Aniara: The Existential Despair of Waiting for the End - Reactor

Aniara (2018). Written and directed by Pella Kågerman and Hugo Lilja, based on the epic poem of the same name by Harry Martinson. Starring Emelie Jonsson, Bianca Cruzeiro, Anneli Martini, and Arvin Kananian.

One night in late 1953, Swedish writer Harry Martinson took his telescope outside to look into the night sky. He found the Andromeda galaxy, which looked so beautiful and bright that night that he went to wake up his wife so she could see it as well.

The Andromeda galaxy was getting significant attention in the early 1950s, at least among those who followed developments in physics and astronomy. A few decades before, in the ’20s, Edwin Hubble had used the presence of Cepheid variable stars—using the method developed by Henrietta Leavitt—to estimate Andromeda to be 800,000 light-years away, an estimate that played a significant role in settling the so-called “Great Debate” regarding whether the Milky Way encompassed the whole of the universe or was only one among many galaxies. (It’s worth noting that Harlow Shapley, the astronomer who had so famously argued that Andromeda and other observed “nebulae” had to be within the Milky Way, changed his mind completely when he was presented with Hubble’s research, and he would go on to make significant contributions to the mapping and study of other galaxies.)

It would turn out Hubble had vastly underestimated the distance. That discovery came thanks to Walter Baade, a German astronomer who had spent World War II working at the Mount Wilson Observatory in Southern California. Because Baade was German and therefore suspicious to the U.S. government, he was registered, monitored, and subjected to a strict curfew—which is not, as one might imagine, a workable situation for a scientist whose work required him to be out and about in the middle of the night. Fellow astronomer Milton Humason argued with the authorities on his behalf, and Baade was permitted to travel to and from the observatory under supervision. For a time during WWII, California’s defense authorities also imposed partial blackout orders across Southern California. Civilians might not like blackout orders, but the uncharacteristically dark night skies around Los Angeles helped Baade identify a second, previously unknown type of Cepheid variable star, one that prompted a complete reassessment of the size of the universe—including the size and distance of the Andromeda galaxy.

That’s what was in the news in the early ’50s: new calculations showed that Andromeda, our nearest galactic neighbor, was about twice as far away and twice as large as previously thought.

However, this was the 1950s, and we already know that there was another type of scientific news capturing the world’s attention at that time, and it was news significantly more grim than revelations about distant galaxies. In 1950, U.S. president Harry Truman directed American scientists to begin developing thermonuclear weapons, or hydrogen bombs, and the first tests were conducted a little over a year later. The Soviet Union was doing the same thing in parallel; they detonated their first test bomb in autumn of 1953. As we learned when we watched Godzilla (1954), the United States would test an even bigger bomb in 1954. The Cold War nuclear arms race was escalating and intensifying, and it would keep on that path until the nations of the world began pumping the brakes with negotiations toward the Non-Proliferation Treaty in the late ’60s.

That was well into the future that night in 1953 when Harry Martinson gazed into the night sky to admire the Andromeda galaxy. Martinson would go on to win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1974 (a prize he shared with Eyvind Johnson), just a few years before his death in 1978, and in 1953 he was well into a successful and respected literary career. He’d had quite an interesting life before he became a writer. He and his siblings were abandoned to foster care when they were children, and at sixteen he ran away; he spent some time homeless before traveling the world as a seaman. Years spent working among the engines of steamships gave him black lung disease, so he eventually returned to Sweden. He started writing and publishing poems in 1927, at the age of twenty-three, and became acquainted with other writers and poets in the literary circles of the time. He wrote poems, novels, stories, and essays, mostly drawn from his tumultuous childhood, his travels, and his love of the natural world. During WWII he spent some time on the front line of the Winter War between Finland and the Soviet Union, and he wrote about that too. He won piles of literary awards, was widely respected in literary circles, and was elected as a member of the Swedish Academy in 1949.

What Martinson did not write was science fiction—at least not until 1953, when he read about doomsday bombs in the news, and gazed through his telescope at another galaxy, and began thinking about drifting out into the unknown darkness. That’s when he began writing the poems of Aniara.

Aniara is made up of 103 cantos that Martinson wrote over the course of the next few years, with the complete work being published to great acclaim in 1956. You can read Stephen Klass and Leif Sjöberg’s 1999 English translation on the Internet Archive; that’s the second of two published English translations, neither of which is currently in print. You can also listen to the opera adaptation by Karl-Birger Blomdahl, or perhaps catch a planetarium show that adapts the story, or listen to the 30-minute song adaptation “The Great Escape” by Swedish prog metal band Seventh Wonder, or contemplate Fia Backström’s “A Vaudeville on Mankind in Time and Space” mixed-media art installation. There’s even a death metal album adaptation, if that’s more your speed. There are countless readings, reimaginings, songs, and artworks based on or inspired by Aniara.

But there’s only one movie, and that’s the 2018 film written and directed by Pella Kågerman and Hugo Lilja. Aniara was their first feature, although they had worked together on short films before. The film is a pretty faithful adaptation of Martinson’s epic poem, with some changes to things like characters’ genders and some contextual worldbuilding to modernize it, but the heart of the story remains the same.

When Aniara opens, we meet a character who is never given a name; she is only ever known as Mimarobe, or MR, which is her job description. MR (played by Emelie Jonsson) works aboard the spaceship Aniara, which is a sort of futuristic cruise ship that transports people on a three-week journey between Earth and Mars, complete with luxury shops, numerous bars and restaurants, casinos, arcades, theaters, and all other manner of distractions. One entertainment on offer is the Mima, an artificial intelligence that plucks memories from a person’s mind to create a soothing virtual reality experience. Managing the Mima is MR’s job, and when she tests it, we see her enjoying a lush natural sojourn in a forest on Earth—the kind of forest that in her world does not exist anymore.

The ship clearly makes the journey in both directions—MR and the shipboard astronomer (played by Anneli Martini) have both made the journey before and discuss bunking arrangements on the return trip—but it’s also implied that many of the passengers are making a Titanic-like migration away from a dying Earth toward what they hope will be a better life on Mars. (From what I understand, in the book the ship is a one-way transport for people fleeing Earth.)

None of them will ever make it. Only a few days after they leave Earth, Aniara encounters some space debris and makes a sudden course correction to avoid a collision. Some of the debris strikes the ship anyway, puncturing the nuclear reactor and triggering a meltdown. Captain Chefone (Arvin Kananian) orders the reactor and fuel to be ejected, which leaves the ship without any way to steer back on course. The captain at first lies to the passengers and tells them they’ll be able to course correct in about two years, but the truth gets out and soon everybody on board knows there is no turning back.

This is all established so plainly and addressed so rationally that it is tempting to interrogate the premise: Why can’t they communicate with Earth? If this journey is commonplace, why is there never even a possibility of help? If they have the kind of power necessary for artificial gravity, why can’t they get power for steering? Or properly shield their reactor in the first place? Why was all the propulsion and fuel in one vulnerable location anyway? Do they even try to fix it?

But it quickly becomes apparent that this is not that kind of story. This is old school sci fi, not in the classic “give humans a technical problem and they solve it” vein, but rather in the “put humans in a situation and watched them fuck it up” vein. This is a film where time is marked by the passage of years, not days or weeks. For all that it wears the clothing of hard sci fi, the core of the story presents an existential conundrum, not a technical one.

The Mima, which had been of little interest when everybody aboard had better places to be, soon becomes a rare source of solace for the passengers and crew, as they constantly seek to escape into constructed virtual experiences of a thriving, long-lost Earth. Three years into the journey, the Mima becomes overwhelmed by all of the painful memories and ongoing misery it picks up from the humans, and it destroys itself in despair.

This is, interestingly, a change from the original story, in which the Mima is a rather more expansive, almost mystical entity that absorbs information from all the cosmos. The film’s Mima is as isolated from the rest of the universe as the humans aboard; the onslaught of misery that it absorbs comes entirely from within their minds.

After the Mima destroys itself, the situation aboard Aniara deteriorates dramatically. It takes four years for the mass suicides and sex cults to start, the latter of which seems like an overestimate to me. (If there’s one thing we know about humanity, it’s that people will start a sex cult for any old reason.) At five years, MR and the pilot Isagel (Bianca Cruzeiro) are playing at domesticity and raising a child together, and hope of rescue appears in the form of a space probe that is approaching Aniara from the direction of Earth. In the sixth year, however, the probe finally arrives and turns out to be unusable, and Isagel takes her own life and that of their child. At ten years, the remaining people aboard are barely pretending to maintain a functional society anymore. At twenty-four years, MR is one of only a handful of people left, and they are sitting in the shadowy remains of Mima, waiting for their last light to fade away.

The last we see of Aniara, we are nearly six million years into the future, and the ship is dark and lifeless, drifting past a beautiful, Earth-like planet.

A piece on Martinson’s poem and its various adaptations in The New York Review of Books compares the tone of Aniara to Stanley Kramer’s classic Cold War film On the Beach (1959, and based on Nevil Shute’s novel of the same name). I can see where the comparison comes from, as this is not a story about people trying to prevent or reverse their apocalypse, but rather one about people left adrift and lost while waiting for an inevitable end. The atomic-age themes of Martinson’s poem have been updated in the film to comment on the era of global warming; the passengers have both scars and memories from massive fires, and the images Mima immerses them in are of verdant natural landscapes. The only green aboard Aniara is the factory-grown algae that provides both their oxygen and their food source—and which eventually becomes contaminated and rots away.

Aniara is a skillfully made movie. The claustrophobic cinematography by Sophie Winqvist makes good use of a familiar setting crumbling over years of neglect. The cast is quite good, especially Jonsson and Cruzeiro, who portray MR’s helplessness in the face of Cruzeiro’s despair so very well.

It’s such a bleak story that I’m not sure I enjoyed the movie, but I find it thought-provoking and fascinating. I think this is a film best appreciated not in terms of how convincing or entertaining it is, but in how powerful it is in forcing us to sit with and understand our own reactions to it. Is it frustrating that they declare their problem unsolvable? That only half-hearted attempts are made to improve their situation? That the characters will speak vaguely of a future without believing in it? That the society as a whole embraces escaping into nostalgia and hedonism rather than any sense of exploration or creativity?

Of course it is! It’s incredibly frustrating, especially because in the last few years it has become very trendy for sci fi to insist upon offering hope and solutions, to the point where a lot of sci fi authors will even claim the genre has an obligation to do that. (I strongly don’t agree with that implied obligation, but I also understand why it’s so popular and strongly felt—but that’s a topic well outside the scope of this piece.)

What’s relevant here is that it’s truly not an easy thing to invite moviegoers to empathize with characters who don’t have either hope or solutions, or to go along with them as the darkness and emptiness of space slowly suffocates their interest in living. We like to tell ourselves that humans have a uniquely strong will to survive, but Aniara is the kind of science fiction that asks what that actually means. How strong? In what circumstances? In the absence of any other goal? What if the society around us does not share it?

These are big, heady things to think about. It’s not a comfortable movie, and it certainly doesn’t offer any clean themes or easy answers, but I’m glad that sci fi like this exists.

What do you think of Aniara? Who has read Martinson’s poem? I would love to hear your thoughts about the film as an adaptation.

Wholesome Family Films That Inexplicably Gave Me Nightmares as a Child

Spooky season is here, and I’m going to take a break from talking about horrible deaths in space for now, so we’re going back to childhood to rewatch some movies. Specifically, we’re watching a bunch of films that upset me terribly when I was a child, but I haven’t seen since then.

It is important to note that, unlike the genuinely horrifying Return to Oz (1985) (which Tyler Dean recently wrote about), I doubt any of these movies is actually scary. I was just a very sensitive child with an overactive imagination and an undiagnosed anxiety disorder. But it’s been many, many years since I’ve watched these films, and children’s films of the era had some wild stuff going on, so we shall see…

October 1 — Flight of the Navigator (1986), directed by Randal Kleiser

One of the most vivid recurring nightmares I had as a child was about being abducted by aliens and transported into the future.

Watch: Hulu, Apple, Disney, Fandango.

View the trailer.

October 8 — E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982), directed by Stephen Spielberg

To this day I remain highly suspicious of what visitors could be hiding in large piles of toy plushies.

Watch: Netflix, Amazon, Apple, Fandango.

View the trailer.

October 15 — Escape to Witch Mountain (1975), directed by John Hough

There are aliens, but mostly what I recall is that it made me very suspicious of rich men, a suspicion that has served me well in life.

Watch: Disney, Amazon, Apple.

View the trailer.

October 22 — The Secret of NIMH (1982), directed by Don Bluth

I read the book dozens of times as a child and gained only appreciation for laboratory rats with enhanced intelligence, but the movie caused me to have concerns about my house getting destroyed by a giant plow.

Watch: Amazon, Apple, Roku, and more.

View the trailer.

October 29 — The Last Starfighter (1984), directed by Nick Castle

I remember absolutely nothing about this film except that it made me worry intensely about being bad at video games.

Watch: Apple, Amazon, Fandango.

View the trailer.