One of the things I keep coming back to that I really liked about ‘Iron Lung’ was the lack of moral judgment in the movie. This was a film interested in telling a tight, self-contained story which obviously had moral implications, as everything does, but had no interest in preaching about those implications. And it had absolutely no interest in simplifying anything for anyone.
And so no one came into this story with perfectly clean hands. Everyone is stuck in a gray area of doing what they have to do because this is the tail-end of humanity dwindling into the darkness. There is no way to survive with clean hands in that circumstance. It isn’t morally just to send ANYONE into the ocean, no matter their crimes, but does that even matter? When the whole of humanity’s survival is on the line and someone has to go down, this is the sort of decision that makes a cold logical sense.
Ava is a ship captain turned prison warden, but was she always that? It seems like the initial expeditions into the blood ocean were scientists. People who likely volunteered to go down. Until the SM-8 was lost and a terrible calculation had to be made: there aren’t enough scientists left to chuck them at such a hazardous situation, but data collection must continue because this is the only new thing they’ve found in the entire empty universe. This is the ONLY hope they have. So what do you do?
The dreadful calculation is to send people who are ‘worth less’ than those scientists. You send prisoners who, by this logical through-line, have already proven themselves through their own actions to be the least worthy and most expendable lives available. Did Ava start off trying to rescue them and help them? Did she start off learning their names? Or had she already closed herself off for her own sanity and ability to do the job she knew she had to do? Was Simon just the unlucky one who came after all her empathy had been burned out, or had she already learned to ration her empathy, to treat it and everyone around her as just another dwindling resource?
For a character with so little screen-time, Ava fascinates me so much. Because even in the time we have with her, we do see her change. She finds herself empathizing with her prisoner because they are both survivors. They are both hungry rats clinging to the last scraps of humanity. Ava starts out putting all her faith and her hope into a bigger picture and a dream of a future that I am certain she knew she would never get to see. But through her interactions with Simon she rediscovered the necessity of seeing the individual in the big picture. You cannot believe in humanity and not believe in the people who make it up. And even if she could never quite thread the needle between knowing that Simon MUST do this job for the good of everyone and the unfairness of the universe that demands he be sacrificed for that good, she did try by the end. She ended up joining him in the ocean, both coming to the same conclusion: this is bigger than us.
Simon also does not have clean hands. He had a crisis of conscience on Filament Station and turned himself in, but that does not change a past in which he killed enough people to be dubbed ‘the Butcher’ by his own brothers. Simon was every bit the zealot that Ava is at the beginning of the movie. He was a true Son of Eden, and the deaths of those few remaining people left in the universe did not weigh on him enough to stop him until Filament Station.
We will never know what happened to change him there. We will never know what he was asked to do that the finally balked at, finally opened up his eyes and realized that he had been raised in what had become a death cult, a group of people mourning the loss of the last tree so much that all they wanted to do was follow it down.
And yet they didn’t simply commit some sort of mass suicide; they actively began taking others with them. Some part of Eden still wanted to live in spite of the prevailing belief that there was nothing to live for. And we see that contradiction in Simon himself. He wants to live so fiercely it overrides everything else. He is desperate for hope. Not the hope of death Eden offered, and not the hope of eking out survival the way the Consolidation of Iron offers, but something more. A perhaps-vain hope that the rest of the universe is fine, that the people trapped in this hell of ghostlight and emptiness are the ones who went away. That they may be trapped, but if they were snatched away once, maybe they could simply return some day.
He lost his belief in a greater good on Filament Station. He lost his belief in Eden, but not his stubborn love of home. So he is reduced, by the time we meet him in the film, to a man solely focused on himself and his own survival. Ava is purely facing outward, willing to pay whatever price she must for the greater good. Simon is purely facing inward, willing to pay whatever price he must for his own survival. These are both unhealthy extremes that damage them, but what else are they supposed to do at the bitter end of everything?
They can meet in the middle. A subtle through-line of the film is both of them changing their minds. Ava moves from only allowing herself to believe in the greater good to believing in Simon the individual, despite what he has done in the past. His current actions do not wash away who he used to be, but they can change his trajectory. They can even allow him to turn the Butcher into someone working for something better. She sees that will to live, but also that willingness to do what needs to be done, and that seems to break something in her. He is willing to risk it all for the information necessary to save them, so she must do the same. She has to see him as a person, to learn his name, to work with him rather than simply overseeing another piece in a collapsing machine.
And he moves from losing all his beliefs on Filament Station, to becoming entirely self-focused, to rediscovering his hope. That fragment of the tree hidden away in a panel--a reminder of a home he lost, but also of the hope for a tomorrow that Eden had turned its back on--reminds him of his own hopes, of the dream that there is still a universe out there that he could one day return to. Or that humanity could return to.
Ava dies trying to finally fulfill the promise she made Simon: if he got the data she would save him. He would be free. She gives herself to the ideal that his life, even if it is ‘worth less’, is not worthless. He is worth saving. He did not deserve to die alone at the bottom of an ocean of blood, because no one does. But she can’t save him by then; she can only join him.
Her death is Simon’s turning point. From then on he knows he’s not making it out. His will to survive transforms into a will to make a difference: to give this end some sort of meaning, to defy the ocean and the pinhole god that did this to humanity. Could that data save everyone? There is no way to tell; the answers to that and so many other questions are bigger than Simon. But that is his drive: he takes Ava’s own motto—the COI’s motto—and truly believes it. This is bigger than him. He will die, but he will make a difference. He believes in a greater good by the end, and gives everything to it.
And I think this is why I find the idea of the tree ending so satisfying. The ocean was transforming Simon against his will into itself. It was the same process he had lived through his whole life: being turned into a part of a greater whole without his consent. Only he’s no long a child able to be turned into a Butcher for Eden. He’s an adult who has already been a true believer once, became jaded, lost his purpose, and finally chose a new one. It is the choice that ties him to the hope that lies in the seed of a tree around his wrist. It is the hope that turns one of his red eyes to white near the end, even as the pendant shatters and white roots spread.
And it is that choice that brings him full circle to being the soil that nourishes a new tree, and so becoming the tree himself. Destroying the monster he could become and had been for so long, and instead becoming something greater that he chose. Is there a new god in the ocean? A new life? A tree fed on blood and light and the pinhole perspective of an eldritch god so vast that its perception reshapes reality? Is this why it chose Simon, of all the people who died and joined the ocean? Because his hope could bloom into something new?
We don’t get told answers, because this is a true cosmic horror film, and this movie has no interest in explaining anything to anyone. It is a story designed for us to make our own interpretations, to choose rather than be told. And given the paths both Ava and Simon travel through the movie, I find that very fitting.
