As we do so, we stitch together a pattern that is the meaning of the movie. We already have a partial answer from previous sections which describe the ways some of these meanings intersect. Most notably, they describe the way communism, mutations, and some forms of rationality in modern America are viewed by the movie as something unnatural and inhuman, and as forms of deadness that we associate with anality. This extends into the movie's mythic symbolism, since Satan, dragons and witches are all images of morbid deadness and destructiveness. Satan, imbued with anality, is the reign of death in the world.
Dragons make the land waste.
More specifically, the movie tells a story about the connection between science, responsibility and human morbidity. But we have used those power to express the dark side of our nature by creating the bomb, which is the ultimate expression of our tendency to make things dead. It now threatens to undermine nature and potency, and turn the world into a wasteland. The characters' role is to go into the nest of death and stop it from multiplying. Through our identification with the characters, we experience what it is like for our urge to live to triumph over morbid death, until, at the end, we see the male and female come together and know they will produce more life.