ANNIHILATION and Crosby, Stills, and Nash’s ‘Helplessly Hoping’

Pop songs in film, if chosen well, can become inseparable in meaning from a film’s text. One of the ways selecting a song can be tricky is when the song comes with layers of historical or socio-cultural significance already baked into it. A song could evoke the artist’s personality or a historical event to which it’s tied, both potentially distracting from or confusing the story. Some songs are used repeatedly on film soundtracks, diluted further with each use.

When ANNIHILATION introduces Crosby, Stills, and Nash’s “Helplessly Hoping” early in the movie, it’s a gamble because the song and the group are tied to an era 50 years prior to the events of the film and they carry significant emotional weight for the baby-boomers. It’s a real classic-rock, greatest hits button being pressed, and at first seems out of place in an early scene where a young woman is grieving for her absent or presumed-dead, yet also youthful, husband.

ANNIHILATION isn’t the only sci-fi-with-a-message vehicle to press that button recently. PROMETHEUS had Stephen Stills, ALIEN: COVENANT had John Denver, and even A QUIET PLACE couldn’t resist playing some Neil Young. “Helplessly Hoping”, on first viewing, felt like a heavy-handed way of raising the emotional stakes when it hadn’t yet been earned.

The lyrics, however, are tied to the themes of the film in a unique way in that they describe and illustrate the dynamic between the wife and husband despite evoking the dank-smelling mud of Woodstock. They also echo a prominent theme of cell division.

They are one person/they are two alone…
They are three together/they are four for each other

In a movie starring a female-led cast about overcoming trauma, dealing with cancer, DNA mutation, and cell division, “Helplessly Hoping” underscores and foreshadows that ANNIHILATION is ultimately about how a couple overcomes the trauma of their divided marriage and fractured selves. They are one person as a couple, two alone, split apart by war and infidelity, and in the end reunite for each other.

The main characters — a couple, Lena and Kane — played by Natalie Portman and Oscar Isaac, are shown both together and alone, separated by Kane’s military service, reunited under mysterious circumstances, and literally transformed by the end.

The song’s lyrics, similarly, could describe at once Lena’s experience as a presumed war widow, hoping her harlequin hovers nearby, awaiting a word, and then later as Kane’s experience returning home transformed, wordlessly watching.

Entire scenes or bits of dialogue are revisited, like the film is producing duplicates to be observed by viewers. Throughout, Lena is grasping at glimpses with her memories, allowing the viewer to see how meaning in those memories changes given a new perspective. When Kane is called to an assignment, his goodbye with Lena at first shows she is sad to see him go. When the scene is revisited later, we know about Lena’s affair with another man. What first appears to be Kane returned home but disturbed by his military experience could later be interpreted to be a husband still grappling with his wife’s infidelity. Or a mutated Kane who is grappling with his transformed identity.

Either way, their departure is strained. Kane is wishing he could fly, only to trip at the sound of goodbye. He says, “I do…love you,” which maybe at first sounds like the answer to a marriage proposal but later could be interpreted as his answering her question (“Do you still love me?”) after her affair is revealed to him. Did he hear a goodbye? as he leaves the house without her responding to him. Or even hello? as in, maybe their relationship wasn’t strong to begin with and isn’t worth pursuing any longer. And though their goodbye is sombre, he’s left the door open to their eventual reunion.

It becomes clear that Lena makes a choice, even though she’s thinking she is lost. When she is detained with Kane hospitalized after leaving the Shimmer, she asks if she will be allowed to go home. “Is that what you want?” asks Jennifer Jason Leigh’s Dr. Ventress. “No,” says Lena. “I want to be with him.” In other words, she’s decided then to abandon her life as it was in favour of finding redemption or transformation in her relationship with her husband, who we’re told spends more time away from her on missions than with her at home. Their life as it was self-destructed, which happens to most everyone we’re told. Both Lena and Kane returned from the Shimmer, the only two to do so. They had a reason to come back, is the idea, unlike the others. Confusion has its cost on the pair who experience a painful separation before their reunion. We learn “Lena is a liar,” as one of her colleagues in the Shimmer says. She’s lied to her husband and she’s lied to the women with which she’s on the mission. Perhaps she’s lied to herself, but she seems lost or confused while she’s inside the Shimmer. Though love isn’t lying, it’s loose in a lady who lingers/Saying she is lost/And choking on hello.

Lena and Kane’s reunion affirms this difficult but necessary process for a couple grieving their old lives, their past traumas. One of Lena’s colleagues in the Shimmer, Sheppard, talks about losing her daughter, and how it was really two bereavements: the loss of her daughter and the loss of her old life, her old self. Is Kane not actually Kane any longer? Is Lena Lena? Does it, as Kane says in the scene where he first returns home to Lena, even matter? They’re together, even after all that. And they’re together because they chose to return to each other, however they’ve been changed by their collective loss.

“Helplessly Hoping” avoids mere nostalgia by being included because of its lyrical content. It also, like duplicate scenes in the movie, defies explanation at first, revealing its contribution to the story as the story unfolds. In doing so, the song, for listeners and viewers, adopts some of the meaning of ANNIHILATION onto itself given a new perspective. Older viewers could hear the CSN song with new ears, younger viewers associating “Helplessly Hoping” now with a 2018 film, not a group of singers from the 1960s.

Crosby, Stills, and Nash, like those of us who loved this film, are now enveloped in the Shimmer.

by @JoePack