Arrival (2016 film) Review

This is one of those stand-alone films that comes around every couple years and simply blows your mind. The film was amazing. I can't decide whether to call it painfully beautiful or beautifully painful. And if Amy Adams is not at least nominated for best actress, I'm saying screw the oscars forever.

Basically at the end of the day, it is not simply that it is well thought-out and executed sci-fi/intellectual content. It goes beyond into a realm of the mystical grit of human experience, much like other definitive stand alones such as Inception and Interstellar by Christopher Nolan (and always have to note Jonathan as his partner).

I don't want to ruin anything with even vague spoilers, but I have to admit from the outset that any discussion at all may unwittingly give away things, such as, "why go to so much trouble to be so circumspect or vague in describing that ... probably a place to look for a twist or reveal, and now that I know to focus there, I see it coming" ... even this bit about "mystical" makes one go "hmmmm ... it's something beyond the mere sci-fi value, so maybe ..." and I am thankful to the person who suggested it to me for keeping their recommendation to the sci-fi level because it made the reveal have that much more impact on me (I think that was intentional on their part, not to even give a spoiler of the type of content that would be coming, for which I am thankful to them).

So, for this post, I am going to say that I think the film is amazing and note a few things either technical or from the sci-fi/philosophical side.

Denouement technique and theme (without spoilers?)

The first is technical and has to do with three "revelations." To start off, "denouement" is the technical term for the big types of "revelation" I am talking about below. By definition it comes at the end of a story, but sometimes the final denouement relies heavily on a major revelation earlier, such as the revelation midway through the first Matrix film when he wakes up in the pod. In Arrival, though, it all comes at the end, and I think it is defined by three simultaneous revelations.

As with all even loosely sci-fi stories, there is a mechanics going on and part of the central action of the denouement is the reveal of that mechanics. Here, I think it is a mark of good technique that it happens precisely at the reveal of who a certain person really is.

Of course, this is also the place where the film goes from sci-fi to human experience. The mechanics that are revealed are distinctly sci-fi and not accurate to our real world or what we have been able to discover about it, but they are not really the core thing of the film (although they are connected to the core in well done films). The core thing  of the film is the third thing revealed alongside the revelation of the mechanics and the revelation of the person ... the revelation of the choice. This reveal actually kind of does an inclusio/envelope around the mechanics/person reveal: it begins in the preceding scene, the explanation by the lake, and concludes in the scene where you hear the choice actually made ("do you want to ...?" ... "yes, I do.").

Other Elements

So, here are some other aspects that I thought were interesting. Ultimately I think they are more than just "interesting" because I think that they meld with the core action of the film, that choice, in a way that takes them up into an artistic whole, but I sort of have to have some term like "[implied: more simply] interesting" to mark them as not the core.

For the most part, they center around the interplay between science and language. And for this section of the post, you kind of have to process through it, and the "versus" part will be discussed at the end because it is the most significant.

Before I get to the main class of these elements, I just wanted to note numerological possiblities: 7-footed (seven as the most "magical" number in Haryr Potter is based on the huge numerological tradition: seven-stage description of alchemical process, seven days of creation, etc) and coming in a group of 12 (12 tribes of Israel and many others).

1.
So, back to the language aspects, the first of those is that they laid the groundwork for what is important about "language" as distinct from science when they had her interrupted class lecture begin with her telling students that they will be discussing why Portuguese sounds different from the other romance languages, which is then pitted off against the heptapod language, which she finds out has no connection to the sounds they emit (which may be language on their own, just not in any way connected to the written). For humans, language is aural before it is visual and the visual system of letters often follows non-logical developments because of the historical impact of things like dialect (and if you want to see how wonky that makes it, check out Gallagher's hilarious live comedy bits).

2.
A second thing to notice is that the heptapod language not being based on sound means that it is not linear, which is because we have to experience sounds one at a time in linear progression (heptapod writing resolves the whole writing looking in opposing directions question of whose linearity you're writing for, i.e. that your own linearity is mirror writing for the other, eh? and you don't have to worry whether you're reading left to right or right to left, like English).

Ultimately, I don't think this kind of language and thought is possible for humans, but that is why this is sci-fi, which makes its points differently than do moral exemplar stories (although they can both operate in the same story, such as the fact that I think this film takes an approving stance toward the choice that was made). The fact is that our experience of time is both linear, unlike the heptapod language, AND cyclical, LIKE the heptapod language. I think that what the mechanical ability given in the fiction of the world symbolizes is the real-world capability of language to make sense of our experience, to see it in a way that transcends (while still including) linear chronological understanding (which takes its most distinctive form in history as a scientific discipline) ... the ability to see meaning.

I also like the fact that their acts of predication happen in circular form, like ring composition, which is a cyclical structure.

3.
The third of the language elements I noticed and thought was amazingly incorporated was the issue of multiple language games. Ludwig Wittgenstien was probably the most prominent philosopher to discuss "language games," and it was probably his most significant contribution to philosophy and what is known as the "linguistic turn" in post-modern thought.

I don't want to give too many spoilers, so I will keep my comments limited to just the revealed action of General Shang. Louise brings out well the potential dangers in using the qualitatively different "language game" of "competition," which is what he does. The point is the qualitative difference between language games and the basic fact that there are multiple possible language games with variant motivational constructs, methods, and outcomes.

This is where it starts to get into the tension between scientific thought and linguistic thought or other forms of thought. Science has a problem with conceiving of a plurality of language games or contextual constructs that are not ultimately reducible to (and thus subject to rule by) scientific discourse as the basic form of human understanding (and I have witnessed it personally in people of a very scientific turn of mind when they try to approach literature and philosophy). This is the mentality of what I call materialistic "scientism" (I alit on this term on my own but I have since seen a number of philosophical writers use it in the same sense), and it cannot process the validity of multiple different language games with scientific discourse being but one among them or the idea that there may be a more primal language game from which all the others derive along different paths ... precisely the "language game" of supernatural revelation (this is my own little side tangent beyond what is in the film), which I like to bring in here as a way to sat that things like the revelations I have talked about above can be a human participation in something larger than humanity, what Tolkien would refer to as "sub-creation." In this understanding of the language of supernatural revelation, creation itself is an act of revelation (not just that all creation contains revelation, which is the concept of "natural revelation" as opposed to "specific revelation," but that the very act of creating is revelatory), or it may be more to the point to say that revelation is a creative act.

4.
So, as noted at the outset of this section, I have saved this one for last, although the pitting of the linear against the cyclical was a forecast of it (but I think that the heptapods and Louise are viewed by the film as melding of the two), as was the mention of "scientism" just above. This last element is that they bring in a linguist and a scientist to address the problem of figuring out communication with the heptapods and that a good bit of the film is taken up with the interaction between the two characters as characters, beyond just their discussion of their different approaches and combined efforts at developing communication with the heptapods.

Where my interest comes in for this is with the work of the twentieth-century philosopher Paul Ricoeur, whom I have mentioned in other posts occasionally and on whose very dense 400-page Rule of Metaphor I did one of my PhD comp exam questions. I'm actually really glad for the opportunity to bring him up. His thinking has played largely for me in discussions of a variety of literary subjects over the years, and particularly recently in some of the discussions I have had in the Inklings book club, and I have always wanted to record my particular thoughts on this core aspect of his thought in this blog, which has become for me sort of a place where I get out not only ideas as they occur to me now but also theories into which I have poured a lot of mental energy over the years, but it always seems like a better idea to introduce things like this in a context of them being applied. So, I was really happy to realize that this film provided me an opportunity to bring it up.

Ricoeur said (he died in 2005) that our experience exists on a fluctuating spectrum between "understanding" and "explanation." As far as language goes, I take these two to be poetic and scientific language, respectively. It is a well-known fact that poetry is prior to scientific prose: all of the ancient mythological epics are written in verse (the Hebrew Bible is, actually, the first major instance of religious prose), and we can see this in the comments of somebody like Tolkien that Tom Bombadil is a more straight up allegory for unfallen nature and that this is evidenced in the fact that he always speaks in verse, in poetic form (Bombadil is one of the few strictly allegorical characters in Middle Earth, according to Tolkien, I believe in one of his letters, which I think Tolkien would see as the reason why he isn't much direct help in solving the problem of the ring, although explaining this would take a lot of work in linking the world of the mechanics within the narrative to theoretical aspects of narrativity itself in a discussion of it in general, outside this particular narrative, but as applied to this particular narrative).

First, "understanding" might be best described as "getting" a joke. The more you have to explain the joke, the less funny it becomes. My take on it is that we start with understanding, with intuitive grasp of what is at the core. But we have an innate drive to explicate, to explain, what it is that we understand in scientific language. I personally think that this drive to explain actually comes from our drive for community. There is also, undeniably I think, a self/ego-driven rhetorical desire that also plays into the impetus for formulation in scientific explanation (the first audience, and always an important one, is ourselves, we want the "understanding" that presents itself to us to show that what we want is what is right and convincing others through rhetorically effective explanation helps us to do this), but I think that, alongside this, there is a genuine drive for community that fuels the drive for communication that yields our attempts at explanation ... a single action (explanation of understanding) with two motivations, an attempt not only to own the understanding for the sake of our own desires but also to share the understanding for the sake of the other's well-being ... and to know that we are not alone ... a basic drive to love and be loved.

As I said, Ricoeur said we exist in flux along this spectrum. We cannot have one without the other and still be human. Pure scientific understanding will wind up being dry to the point of death (people often want a "cut and dried" explanation, but the thing about a human being is that, if you cut and dry it ... it's dead). So, we keep returning to the well of the understanding pole, but then going forth again toward the explanation pole for the sake of sharing, as well as for the sake of trying to see what deeper understanding we might be able to glean from our initial raw understanding.

On that second goal, deepening our own understanding through developing explanation, one of my mentors as an editor, Fr Joseph Lienhard, when he would teach undergrad theology courses and try to talk to students about writing papers for classes, always liked to say, "we write to think." We always think of it the other way round, that we write only to communicate what we think ... but we really also write in explanatory language to try to figure exactly what our first raw impressions were. On the literary side, Tolkien is famous for saying that the opening lines of The Hobbit ("In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit ...") just came to him and that he had to keep writing to find out what hobbits were like. We express in more poetic language originally, but then we try to explain and share through analysis of the poetic language, and then keep that from getting too dry by returning to the poetry as somehow mysterious.

The relation of this to Louise in Arrival should be pretty obvious, but I will bring it out here just to be clear. As I said, our first experience of her as a linguist comes in her opening comments of the lecture that gets canceled, and in those brief lines, she says she will be talking about why Portuguese sounds different from the other romance languages. Sound quality is a performative aspect of language and really only relevant in poetic exposition, at least in Western languages, although we do have a few limited instances of the use of tone for prosaic discourse, but that I know of, not for the indicative mood, which is the proper domain of scientific discourse ... we use the uplift in tone at the end of a line to represent the interrogative mood, but even with that mood, we can rely on word odering: it's not proper writing, but we can tell the difference between "I am to keep going" and "Am I to keep going" even without the final punctuation of question mark or period, let alone the uplift in tone at the end in oral performance. Poetry, however, will rely on sound quality for augmentation of its core meaning ... and not just in mechanical end rhyme.

(Aside for Support: For a poetry course in college, we were assigned to write a short poem relying on sound qualities in words to augment the actual content of the poem, so I did a poem about smoking that started "a scratch on the patch and the sulfur sends smoke," with the gutteral hard "c" and the "tch" sounds mimicking the striking of a match and the "s" and "f" in "sulfur" mimicking the initial flare of the match, and then the sibilants mimicking the sliding flow of smoke, and there is a sort of inclusio formed of that line by the initial gutteral hard "c" and the final gutteral "k," so you can also see sound contributing to structure ... and in a less "this is technically poetry" vein and more in a vein of the poetic and sound-performative qualities used in prose, for the same professor but in a course on 20th-century American novel, we had to read Ralph Emerson's Invisible Man, and there are short passages in that book, especially when he is at the college, in which he distinctly drops out into a "voice" that I would say most resembles a hot jazz trumpet solo, on one case particularly through a recurring "hah!")

The centrality of the tension with science is revealed in their first meeting on the chopper when he reads from her book or article and says that she is wrong about language being the basis of civilization, that science is.

I also like that scene where they both admit to each other that their individual approaches, science -focused or language-focused, can both leave a person single ... it gets to that core drive for community, in this case longing for and lamenting the absence of the particular community or romantic love.

Unfortunately, I have to note that there is a sadness. It is the scientist who thinks the wrong choice was made about the child. The fact that the film seems to approve the choice would seem to mean that it censures the scientist, and this should be to my advantage in my rhetorical arguments ... but I am actually saddened. I'm not pejorative of the film as having done something wrongly or even poorly, for I do think that this happens a lot, but it makes me sad that it happens. As I said, following Ricoeur, we need both, and I wish there could be more agreement than there very often is. And if you have seen the film, you understand the deeper level of sadness in that too.

Conclusion
All in all, this film totally blew me away.  The complexity of the sci-fi and linguistic content was amazing on it's own ground, but when they took it to that core level of human experience and desire by revealing the choice ... that left me speechless. As I said, if Amy Adams is not at least nominated for best actress, I am going to march down Broadway, all 15 miles of it, protesting. Hopefully this discussion/review of the film has not given away too much (I tried very hard to be ambiguous where I needed to be) but also was a meaningful discussion for those who have seen it and and inspiration to see it for those who have not (meaning not so ambiguous that it doesn't count as any discussion of the film at all).