and the desire for whiteness (the conatus), is threatened by the black body and a desire for blackness. As Andreas writes, “The lawscape converts itself into an atmosphere by allowing certain affects to come forth while suppressing others.” ²⁸ The film’s tautologies between space, power, the law and bodies therefore become understandable in terms of strategies of creating, managing and regulating desire. Relating each term to the other—space to desire, for instance, or body to space—reveals the involved, implicit construction of such concepts in a white supremacist mindset and how they come under threat for a desire for difference and a body of difference. Each term is latched onto the other in a co-determining and mutually supportive way: the body onto power, onto desire, onto space, onto the law. Crucially, such tautologies and dependencies reveal the nature of a power, which orchestrates our being through our positioning and the control of affect. The lawscape and the atmosphere are about power and the asymmetry of power, which structures our society and bodies:

Bodies carry law and space, indeed generate law and space, through their moving on the lawscape. Just as any surface, the lawscape is tilted. Bodies fall more readily onto other bodies, and the sliding is more easily allowed by the terrain. Some bodies weigh more than others, are more powerful than other bodies and force the latter out. The conflict of bodies carries on, mostly on unequal footing. ²⁹

I will describe and analyze the spaces of Law/Power/Desire in the film paying attention to the race and sex of bodies through which spaces are created, sustained, and protected from threat. This will enable a description and analysis of how a system of control is enabled by the terrain. Call it what you will, an assemblage, a complex, it is mutually sustaining parts of a coherent and regularized system, which I am studying, not an arbitrary and confusing mess. I am tracing the thread which connects these beads through ideas of marriage and invasive interracial relationships: law–space–power–body–race–gender–desire. What is of particular importance is how the complex is being positioned as taken for granted, or as normal and inevitable—the effect of power, and also how segregation philosophy is being transferred to viewers through implication and suggestion. The importance of such an analysis is the difference between the world as it is and how one wants it to be.

Andrea’s scholarship allows me to address the neglect of the place of the law in the relationship between race and space, which has been investigated by existing scholarship. For a number of years, geographers have been asking, and supplying answers to, the questions of “how does the racial formation shape space, give meanings to places, and condition the experience of embodied subjects emplaced in and moving through the material world?” ³⁰ Such scholarship argues that “a multifaceted relationship exists between place and race wherein places are racialized while places also structure, construct, and re-produce racialized individual identities.” ³¹ What is missing from these accounts is the key relevance of conceptions of the law and the law’s control. While I highlight the role of the law in this mutually generative and identity-forming relationship between race and space in my analysis of the film, I also wish to highlight the role of imagined vision too. In the film, a white panopticon and a white lighthouse are privileged spaces of Law/Power/Desire. The white space’s power is dependent on an imagined position of visual mastery. Owen J. Dwyer and John Paul Jones III explain this feature as a mark of “white socio-spatial epistemology,” where there is to be found a visionary point where “the omniscient white (male) subject” is “secure in his position as a surveyor of the social terrain.” It is no wonder that this space is to be found in a film that relies on visual media to relay its messages and that presents the spaces of segregation. ³²

IV. A Bigoted Beginning: The Big White Bang

In the beginning was Chaos, an abyss of nothingness. So said the Ancient Greeks. However, in the universe of Annihilation, the beginning of all things, and the source of narration, is white state space. The opening full-figure shot shows Lena sitting in a white gown in a white room in a silence. The film cuts to a profile view, and we see a crowd of spectators looking in on the location through a blue tinted glass which, as we will realize later, appears to make their white costumes blue: white spectators of a room stripped of color. Then Lena is questioned by an interrogator in another white, sanitary suit (he is not white, but East Asian, a reflection of the fact that all white spaces in the movie involve a mixing which is problematized (I will discuss the blue glass in this context later) and fails to ensure total control and dominion of space, contributing to the horror sensation of loss of power). The narrative mode of film emerges as a series of flashbacks from this state space of quarantine, whiteness and white spectator-ship where Lena is being controlled, supervised, and interrogated. White costumes, white room, white spectators, a white space of power and control. A white panopticon, as it were, a place of visual mastery. In terms of a genre of space, the room is associated with ideas of what Sean Redmond terms “white encoded laboratories” in which:

“nature,” in the form of bacteria, germs, human sweat, human emotion is excluded, actively repulsed, in case it interferes with the synthetic, methodical experiments taking place. This white space is so ultra-clean that nothing could grow there unless it has been artificially planted by scientists in test tubes, incubators, or sealed walls. ³³

The film’s form is therefore structured around the white state’s control of white women through a defensive whiteness meant to guard against infection, a controlled space, a heavily guarded inside of whiteness and white power. A narrative restricted to what she knows, her journey into the unknown space of the alien Shimmer, we are being fed Lena’s point of view. Comfortable and ever so familiar, the viewer’s interpretations and frame of reference are founded in this safe scene of whiteness.

Having established the conditions of the film’s narrative, the centrality and power of this secure white inside and space of visual mastery is immediately threatened. We are shown that something invasive comes from black “outer space,” a destabilizing “outside.” In a spectacular, consciously cinematic experience, we are moved to a dramatic long shot of a white lighthouse, another white space and controller of vision, framed centrally by the camera, and this is infiltrated by the foreign object resulting in the Shimmer, a film like the colored, shifting, playing surface of a bubble. There is a close-up of an unknown black, shifting mass or body, the aggressor: a tense comparison or juxtaposition to the familiar, protective structuring space of whiteness, the white phallus-like lighthouse as object of desire, white body as desire, power. . . Almost immediately, we learn that the central theme of the movie is the fight of the white space of power/desire to preserve its integrity against change from a black, alien, unknown, unfamiliar “outside.” And the structural paradox around which the film turns is revealed—although immensely powerful, the white space that centrally surveys all reality is super vulnerable, too porous to an outside, a precious ambit which is all too easily infiltrated, subverted, overruled. . .

But where is the law in all of this? As we will learn, the lighthouse as a site of desire, transformation, and power is the ultimate destination of the husband and the wife in the film’s storyline. They are impelled there because of their marriage, the legal contract, but also because of an interracial affair that destabilizes that legal contract. . . The lighthouse is the destination, or telos or purpose of the law, the end of its journey. . .

V. Sex Scene, Space

If the phallic white lighthouse is a central, familiar space of desire in the film and its ocularcentrism, the address at which the letter reaches its destination, how is that centrality and feeling of fittingness maintained? Against the threat of other spaces of desire where bodies and desires are positioned differently, through the sex scene.

Lena’s flashback to her tryst with Dan, her black colleague, involves loaded connotations of the unfolding of desire in space. A title screen indicates that the flashback occurs when Lena is in the space of alien difference, in the Shimmer: an implicit continuum between the episode in the bedroom and the space of the other. The sex scene is presented as a mini montage. First, a central shot of Lena’s naked white back amidst dark lighting and shadows suggesting the sinister. No frontality and therefore no frontal nudity. Desire for Lena and identification with her is foreclosed, controlled: there is no desire allowed for the viewer in this space of Lena’s desire. Second, a profile shot of shadows which obliterate Lena’s face, shadows which impose a blackness on her skin, suggesting a racial transformation and a darkness. Then, the unexpected: not Kane but Dan that lies beneath her. A black body where a white body was supposed to be. The key theme of the movie: one body usurped by an opposing body in a legal context of marriage. Surprise, shock. The outrage of the law of marriage. The unknowability and fickleness of a woman’s desire and the space and bodies it carries within it. The bedroom is blue, but darkened and almost unrecognizable to how we have seen it before. Lena grunts animalistically in the montage.

The montage can be categorized as intellectual since it presents concepts of body and situation in area. Through the editing of the montage, Lena and Dan are presented in divided and discontinuous spaces rather than in continuous space, together. The two sexual partners are shown isolated and discrete so that there is no connection of thought and feeling implied between them. Later in the film, Lena has a flashback to the aftermath of the scene which develops this loss of connection. After the mini montage is repeated, the characters are shown arguing to emphasize that they don’t have “the meeting of minds” that is required in a legal contract and institution such as marriage. The effect of shooting Lena and Dan in separate spaces while they are involved in an intimate act is to show that white female bodies and black male bodies inhabit fundamentally different spaces, which cannot be joined together to form a continuous space but only an artificial, forced, and false union. This idea is repeated in the storyline of the film in the idea of the Shimmer to which the sex scene is compared or with which it forms a continuum. The Shimmer is a space of alien difference which is not presented as being able to form any kind of unity with normal human space, but which actually threatens to transform and dominate it. The message? Other bodies inhabit other spaces while white bodies inhabit white space and racial spaces are therefore closed, discrete, autonomous units incapable of allowing other bodies. The depiction of the act of interracial sex can therefore be understood as a cinematic illustration of the philosophy, principle, and practice of segregation. What is out of the law is space and bodies that are only united illusory: fragmented, partial, lacking overall connection, unity, wholeness. In fact, Ventress reveals at the end of the movie that fragmentation is the most troubling aspect of the Shimmer, endless division into nothingness, like a cell of a body dividing perpetually not to form a huge mass, but, counterintuitively, to form a vacuum: “It will grow until it encompasses everything. Our bodies and our minds will be fragmented into their smallest parts until not one part remains. Annihilation.”

The sex scene involving Lena and Dan contrasts strongly with the act of sexual intercourse between Lena and Kane, which is presented beforehand, the act of legitimate intercourse between a white husband and a white wife. This act represents the law and the rule of law since marriage is a legal contract, as well as the law’s regulation of desire. Soft, warm lighting defines the couple in the lead up to the act. The sexual intercourse is never explicitly shown. Instead, Lena and Kane are presented as connected in thought and feeling before the consummation of desire through joking and kissing. Then, in a close-up shot, Kane gets on top of Lena and both are shown inhabiting the same continuous space in the shot before the camera decorously moves away, leaving the act to the imagination.

Lena’s differing sexual positions depict the relationships of gender power involved. In the original novel, when the biologist that Lena is modeled has sex with her husband, she is on top. ³⁴ However, in the film, Lena’s husband Kane is on top of her and she is below, in the subjugated position. Kane’s white body dominates the screen space in the close-up and overshadows and obscures Lena. Kane’s back is highlighted as the light falls upon it, so the desire of the viewer seems to be directed toward his body rather than hers. It is worth pointing out that Kane is a soldier—he is the face of the state and shares in its power. He is also a “defender” of the state and sustains its conatus. In fact, just before the camera moves away from the intimate moment, Kane suggests that the sexual act is a punishment for Lena who is “disrespectful to the president.” The political connotations abound. On the other hand, when there is the interracial coupling, Lena is on top of Dan and she is in the dominant position. Thus, the consummation of the interracial relationship is associated with a woman’s empowerment and freedom from subjugation by a white male husband and a white state and law understood through sexual power. In the interracial act, Lena actually dominates the male, so the interracial act carries with it the anxiety of men being dominated by women.

The most obvious contrast? While the interracial space of desire is shown (in parts, if not in the whole), the white space of desire is not. Significantly, the white space of desire is invisibilized. As I wrote above when discussing Andreas’s theory, we do not like to think of our desires and private scenes as intensely regulated by the law. We feel that the realm of our desires and fantasies is virgin soil, free, unencumbered, open. This strikes us as the “normal” case, when in fact, it is exactly the opposite: there is no legal freedom. We are always situated in the lawscape and its atmospheres. Invisibilization does not take the sex scene out of sight. Andreas is quick to remind us that invisibilization does not mean invisibility. ³⁵ Thus the last lingering image of Kane’s dominion of Lena relays the visual composition of the consummation of desire. Instead, invisibilization aims to make the relationships between power and desire, ruler and subject, conceptually disappear in service of maintaining the knot that ties together body, space, and the law in the service of power. The carefully engineered white space of desire, which is meant to be the mirror of the viewer’s own desire, is to convey asymmetries of power in its composition and purpose by stealth.

This invisibilization of the white space of Law/Power/Desire persists. When Lena has her flashback to the aftermath of the adulterous act, such conceptions control the interracial relationship and a return to a sexually exclusive white marriage in a veiled and suggestive, “unconscious” manner. Segregation philosophy is espoused by the movie as an unrecognized guide to thought. The idea of white space is introduced by the white door in the blue bedroom, depicted in the background, immediately behind Lena. Later, chronologically speaking, Lena will try to paint the whole bedroom as white, to transform it into white space. This is in the immediate aftermath of a refusal of Dan’s invitation to a barbecue and to continue the affair. Hence, the associations of the white door cannot be seen as a coincidence, but a repetitive and racialized motif in the movie. The white door represents artificially and deliberately whitened space, the control of space and desire through whiteness. As Dan talks about his “physical and emotional connection” with Lena, she moves away from him and turns her back to Dan as he is talking. The viewer then sees the white door centrally framed in the background behind the white woman as a symbol of white space and the movement away from the interracial relationship and the black man. The shot is repeated when Lena has told Dan to get out and coincides with her statement that she “hates” Dan. In this shot, a lamp highlights the door giving it radiance and, perhaps, greater beauty and allure (is this an implicit comparison with the white lighthouse?). The central white space that Lena moves toward is thus associated with the denial of the connection between the white woman and the black man, as well as ideas of hate and the ending of interracial relationships. It is implicitly associated with ideas of racism which involve feelings of hate and the control of desire and the body. The movie thus makes evident how conceptions of white space control gendered and racialized legal relationships such as marriage, as in segregation philosophy. The law has a definitive space of power which can be described, contextualized, criticized, a space from which we can remove ourselves in the interest of justice.

VI. Blue Room Blues: Domestic Space as Unfinished Space of Whiteness

In broad chronological terms, Annihilation moves through first, domestic, then public and last, state space: first, bedroom, then the Shimmer in a state park, lastly state space where Lena is interrogated by a questioner. All of these spaces are presented as white spaces that are threatened by difference and transformation, different aspects of the lawscape and the atmosphere. It is worth repeating that the interracial relationship which leads to both husband and wife being put into alien space, the space of difference and transformation. From Dan and Lena’s argument, it is suggested that Kane goes into the alien space which is a “suicide mission” because he has become aware of Lena’s affair with the black man. Similarly, Lena goes into the space of the Shimmer to save her husband because she “owes” him, presumably because of the affair.

The film introduces the idea that domestic space is to be controlled as a space of whiteness which excludes black bodies and the forming of interracial relationships through the symbolism of Lena whitewashing a wall of the blue bedroom. The bedroom is itself cast as a space where interracial relationships and whiteness contest each other. When Dan invites Lena to the barbecue, a covert way of maintaining his adulterous affair with her, Lena says she is going to paint the bedroom and calls it “our bedroom” but then immediately corrects herself to say “the bedroom.” The ambiguity and openness of the phrase reveals that the bedroom could be seen as hers and Kane’s or hers and Dan’s, since it is where they have had sex. Lena’s whitewashing of the bedroom and the whitening of space is also ambiguous and reflects contested or conflicted aims. The whitewashing is set in the context of refusing Dan’s invitation to the barbecue and ending the adulterous interracial affair. It thus preserves marriage against threat or preserves the law. At the same time, the whitewashing can be seen as a ritual way for Lena to move on from her husband who has been absent for a year. That is, the painting of whiteness represents the destruction of the legal institution of marriage. Lena thus stands in a state of unresolved ambiguity toward the structuring of the space of Law/Desire/Power. She does not understand its purpose or direction. Despite the conflicts in motivation, the white space is determinative, decisive, powerful. It serves as a transformation of being and life, a way to find identity and orientation in life, a guide to thought and relationships. It is in such characterizations that the power of conceptual whitewashing lies in the movie. Area is understood to transform identity and being, and this is why locations are contested so keenly, and also why the space of the Shimmer is seen as a threat, since it threatens to transform being. The movie’s aim is to preserve white space as the space of transformation and the controller of being. White space wages war against black space as both are fighting for the same spot. Hence, the demonization of a totally usurping black territory merely reveals the real characteristics of the dominating white space of power in a classic case of what a psychoanalyst would call projection.

When Lena is painting the blue walls of the bedroom with white paint, we are shown the view of her back as she moves the roller up and down on the wall. Once more, through the denial of frontality, the viewer is prevented from forming an identification with her, as her intentions are not clear or fully formed. Then she is shown approaching her husband who has unexpectedly arrived with the unfinished wall painting shown in the background. The reunion takes place in the open door frame of the white door which is important in controlling Lena’s desire and in rejecting Dan. Lena’s task of making domestic space white and exclusionary of interracial relationships remains unfinished or interrupted. What seems to interrupt is a black “invasion”: Kane is dressed in black. As we later find out, Kane is an alien double that has come back from the space of difference in the Shimmer. He no longer represents the white body but the white body usurped by difference. However, at this moment in the movie, the viewer does not know this—Kane’s whiteness is therefore deceptive as a covering over of his difference. Like Lena, the viewer is lost, not understanding the true nature of whiteness. Kane and Lena embrace in the empty space surrounded by the white door frame: a mirroring of the interracial relationship that destabilizes marriage and the law that has usurped the marriage relationship. Kane’s black clothing, a contrast to the unfinished white wall. There is an eye-level angle and the editing alternates between a view of Lena with the unfinished white wall behind her and a view of Kane centered in the white space of the door frame. We can only see one face at a time, with the back of the other’s head in the shot. The sequence closes on a shot of Lena against the unfinished white space. The idea of space in the mini montage of interracial sex repeats—the characters are “isolated” and the embrace is shown in parts rather than in the whole, as it could have been in a profile shot or from a high-angle shot. The unfinished white space on the wall is also a fragment or a part, just as the white door is a part of the whole. Hence, in the scene, the characters, and the viewers, are trapped in fragmented spaces of whiteness. This scene and editing will be mirrored in the ending of the movie where Kane and Lena embrace first in a medical, white space and then through a blue tinted glass, which is reminiscent of the blue bedroom with the unfinished whitewashing and both husband and wife are suggested to be alien doubles divested of their identities. The implication of the scene is that the domestic space of whiteness has been thoroughly subverted by the couple and is fragmentary because they haven’t fulfilled the purpose of their marriage and the law. Yet the domestic involves the political: the bedroom is originally blue, which represents the Democrats and Barack Obama too. The mixture on the wall of white and blue, the blue itself recalling the interracial relationship between Lena and Dan, references the “invasion” of the White House by a mixed-race president and an inability to move on from that scenario and history. Similarly, through costume, Kane is both white and black, a product of mixing.

There is a soundtrack played while Lena paints with white, which illuminates how she is perceived in space and what her recognition of white space is. The song is “Helplessly Hoping” by the American folk rock group Crosby, Stills, and Nash. There is a lyric about a woman being confused and lost, which elaborates Lena’s ambiguous relation to space and the law. ³⁶ The lost lyric comes when the couple embrace and whiteness and the legal space of marriage has been subverted by blackness in the white door frame. The lyrics reveal Lena’s disorientation in white space and her confusing of secure and known spaces (and the space of the white body) with the strange space of difference that she is subsequently lost in in the Shimmer. Kane the alien double is also lost. Lena asks him incredulously, “You’re telling me you don’t know where you’ve been? How can that even be possible?” The alien space of the Shimmer is thus associated with Lena’s disorientation in space, and disorientation is associated with Kane’s blackness or his loss of whiteness symbolized by his black clothes, while he deceptively masquerades as a white man and usurps a central position in the white door frame of Law/Power/Desire (as a participant in “passing”).

In the first part of the movie then, the space of the law is revealed, as well as the engineering behind its realm, sphere and rule. The mastery of space, the law and desire through whitening is interrupted or unfinished business, fragmentary, compromised. The specter of interracial relationships threaten visual control and power over space, and through the visual control of location, the control of bodies. The black body invades white territory and threatens to usurp the white body and its supposed supremacy through connection with the white woman who is implied to be disorientated and lost, visually illiterate, and unable to understand space and the aims whiteness suggests. This is represented by the alien embrace of the white woman by Kane, a corruption of the form of marriage. In the embrace, Kane’s white male body and identity has been usurped by an alien other and appears dressed in black. Blackness is perceived as introducing endless division and nothingness into the body, fragmentation into a vacuum, as whiteness is to become increasing partial until it becomes negligible. Cell division divides and divides and divides, forming a fragmented nothingness. . .

VII. The Insatiable Cervix: Black Cancer and The Impossible Life

Before we adventure into the Shimmer, consider. Handsome, charming, cheerful, stylish. How could Barack Obama be the stuff of nightmares in what is categorized as a sci-fi horror film? Why is he a threatening vacuum of non-being? To understand the symbolic logic behind such a construction, and the real story in Annihilation, I believe one must turn to a scene of relaxed reading in the film and “Lacks.”

Him, a magazine. Her, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot (2010). A difference in education and interest, surely, an indication of the vast intellectual divide between Kane and Lena. Lena’s book is about a black woman, emphasizing Lena’s interest in the black community. Moreover, the book reveals Lena’s sympathies since the book demonstrates the exploitation of a poor black woman and her family by white researchers. A scientific story, the book also indicates Lena’s professional interests in cell research since it is about how Henrietta Lack’s cancerous cervix cells were exploited in medical research to bring about a medical revolution. Getting to ideas of space: the book is also a true story of how segregation was overcome on a number of levels. For instance, the white woman scientist author “grew up in a safe, quiet middle-class neighborhood in a predominantly white city and went to high school with a total of two black students,” but became immersed in the black lives and black neighborhood of Henrietta and her descendants, described as “The Other Side of the Tracks” in a chapter heading. ³⁷ The research on Henrietta’s cells was a product of the overcoming of segregation at John Hopkins Hospital in the 1950s:

David drove Henrietta nearly twenty miles to get there, not because they preferred it, but because it was the only major hospital for miles that treated black patients. This was the era of Jim Crow - when black people showed up at white-only hospitals, the staff was likely to send them away, even if it meant they might die in the parking lot. Even Hopkins, which did treat black patients, segregated them in colored wards, and had colored-only fountains. ³⁸

Even in the segregation era, Henrietta Lack’s cells traveled all over the world in different laboratories. The book reflects the overturning of segregation and its philosophy which is fundamental to the film. As reading material for Lena, it is a radical subversion of the white spaces of power and the law. In the film, this is emphasized since the song lyric of a woman being “lost” is repeated at the close of the scene of reading.

But even beyond this, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks supplies the material for the nightmare imaginings of the film because a major theme in Annihilation is a contagious cancer, a type of cancer associated with these cancerous cervical cells of a black woman, which resulted from an overturning of segregation. There is a complex intertextuality between the book and the film, but the The Immortal Life relates how Henrietta’s cancerous cells (HeLa) have been historically perceived by scientists as a contagious form of cancer, and also, like the Shimmer, as a total domination of space: “If allowed to grow uninhibited under optimal cultural conditions, [HeLa] would have taken over the world by this time.” ³⁹ The cells were also described as surreptitiously contaminating white individuals and, unbeknownst to scientists, powerfully colonizing all other cells in research laboratories in the context of the idea of marriage, which is so important to the film. An excerpt from a Rolling Stone article in the book: “It was a story of white selling black, of black cultures ‘contaminating’ white ones with a single cell in an era when a person with ‘one drop’ of black blood had only recently gained the legal right to marry a white person.” ⁴⁰ This idea of contagious cancer is associated with the Shimmer in the movie. Sarah Sloat suggests that Annihilation “theorizes what happens when the planet gets cancer.” ⁴¹ As she writes, Lena describes the anomalies that she sees in the Shimmer as “malignant,” which is “a term often used to describe cancerous tumors that can divide uncontrollably and spread cancer to other cells in the body.” ⁴² As Sloat elaborates, in the Shimmer (or Area X):

There are unrestrained, biological changes happening in Area X, with each affected organism becoming more powerful with every mutation. It doesn’t perfectly mirror what happens to a body infected with cancer, but the disease’s quintessential characteristic—mutation leading to unchecked growth, movement, and power—are the same. ⁴³

The film’s theme of cancer draws from the original book. There, the husband’s journey into the Shimmer resulted in his diagnosis of “inoperable, systematic cancer” and his death. Similarly, all of the other members of his expedition also died of cancer as well. ⁴⁴

In the Shimmer, the colonizing HeLa cells, or the black woman’s cancerous womb/vagina stands as an opposing, alternative space of desire to the powerful white phallus. It is the other of space—“lack” from Henrietta Lack’s name. This womb-like quality is materialized in the alien’s black cavern burrowed underneath the white lighthouse at the heart of the Shimmer—the womb is often represented as a cavern as per psychoanalytic theory. It is from this black womb that the alien doubles of Kane and Lena materialize to usurp white bodies and identities. Significantly, the cancer-ridden Dr. Ventress merges with the black space and disappears into nothing in the alien’s den in a spectacular display of lights in which a white body forms a continuum with the cancerous space. This womb characteristic of the Shimmer explains its fertility and productivity. As Lena says, of the alien, “It wasn’t destroying. It was changing everything. It was making something new.” Thus, Obama is understood as nightmare because, in the racist equation, white woman (Lena) + black man (Dan) = black/female body (an “overlap”) = black space = black vagina (= lack or nothingness, from the name Henrietta Lacks). Paradoxically, the nothingness is creating being: annihilation.

The Immortal Life’s influence on the film can be seen in several important details as commentators have noted. ⁴⁵ I will add that such details cluster around ideas of segregation. Lena and Dan teach at John Hopkins, where the space of segregation was overcome in order to obtain Henrietta Lacks’s cells. Subsequently it is Lena and Dan that defeat the system of racialized spaces in the blue bedroom. The aftermath of the interracial sex scene is later shown just after Lena sees her own cells dividing in a microscope, linking it to the HeLa story. Henrietta Lacks’s cells are also explicitly shown in the film being studied by Lena when she is first introduced. When Lena is teaching the medical students at John Hopkins, the cells are shown dividing or multiplying under a black and white microscope as Lena says, “This cell we’re looking at is from a tumour. Female patient, early 30s taken from the cervix.” This black and white imagery of the cells, which could easily have been represented in color, indicates how the cells are tied to a black and white understanding of the world, including its spaces. They are also associated with the dividing and a simultaneous expansion of space and the reach of nothingness and death as in the idea of fragmentation since the cancer is a fatal one.

Let us return to the scene where Lena is reading from the book in order to explain why it becomes the source of nightmare. First shot. Kane as a white male body frames the scene in the foreground while Lena is in the background. Kane interrupts Lena’s reading with a “hey.” The flashback closes on his body again once he has interrupted her reading. It is the white body against the book and its sympathetic reading and sympathetic readers, a white, male framing against the book’s content which supports a black woman, Kane against Henrietta Lacks and against the overcoming of segregation. To repeat: the scene closes on the idea that Lena who is reading the book (in what is suggested to be the wrong way, sympathetically) is lost in space through the repetition of the song lyric.

VIII. The Shimmer and Public Space—Racial Mixing and Horror

The failure to control domestic space as a space of exclusionary whiteness leads both Lena and Kane to the space of the Shimmer, a corruption of public space. As the alien transformation of a state park or public space, the Shimmer represents a failure of the white control of space and white power over space. The Shimmer threatens a domination of all territory. It becomes a priority for the white characters in the movie to control and limit the alien space, to destroy it. Dr. Ventress says, “In a few months, the area will have grown to where we are right now. And then we're talking cities. . . states. . . and so on.” While Dr. Ventress tells Lena this, she plays with a small black object in her hand, a mood stone. This suggests the idea that the Shimmer is a place of blackness which originates in the blackness of outer space. Lena enters the Shimmer in a group of women that includes white women and non-white women, suggesting the mixing of races and “race loyalties,” which has overtaken her mind and, even more implicitly, that she has vacated her racial identity as a white person.

Annihilation is a sci-fi horror movie, and it is evident that the horror relies on the contrast of normal, banal, conventional white space with the dark horror space of the Shimmer. To enter the Shimmer is to experience the outcome of racist fears of miscegenation and perceived threats to white purity and the integrity of the white body. There, the viewer is presented with a supposedly unsettling and disturbing territory of mixing and mutation where there is the transformation and destruction of white bodies represented by the soldiers and scientists who are killed. The Shimmer is therefore a direct competitor to the power of the white space of the whitewashed bedroom wall, “the Law,” which would transform being, identity, and relationships.

The space changes the bodies and the DNA of anyone who ventures there, as we are shown when Lena analyzes her blood through a microscope. Perhaps, the most memorable symbol of the transformation of the white body is the unnamed white soldier in the video who had the worm-like creature moving around inside his intestines. Later, we are shown how his body is transformed into something that is almost unrecognizably inhuman and plant-like in the figure against the wall. In keeping with the theme of the fragmentation of the white body in the movie, his form is divided into parts that break up its unity and continuous space. The skull is in two halves.

In particular, the representation of the space of the Shimmer can be shown to associate the mixing of whiteness with color and the threat of interracial relationships to marriage and the law. As Lena and the other women scientists explore the space, they come across some flowers. Josie remarks “Looks like someone's about to have a wedding,” relating the flowers to the major theme of the film, which is marriage. There are a substantial number of white flowers with some colored flowers, so the flowers can be seen to subtly represent racial mixing and interracial relationship and marriage. Lena analyzes the flowers and says, “Well, they're all so different. To look at them, you wouldn't say that they're the same species. But they're growing from the same branch structure. . .” The flowers are then explicitly compared to the human species and Lena says, “you'd sure as hell call it a pathology if you saw this in a human.” Here, Lena seems to make a negative comment on the production of the results of mixing in interracial marriage. The movie returns to the theme of flowers and whiteness later in the representation of the Shimmer, emphasizing the subtle hints and suggestions made around the representation. Lena sees white deer with flowers as antlers, one of them with a white and colored body. There is the same representation of whiteness mixing with color. Lena points a gun at the white deer and hesitates to pull it. Finally, she lowers the gun amidst unsettling acoustic music as she looks, fascinated. Clearly, the horror of the space of the Shimmer derives from the idea of whiteness being “contaminated” by color and the white woman’s refusal to destroy this space because she seems seduced by what Lena will call the “beauty” of mutations in the space under an interrogation where the mutations are referred to as “nightmarish.”

As a space of interracial mixing and loss of control over white space (and the law and the legal space of white marriage), the Shimmer is described firstly as a space in which there is no orientation. The space, we infer, is the natural outcome of Lena being lost in space, unable to maintain the boundaries, aims, and directions of white space and the space of the other through her inability to curb her desires for black men. The Shimmer is therefore a space where one becomes lost. This is illustrated when the women scientists first come into the space, and there is a shot of a compass spinning around meaninglessly. Josie indicates the idea of fundamental disorientation when she says, “So we've got no compass, no comms, no coordinates. . . and no landmarks.” In fact, the final destination of the scientists is a white lighthouse and all space is orientated as moving toward that white space, a space that as a lighthouse orients all.

The Shimmer is also described as a space for those who wish to annihilate themselves, building on the choice of an interracial relationship as a willful annihilation of white purity and supremacy. Lena does not understand why Kane goes into the territory because she thinks of it as a “suicide mission.” Cass says that volunteering to go in represents something pathological on the part of the individual. She says, “It's not exactly something you do if your life is in. . . perfect harmony. We're all damaged goods here.” Cass also suggests that the journey is a willful destruction of the self and identity because she adds that “In a way, it's two bereavements. My. . . beautiful girl. . . and the person I once was.” Lena is depicted as such a pathological and self-destructive person in her attitude toward the Shimmer. In the interrogation room, Lena reveals that she wanted to explore the space instead of going back, which is what her colleague Anya wants at one stage of the investigation. She therefore lies to the other scientists. She then states that, “I didn't know what going back meant. Why it would be safer than going forward.” Lena seems to have integrated herself into the space of difference and interracial mixing over white space.

The Shimmer as a space of non-law is then presented as the nightmare result of interracial relationships and racial mixing. It presents an alternative and rival conception of spatial power to white legal space since it can transform identity, the body and being and usurps the public space of the state park, threatening to take over all territories. The white woman who cannot curb her desire for black men bestows esthetic value upon this space and attaches herself to it, threatening to self-destruct and to destroy whiteness and white supremacy in the process. Indeed, all the women in the group are overtaken by the Shimmer in their various ways: one becomes a tree, one integrates with the black space burrowed beneath the lighthouse, one is killed by a hybrid monster, Lena becomes an alien double.

IX. Dick Fights, Dick Moves—The Orientating White Space of the Lighthouse

In order to fight against the Shimmer, the women scientists have to travel to the white lighthouse, the white space where the Shimmer began and set up its rivalry against the spaces of power and the law. As a lighthouse, a place of visual mastery, this white space is presented as one which orientates others and which stops individuals being lost in the blackness of night. However, because of Lena’s uncontrollable and extra-legal lust for interracial relationships and her misunderstanding of the white space of power and its purpose, as well as the fact that it is suggested that she is lost in space, the lighthouse is transformed by her into a space of destruction and loss of identity. The white space of the lighthouse is therefore subverted by Lena. The lighthouse is burnt down and alien doubles appear to substitute themselves for Lena and Kane there in its white space. This is both a castration of a phallic symbol and a blinding which sets the scene for the mimicry of whiteness. Lena’s subversion of the white space echoes her ambiguous whitewashing of the bedroom space, where the white marriage was being marked as symbolically destroyed and the whitening of the space marked a moving on from the relationship, or its destruction. The destruction of the lighthouse can therefore be seen in the light of the “self-destruction” of Lena that Dr. Ventress suggests when she says that the self-destructive purposefully destroy a happy marriage. Its destruction is a destruction of the space of Law.

The lighthouse has a phallic shape. Object of desire, which itself desires. Which appears to represent white masculine power which accounts for the idea of the white lighthouse as the orienting principle of whiteness. One is trapped within the lighthouse. In one scene, in her “fight” with the alien that merely mimics her moves, Lena tries to escape from it through the blue door. The alien presses her against the door, which is the color and “space” of the Democrats and Obama, threatening to crush the life out of the white body of Lena, perhaps trying to forcefully join her to the door and merge her body with its space. In the lighthouse, whiteness and white supremacy are subverted by blackness. Kane turns into a black, charred corpse in its walls because he kills himself with the phosphorous bomb. In stark opposition to the scene of whitewashing in the movie, the bomb has the effect of “painting” the white walls of the lighthouse black. Space and the body is transformed into blackness. Similarly, the alien’s burrow, the root of alien space in the film, which is tunneled into the base of the white lighthouse is black. Here, the alien double of Lena arises, or is born, to mimic her movements aggressively and uncannily, reminding us of Homi Bhaba’s thoughts about the colonized non-white’s mimicry of the white and how the non-white mimics menace the structure of power and being because they are not quite “the real thing” and blur the boundaries between white and non-white. ⁴⁶ Perhaps, also in this scene, there is an implicit and unconscious racial assessment of Portman as a woman of Jewish ancestry seen to be “deceptively” mimicking whiteness. After all, the double takes her particular body or form.

The destruction of the lighthouse and the black womb burrowed into it by Lena, when it is first presented to the viewer, is ambiguous on a number of levels. It is presented as a destruction of both white space and black space, white power and black power, the spaces of segregation and separate, contained and discrete spaces. The destruction is the nightmare realization of fears of the system of segregation and white supremacy being destroyed. The destruction of the lighthouse as an orienting guide suggests that all are to be lost and disoriented. Lena is lost and she is thus forcing her own disorientation on the world and not allowing the proper orientation to be made through the white power of white space and notions of the space of difference.

The way that Lena destroys the lighthouse raises a complex of comparisons between her and the alien other, although, crucially, we later find out, this version of events is not necessarily what happens. Lena is narrating the story to the state interrogators, and it is heavily suggested that she is an alien substitute for the original Lena in the ending, when her eyes glow with a strange light. So she is most likely lying about what happened and presenting a story of what is acceptable to the state authorities. In the unreliable version of events, seeing that the alien double mimics her, Lena hands it a live grenade which sets the lighthouse on fire, destroying both the white phallic symbol of white space as well as the constructions of the alien space, the Shimmer. Thus, through the alien double, Lena destroys the spaces of difference, getting the alien to annihilate itself and the spaces it creates. Even in this useful lie to the authorities, there is a continuum between Lena and the alien. Just as Lena annihilates her own white identity through self-destruction, so the alien is made to destroy itself and its own space. It is the union of the white woman and the alien other that destroys segregated space and equalizes the power asymmetry between the space of white power of the white supremacist and the space of power of the Shimmer. In fact, if we follow the suggestion that Lena’s identity and body has been usurped by the alien, the act of destruction becomes less ambiguously a destruction of the white space of power by alien hands.

There is continuity between how the white space of the lighthouse controls things, as in the bedroom and the white spaces of the white paint on the bedroom walls which were intended to transform identities, bodies and relationships. It is in the lighthouse that events unfold, so the white space is still the organizing and overarching principle of how spaces are transformed, as well as identities, bodies, and relationships. Despite all the ambiguities and contradictions, white space is preserved as the space of power and determination, as the ultimate space of resolution, the ultimate destination of the law.

When we feel that the lighthouse has been destroyed, as per Lena’s account, the film first suggests this ambiguous moment is a triumph of the space of white law and a defeat of the black alien womb space. Back in the interrogation space, the white panopticon, there is a close-up shot of a glass of water, which is drunk by Lena. It shows her hand, slightly distorted by refraction, wearing her wedding band. Earlier, the hands of Kane and Lena had been united in a similar glass of water in another close-up shot. The shot represents marriage and the law as lawscape and atmosphere, an isolated, exclusionary, and protective field of white bodies, which are sealed with a transparent envelope of invisibilized water and glass. The mediums of water and glass, while controlling and engineering the space, seem not to be there, even though they refract bodies, like the Shimmer, which is described as a huge prism that refracts bodies too. When Kane had drunk from the glass, blood had appeared in it—self-destruction, death. When Lena drinks, there is no blood: security, health, safety, bodily integrity. The viewer is misled that all is well with the lawscape and the atmosphere of white marriage and the law.

X. The Ending: The Nightmare Return of the Interracial Sex Scene in State Space

We return to the safe place of whiteness where Lena is sitting, protected. This is the site upon which our interpretations are based. However, the ending of the movie shows how state control of white women through white space fails and unsettles our comfortable interpretations. Lena does indeed use the blue door of the white lighthouse to escape. There is an overturning of the white space of state power by the space of difference. This is in keeping with the attempt of the film to create a sense of horror: that the attempt to impose white control and white space ultimately fails. The state’s heavily controlled space of whiteness and power and control of white women is invaded by the uncontrolled domestic space of interracial mixing. This is reflected in the final embrace between Lena and Kane, which recalls their earlier embrace in the white space of the bedroom’s door when blackness and the space of the Shimmer invaded. As I argued before, the embrace was a repetition of the act of interracial sex, when two spaces and the bodies which move through them, and which were “supposed to be” separate and incommensurate, were joined together.

At first Lena and Kane embrace in white, continuous, medically sanitized space. Both bodies are shown together in unity through a long shot. Then, amidst eerie and unsettling music, the camera pans and goes behind the blue tinted glass, rendering the scene in blue. This is a contrast to the glass of water image a few minutes before, a glass that was transparent and invisibilized. The camera moves to an eye-level angle and then the characters are shown in isolated spaces, where there is a frontal view of the face of each with a shot of the back of the other’s head. An echo of the embrace before in the white doorway. As Lena embraces Kane, her eyes shine with an eerie light that strongly suggests that she has become an alien. The blue color of the scene reminds the viewer of the bedroom where interracial mixing happened and there was the unfinished and interrupted, fragmentary, painting of whiteness. That is, the uncontrolled domestic space of the interracial relationship invades the state controlled space of whiteness and power, a rival space of power. This space invades unity, marriage, the law, bodies, desires. . .

When the two characters embrace each other at the end of the film, still nominally husband and wife, we see what the threat of embracing difference is to the segregationist mind and how it is a complete “annihilation” of the white body and being, how uncontrolled domestic space threatens the ultimate white space of power, the state. Lena and Kane only seem to be husband and wife. They are actually imposters, bearers of deception. They make a mockery of the legal institution of marriage and the law. They are no longer real people. They don’t have a self anymore because they have become bearers of alien difference. They are completely transformed from what they once were and have become mere imitations of actual persons. The idea of annihilation is again emphasized as a “self-destructive” act, an act in which selves are destroyed. This is the horror of interracial mixing and the loss of control over space and white women in the film. This presentation of the embrace as a horror perhaps invokes the ethnic backgrounds of the actors playing the characters as I have suggested above. They both seem to be white in terms of appearance (which, partially explains their success as mainstream actors, as they can be seen to play the white roles which are dominant), while their descent actually differs in fact from a pristine whiteness. Thus, the embrace and the openness of the characters’ marriage to black invasion in the film’s narrative is perhaps situated in an unconscious racial assessment of the actors playing the roles, a cinematic literalization of “passing” as white after a journey into unknown space and back again.

XI. Conclusion: Should We Paint the White House Black (or Blue)?

By responding to the threat of the spaces of difference, Annihilation reveals how a space of white power and control is understood as covering domestic, public, and state space and also the legal space of marriage and thus the law itself. The structural paradox of this space is that while it wields control over being and rules, it is perceived as super vulnerable. The dimensions and desires of the conceptual realm of the law and power in a white supremacist mindset become clear. And this prompts the question. Does anyone in their right mind want to be ruled by anything as arbitrary and absurd as a colossal, conceptual white phallus (one with “eyes,” as in the lighthouse)? Or to be terrorized by a black womb? The paranoid subject at the heart of these racist constructions bestows an immense and omnipotent power to blackness. An action that reveals a total emasculation of the paranoiac’s own white being and a dissimulation of victimhood even as he enjoys largely unquestioned white privilege and authority in culture, politics, and power. The film shows that the philosophy of segregation is still in full force and reveals the major aspects of that philosophy, which includes not only racial but gender subordination. Interracial mixing and alternative desire threatens each of the white spaces of power and the basis of white power and white supremacy. Interracial mixing also threatens to give controlled women more power and freedom because it is seen as a subversion of the ways that racialized and gendered bodies are related in space through mixing rather than preserving separate, contained, autonomous, incommensurate, and discrete fields. The movie indicates how white women are subjugated on gendered and racial lines through the categories of space in order to preserve power. This indicates how the ultimate form of power is affected through ideas of space and the categories of bodies and desires which move through it.

I believe that my analysis of the film has indicated a significant and unrecognized guide in contemporary thought which should have expired with the civil rights movement of the sixties. This unrecognized guide to thought can be conceived of as hidden or largely “unconscious” and relies on implicit and heavily veiled assumptions. The existence of the unrecognized guide to thought suggests that the indirect and implicit representations of the film and its covert philosophy of segregation and space are crucial to making meaning and significance and rely on a tradition of racism and oppression which subliminally controls American society and its thought. By making this unrecognized guide to thought visible, thus depriving it of its subliminal power, I believe it can be made contestable and overturned. The space of the law can be made more just, if only we recognize that it is a space. And here we must ask how far the segregation philosophy extends out of Annihilation to corrupt other films, books, thoughts, and beings. Is the film an isolated example of white supremacism? In fact, I see the film as part of the larger renaissance of racism, which attended Barack Obama’s rise to power and which took a new urgency on the appointment of Donald Trump, who sought to dissociate himself from his predecessor’s administration. What about the status of white space in America and in the rest of the Western world? Why is it that the White House, the epitome of power and space in America, is still white? Why is it that so many black men who adventure into perceived white territories in America end up being shot dead by the agents of the law as invaders? Why has there been a white flight from London, the most cosmopolitan and racially mixed city in Great Britain? Does Annihilation provide some sort of answer to such questions?