Gaia (2021): or Nature will F You Up, Fungus-Style, Again. Ecohorror III

Remember how, two weeks ago, I wrote a post about Alone as horror? And remember how, last week, I wrote about The Girl with All the Gifts? Today, I’m going to write about a movie that—implausible as it may seem—tidily combines the two.

Gaia opens with two environmentalist-ranger types canoeing along a wild river in the jungle. They’re checking cameras that have been left in the forest to record. And one of them, Gabi, played by Monique Rockman, loses a drone, so she goes out to look for it, in the jungle.

Alone.

Now, this is someone who loves and fetishizes nature. She had already said, on the canoe, as she examined the world around her, in a state of wonder: Imagine: there was a time when the whole world looked like this. She wants nature to be wild, unchecked, unhinged, unplugged. And she’s going to get a strenuous ass-kicking for her hubristic desire to think that she might just be perfectly ok out there, out there among all the wildness. Because in this film, nature isn’t nice. It isn’t an epiphenomenon of divine providence. It’s a massive predatory organism that’s always trying to one-up itself. And in this film, as in Girl with All the Gifts, nature shall succeed, at the expense of what we think of as humanity.

Out in the woods, Gabi gets a little lost, a little turned around. Because nature is super perilous to be in all by yourself. Meanwhile, though, she’s not totally by herself, because nearby there are two weird men, bathed in mud and muck. They appear to be super intense survivalists. They are collecting mushrooms. Poor Gabi, meanwhile, trips a trap the men had laid, and her foot is pierced by a sharp stick. In agony, she pulls the stick out and begins hobbling around in the forest, as it grows dark.

Things are looking somewhere between grim and grisly for our new, naïve friend Gabi.

She makes her way to a shelter—it belongs to two weird survivalist mushroom-hunting dudes, but she doesn’t know that yet—and tries to bandage her severely hosed foot. Eventually, the men return, wash up, and attempt to treat her wound. For dinner, they will eat maggots, organ meat, and some kind of jungle weasel. Why? Because roughing it is like really, really hard and pretty gross.

Meanwhile Winston, the other ranger who was with her, has started to search for her. He, too, is out in the jungle in the middle of the night now. Alone. And he sees a creature, vaguely anthropoid, but with a mushroom-looking head. It is terrifying, and seems pretty aggressive.

When Gabi wakes up the next morning at the survivalist’s shack, she is horrified to discover several little fungal sprouts—usually called fruiting bodies in the mycology world—growing out of her forearms. She plucks them out, and, based on how they cling, it’s clear they’re growing from within her, not simply growing on her.

Soon we see a shot of Winston, who’s been imprisoned by predatory fungus next to a tree. The fungus are taking over his body, growing from his face.

Gabi, of course, doesn’t know this, but later that night, she and the survivalists hear the strange clicking sounds and loud bangs of what she soon learns are predatory mushroom-people who live in the jungle.

Not. Good.

The creatures are blind, with highly sensitive hearing. When they’re stabbed, they bleed thick, red blood. They release spoors. The father survivalist—who reveals that he is a trained plant pathologist—says the creature is a fungus that seems to “prefer homo sapiens…it feeds on the eyes, the mouth, the lungs.” He goes on to say that the “oldest living organism on the planet lives right here.” Evidently, there’s a massive, ancient mycelium living right where they are, in the forest. He says it’s now ready to spread. He also reveals that this organism is his god. Or, actually, goddess.

Whoa boy.

He collects two tiny mushrooms from a tree nearby, and eats them, with a look of almost erotic delight on his face. So, not the most mentally sound guy for Gabi to be convalescing with. But she makes do, because the fungus people are worse.

Soon, Gabi finds Winston, who’s been mostly taken over by the fungus now. But he’ s still alive enough to beg for death. Gabi refuses, so he forces an arrow through his own soft palate and kills himself.

Soon, Gabi realizes she’s definitely incubating the fungus, too: her leg is sprouting fruiting bodies like crazy, as are her ears. She decides to stay in the jungle with the survivalist men and die, because she knows that if she returns to civilization, she will start an outbreak.

The survivalist father starts to seem more and more deranged: he feeds blood to the fungus tree that is the point of origin for all the spoors. He prays to it. He talks to it. He hears it tell him to sacrifice his son to it. He prepares to sacrifice his only son to the tree-fungus-goddess, in a really weird gender-flipped reenactment of the Abraham and Isaac story. His son—Stefan—even goes willingly, as had Isaac in Genesis, though, like Isaac, he doesn’t know exactly what’s going to happen to him. Once he realizes, it’s too late: the fungus-tree has wrapped its roots around his arms, pinning him to the earth. As his father raises his axe to slaughter his son, however, Gabi emerges from the forest. The father says to his fungal goddess: I knew you wouldn’t forsake me. Just as God allowed Abraham to spare Isaac, sacrificing instead a ram, so Fungoddess allows the father to spare Stefan, sacrificing instead a young woman.

Yep, we’re in Genesis for sure. And I love, love, love that as an intertextual gesture. Because, of course, Genesis contains the ultimate and perhaps original ecohorror: the explusion from Eden.

Think about it. Eden was a perfect, replete, infinitely beautiful ecosystem that was perfectly designed to work in mirthful synergy with Adam and Eve. And then they, through their grasping for knowledge and power, ruined it all. God’s punishment, very literally, was to cast them out into a wasted land. An unproductive, unyielding land that would require painful labor to eke a living from. Genesis is the story of the beginning of a world, but it entails the ruination of Eden. So then the interesting question becomes: if the Eden that is being destroyed in this film is modern society—which the survivalists are pretty clear it is—what are we witnessing the genesis of? Clearly some kind of new world. But what is the nature of that new world?

It’s not patriarchy, as it was in Genesis. The Fungoddess is very clearly understood to be female. So maybe it’s a matriarchy? But, if so, it’s a super violent, vengeful, predatory one. It’s a matriarchy that’s actively looking for human sacrifice. Gabi, however, doesn’t die yet. Instead, Stefan stabs his father in the back, and the Fungoddess takes him. So maybe we’re witnessing a matriarchy in which sons are not constrained to sacrifice themselves to the whims of their fathers? And in which women aren’t, either? Maybe the Fungoddess only picks off enraged old men, who want to colonize their sons’ minds and sacrifice young women?

Nope. The goddess wants a different world from that entirely. She wants something much more radical. The next morning, Gabi and Stefan are on the sleeping mat together back at the shack—like a new Adam and Eve, alone in all the world but for each other—and we can see that Gabi’s body is finally losing its battle against the fungus. Her eye is compromised. There are numerous fruiting bodies growing from her face and mouth. As well as from her leg. Soon, her entire body is a massive fungal growth. She looks gross, but also, weirdly, kind of beautiful.

There are parts of her body that appear to be covered with rosettes; others with beautiful braching tree fungus. She can no longer move, and she asks Stefan to kill her. He doesn’t, but she dies anyway, looking like this:

Death in this film is absorption into the earth, and an aborption that’s beautiful, obviously richly alive, but not, in any meaningful sense, still human. Except in outline, I suppose. Gaia is asking us to envision a new Genesis in which humans are radically decentered, made into a growth substrate, in fact, for the new top organism, the Goddess’s chosen ones, who are fruiting bodies of a massive, self-perpetuating mycelium. Images like this in the film ask us to ponder what the world might look like without humans. Perhaps that world looks beautiful. Perhaps it’s glorious on its own terms. Perhaps it’s a world we would wonder and marvel at, if only we could live to see it.

Which we won’t.

In the final scene of the film, young Stefan has left the forest, to go join the world. He does so without realizing he’s carrying spoors. We see him finish a hamburger at a restaurant. He walks out. But behind him, the bread in his burger wrapper starts to mold and fruit. Very rapidly. Gaia the Fungoddess will take this city, and all the others to boot. And she will make a beautiful, richly alive, glorious world—with no humans.

Like I said: Alone plus Girl with All the Gifts. And of course, plus Genesis.

But there’s another ecohorror braided in here. It, too, is Biblical. I’m of course talking about Job, which we covered three weeks ago. Remember, how Elihu and God—after God allowed Satan to horrify and torture Job for no real reason—both came to Job and insisted that he take comfort by contemplating the wondrous beauty of the natural world? Yeah, well, at the start of Gaia, that’s where Gabi’s head was at. She was feeling the wonder of it all. Feeling wonder at nature, the magic, the miracle, the mystery. And this movie, I think, is actually kind of down with that. But the film does not want us to take away from that wonder a sense of comfort in divine providence. It wants us to take away a marveling sense of our own smallness, our vulnerability. It wants us to feel the rapidity with which our bodies can be overtaken by more successful natural organisms than we are: virus, bacteria, or, in this case, fungus. The beauty in this movie is a beauty of precarity. And it’s not Gaia who is in a precarious position. It’s us. Just us. Just the lucky organism that the fungus can’t get enough of: homo sapiens.