Arrival and Reading Generously
After finally seeing Arrival this weekend, I took to the internet to discuss it with a friend who had been itching to talk about a particular aspect of it since its release. As soon as I had told him I saw and loved the movie, he launched into his complaint: “They cheated!”
“How do you mean?” I responded, curious as to what I had missed.
“She sees the future before she even starts to learn the language. Its a huge logical hole.”
He was talking of the lyrical, heartbreaking sequence that opens the movie. The film just gives us snatches of Louise and her child. Love and warmth and family painted in close ups and dialogue snippets. Then we learn of the heartbreak; quiet and devestating.
Cinematic convention teaches us that this sequence is a flashback. It is the backstory that informs our understanding of the character’s inner life. So when Arrival takes us from this sunset-hued tragedy to grey monotony, we assume we have moved forward in time, that these events are past but not forgotten.
My friend’s complaint is that when Arrival subverts this assumption, it does so ambiguously. The movie’s central conceit is that Louise learns to see time as non-linear, that she begins to see “flash-forwards” of her future as she learns more and more of the strange new language she is tasked with translating. My friend’s complaint is that we are shown the opening sequence before she even hears the new language. How can she be using this power before she acquires it?
We went back and forth over the issue. For my part, it seemed very clear that the opening sequence was supposed to function, not as an in-story flash-forward experienced by a character, but as cinematic flashbacks always function: to provide background and context to the audience. We are given no clues to indicate that Louise has experienced these visions, no reaction shots, no present-day bookending. They function completely differently cinematically than the visions Lousie later suffers.
On the other hand, by the time Arrival tips its hand, the audience has been viewing Louise through the lens of her backstory. We interpret her actions and emotions in terms of her tragedy. While the movie does a lot of well-observed, quiet character building outside of the opening sequenve, it is all predicated, for the audience, on her history. Having that pulled from under him made my friend feel cheated, and understandably so.
We argued and counter-argued for a little while over our interpretations, and we ended, as so many discussions about art must, on a friendly “agree to disagree” note. But something about the discussion rankled me.
I’m sure if you’ve seen the film you have already decided which reading you agree with. I could talk till I was blue in the face about cinematic convention and the difference in editting between the two types of flashforward, but if you came out of the film feeling cheated, you came out of the film feeling cheated. Your response to the movie is just as valid as mine. So what stuck in my craw?
Arrival is a movie about language and communication, it is about striving to be understood and to understand. Perhaps what upset me was that this plea for understanding was being misunderstood.
The movie eloquently argues that the key to true understanding is not just establishing a vocabulary, nor is it just establishing common ground. The key is knowing what you don’t know. Understanding both the gaps in your dictionary and the places where others are missing the words they need. It is also a movie about how understanding those gaps requires generosity and empathy.
Conflict in Arrival does not arise from complete misunderstanding, but from the deadly combination of partial understanding and unexamined assumptions. We run the greatest risk of misunderstanding one another when we think we are speaking the same language.
As an audience, we do not come to movies as Louise first comes to the heptapods, in complete ignorant of both language and concept. We come half-understanding. The language is foreign, symbolic instead of spoken, and with a strange understanding of time, but, whether through casual viewing or serious study, we all know at least some of the vocabulary of cinema. But no-one is truly fluent.
We know enough to pose Arrival’s central question: “What is your purpose on Earth?” and mostly we know how to translate the answer, but there are gaps in our knowledge. There are words we don’t know, concepts the film can’t express clearly. So our translation, our reading, is forever incomplete.
As Louise passionately argues, filling in these gaps is an exercise that requires not only effort and attention, but care, forgiveness and generosity. Don’t assume the alien means to say Weapon and not Tool.
In assuming the filmmakers cheated, or made a mistake, my friend is filling in the gaps in his dictionary with the simplest word that fits. The film made a mistake. This plot has a hole. While this reading is not unreasonable, its worth looking at the alternative. Offer the benefit of the doubt to the unknowable intelligence behind the language, and see how your interpretation changes.
The result, argues Arrival, could change how you view the whole universe.
