Source: Paramount Pictures, official Arrival movie public photo Who among us does not believe there is life out there in the universe? Just recently, we learned that seven Earth-sized planets orbit a dwarf star named Trappist-1, only 40 light years away (New York Times, February 22, 2017). Science fiction thrives on the assumption of intelligent life on other planets, although most of the books and movies I grew up on imagine alien life as monstrous and threatening,
Last Thanksgiving, my forty-something daughter and I, along with my two grandchildren (ages 10 and 12) saw a different kind of movie about aliens—Arrival. My daughter selected it among the available options at a main screen movie theater in Minneapolis. It was billed as a sci-fi film, rated PG-13. I’d not heard of it myself but trusted her judgment.
I should mention here that my daughter is an independent screenwriter and filmmaker and has a good eye for movies. You should also know that she and I are the “criers” in my family, the ones who tear up at the least hint of anything sad. The kids are used to this by now, but also curious and inquisitive.
None of us was prepared for what followed. Expecting a typical alien invasion movie, where mutant creatures threaten life on earth and must be eliminated with the latest weapon systems, we were all surprised by the film’s quiet opening. Huge shell-shaped objects have descended to earth in twelve locations around the globe. They contain strange creatures that look like a cross between spiders and giant squid, which float around behind a foggy screen, emitting gravelly sounds that pass for language. Who are they and what do they want?
The protagonist Louise Banks is a linguist. She and a male physicist named Ian are recruited to decipher the “message” that the alien creatures are trying to convey. Not what you might call an “action” film, hence not what the kids might have expected.
To make matters even more mysterious, there is a voiceover, which relates the history of Louise’s daughter, who dies as a teenager. As viewers, we understand this storyline as a part of Louise’s past, which she relives in the present. We read it as flashback—or living nightmare.
I could feel the kids getting restless, as the film continued in this disrupted way. Increasingly Louise seems to descend into dream or fantasy, as her “memories” of her daughter begin to overtake her waking life.
But then the pace of the film picks up, as the prospect of a global war on the aliens becomes imminent. The usual “us vs. them” scenario of sci-fi movies seems to have emerged at last. Are we on a path to total war, portending mutual assured destruction?
No, we are not.
Yet the resolution of the film is surprising—at least to a naïve viewer like me. In the swift denouement, we learn to read the alien language (expressed in its idiosyncratic script) as encompassing knowledge of the future as well as the past. Since the aliens can anticipate their need for assistance from earth 3,000 years hence, they want us to begin to cooperate with one another now so as to be able to help them then.
Ah….
Louise comprehends this message, along with the meaning of her strange dreaming states and saves earth from a disastrous war on the aliens that will annihilate us as well.
Only now does the jumpy sequence of the film become clear. Louise, like the aliens, can foresee the future, her own included. The supposed “memory” sequences that we have been witnessing are her premonitions or precognitions of her own life.
I could just barely follow this reverse chronology by the time Louise agrees to “make a baby” with Ian, the physicist she has worked with on this project. Knowing what she knows, Louise makes a conscious choice to have the child she had imagined in her “dream states,” while also acknowledging and accepting the fact of her loss.
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What Donald Trump’s Most Loyal Followers May Have in Common Hardly an easy message for an adult like my daughter or myself, much less a child. I began to cry. As I glanced down the row to my daughter, I saw her also wiping her eyes. As the credits started to roll, the kids looked at us both, wondering what was going on.
In the car, they kept asking what happened. What did the story mean?
My daughter and I reconstructed it as best we could, explaining how Louise’s flashbacks were actually flash-forwards: how her comprehension of the aliens’ manner of writing made her aware of her ability to imagine her own possible future and how she chose to marry the physicist and have a child with him, knowing in advance how this choice would affect her life.
What a difficult thought for a 10-year-old and a 12-year-old to have! If you knew in advance what your future might be would you choose it anyway—knowing the kind of pain or suffering it might entail? We talked about this question all the way home.
Arrival is a film that turns us back on ourselves. It makes us think about the choices we make in our young lives and how we may view them from the vantage point of maturity, but it also sends a message about how we regard the “Others” in our day-to-day lives. If they look different from us and don’t speak our language, and communicate in forms of writing that we do not understand, how are we to respond? With interest and a desire to communicate, or with fear and violence?
On October 30, 2016, a white woman in an Applebee’s bar in a suburb of Minneapolis slashed the face of a darker-skinned patron with a beer mug for not speaking English. The object of her rage was an ethnic Somali woman who had immigrated to Minneapolis in 2000 from Kenya. She commands three languages but was speaking Swahili at the time of the attack.
This incident occurred just days before my daughter and family went to see Arrival.
On January 27, 2017, President Trump signed an executive order banning travel from seven Muslim countries for the next 90 days, barring entry from Syrian refugees indefinitely, and halting the admission of all refugees to the US for at least four months.
On February 22, 2017, a 51-year-old white man shot two Indian men in a bar in a suburb of Kansas City, purportedly shouting “Get out of my country.” The Indian men (one of whom died) worked as engineers at GPS maker Garmin. The shooter then drove 70 miles to an Applebee’s bar in Clinton, MO, where he confessed that he had “killed” two “Iranian” men.
Source: Paramount Pictures, official Arrival movie publicity press photo via Facebook Suppose, like Louise Banks, we had the power to foresee such events. How would we respond? What would we say? What would we do?