[Movie] Arrival

[Phoebe]

Obviously could be lots of spoilers here, stop now!

A few random thoughts related to Arrival:
The "encounter" we have with others is invariably mediated by time and language, never fully shared, unless we are actually touching. The moment where she and it touch across the glass is especially important in this respect; also highlighted by other moments of a sudden, deliberate touching in real time or memory (like touching her daughter's nose, or when Ian feels sick). Taking off the suit and helmet may seem like a silly moment in the story, but in this context it's necessary.

What can determine the boundaries of things like "an event" (a surprisingly controversial matter even for physics) or "a communication"? I love that the very structure of the movie demands asking the question. How can the causality of an event be untangled enough to be fully grasped?

She knows he thinks she made the wrong decision, so she realizes that she's going to lose him too, but she chooses to love anyway despite the horrible suffering. Yet it's an equally momentous decision that he goes away, under the circumstances. It's not as if going away changes anything, besides raising the stakes for her. Being so driven in that way by anger just means you have to live with being angry, instead of with whatever good might have remained. Anyway, I think it's important he's the one who asks her if she wants to go make a baby, because his agency is just as causally important despite not knowing. Why should we assume it's worse if you know, and excusable to act the same way in ignorance? After all, we're all doomed to die after some period of time, and the measurement of life's value isn't the mere counting of days. This is a mind-blowing way to bring up not just the fundamental dilemma of acting ethically, but also the problem of theodicy.

Furthermore, it's one of the reasons why this is an amazing science fiction movie, because one common theme in such movies is, what happens when science or technology enhances our powers in some amazing way? The movie imo invokes this issue straight back to ancient myths like Prometheus. Fire (or, technology) is supposed to make humans capable of fending for themselves. But now we use our fire to destroy one another, and even attempt to use it to destroy the visitors and their gift that would again make us capable of fending for ourselves. Full circle, of course.

Anyway, science fiction often has at its heart an interrogation of whether a power science gave us is indeed a gift, or whether the gift is being misused in some way. Many variations on this theme. So to put the gift itself front and center was a great move.

Another classic sci-fi theme is taking some technology or theory into a far more fully developed place than we can imagine being non-fiction, which is what they do with the linguistic theories. But even at the most "out there" point where a more mundane theory is stretched into fiction, we find (like in the best sci-fi) that this is, indeed, reflecting our daily human reality. We always communicate through a barrier of time, space, language, understanding, and more. The movie pauses to highlight many examples beyond Louise herself - for instance, the soldier who talks to his fearful wife on the phone, and also keeps his silent concerns to himself, the mediation of rapidly developing, high stakes events through the "media", and the efforts of the Russian scientist to break through the official state communication with his critical truth. At first I didn't understand the parallel scene with Louise, but she has to be trapped alone, reaching out to space (i.e. satellite) and back to contact China to evade the surrounding attempts to shut down her communication, and she succeeds in part only because Ian has become so attuned to what she's doing, and is able to find her and buy a moment in time. So what may seem like a pointless action sequence has some onion-like layers.

The choice of the name Louise is also fascinating in the setting where many humans are misunderstanding the "weapon/tool/technology/gift" concept. I wonder how many of the things like this that excite me about the story are owed to the story the movie was based on, however. I need to find and read that soon.

[buckett]

The short story is really good! It's a really interesting read after seeing the movie (which I also loved). It's a bit more technical in explaining the underlying theory behind the alien's language and how it could feasibly alter the perception of time like that. Jeremy Renner's character is a bit more fleshed out since the metaphysics are discussed in greater detail.