Arrival

Structure is theme in Canadian director Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival. The two interwoven plot lines embody the distinction between our linear time and the broader perspective that reveals the past and the future as well as the present. That’s the perspective we would get from outer space, from beyond our normal experience and apprehension. That's what we could perceive if only we could rise above our normal understanding. 

The space alien plot unwinds in simple linear story telling. It introduces creatures who have that greater perspective. The aliens have come to earth to provide the wisdom we need to survive. They have foreseen a disaster 3000 years from now in which they will need us. They now give Dr Louise Brooks the gift of their wisdom, their perception of the future and the past. With the latter she can win over the Chinese general by telling him (in Chinese) his wife’s dying words.  With the former she can foresee the heartbreak that awaits her — but she embarks on that journey even knowing its pain. Life and love are worth it. 

The more familiar story line, Louise’s marriage, her bearing, raising and loss of her daughter, is told in a non-linear mode, leaping forward and back, because of that greater perspective the aliens gave her. Hence her constant tension between memory and foresight. So too the daughter's name Hannah is a palindrome, a variation on that idea, because it reads the same backwards as forwards. 

This difference also distinguishes their two languages. We speak in linear sentences that unfold over time. The aliens communicate in whole circles, with instant complete structures. They apprehend a whole where we only see a part. The circle is our emblem of completeness and eternity, the never-ending. We live in arcs, blind to the higher wholeness. 

Because the film opens on the story of Louise and her daughter we initially think the alien plot happens after her divorce and her daughter’s death. In the first scene Louise tells her infant that they are at a beginning or an ending. That’s truer than we realize, because the film ends on the beginning of that family story. The film’s first scene actually happens after its last. 

The family narrative starts at the end of the film, when Louise has published her dictionary of the aliens’ world language and has had a child with scientist Ian. This plot-line is like the snake biting its tail — or the instant complete circle that is the basic form of the aliens’ language.  

        So there are two arrivals. One is the aliens' at the start of the narrative. The other is the arrival of Louise's future -- which the aliens have enabled her to foresee -- which includes the joys and heartbreaks of a marriage and a lost child.  

The aliens’ broader vision and understanding provide the genre’s familiar lesson — mankind has to overcome its delusions of difference and rivalries and its mortal competitions, to embrace a common humanity. That lesson is as old as The Tower of Babel, here replayed as the wall of TV screens on which the 12 nations visited by the aliens at first communicate and share knowledge, but then shut down out of mutual fear and suspicion.  The aliens have brought their message in 12 distant instalments because they need us to overcome our animosities and superficial differences to work together, to harmonize. Their circles are the antithesis to our fragmentation. 

       Louise's dictionary provides a global language that offers to overrule our fragmentation in languages and conflicting cultures. At its release the Chinese general appears in a suit, the civilian freed from the uniform, whispering in Louise's ear where he once transmitted bellicose threats. 

As in so many alien creature films, the military’s first impulse is to attack them. Here at least they make an attempt to learn to communicate with them first, but panic when the language difference kicks up the term ‘weapon’ instead of ‘tool.’ For the frightened any hint of danger can trigger aggression. Unfortunately, the unknown seems always to trigger our fear, whether our aliens are from outer space or another culture. Our aggression projects aggression upon the Other. 
     In this film the military impulse is fortunately checked by the linguist and the scientist. Seeing world governments embrace science over their old ideology is extremely heartening but — especially after The Election — not a very convincing assurance.