Humans Don’t Always Look Good in “Arirval”

Amy Adams as linguist Louise Banks in "Arrival." That's no human vehicle parked in the background. All images on this post appeared in online news stories or reviews and are credited as Paramount Pictures PR images.

In case you didn’t catch the Amy Adams movie “Arrival” when it came out five years ago, I’ll try to avoid spoilers in this essay about the film. Which seems a bit ironic when writing about this movie, which plays with and twists notions of both time and language. My wife and I noticed the DVD at a sale price, and took a chance on it, and Friday I watched it for the first time. Amy Adams, don't you know. I can watch her read the phone book, I think. She's a bit like Sarah Michelle Geller--in that her eyes to a lot of the acting, too.

What we think are memories aren’t that at all. And what did the word “weapon” actually mean in that pretty ink blot alien tongue? Having just watched the movie for the first time, I feel that I missed a key plot twist that hinges on that word, which, after all, comes close to igniting a world war.

And why did the heptapods (the aliens sure do have feet) come to Earth and give us a language that opens what sounds like a cool super power but that turns out to involve a lot of complexity in choice, fate and pain? Well, that question is partly answered when Abbott (one of the two aliens the Amy Adams character converses with, the other is named, by her future or past love interest, “Costello”) tells her that they will need human help in a few thousand years, but that again raises a whole bunch of questions.

We don’t ever know where the heptapods came from. Did they travel faster than light, or is theirs a different way of viewing reality mean a journey of thousands of years at sub light speed seems undaunting? And that foggy, misty environment that they live in—what is their reality like?

The movie is clever. It plays with the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis in an interesting way, seeming to suggest that we experience time in a conceptual way that is tied to language, which shapes how we think. That hypothesis, by the way, is useful for understanding language, but not always all that useful for understanding all of human experience. It’s the notion that the nature of our language shapes the nature of our perception. What follows is my opinion (although most of what preceded is also my opinion, a fact you probably remembered)—but sometimes I think people take that useful hypothesis too seriously. For example, I’ve seen people make a big deal out of the supposed fact (I don’t know the language, so I don’t know if it’s actually true) that Arabic has no equivalent for the word “compromise.” Or that Inuit people have a gabagillion words to say “snow.” Or that some color labels don’t exist in some languages.

Sure, those are ideas worth exploring. They shape perception. But they don’t dictate it. If I don’t have a label for “teal,” for instance, it doesn’t mean that my eyes won’t see the color (my visual organs and optic nerves are still very similar to the equivalent organs in most other not-color-blind humans), and thus I may notice the hue even if I cannot name it. I think people from a linguistic tradition that doesn’t label “compromise” probably can, and probably do, grasp the idea anyway. I may not have individual words that differentiate between wet or powdery snow, or snow in the air or on the ground, or snow that has blown—but I can still see and appreciate nuances of snow.

As a writer, I believe in the power of the word. I loved the way Amy’s character Louise quickly concocted a lie about “kangaroo” to explain a truth. As humans, our words are inexact attempts for us to capture and share our experiences, but I also think experience can be “real” when it’s not bound up in a word.

That’s a long way of saying that the time-bending nature of “Arrival” was interesting, but didn’t completely work for me. And the foreboding tone of the movie made it sometimes too heavy—Louise Banks seems disturbed and fearful in her contact with the heptapods, and I wanted a bit more wonder and whimsy. The movie was clever, but sometimes too clever (that Hannah is a palindrome seemed to be emphasized way too much—so is dud).

Will I watch “Arrival” again? Yes, I think I will, if existence and time and my life cooperate. It’s not my favorite movie but it was a worthwhile and interesting one, and I’m pretty sure I’ll see details in the next watching that I missed in the first one. I also loved the idea of aliens whose written language has nothing to do with their speech, which made me wonder if there was any meaning at all in their vocalizations, yet again one of those many unanswered questions in the film.

And I respect a movie, especially a science fiction adventure, that doesn’t feel it has to answer all questions and that defies some norms of the genre. It doesn’t rely on too many car chases or breathtaking action scenes—it builds great tension with more subtlety. It has a heroine who never smacks anyone and never fires any weapon, at least as I understand the word even if I still wonder if a heptapod would agree. It’s an alien war drama where war fails to break out out—and where it was the humans and their poor choices and inability to function without clarity that caused the real danger.

Our hero uses her mind and language to save the world. No light saber, just enlightened thought.

Seems human to me. In my life, the most important problems are caused either by mindless microbes or by other hairless apes who irk me—and right now, irksome humans who respond mindlessly to certain microbes.

Obligatory pandemic side rant: I don’t care what “omicron variant” can be rearranged to spell. Potential overlords aren’t dumb enough to leave an obvious clue like that, but silly humans are prone to misinterpret words and forget that the variant wasn’t named omicron for the sake of a sick joke or some secret code; it was just the next letter in an old alphabet. We should respect words, but we can read way too much into them, too. The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis also means that we can construct reality with language, and we’re sometimes shoddy builders.

Back to this interesting movie. I kind of wish Amy could smile or laugh a bit more. She has a few seconds of “oh gee” facial expressions when she meets the aliens, and I kind of wanted a bit of emphasis on that. It seemed to me that wonder was among the reactions that would be worth exploring.

It was a thoughtful, but perhaps too heavy, movie. “Arrival,” how many stars should I give you? I was thinking three, but that seems too few. You're too interesting for that. How about four? And did you remember beforehand that was what I was going to write?