By Heather Duncan, University at Albany
Sometime in the early days of 2019, I came across an article published in Slate called ‘The Stalkers: Inside the bizarre subculture that lives to explore Chernobyl’s Dead Zone’ (Morris, 2014). I have always had a morbid fascination with Chernobyl but had never heard of the Stalkers. Stalkers, the article explained, are individuals that devote their free time to exploring the exclusion zone, particularly the areas that are designated off-limits to the public because the levels of radioactivity are deemed unsafe. Their motivation varies; some go for cheap thrills, but others go to serve as witnesses to a disaster that, in many ways, is still unfolding in Ukraine and Belarus. It is almost as if by contaminating themselves, these Stalkers gain access to a fellowship of suffering, a way of confronting a traumatic event that lives on, invisible, inside their bodies.
The Stalkers are actually a part of a longer tradition of intentional exposure to nuclear radiation. For example, in the mid-1990s, a Ukrainian-Canadian performance artist named Taras Polataiko traveled to the Chernobyl exclusion zone and intentionally exposed himself, then had his own blood drawn over a period of fourteen months until it filled a small bathtub (see Figure 1). This bathtub then became the primary element of an installation entitled Cradle (1996). In a write-up on the artist for the Barbara Edwards Contemporary art gallery, this project is described as ‘a means of addressing the past, thereby resolving the future through dialogue and awareness’ (2020). The blood itself represents a mute language of contamination, a visual marker of the invisible trauma left in the wake of the disaster. Projects like Polataiko’s and the dual impulse in Stalker culture to seek an adrenaline rush while also coming to terms with the loss of an entire way of life seems to suggest a fundamental connection between contamination and love; a comingling of bodies and minds that inevitably erodes the illusion of self as an inviolable entity.
In Svetlana Alexievich’s Voices from Chernobyl—collection of eyewitness accounts from Chernobyl survivors—a woman named Lyusya recalls her husband’s rapid deterioration as he slowly dies of radiation poisoning. Despite the protests of her husband and the doctors treating him, Lyusya refuses to leave his side as he quite literally disintegrates before her eyes, even at the risk of poisoning her unborn child. She recalls a doctor telling her, ‘You have to understand: this is not your husband anymore, not a beloved person, but a radioactive object with a strong density of poisoning’ (p. 16). But despite the doctor’s attempts to dehumanise him, Lyusya never leaves his side, even as he becomes a monster before her eyes. Emotional, she asks Alexievich, ‘Why are these things together—love and death. Together. Who’s going to explain this to me?’ (p. 22)
This question became all the more urgent during the COVID-19 pandemic. My own husband is a healthcare worker, and I found myself suddenly looking at him not just as my partner but as a potential disease vector. In the early days, before we understood what kind of PPE was effective against the virus and what sort of chemicals would render it inert, we lived with the knowledge that any day he might bring home a silent companion that had the potential to kill us both. I moved out of our bedroom and into the guestroom. We began a new routine in which he would strip as soon as he entered the house and put his clothes straight into the wash. I couldn’t touch him until he was, to our best knowledge, ‘decontaminated’. Hugging and kissing felt dangerous and became a rare indulgence. It felt like we were living with a time bomb that might go off at any moment. Like Lyusya, I found myself asking, ‘Who’s going to explain this to me?’
It was in this frame of mind that on a rare day off from the endless commitments of online teaching that I sat down to watch a new nature documentary, now readily available on Netflix, called My Octopus Teacher (2020). I first became aware of this film because of a rumor circulating on social media that the film featured a man committing a sexual act with the titular octopus. This was, of course, completely fabricated, but the rumors caused me to approach the film with some skepticism. In her review of the film for The Cut, Amanda Arnold boldly declares that My Octopus Teacher is ‘the love story we need right now’ (2020). And after viewing the film, I don’t disagree. But beneath the film’s message of unselfish love is a darker narrative about the perils of loving a creature that the human imagination has long considered a monster.
My Octopus Teacher is the creation of nature filmmaker Craig Foster. The format is deceptively simple—Foster sits in front of the camera as he delivers his narration to accompany the incredible scenes shot underwater with minimal assistance near his home off the coast of South Africa. It is clear almost immediately that Foster has a rare talent for nature filmmaking. The camerawork is intimate, even claustrophobic at times. The shots of the octopus exploring Foster’s camera are mesmerising — the viewer can almost feel one’s skin being poked, prodded, gently caressed by her tentacles.
It is this sense of the tactile that Foster brings to his filmmaking that, perhaps, stoked the internet rumors that this was a film about a man who has intercourse with an octopus; or, perhaps it is the fact that the study of Gothic literature has long emphasised the erotic dimension of monster narratives, the allure of that which threatens to consume us. Thesis VI of Jeffrey James Cohen’s Monster Theory asserts that ‘fear of the monster is really a kind of desire’ (p. 16). Though not overtly sexual, Foster’s intense need to touch the octopus is perhaps an echo of these darker erotic impulses stemming from a desire for freedom from repression. The transgression of bodily boundaries that occurs when her tentacles brush against his skin has the same type of erotic and even transcendental appeal that scholars associate with the Gothic.
On the brink of a nervous breakdown and flailing professionally, Foster began taking daily swims along the dangerous coastline, a place he describes as ‘much more extreme than our maddest science fiction’. When he first encounters the octopus, she is hiding under a strange assortment of rocks and shells; behavior Foster has never encountered before. After accidentally startling her with a falling lens cap, she disappears from her den and does not return. Fearing that he may never see her again, he decides to try to track her; a task that he admits seemed Herculean given that octopi have evolved for millions of years to become undetectable. Nevertheless, Foster’s efforts give him an even deeper understanding of the kelp forest than he had realized was possible. This is the point at which he ‘begins thinking like an octopus’. When he eventually finds her, she recognises him, grasping onto his hand and allowing him to carry her to the surface—a boundary rarely crossed by her species. It is at this point that Foster’s fascination with the octopus becomes all-consuming. When he is not in the water, he spends his time obsessively reading every bit of scientific literature on octopus vulgaris (the common octopus) he can find. In the periphery of the film are allusions to a son whose life he has not been particularly present in, and a general atrophying of his human relationships. Foster’s mind has been hijacked by a monster.
The Stalkers of Chernobyl sometimes speak of feeling invigorated by their time in the exclusion zone, some going so far as to argue that the radioactivity present in the flora and fauna of the region is healthful to consume. And the more time spent in the exclusion zone, the more risk there is not just to individual Stalkers, but to the other human beings they come into contact with. Perhaps there is even some appeal in knowing one is secretly contaminated after the years of discrimination and ostracism victims of the disaster have faced. Foster feels a similar thrill, finding new purpose and drive as a result of his connection to the octopus, fully embracing his obsession and, in a sense, becoming a monster himself.
In an excellent piece for the London Review of Books, Amia Srinivasan writes, ‘the octopus threatens boundaries. Its body, a boneless mass of soft tissue, has no fixed shape…does not have any stable colour or texture’ and ‘can be invisible from just a few feet away’ (2017). In terms of their brains, they are about as far from human as one can imagine, because their cognition is distributed throughout their bodies. It is no wonder, as Srinivasan points out, that the octopus has long been seen as the consummate monster. For what could be less like us? Victor Hugo even went so far as to call the octopus the ‘devil-fish’ in Toilers of the Sea (1866), describing the creature as ‘glutinous mass, endowed with a malignant will’ (p. 293). Lovecraft’s infamous Cthulhu deity is part octopus, and the Kraken was a giant octopus long feared by northern European mariners. Insofar as representations of the Other are concerned, the octopus is about as Other as you can get.
Do the Stalkers of Chernobyl experience a similar thrill in exposing their bodies to the touch of that invisible monster, radiation? Perhaps yes, perhaps no. But these pursuits all suggest a primal human drive to transgress bodily boundaries, even when these encounters have the potential to prove deadly. Lyusya, the woman whose husband became a monster before her eyes, expresses a kind of fearful puzzlement when she recounts her experiences to Alexievich. It is as though she cannot begin to truly explain or justify her actions, which did indeed result in the death of her unborn child. Something drives her towards her husband, even to Moscow, where he is eventually entombed in a lead coffin. Foster expresses similar sentiments in My Octopus Teacher, though fortunately with much less tragic results. His love affair with a monster eventually brings him back to the world of human beings, albeit only after her death leaves him with no other choice. He admits toward the end of the film that the intensity of the experience was taxing because he ‘slept, dreamt, this animal’ and that the relationship was unsustainable.
Our horror narratives are full of monsters we love to hate or hate to love. Is this the inherent draw of the nonhuman, or is it perhaps that we misunderstand the nature of love? In this era of Hallmark greeting card sentiment, it is easy to forget the terrible loss of self that love requires of us. That when we truly love another, we are forever contaminated by them. That love is one of the most dangerous choices we can make. For once you love something, it lives forever inside you—for better or worse.
Bibliography
Alexievich, Svetlana. (2006) Voices from Chernobyl, New York, Picador.
Arnold, Amanda. (2020) The Love Story We All Need Right Now. Available from: https://www.thecut.com/2020/09/my-octopus-teacher-on-netflix-is-the-love-story-we-need.html [Accessed 4th December 2020].
Barbara Edwards Contemporary. (2020) Taras Polataiko. Available from: http://www.becontemporary.com/art-polataiko.php [Accessed 22nd November 2020].
Cohen, Jeffrey James. (1996) Monster Theory. Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press.
Hugo, Victor. (1866) Toilers of the Sea. New York, Harper and Brothers.
Morris, Holly. (2014) The Stalkers: Inside the bizarre subculture that lives to explore Chernobyl’s Dead Zone. Available from: https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2014/09/the-stalkers-inside-the-youth-subculture-that-explores-chernobyls-dead-zone.html [Accessed 4th December 2020].
My Octopus Teacher. (2020) [Online]. Ehrlich, P. and Reed, J. dirs. South Africa: Sea Change Project, Off the Fence, and ZDF Enterprises.
Srinivasan, Amia. (2017) The Sucker, the Sucker! The London Review of Books. 17 (39). Available from: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v39/n17/amia-srinivasan/the-sucker-the-sucker [Accessed 4th December 2020].
Biography
Heather Duncan is a full-time Lecturer in the Writing and Critical Inquiry Program at SUNY Albany. Her research focuses on the intersection of ecocriticism/environmental humanities and contemporary science fiction, horror, and popular culture. She has a forthcoming article in ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment and an essay published in the edited collection Green Matters: Ecocultural Functions of Literature.