Beauty and The Beasts.

Hell is a scary place. It is also a beautiful place, not because of what it is but because of the potential of what it can be. The power of chaos, the reason we need it is because of its rejuvenating quality. Change is destructive but that is only half the story. It gives the opportunity for something new to be born in its place.

To be afraid of change is to be afriad of growth, to be afraid of the universe. One thing, I think, what seperates us from the rest of the animals is our ability to change the environment around us to suit us. We are extremely adaptable animals, true, but if you look at the world, the differences between humans is tiny. However, the difference between the environments we inhabit are vast. From the deserts to mountains, we can live anywhere and we do so by manipulating the environment to an extent that is far and beyond any other animal. We are not alone in this either. It appears to me that the role of living things is to construct. To take the potential of the unknown and turn it into something. Ants build ant hills, birds build nests and humans build cities. Animals, to varying degrees, change their environment, if they can, to suit them.

It is the balance to the ever-changing, ever-mutating entropy of the universe.

This idea, to me, is shown all throughout the movie. From the beautiful flowers to the crystal trees, as terrifying and unknown as Hell is, it is also beautiful. It’s not a beauty that can be seen until it’s perceived as such.

The shimmer is a prism. It refracts everything.

When you are in Hell, you start seeing patterns and noticing things that you’ve never noticed before. It’s that rabbit hole you go down when you find out that your husband has cheated on you. You start looking back at every moment. Every fight, every long night at work, every dismissive comment. He changed the type of shirt he wears, you never noticed. It puts into doubt everything you ever knew about that person and yourself. It is that boundary in time and space where the known meets the unknown. It’s where everything is familiar but different. From space but fits perfectly on earth. If Hell was completely new and unrecognizable, then it might not be half as painful. The recognizable brings the past with it and that adds to the things that you must figure out.

The only way out, is in.

“Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage” — Anais Nin

You find that in the course of the movie, our hero, Lena decides that yes they need to escape, but they’ve come so far already that the best way out is further in.

When life gives you lemons, your reaction is either fight or flight, with a brief moment to freeze in between. The catch is every time you choose flight, the stronger your wings get, the better the wind feels in your feathers when you take off, the easier it becomes to always fly away from your reality — your problems and at the same time, the potential beauty of what you could create. Meanwhile, day by day you forget what you’re capable of, your muscles loose their once-glorious strength and the dragons you were flying away from appear to be mountains from the distance. It’s easy to escape. It’s the path of least resistance and the world will give you all the ropes you need to hang yourself with. There is always something to make you forget what you have, fantasize about what you could have, or cry over what you had.

One of the hardest things in this life is to admit that something is wrong. If you admit that something is wrong that means you have the realization that you have to act to change it, which is difficult. The daunting task of wresting order from chaos, the overwhelming complexity, is in most moments more terrifying than the current state of things. Better the devil you know than the devil you don’t.

In one scene, when asked why she was the only one that survived, Lena responds:

I had to come back. I’m not sure any of them did.

Lena is the only one to come out of this mess. Like I said above, I believe Lena being the only person who willingly goes in to the shimmer is significant.

However, Dr Ventress also goes in willingly. The difference between Lena and Ventress is that Lena had something, someone, to come back to, Ventress didn’t. It has led me to think about what makes us pull ourselves together and come out from the existential holes that we fall into. It has led me to believe that the best thing you can do with your life is to fill with it gratitude for the past and hope for the future. To have something to look up at when you’re in the bottom of the well, make a light for your tunnel. It can be something you have to achieve not just for yourself, but for someone else. I think this is why family, especially children, saves us from ourselves. They short the “me, me, me” circuit. Having people counting on you or depending on you can be the orientation you need to be able to know which way is up. To stop spinning for long enough to get your head above water and catch a breath. It may not be enough to get you all the way through Hell, but damn, if it won’t keep you alive long enough for you to figure out how. Sometimes the best way to protect and be there for the people you love is to be there for yourself.