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‘Arrival’: A Welcome Film about Unity and Communication

And about how language constructs reality. We’ve never needed it more.

Dorothy Woodend 17 Nov 2016TheTyee.ca

Dorothy Woodend writes about film every other week for The Tyee. Find her previous articles here.

It seems fitting that a film about the need for unity and communication should gently touch down in theatres. If ever there was a moment when it seems impossible to understand other humans, it is now.

A lot of people, myself included, are probably finding it difficult to stop reading coverage of the U.S. election. The need to understand or make sense of things is like an itch that can’t be scratched. I am sure I am not alone in obsessively searching for some kind of explanation about what is happening to American democracy. I don’t know if anyone is getting too much work done. Every day there is some new story that confounds reason and reduces the world to a Through the Looking Glass experience that stretches and warps like a fever dream. I keep expecting to wake up, but instead the long fall down the rabbit hole just goes on and on.  

Denis Villeneuve’s new film Arrival does not offer any answers. But it does offer something else — a brief reprieve from the time we are all currently stuck in. This may seem faint and thin beside the yawning horror that is the Trump debacle, but this too shall pass. Hopefully it will pass sooner rather than later, like a large orange bowel movement. Maybe our future selves, the ones yet unformed, will look back and shudder and thank the heavens that sanity and good plumbing prevailed.

But enough of that. Let’s return to the film at hand.

Arrival begins with a fragmented kaleidoscope of images — mother and child flashing forward in tumble of moments. Here is a new baby, as round and pale as the moon, being kissed by her mother. Here is a little girl, dressed in full cowgirl gear, chased and tickled until she erupts into giggling chaos. Now she is a skinny knobby-kneed kid saying “I love you,” and next a teenager screaming “I hate you.” And finally, that same girl, pale and still as an infant, but this time life is on its way out. 

Such is our introduction to Louise Banks (Amy Adams) and her daughter Hannah. After the death of her child, Louise floats through her life like she is shrouded in mist. Sadness coils off her like a scent — a bitter curdled thing that speaks of hopelessness and loss. She spends her time teaching linguistics to bored university students and at night drinking wine and falling asleep to the sound of the television. Days fade into one another, gray and indistinguishable. Until suddenly one dreary morning 12 enormous alien spacecraft appear, and alight on a different section of the planet. The humans freak out, as humans are wont to do. Jet planes are scrambled and university classes are cancelled. What exactly do these new visitors want? The answer to this rather large and ominous question requires communication. Language, in other words.

The U.S. military come calling, demanding help. Colonel Weber (played with slow burn intensity by Forest Whitaker) is the commander of the “Let’s Talk to Aliens” mission. He wants Louise’s aid in deciphering the alien language, which resembles orchestral groans and clicks, like so much interstellar whale song. Louise gently informs him that she cannot understand a language unless she is front and centre with the native speaker.

And with that we’re off to “the show” — a term the military types use to describe the site erected in rural Montana where one of the oblong spacecraft is hovering just above the ground. Every few hours a portal opens in the bottom of the craft, and the humans clamber in to see what’s up. Louise, along with a fellow scientist named Ian Donnelly (Jeremy Renner), gets tapped for the job of talking to the new arrivals.

The opening scenes gallop along, and initially we are as confused and scared as Louise. The sense of being knocked off your feet and tumbling through midair continues when the team of scientists and their military handlers are suited up in giant orange hazmat gear and herded into the belly of the spacecraft.

All normal rules are suspended. Gravity is gone, along with the alphabet. All that remains are the remedial tools of pointing and yelling. Villeneuve does some interesting neo-Bressonian business with hands in these early scenes. As the humans are hoisted into the alien craft, Ian drags one gloved hand along its pitted surface, like he is touching the side of some enormous new species. It is a formidable moment, all the more powerful for its restraint and grace.  

When the creatures themselves appear, shrouded in mist and moving like squids, the humans dub them Heptapods for the number of legs, or perhaps arms, that they possess. Ian and Louise call the pair of aliens with whom they are charged with conversing Abbott and Costello. It is both a joke and a gentle nod to the confusion of the English language, otherwise known as “Who’s on First?”

At the heart of the story is the good old Sapir-Whorf hypothesis that states “the structure of a language affects its speakers’ cognition or world view,” or in this case, otherworldly view. This concept has been the basis for a number of films and novels from Suzette Haden Elgin’s feminist science fiction epic Native Tongue to Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

Language, and by extension all communication, is a complex business. Writing about Arrival, Village Voice critic Bilge Ebiri gave a perfect description of the power of language to construct reality: “When people ask me if switching from English to Turkish is like switching gears in a car, I tell them that it’s like stopping the car, getting out of it, stepping into a truck, and driving off in a completely different direction. I essentially become a different person.”

So imagine the effect of learning an entirely new language, generated by enormous squid-like creatures that secrete ink to form shapes that resemble coffee cups stains, or Rorschach blots. As Louise begins to make meaning from the curvilinear shapes and blobs, understanding arrives in bits and fragments. The process of acquiring language is a slow and tedious job. Just ask anyone who ever conjugated a French verb or two. Villeneuve cheats a little here, jumpstarting the process so that we leap from basic acquisition of vocabulary to constructing almost full sentences.

Still, misunderstanding is the basis for conflict. When the aliens state, “Offer weapon,” the humans get a little edgy. Does the word “weapon” mean what we think it means? It is difficult to say, and I mean that quite literally, as the human folk and the alien folk cannot speak to each other and are forced to rely on a pidgin form of the written word.

As Louise labours towards understanding, a similar process is being undertaken in 11 other sites around the world. Add misunderstandings in 11 different languages and, before long, global sabre-rattling and the threat of violence begins to ratchet up. Ultimatums are issued, and interstellar war looms.  

Science fiction is never really about aliens and spaceships; it is about humans trying to understand themselves. So it is here as well. Language is the only tool we have to conceive of the universe and our place within it, but it is often a rather clumsy tool. Rather like a sledgehammer, when you need a laser. How can we even begin to understand and get along with other species when communication with other humans is such a fraught enterprise? Even the most civilized and erudite people on the planet are reduced to warring tribes when it comes to words. Think of the epic smack-down between Noam Chomsky and his followers versus the upstart linguist Daniel Everett.

Still, Arrival offers up a resounding message of resilience and hope. Suffering comes and then it goes. Time moves on. The power of unity, be it alien and human, men and women, parent and child, is considerable and magnificent. This may seem small comfort in the face of our current cultural moment, but people coming together can still surprise you.  [Tyee]

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