"Arrival" - Understanding Language

Watching Denis Villeneuve's Arrival is to watch a master at work. Villeneuve takes the audience by the hand and expertly guides them through a tale of pain, loss, destiny, freedom and, most importantly, language.. It's soothing to watch a film that knows exactly what it's doing. Every shot means something; every scene is important. The plot never stumbles. The writing and direction takes the audience through the story, and never forces you to compensate by figuring things out on your own. Everything is made clear by Villeneuve's expert film work. It's the perfect example of artistic unity.

Arrival is one of the most meaningful films of the past decade. Like any good literary science fiction pace, the story takes grand concepts like space travel, aliens, and time travel to create an introspective story that focuses on the human issues involved. All of these ideas are focused through one lens: language.

Language is the foundation for the story. It propels the basic conflict of the human interactions and serves as the basis for the lofty ideas that Arrival deals with. The human characters don't understand the aliens that arrive on earth. Based on instinct, the leaders of the world assume they are a threat. US army Colonel Weber, played by Forest Whitaker, seeks to understand the aliens and so recruits our protagonists, a linguist and a mathematician, played by Amy Adams and Jeremy Renner respectively, to help him in his quest.

Ian (Jeremy Renner) and Louise (Amy Adams) hard at work.

As our linguist submerges herself in the alien language, her worldview begins to fundamentally change. This is where the complex ideas of language enter the film.

In a paper published in his 1956 volume Language, Thought, and Reality, American linguist Benjamin Lee Whorf said,“Language shapes the way we think, and determines what we can think about.” This is the primary idea behind the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis about language. The way we think is determined by how our language behaves. Our thoughts move in the way that our language does. The film takes this to an extreme.

The aliens in the film have a circular language. Ideas are expressed in a circular form. When you write in the alien language, you have to know the bigger picture of what you're trying to communicate. As I write these sentences in this essay, I'm going from one word to the next. While I have some idea of where I want to go, my words come one after another. The alien language mixes past, present, and future in which each influences the others. And as the film goes on, the audience realizes that the structure of the film reflects the circles of the heptapod language.

The opening of the film is an experiment in the Kuleshov effect. Wikipedia defines it as: "[the] mental phenomenon by which viewers derive more meaning from the interaction of two sequential shots than from a single shot in isolation." It is the basis of montage and visual storytelling. It is also highly reflective of human languages. Humans think linearly. If a film goes from a brightly lit scene of a mother and her daughter to a dark scene of the mother alone, we can naturally assume that tragedy has struck.

The aliens arrive on earth.

This is where we have to refer to the Sapir-Whorf theory. The film isn't told in a human way. It's told in a heptapod way. The beginning of the film is the very end of the story. The things that will happen to Amy Adams' protagonist Louise Banks determines what she does in the present. This is where the ideas of free will come into play.

If we know the end of our stories and know the path we have to take, do we have free will? This is a question the film subtly deals with and it's explored through Louise and the alien Abbott. We can assume that Abbott knows he's going to die. He knows what his story is going to be. Does Abbott have free will if everything is determined already?

Louise faces this question as well. As her story goes on she begins to see things in the heptapod way. She knows that if she gets together with colleague Ian that their daughter will have an incurable disease. She knows that Ian will leave her. In the end, she'll end just as alone as she began. Yet she chooses to follow through. Ultimately she chooses Hannah. In the films final moments she states, "Despite knowing the journey and where it leads, I embrace it, and I welcome every moment of it."She chooses this life because she knows this is the way it has to be. This is the only way to assure that the present works out the way it does.

Tim Chiang, writer of the short story Story of Your Life on which Arrival is based, once said in an interview, “To me, science fiction - it’s not about special effects or giant battles between the forces of good and evil. Science fiction is about using speculative scenarios as a lens to examine the human condition.”

That philosophy is at the centre of Arrival. Villeneuve takes us through a story that deals with human issues with the scale of a Sci-Fi epic. In extremes, we are revealed. The extreme situation of the story cracks open humanity and speaks to the ideas of understanding, conflict, to the way we think about destiny and fate, and to the way we understand ourselves.

Arrival quick facts

Directed by: Denis Villeneuve

Written by: Eric Heisserer

Starring: Amy Adams, Jeremy Renner, Forest Whitaker

Run Time: 116 minutes

Released: November 11th, 2016