Hipster life

Annihilation (d. Alex Garland)

Less of a sci-fi flick than a hipster movie about multiculturalism–of all things! Garland parlays his problematic representation of the passive Asian woman as a sex robot from his well-reviewed Ex Machina (2015), where most reviewers ignore or seem to be unaware of this problematic stereotype, into a wider explication on race, interracial romance, and cultural (dis)assimilation. Assimilation, by the way, would have been a better title for the film.

Here’s how hipsters believe that they of all people could not possibly be racist: if my sexual partner or LTR bae is a person of color, how can I be racist? This is the thinking that informs the film: use stereotypes and fuck them too. The female protagonist is having an affair with a black colleague and his race is intentionally unmarked racially. “We are physically and intellectually compatible,” he says, which is another way for the movie to say race doesn’t matter while intentionally casting a black man for the part. The camera doesn’t show them fucking but implies it, which is a curious elision when the film has no problem going all out in visually representing the alien other–as a dancer out of a Sia or Bjork music video.

Garland is well too aware of the explosiveness of the meekest representation of interracial sex, but he doesn’t extend this courtesy to female Asian subjects, apparently. This I-don’t-see-color makes it possible for Garland to use other stereotypes that populate the film like the inexplicably psycho Latino whose pathology is hinted as linked to her lesbianism. Finally, the alien creature is actually the racialized other who threatens the physical but also racial and psychological integrity of the white female protagonist in the form of cellular mutation. The fact that the alien mimics each of her move reminds me of the strategy of colonized subjects to ape the actions of the colonizers. However, here, the colonized is the violent one, in contradiction with actual colonial history. The alien colonized is also represented as living behind a rainbow colored shimmer, perhaps an echo to the questionable melting pot ideology. And here’s the thing with this movie, the colonizer outwits the colonized by having the latter unable to assimilate into the body of the colonizer and self-destructs instead. Meanwhile the white bodies are able to carefully assimilate the alien elements into themselves and fuse the two together. In the end, it is the white hetero couple who walk away intact. This doesn’t sound like sci-fi but everyday life in any hipster metropolis.

Basically, the newly mutated power couple remain white but now with multicultural bits, like the hipster who will correct your pronunciation of pho without bothering to think hard as to why pho is available in North America. Forget history, immigration, the disastrous war. They just eat the food and fuck them, that is all that matters in the la dolce hipster vita. Hipster racism in a nutshell, this movie.

#2018 #March