Évolution (2015)

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The Island and the Comet: Epicenism and Biology Horror in Hadzihalilovic's Evolution

Lucile Hadzihalilovic's Evolution collapses popular notions of evolutionary biology in the early twentieth century with those of a cinematic genre that has come to be known as body horror. It does so primarily through the depiction of epicenism among its characters, both human and otherwise.

Though Hadzihalilovic's portrayal of those subjects is unique, the subjects themselves are not. The film's narrative and production design suggest themes of epicenism, evolutionary biology, and body horror that appeared both in fiction and scientific literature throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It is necessary to briefly describe a few of the film's narrative and aesthetic sources since Hadzihalilovic both employs and complicates the content found in those sources. Narratively, Evolution takes its cue from H.G. Wells' novel The Island of Doctor Moreau from 1896, Edogawa Rampo's novella The Strange Tale of Panorama Island from 1926, and perhaps to a lesser extent Kurt Vonnegut's Galapagos from 1985. A number of film adaptations of those works have emerged that inevitably bear similarities to Hadzihalilovic's film. The silent short film Ile d'epouvante by Joe Hamman, filmed in France in 1911 and presumably lost, and Island of Lost Souls by Erle Kenton, from 1932, both use Wells' novel as a source. Teruo Ishii adapted Rampo's novella -which is a variation on Moreau– into Horrors of Malformed Men in 1969.

These works all address the subject of genetic change in humans -be it from natural or artificial selection. Evolution occupies a space among these works, as well as another corpus of fiction -one that addresses experimentation on human subjects. In that regard, the adult characters in the film recall the medical personnel and cabal in Frans Zwartjes' Pentimento from 1979 and Pascal Laugier's Martyrs from 2008, respectively. As in Evolution, the experiments in these films are done clandestinely, and forcibly on unwilling subjects.

Intentionally or not, Hadzihalilovic's visual sensibilities recall the affected tableaux by artists such as Paul Delvaux and even Jacques Tati. What bearing her visual sensibilities have on the film's content is difficult to say, but the viewer could deduce that like those before her, Hadzihalilovic collapses natural and artificial landscapes. What results are 'painterly' tableaux in Hadzihalilovic's films, such as the female figures situated stoically on the rocky shore or the Cycladic-style houses of the Canary Islands. One sees this collapse in Hadzihalilovic's Innocence from 2004.

Epicenism: Binary of Language and Anatomy

Evolution portrays gender in a unique way, complicating both the anatomy and social roles of male and female. It does so by way of epicenism -of a kind. The words 'gender' and 'epicene' take on different meanings depending on the context in which they are used. This discussion will use the words as they are used in the field of linguistics, and apply those meanings heuristically to the physical form of characters in the film. In linguistics, gender refers to a language's system of classifying nouns. In certain languages, nouns take on a gender: masculine, feminine, and in some cases neuter or neutral. For instance, the gender of the German words for 'fish,' 'coral,' and 'water' are masculine, feminine, and neutral, respectively, and therefore take different articles that indicate those genders (der Fisch, die Koralle, das Wasser). This form of classification exists in approximately one quarter of the world's languages.

Conversely, a word is epicene if it takes on only one form for either gender. The English words 'parent' and 'child' are epicene, for instance, in that they can refer to either male or female parents or children. Thusly, the words 'actor' and 'actress' are not epicene since they denote gender. Further, the word 'nurse' in English is epicene, though historically it has connoted a female (compare the French infirmier and infirmere, which distinguish male nurses from female nurses, or the German Krankenschwester -literally 'sick sister'- used to describe all nurses, male or female, yet denoting a female).

At first glance, Evolution distinguishes two genders, or at least presents human forms that at first register as two sexes: adult females and adolescent males. These are the only forms in which the sexes appear in the film (there are no adult males or adolescent females). The film also establishes perfunctory gender roles and some gender-specific names to the sexes: Each boy lives with a woman, who they refer to as 'mere,' the women work as nurses, and two characters are referred to by name. The name of the protagonist, Nicolas, is a common masculine given name. He eventually befriends a nurse, Stella, a common feminine given name. Though Evolution's setting is temporally ambiguous, the film's wardrobe, furniture, and technology suggest the early twentieth century. The nurses' uniforms and women's swimwear not only suggest a certain time, but also traditional roles that existed at that time.

Biology Horror

The binary between grammatical gender and anatomical sex forms the basis of several ideas that Hadzihalilovic explores in Evolution. Hadzihalilovic uses the conventions of the horror genre -specifically body horror- to portray modern notions of evolutionary biology -specifically anatomical sex and reproduction.

In short, the film conflates evolutionary biology with the conventions of body horror. A viewer can define 'body horror' in several ways, but here I define it as such: If we source our understanding of the world to our bodies, as Merleau-Ponty did, and think of our bodies as indicative of our discontinuous being, as Bataille did, than one can trace all things that frighten us back in some way to the physical violation or physical corruption of our bodies: projectiles or stabbing weapons entering the skin, sexual assault, disease, mutilation, and so on. All forms of horror are, traced back far enough, body horror. The viewer sees this conflation throughout the film. One will note that the field of evolutionary biology and the genre of body horror occasionally use similar language: The word 'mutation,' for instance, appears often in both. Mutation in the former denotes a change in an organism's genome sequence, which can have positive or negative effects on an organism's survival. Mutation in the latter denotes a type of alteration to the body's appearance, with typically negative connotations.

Evolution conflates both notions of mutation. The anatomic abnormalities in the film's characters register as conventions of body horror, but also suggest what biologists define as variation or vestigiality. As the differentiation in the shape of the beaks of birds collected by Darwin on the Galapagos Islands represented thirteen different variations of one bird -a finch- the females on Hadzihalilovic's island vary from other females in that they are portrayed with what appear to be carpal knobs or carpal suckers -typically found on the limbs of cephalopods- along their backs. Whether or not the film intends to imply an evolutionary 'regression' of sorts to humans' marine ancestors or a type of evolutionary mutation taking place on the island is difficult to say. The appearance of these carpal knobs and suckers could also suggest -provided that the viewer allows the film artistic license- vestigiality, also alluding to homo sapiens' marine ancestry. Like language, the anatomy of any organism is the product of evolution and contains vestigial matter. Whales, which have no teeth as adults, have them as embryos. Snake embryos contain vestiges of limbs. Vestigial matter in humans includes the appendix, coccyx, plica, and wisdom teeth.

The film routinely conflates notions of human reproduction and development with that of marine life. Modern embryology supports this conflation. The process by which the pharyngeal arches form the head and neck of a human embryo in the morphogenesis stage (typically during the second month of development) is virtually identical to that of any other amphibian, bird, or mammal, all of which are descended from fish -for which these arches originally formed gills: The eyes first emerge on the sides of the head and move inward, the nasal septum first emerges on the top of the head and moves down, and the jaw emerges lower on the neck and moves upward. In the earliest stages, human embryos are virtually indistinguishable from those of a chicken or a bat.

Iconographically, the human characters in Hadzihalilovic's film have much in common with marine life, particularly in the film's portrayal of sexual dimorphism and asexual reproduction. Sexual dimorphism -the instance of noticeable differences between two sexes such as physical size, shape, and so on- is common throughout the animal kingdom. There are many instances where members of the female sex are larger in size than the male, notably with fish, reptiles, spiders, and some mammals. Female fish are often larger than male fish of the same species, the dimorphism being dependent on fecundity in the former and sperm competition in the latter. Homo sapiens is a sexually dimorphic species, with male adults and children typically being larger in size than their female counterparts.

Evolution complicates sexual dimorphism in its human characters. Dimorphism occurs in species that reproduce sexually, which is not the case given the film's narrative. With the elimination of adult male and adolescent female characters, Hadzihalilovic inverts human dimorphism, accentuating the dynamics of physical size and authoritative power between adult women and adolescent boys. There are numerous scenes of women standing while boys sit at dinner tables or lie in beds, and of women carrying or tending to immobilized boys. In that regard, the film's iconography succors this dynamic: The association of females with nurses' uniforms reinforces their position as authority figures vis-a-vis the association of males with patent gowns, beds, and operating tables.

Parthenogenesis, or reproduction by way of an egg developing without fertilization, is common throughout the animal kingdom, but especially so in marine life. Numerous species of decapod crustacean and at least three species of shark have been able to reproduce via parthenogenesis. The Amazon Molly -an all-female species of fish- reproduces via gynogenesis -a process by which a female egg is fertilized by merely being in proximity to sperm. Experiments in Germany between 1911 and 1924 achieved artificial parthenogenesis in amphibians.

Evolution features imagery that alludes to similar forms of asexual reproduction, most prominently with its central iconographic image: The starfish. As with crustaceans or sharks, certain genera of starfish reproduce asexually, either by spitting their discs into two fragments or by shedding an arm. Both processes result in the fragment -or 'comet' as the severed arm is called- regenerating more arms and in effect producing two distinct starfish.

The image of a starfish and star imagery in general occurs throughout Evolution, the most noticeable being the starfish themselves and the arrangement of bulbs in the overhead lamps in the film's operating rooms. The film's only female character referred to by name is named Stella (a scene late in the film recalls, intentionally or not, Kazan's A Streetcar Named Desire). The film's narrative produces a 'comet' in the character of Nicolas, who eventually severs himself from the island with the assistance of Stella. One can compare this sequence to two scenes earlier in the film: One where Nicolas injures his hand on the coral while swimming on the beach, and another featuring his mother carrying the body of a dead boy who has presumably drowned in an attempt to leave. Both scenes suggest that venturing far from or attempting to leave the island are dangerous and even fatal. Nicolas survives due to Stella providing him with oxygen as they swim past the coral to escape the island.

More specifically, two scenes extrapolate the theme of asexual reproduction. The first features the women lying supine and squirming on a beach at night, 'birthing' an infant boy. This scene reveals to the viewer that the women have no genitals. The second is a dream sequence wherein a starfish comes in close proximity with a boy's stomach. This scene reveals to the viewer that the boys have no navels. With asexual reproduction comes the benefit of a female not needing a male in order to reproduce, and one way to interpret the absence of genitals in the film's females and abnormal navels in the film's males is as a beneficial mutation.

With asexual reproduction, however, comes relatively low genetic diversity. In contrast to natural selection, certain events in Hadzihalilovic's film portray a type of artificial selection, to which aquatic species such as shellfish yield a much greater response. It is clear to the viewer that the women conduct ongoing -possibly sinister- experiments on the boys having to do with reproduction. It is not clear, however, what precisely the experiments entail or how the reproduction process works. There are cesarean births, boys 'nursing' small humanoids while immersed in tanks of perhaps an embryotic fluid, a wunderkammer of humanoid forms housed in jars, and numerous allusions to marine life.

In keeping with the film's 'atemporal' decor and wardrobe, it is perhaps not a coincidence that the phenomena of sexual dimorphism and asexual reproduction in marine life to which the film alludes were discovered or studied intensely throughout the 1910s and 1920s. Evolution further uses its atemporal setting to address Darwin's theory of evolution and the shortcoming that, by his own admission, it contains -specifically the process by which organisms inherit traits. Darwin could not have known about DNA and genetics as we understand them today, and so he suggested that these traits were passed on through small particles he called gemmules. Darwin hypothesized that every cell of an organism possessed these gemmules, which developed into various 'parts' of an organism as an embryo. Georg Mendel's laws of inheritance eventually supplanted this hypothesis at the turn of the twentieth century.

One popular myth associated with Darwin's theory, however, is that he believed an organism's blood contained gemmules. This myth originates, possibly, with Darwin's cousin Francis Galton, who suggested that blood might contain gemmules based on his blood transfusion experiments with rabbits. Evolution contains scenes of nurses drawing blood from the arms of the young boys, which might possibly recall this aspect of trait inheritance. In fairness to Galton and by extension to Hadzihalilovic, documented theories regarding inheritance of characteristics date at least to antiquity (Hippocrates' theory of differentiation in the human head being the canonical example), so the viewer might allow these scenes the same artistic license they would to the film's portrayal of mutation or asexual reproduction.

These narrative and iconographic elements converge in Hadzihalilovic's film to portray a world that both inhabits and complicates ideas -both scientific and popular- regarding human biology at the turn of the twentieth century, while also registering cinematically as body horror. Evolution distinguishes itself, however, in how it does so: By using body horror to portray the two genders as epicene.