Green Frontier (2019): the Last Gasp of the Mystical Matriarchy, or Ecohorror VI

This is one of Netflix’s best limited series horrors. Say what you will about Haunting of Hill House, Haunting of Bly Manor, or Midnight Mass (all of which I admire in different ways), this thing is better. Smarter, braver, less Hollywoodish.

The first episode opens with a pan over a bunch of dead female bodies, most clad in what appears to be maids’ unforms (but are actually missionary uniforms), most apparently shot by some kind of indigenous arrow. A voiceover in an indigenous language makes a kind of encomium to nature, the wild mother, the jungle, who lives forever, is the origin of everything, and rules all.

Soon, we meet a young, female detective, named Elena Poveda (Juana del Rio) who’s traveling to the indigenous interior of the Amazon to investigate the murder of all of these young, arrow-shot women. She has a noticeably low voice—an interesting choice, because it right away conveys that she’s not “girlie” or sweet, and won’t probably need to be catered to very much. She meets a local police officer, who’s going to help her get situated. She’s told that everyone assumes the indigenous people of this area of the Amazon committed the murders, and that she’ll never find them, because they’re like “fantasmas.” They are referred to as the “nocontactados,” or the uncontacted ones. The notion here is that there are indigenous peoples in this area who are not influenced by western culture or colonialist lifeways. Turns out that three of the murder victims are white and blond, while the fourth has dark hair and eyes. The detective’s assistant informs her that the location of the murders is an ancient indigenous cemetery. While walking around, they find a fifth body, hanging from a tree by her wrists, with her heart ritually removed from her chest. This woman appears to be indigenous. They bring her back to her indigenous village.

But as all this happens, we also meet a young indigenous man named Yua (Miguel Dionisio Ramos), who seems to have been the beloved of the fifth dead woman, whose name is Ushe (Angela Cano). And it starts to seem like there’s something funky going on with timeline. For most of the film, we’re clearly in the 2010s, along with our detective. But sometimes, we seem to be sometime earlier, witnessing the life of the fifth dead woman. This overlaid timeline is complicated further by the existence of a wild spirit realm, where certain indigenous characters meet to talk, including Yua and Ushe, who asserts that she is now one with the jungle.

Eventually, it’s revealed that young, beautiful, dead Ushe was born more than 80 years prior. Her people believe she was bewitched.

Soon, we come to understand that Ushe has some relation to Elena’s own past—it turns out that Elena lived in this jungle as a child, with her parents. But their home burned, and Ushe saved Elena from the blaze. These are things Elena can only just barely remember. But she is connected to this woman, who is, in turn, connected to the jungle, by a transhistorical, transtemporal, transpersonal kind of connection. It’s not rhizomatic, but it does have to do with the roots of the trees, which often appear to be bloody in the series. And it has to do with the ancient mythos of the indigenous people. They talk about Ushe as a ”walker” who moved through the jungle as a part of it, a walking tree. There are scars on her body that look like carvings in tree trunks—Elena’s assistant explicitly remarks on it. The jungle speaks to her, Yua says about her, in one of the film’s unmarked flashbacks.

And the jungle needs to speak to her and through her, because there are loggers cutting down all the trees of the Amazon. And there have been for generations. In fact, the flachbacks to the earlier lives of Yua and Ushe are eventually revealed to have taken place in the 1940s, when a white Nazi scientist named Joseph (Bruno Clairefond) interrupted the lifeways of the indigenous peoples, harassing Yua and Ushe to tell him the “secrets of the jungle.” Eventually, Yua led a rising in which the indigenous people killed off the incurring white settler/scientists.

The ripping out of trees from the Amazon basin is what fuels the horror of this series. The land uses Ushe as a vehicle for speaking out against the violence committed against it. Ushe, from the spirit realm, then uses Yua and Elena. In fact, it turns out that Elena’s father had been studying a phenomenon in the jungle, when their house burned. A phenomenon by which the trees are somehow connected to each other, and to the native peoples. This connection becomes more concrete when a forensic pathologist, studying Ushe’s dead body, reveals that her cells have membranes around them that are similar to those in plants, and that her DNA comes in three different types of chromosomes, from three different species. Ushe is some kind of hybrid. She is a human woman, she is jungle, she is tree.

Over the course of the series, it becomes clear that Ushe and Yua are maybe not quite time-travelers, but they are immune to the effects of time, because of their connection to the jungle. They do not age.

Joseph, the Nazi who wants to control the jungle and its secrets, has also been able to survive for all these years since World War II, owing to his earlier interactions with Yua and Ushe. Joseph stands for the patriarchal, white, settler colonial ways that—in the logic of this film—rip people apart from the natural world. He represents the conversion of indigenous intimacy with nature into the predatory relation of western extractive capitalism to the natural world. Ushe represents a kind of natural, matriarchal unity with the jungle, with wildness itself. He wants to destroy her, to take her knowledge so that he can gain power and wealth from the jungle. He was the one who cut out Ushe’s heart earlier on. He has been using it to transmit her power and blood into his own body.

It is, of course, no accident that the arch bad guy here is named Joseph. In this film, the patriarchal anchor of Christianity—Joseph, the man who confers upon Jesus his status as the inheritor of the Abrhamic birthright. Here, “Joseph” isn’t about the conferring of special privilege or right. Instead, “Joseph” here is about the patriarchal ripping away of the primal, indigenous, matriarchal power of the jungle, and converting it into the profit motive. There’s a scathing critique in this film not only of settler colonialism and extractive capitalism, but also of western Christianity as the justification and underpinning for all of that destruction.

As Ushe says at one point: Death is a cult to men. Life is a cult to women. It’s a cryptic phrase, but in the mystical system of the film, the notion is that men attempt to harness power by conveying death and fetishizing death as somehow glorious or virtuous. Women, by contrast, exist as conduits to a life that includes but also exceeds them and everyone else. They do not fetishize death and power, but life and union.

Late in the series, Ushe meets Elena in the astral realm. She tells Elena that she’s destined to protect the jungle from Joseph. She says, “You are the door and the key,” which sounds an awful lot to me like John 10 from the gospels, in which Jesus describes himself both as the gate and the shepherd. Here, in this film, we’re getting a new religion, based not in patriarchy and patrilinear genealogy, but in matriarchy and matrilinearity. Elena is special not because of her father or adoptive father, but because of her mother (now dead) and because of her adoptive mother (Ushe herself.)

Joseph—his body covered with repulsive rotting sores, but still alive and “young” in the face—captures Elena and forces her to exchange blood with him. His is dark and thick, hers red and bright and easy flowing. They meet then in the spirit realm, and she appears to defeat him, obliterating him and absorbing his energy into herself. But then she “awakens” into a strange dance club scene. Black liquid flows from her eyes, and she sees Joseph there before her, as alive-yet-rotten as ever.

It's this last scene—the final shot of the series—that finally and decisively qualifies the series as horror. We can read the ending in one of two ways. First, we can read this weird, surreal dance club as some kind of inter-realm prison, in which Elena and Joseph are now permanently imprisoned. In that reading, Elena has sacrificed herself in the interest of the world, bringing Joseph and the extractive brutality of his agenda into a state of arrest.

But the second reading, one justified by the fact that the song playing in the surreal dance club is the Love and Rockets song, “So Alive.” The lyrics to this classic 80s song, for those who don’t remember, go like this: “My head is full of magic baby, and I can’t share this with you. I feel I’m on a cross again, lately, and there’s nothing to do with you. I’m alive! So alive. I’m alive! So alive…My head is full of magic, baby, and I can’t share it with you. I feel I’m on the top again, baby, that’s got everything to do with you!”

Uh-oh. Looks like extractive patriarchy has won out in the end. Somehow, Joseph and everything he stands for in this film seem to have overwhelmed Elena (and Ushe with her). Joseph has piggy-backed on Elena’s strength, to catapult himself into the magic, power and life that he sought desperately and violently all along.

The ecohorror of this film, then, has to do with futility. Leaning into the magic of nature, its transcendence, its eternalness, its wildness; trusting the matrilinear, matriarchal order of the jungle; believing in your power to destroy or at least contain the destructive, predatory practices of western capitalism; these are all fantasies. In the end, as the black liquid oozes from Elena’s eyes—Elena, incidentally, means “light bringer”—we are meant to understand that the mystical power of the jungle, in its reciprocal, unified intimacy with human beings, is damaged beyond repair.

The lead-up to this final scene, moreover, is intercut with historical scenes of intertribal warfare among the indigenous people—warfare that is superintended and fomented by the white extractivists. It is also intercut with scenes of burning jungle. It’s too late, as many characters say to each other throughout the series. It’s too late.

Now, it would be fair to say that this film ends on an excessively dark note. But this is an important moment in world history, and, in particular, in the history of how the human species relates to and understands itself in relation to the earth. We are, in fact, out of time. And I’m saying this as a published, award-winning historian of ecological history and ecosystemic philosophy. We are out of time. Happy stories of restored intimacy with the natural world are, in my humble opinion, dangerous. Imagining a scenario in which the matriarchy decisively wins and banished the rotten patriarchy somewhere to the outer realms of darkness is a fantasy we can no longer afford to engage in.

And this, this above all else, is why the horror genre is so important right now, as a vehicle for activism and political awareness. Horror is designed to leave us with a hangover. It’s designed to make us feel unsafe in the world. Which we are, because we cannot seem, as a species, to contain our impulses to despoliate and abuse, to overextract and wield power predatorily over land and peoples.

So, yes, there is a reason ecohorror is having a moment right now. And it’s because we are at the actual last moment.