“Do I have the strength

To know how I’ll go?

Can I find it inside

To deal with what I shouldn’t know?”

– Metallica “Frantic”

The day Metallica’s St. Anger was released, I drove to the Sam Goody in Petoskey, Michigan to buy it on Compact Disc. It’s about a 45-minute drive from Petoskey back to my hometown, so I was able to listen to most of the 75 (!) minute album on the way back. I had already heard the album’s lead single, “St. Anger” by the time of its release, so I had a general idea of the direction the band was taking, and while I wasn’t crazy about it, I figured it was 1 song on a 11-song album, so there was still hope– hope that would dissipate with every ensuing track on St. Anger. No guitar solos. Clanging drums. Tinny production. Seemingly never-ending songs featuring off-key vocals, and frankly, kind of silly lyrics by James Hetfield. St. Anger wasn’t what I was expecting– or what I wanted– but, I did that thing you do when you aren’t crazy about an album: I talked myself into thinking that it might be alright, and that it just needed a second listen.

I used to work at ABC Warehouse in the small appliance department. Basically, my work day unfolded like this: I would go into work around 1pm, and things would usually be pretty slow, so I just kind of walked through my department and moved shit around so that it looked like I was doing something until about 4 or 5pm. That’s about the time people started to show up after finishing up at work, or school, and things would get a little busier. Usually after about 7pm, that late-afternoon rush would die down, and things would become a ghost town inside the store. The store manager would usually head home around that time, meaning you would be free to just fuck around for the next couple hours until the store closed at 9pm–the perfect time to give St. Anger another spin!

I found the best computer speakers that we had in stock (which is weird looking back on it, because the album is always going to sound like shit to me), hooked them up to a desktop, and popped the CD into the computer. I told my boss I was going to clean in the area– an activity which consisted of me waving a duster around items close enough to the computer that was playing the album. I think it was during track 4, “Dirty Window”, when my manager walked over and told me that I had to turn the album off. I figured that it was probably because there were actually customers in the store now, and James Hetfield growling “fuck it all, and fucking no regrets” might be a little too HARDCORE for some our customer base. I asked my boss if I could just turn it down a bit. My boss replied, “No. You have to turn that off. I can’t listen to it. That’s not Metallica.”

HERE BEGIN SPOILERS FOR ANNIHILATION!!!!

ANNIHILATION is a film that is all about change. That aspect of the film has written about quite a bit by people like Film Critic Hulk, and others. I’ll go ahead and link Hulk’s piece, because I think he does a really good job of taking a deep dive into the film, its thematic elements, and how the characters within the film deal with the changes caused by The Shimmer. https://filmcrithulk.blog/2018/02/27/annihilation-the-horrors-of-change/

As FCH points out, in a lot of ways, what The Shimmer in ANNIHILATION represents is impermanence. Everything changes, and has since the beginning of time, and human beings are at the whims of whatever changes nature decides to go through. Being reactionary to those changes is a part of our human nature — a pretty major part — and it changes us on a personal level over time. Nothing is permanent, not even our emotions.

Another example of that impermanence is found in the physical changes created by The Shimmer. Here’s an excerpt from the above article:

Within The Shimmer, she faces a world her deepest fears and most morbid biological curiosity: a world where cancerous mutation and refraction run rampant. Animals become dangerous hybrids of another, alligators with rows of sharks teeth, even plant life spilling into man and vice versa. It is life out of control, and unchecked by that which we consider “the natural order”

The term “natural order” is what sticks out for me. “Natural order” is a term that gets to the core of a very human need: the need to find some kind of meaning, or reason to the universe, and the events unfold within it. A lot of the changes caused by The Shimmer are physical, but many of them are under the surface as well, and a lot of them tie back to the concept of a “natural order” and the sense of control that comes along with that concept.

That Human need for control is one of the things that kept running through my head during ANNIHILATION. We see Lena and her husband, Kane, at different points in their relationship, but most of what we see revolves around– or is in reaction to — one particular moment in their relationship: the moment that Lena cheats on Kane with her co-worker.

Pretty much everything we see regarding Lena and Kane’s relationship springs out of that moment. It’s the couple’s own personal “shimmer”, as it’s the point where everything changes for them, and it’s due to an act of nature: sex. When we see the infidelity occur, we see Lena on top of her co-worker. Lena is in control of things, even when it comes to sex. At some point during the film, it’s stated that Kane knew about the affair, which might have been the inciting incident that sends him into The Shimmer, and in turn is what leads Lena to follow him, whether it be due to a sense of duty, guilt, or even to regain a sense of control over their relationship.

One of the things you learn as you grow up and enter a relationship (s) is that you can’t control another person’s thoughts, or feeling, or actions. Kane was unable to control Lena cheating on him, and, in turn, Lena was unable to control Kane’s reaction to her infidelity, and his ensuing trip into The Shimmer. On top of that, once they are both inside The Shimmer, neither one of them can control the events unfolding within it, or even explain it. When Lena and Kane exit The Shimmer, and are questioned about what happens inside of it, the only explanation they can muster is, “I don’t know”.

“I don’t know” could have been used as the film’s tagline considering how many times that phrase is uttered in the film. When pressed further on the nature of The Shimmer at different points in the film, both Lena and Kane can only reply with “I don’t know” as an explanation for what it is, and how it operates. None of the characters in ANNIHILATION are ever able to give an explanation for The Shimmer, leaving them at its mercy, and at the mercy of the nature created inside of it. All they can say “I don’t know”.

Saying you “don’t know” something is one of the hardest things a human being can admit, especially for someone like Lena, an expert in the field of Biology. The phrase itself is an admittance by a person that they lack control of a given situation—an admittance that goes against our human desire for order. Things change, and nothing is permanent. The Shimmer is an exaggerated example of nature changing, as it does so at an accelerated rate, and in ways that human beings are unfamiliar with, and are unable to predict. The closest we get to an explanation in the film is toward the end of it, when Lena claims that The Shimmer “wasn’t destroying. It was changing everything. It was making something new”. The Shimmer isn’t a force of evil. It isn’t a force of good. It just is. And it’s not just changing the environment it surrounds, but the people inside of it.

This past week was the fifteenth anniversary of Metallica’s  St. Anger, and I listened to it again for the first time in a long time. In a lot of ways, my feelings toward the album haven’t changed. Lars’s drums are infuriating, as is the lack of guitar solos, and there’s plenty to clown when it comes to Hetfield’s writing, but I also kind of wished that I could go back in time and offer a retort to what my boss said to me. The Metallica that recorded St. Anger WAS Metallica, but it was a version of Metallica that had been changed by the environment that surrounded them, and by their evolution as human beings.

Art doesn’t exist in a vacuum, and St. Anger is proof of that. The band’s long-time bassist, Jason Newsted, had just left the band. Lars had been the public face of the fight against Napster (a fight they were on the right side of btw). And James Hetfield had just left a stint in rehab, something that is pretty obvious in some the album’s lyrics, and also something that led to him hiring a therapist to help fix some of the relationships within the band. If you haven’t watched the documentary, SOME KIND OF MONSTER, do so, as it gives a pretty accurate snapshot of the state of the band at the time, and is also a riveting documentary regardless of feelings on Metallica. Everything around Metallica was changing. Their personal lives, the band itself, and their place in the world of music.  All those changes are on display in St. Anger.  and a lot of those changes rubbed some longtime fans, including my boss, the wrong way.

I also understand where my boss was coming from on some level. How much can a band, or a writer, or a film franchise change before it becomes something unrecognizable to you, and the thing you fell in love with? It’s an attitude prevalent throughout fandom, and the timely example is STAR WARS. I’m gonna be honest with you, I don’t have the energy to jump into the shitstorm that is THE LAST JEDI debate, but I liked it. I think it’s my favorite STAR WARS movie in a long time, and so much of that was because it finally felt like the franchise was moving forward. But I also understand that for a lot of fans it broke away from the “natural order”. When you listen to Metallica, you expect a certain sound. When you sit down at STAR WARS movie, you expect certain things to happen, or certain types of characters to be in lead roles, and characters to act in a way that you have established in your head. When they don’t behave that way, are they still the same characters you grew up with? Are they the same band you fell in love with? Can you expect them to be the same after all they’ve gone through?

I bring up Star Wars, but it’s not limited to them, and honestly, the STAR WARS franchise is a different beast altogether. In my opinion, STAR WARS is a franchise that is more product than art at this point, but if the franchise is an important part of Americana–and I think it is– it should reflect America in its characters, and it’s also a good example of the physical changes that art goes through. America looks different than it did in 1977, and the new movies should reflect that. That means a woman might be the new main character. Or the older characters will take a backseat to the younger ones. Or an Asian woman might play an integral part in a movie. You can’t stop change, and you might not like it, but you’re going to have to accept it.

I do think a lot of the negative reaction to things like St. Anger, or THE LAST JEDI stems from wanting an order to it all (some people just might thing they are bad btw. That’s fine too. I’m mainly focusing on the NOT MY METALLICA sort). In the end though, Metallica gets to make any album that they want. Whoever is directing/writing/producing STAR WARS, gets to make that movie however they want. If they want to get rid of guitar solos, record it in a way that makes it sounds like it’s in a tin can, or heaven forbid, give an Asian woman a major role, it doesn’t change the fact that it’s still the same thing at its core. It’s still STAR WARS, and they are still METALLICA.

It’s a weird relationship sometimes between fans and creators, but I think it’s important to remember that artists go through physical and emotional changes too, and fans can’t expect them to stay static just because they want the same thing made that they fell in love with a long time ago. It’s also important to remember that being a fan of something means that you enter into that relationship giving up a sense of control over the thing that you love.   Metallica isn’t the same band that they were in the early 80’s when they burst onto the scene, nor should they be, and you shouldn’t expect them to be. They’ve all gone through changes, personally and professionally, and the band has called St. Anger an album that they needed to make at the time they made it. I might not like the album that much, but I recognize it as a transitional album; a link in the evolution of the band from early thrash metal, to a more refined sound, to mainstream success, to the elder statesman of rock they are now.

At the very end of ANNIHILATION, Lena and Kane meet each other again. They look into each other’s eyes and they embrace. As the camera cuts to a close-up, both of their eyes glow with the colors of The Shimmer. Are they the Lena and Kane that we knew before The Shimmer? In my opinion, after all they’ve gone through, it doesn’t matter, as they were never going to be the same anyway.