By Dr. Joela Jacobs, University of Arizona
Plants seem like the most peaceful creatures on earth. We expect no sudden movements from the pots on our windowsills or the flowers in our garden—though plants do of course move when they grow, turn toward the sun and water, sway in the wind, or open and close their buds and leaves. But it is often more like the Mimosa pudica retracting its leaves upon touch: a reaction that betrays their vulnerability to the elements. Plants do not usually uproot themselves to chase us down. People slayed by a branch were in the wrong place at the wrong time, and victims of poison ingested the wrong herb. Those moments do not seem intentional on the part of the plant. Manslaughter, perhaps, but not murder. So why is there such a prevalent fantasy of plants intentionally killing humans across literature and film?
Already in one of the earliest blockbusters, Nosferatu (1922), scenes of an approaching vampire are interspersed with shots of a scientist explaining the workings of a Venus flytrap (Figure 1), suggesting that both bloodsucking creatures occur naturally and that humans will be as helpless as flies to this threat. In any of the multiple film versions based on John Wyndham’s 1951 novel Day of the Triffids, alien plants take over the planet, taking out any human who gets in the way. And in Little Shop of Horrors, the 1960 film turned musical (1982) turned film again (1986), Seymour famously caves to Audrey II’s demands to “Feed me!” (Figure 2). Like the triffids, this bloodthirsty specimen of a kind of alien Venus flytrap is one of the many murderous plants with an origin in outer space, which is often explained with the idea of panspermia, the arrival of extraterrestrial microorganisms on earth. Just as Nosferatu’s vampire panic was really about antisemitic xenophobia, such science fiction scenarios are products of Cold War fears and hold up a mirror to our own consumerist feeding frenzies. But they also illustrate the limits of what we know about plants and evoke the old Frankenstein-esque anxiety regarding the kinds of monsters we might create through experimentation.
by Chris Blakeley is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.
Already at the beginning of the twentieth century, science-meets-climate fiction imagined the weaponisation of plants. Murder by vegetable is part of an experiment in Alfred Döblin’s voluminous novel Mountains Oceans Giants (1924), for example. The mad scientist Marduk has created a forest that will squeeze the life out of his enemies. But soon more brains splatter, as the plants get their revenge. The more humans mess with the planet, the more a mysterious life force begins to move and merge matter—so much so that rolling masses of soil, plant, and animal matter overrun people and incorporate them into themselves. In this monist fantasy of nature, all becomes one—including the syntax:
The mobile spraying steaming mass swallowed up potato fields, fleeing dogs, people. It bubbled like cake dough, swelled high, wobbling across the cultivated plane, advanced like a slow deadly lava stream. And everywhere treetrunks grew from the pulsing ever more bulbous mass, each leaf as big as a house wall. Arms legs poking from the dark glistening substance were made of flesh and bone, often clad in black bark, toes and fingers spread like leaf-fans. (Döblin 2021, 383-4)
Döblin’s novel suggests that the plants’ violent response of consuming everything, including humans, is not unprovoked—an idea of planetary revenge that seems quite plausible in our age of mass extinctions. In his earlier short story, The Murder of a Buttercup (1913), Döblin presented the reverse scenario. It is not hard to imagine humans killing plants—but we usually do not call it murder either, nor do we persecute people for it. Yet when the bourgeois protagonist of this tale decapitates a buttercup on a walk, he feels suddenly accused of murder by the plants around him and experiences remorse. First, it is the blood of the buttercup that tries to get to him in a scene that could easily be featured in a slasher film today:
And from above, from the stump of the body, it was dripping, white blood spurted from the neck and ran down into the hole, at first only a little, like the saliva running out of the corner of a paralyzed man’s mouth, then in a thick current, slimy, with a yellow froth, it ran at Herr Michael, who tried in vain to get away, hopped to the left, hopped to the right, who tried to jump across it, whose feet it was already surging and beating against like the sea. (Döblin 2016, 52-3)
Following this, the trees close in on Herr Michael as if to form a trap and sit judgement over him, ultimately chasing him down the mountain as he runs away. He becomes obsessed with his deed and names the murdered buttercup Ellen. He even establishes a bank account on her behalf and ultimately digs up one of her “daughters” to keep on his desk—until his housekeeper accidentally knocks over the pot and throws her away. Suck it up, buttercup?
With a strong recommendation to read for yourself, I will leave you to make of Ellen’s story what you will, but I should mention that there are certainly also erotic undertones in this odd encounter with a feminised flower. As you can read in my research, I consider vegetal eroticism and vegetal violence two examples of “phytopoetics,” the impact of plants on the human imagination. This concept highlights the ways in which plants shape human ideas about the vegetal—even if these cultural notions, films, or stories do not ultimately resemble actual plant capacities anymore. Imagination about plants run amok. Plants do not really murder scores of humans, but the fact that we are imagining it, especially as an act of revenge, suggests that our own murder spree in nature has left us with a bad conscience. Even if we underestimate plants, we fear that they might have the power to strike back after all.
Bibliography
Döblin, Alfred. Mountains Oceans Giants, translated by C.D. Godwin. Cambridge: Galileo Publishers, 2021.
Döblin, Alfred. “The Murder of a Buttercup,” translated by Damion Searls. In Bright Magic: Stories, 51-62. New York: New York Review of Books, 2016.
Jacobs, Joela. “Phytopoetics: Upending the Passive Paradigm with Vegetal Violence and Eroticism.” Catalyst 5, no. 2 (2019): 1-18. doi.org/10.28968/cftt.v5i2.30027.
Jacobs, Joela. “Plant Parenthood: The Fear of Vegetal Eroticism.” In Imperceptibly and Slowly Opening, edited by Caroline Picard, 166-72. Chicago: The Green Lantern Press, 2016.
Janzen, Janet. Media, Modernity, and Dynamic Plants in Early 20th Century German Culture. Boston: Brill, 2016.
Keetley, Dawn and Angela Tenga (eds.). Plant Horror: Approaches to the Monstrous Vegetal in Fiction and Film. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016.
Author Biography
Joela Jacobs is Assistant Professor of German Studies at the University of Arizona and the founder of the Literary and Cultural Plant Studies Network. Her research focuses on 19th to 21st-century German literature and film, Animal Studies, Environmental Humanities, Jewish Studies, the History of Sexuality, and the History of Science. She is currently working on a monograph, entitled Animal, Vegetal, Marginal: Being (Non)Human in German Modernist Grotesques, in which plants are agents in the creation and disruption of human identity (re)production. Her research in literary and cultural plant studies engages primarily with phytopoetics, vegetal eroticism, and vegetal violence.