Arrival (Denis Villeneuve, 2016)

[Mr Sausage]

Sorry, matrix, forgot to address your point of locked vs unlocked timelines:

Spoiler

I argue above that the central loop of the film is in fact locked by the mutual dependence of the two central events, but this does not mean that anything outside of that loop is locked. So perhaps Louise can change the future outside of the loop, for instance with regard to her potential daughter.

I would argue that the same process true of the loop holds true of everything in Louise's life outside the loop, too. This is because of how Heptapod time works, and what it means for the events that start the plot off in the first place.

The Heptapods' stated purpose is to set up a series of events that will lead earth to produce something key to the Heptapods' future. Since Heptapods perceive time as a perpetual present, and we see that a key method of problem solving is to use time loops in which events and objects are prior to themselves, we can suppose that the titular arrival is itself part of a time loop. The Heptapods on earth are fulfilling the present section of whatever information has been generated in a future section of a loop--ensuring the present exists by ensuring the future does, ad infinitum. Louise's loop, indeed her entire life following it, is only a small section of a larger loop that must be fulfilled for the reasons I listed in my post above. Therefore, Louise is no more (or less) free outside of her small loop than inside of it. All the paradoxes remain, and we are still left with a problem that's not really about free will.

But free will is irrelevant for me in another way, because, as swo17 intimates, the crucial drama is not whether she can or cannot choose to have her daughter. It's that she'd have her daughter no matter where the metaphysics fall because she comes to understand how the loss does not negate the intense bounty--personal, professional, spiritual, and cosmological--that comes from it. That's the emotional core of the movie, the way it answers the 'love lost vs. never loved' question with a demonstration of the value of love lost.

This is why I disagree with Domino and think Arrival is a much better film than Interstellar. Scientifically, Interstellar is dense and highly conceptual; but philosophically, it's weak, bordering on trite, with no philosophical ideas to match its scientific ones. This is because, unlike Arrival, which sets its terms, Interstellar takes the power of love for granted. Love makes the characters in Interstellar go to incredible lengths, bending the fabric of time itself and communicating across universes. But love gets its power simply by virtue of being love, which we must already assume is powerful. The characters sometimes have to realize this, or rediscover it, but the power of it was there to begin with. It is the sine qua non of the story. That's the movie's limitation, that it takes its fundamental concepts for granted and so cannot arrive at a profound conclusion unless its audience takes the same concepts for granted. I don't, so I just got a complicated movie about a well-worn assertion. Arrival, at least, tries to set the terms behind love's value.

[matrixschmatrix]

Continuing the big black boxes:

Spoiler

So, I had two thoughts about this. 1.) A situation in which the future influences the past doesn't NECESSARILY mean that causality has actually flowed that way, due to what I have heard called the Bill & Ted maneuver- if I, in the present, reach the intention that I will in the future travel back in time and take some specific action, I will therefore cause that already to have happened. Causality is maintained; while the apparent cause happened after the apparent effect, the fundamental cause is the point of decision, and that can happen as soon as the problem is known. Thus, in Arrival, one can presume that Adams recognized that the only way to defuse the situation would be to speak directly to the general, and therefore made the decision that she would, in the future, meet him, get his phone number, and provide it to her past self. This situation is more complex than the Bill & Ted one, because the circumstance of meeting the general only came about because she had already called him, but I think one can assume that on some timeline Adams made a plan that ran: I need to speak to the general personally. Therefore, I need personal information about him that I can only get by already having spoken to him. To meet him, I need to defuse this situation in a way that's beneficial for everyone; thus, my intention is to meet him at a celebration event after the situation is defused. This is highly circular thinking, admittedly, but that fits her character's mindset.

The other assumption I make about time travel is iterative loops- in other words, one arrives at a fixed loop because a loop will play out again and again until it reaches a steady state. So, let's assume on the first loop, Adams fails utterly, everyone dies. This gives information to her past self, which means she will now behave differently. After that, each loop will inform its own origin point, again and again, as Adams tries every conceivable solution and sees the outcome of it. The only way this stops is when the end point of the loop results in a set of actions that would not change based on knowing the end point- at which time, everything seems perfectly locked and fate-driven, and the actual decision points happen in loops that have now been overwritten.

I think this is important thematically because to me, it is vitally important that Adams made a conscious decision to have her daughter- if this was something caused by ontological determinism, it doesn't tell us anything about her, how she thinks, or what time and love mean in the world of the film. It's worth noting that in the story, the daughter dies not by illness, but in an accident- meaning that it was something preventable by future knowledge, which implicitly changes the way time works in that world. Here, there is nothing Adams can do, no matter what decision she makes, outside the simple binary of child or no child; we can assume that a fully empowered time traveler, able to use future knowledge to change the past, would not have any real advantage here, and it goes back to the original question of whether one would choose to embrace love at the expense of known future agony.

(I will admit that the heptapods' actions are harder to explain with this way of seeing time travel, unless they individually live for thousands of years- it would be impossible to change an inflection point occurring before one's own birth, though I suppose one could imagine some sort of backwards knowledge chain in which future generations intention would be to tell their parents to have done something differently as soon as they learn to talk.)

[tenia]

Spoiler

Aliens saw they need to get stuff done in order to survive. They get it done as planned and not one human makes anything to change that. The end.

[Mr Sausage]

I see your black box and raise you another.

Spoiler

1.) A situation in which the future influences the past doesn't NECESSARILY mean that causality has actually flowed that way, due to what I have heard called the Bill & Ted maneuver- if I, in the present, reach the intention that I will in the future travel back in time and take some specific action, I will therefore cause that already to have happened. Causality is maintained; while the apparent cause happened after the apparent effect, the fundamental cause is the point of decision, and that can happen as soon as the problem is known. Thus, in Arrival, one can presume that Adams recognized that the only way to defuse the situation would be to speak directly to the general, and therefore made the decision that she would, in the future, meet him, get his phone number, and provide it to her past self. This situation is more complex than the Bill & Ted one, because the circumstance of meeting the general only came about because she had already called him, but I think one can assume that on some timeline Adams made a plan that ran: I need to speak to the general personally. Therefore, I need personal information about him that I can only get by already having spoken to him. To meet him, I need to defuse this situation in a way that's beneficial for everyone; thus, my intention is to meet him at a celebration event after the situation is defused. This is highly circular thinking, admittedly, but that fits her character's mindset.

That's clever. I like that. I think I can formulate some counters to it, tho', if you feel like indulging me.

Argument 1. The problem is that the information gathered is self-generating, or exists prior to itself, so how does a person in the present get the intention to gather information from the future which cannot exist except at the point of being gathered? For this to work, you have to posit that Louise knows that: A. the general has a wife, B. the general has a pet name for his wife, C. the general has told this information to no other person. You then have to posit that Louise knows this information prior to it generating itself. It has to be gathered before it is gathered, and that assumes ontology and temporality are the same, which they no longer are. So the intention can only be generated by the future being prior to the past, ie. by the loop.

Argument 2. The other problem of course is that it requires the intention to reach the future and then travel back from it. Louise doesn't travel anywhere, she experiences a memory before she could have it, as it were. She cannot intend to come back from anywhere, she can only experience something prior to its happening. She cannot plan future actions because she is never there; she can only plan current actions. And she cannot plan what she will do in the future, only use that information to make decisions in the present (and in that case, see Argument 1).

Argument 3. Let's take causality out of it. Let's say it doesn't matter what causes what; let's say the cause of this loop has its location outside the loop rather than in (Heptapods, god, whatever), and forget the whole nature of cause. Now let's make a broad philosophical claim that I couldn't possibly have space to prove so you'll sort of have to just go with it: everything relies on something else for its being. Assuming that: what gives the future being in a time loop? For your argument to be true, it would have to be the intentions of the people in the present and only that. But the present moment is only happening as it does--that is, has its being--based the future happening as it does. Again, things are ontologically prior in the loop. So the present has its being by virtue of the future, and the future has its being by virtue of the present (which delivers the information). So they depend on each other, not for their cause, but for their being.

Outside a loop, things depend for their being on many, many things; within a loop, that dependence is reduced to a more narrow range of things. In particular, the dependence in this loop is reduced primarily to two things: a present and a future. Since they depend for their own being on each other's being, if one does not exist the other cannot exist, so both must exist (or not at all). So the biconditional formula I used above, a if and only if b, or (a ≡ b), also holds because conditional statements are not statements of causality.

The other assumption I make about time travel is iterative loops- in other words, one arrives at a fixed loop because a loop will play out again and again until it reaches a steady state. So, let's assume on the first loop, Adams fails utterly, everyone dies. This gives information to her past self, which means she will now behave differently. After that, each loop will inform its own origin point, again and again, as Adams tries every conceivable solution and sees the outcome of it. The only way this stops is when the end point of the loop results in a set of actions that would not change based on knowing the end point- at which time, everything seems perfectly locked and fate-driven, and the actual decision points happen in loops that have now been overwritten.

I like this and you may well be right. But as Adams experiences the future simultaneously with the present, it's odd that her visions would not simply change with each change in her behaviour, every action producing another vision of the future, her brain crowded with an infinity of possibilities all passing in waves. I wonder how she would even get to have iterations. I think your iteration argument might work better with an actual time traveling device, so that the intention to use it could instantiate the loop. I think we're bumping against the limits of our ability to conceive, here.

I think this is important thematically because to me, it is vitally important that Adams made a conscious decision to have her daughter- if this was something caused by ontological determinism, it doesn't tell us anything about her, how she thinks, or what time and love mean in the world of the film.

I disagree completely. It does not matter what she does. What matters is how she feels about it. Whether she can or cannot choose to change the fact of her daughter's birth is irrelevant. What matters is that she believes and feels that having her daughter is a good thing even though she knows the pain and loss attached to it. The key here is the meaning Louise gives it, not whether the Universe allows her to act on that. I think I stated something to that effect in my second of my two posts above.

[Salamanca]

I thought this was quite successful in dealing with certain concepts about language. It successfully adapted written language to filmic language. Not a brilliant film, but intelligent cinema that I wish would come out of MRT Hollywood mainstream more often. Couldn't stop comparing it to another film that tries to capture the intrinsic qualities of writing: Atonement. That one far less successful though. Only Villenueve has the talent.

[The Fanciful Norwegian]

Saw this (in Chinese) and it covers something I haven't seen mentioned anywhere else: Bong Joon-ho was attached to this before Villenueve. Bong loved the story but thought the script had been "standardized" and was too similar to Contact. The producers told him that the actors' schedules didn't allow time for a rewrite, so Bong dropped out and the rest is history. Having seen the final product it's impossible for me to imagine what Bong might've done with it, especially in light of how radically Snowpiercer diverged from its source material.

[DarkImbecile]

... to say nothing of Adams' masterful performance and the technical mastery on display (let's just give Arrival the sound design Oscar now, please).

Called it!

[swo17]

I thought my brother (who has a degree in linguistics) had an interesting take on that aspect of the film:

I wonder if anyone else with a linguistics background had a hard time watching Arrival. I had a running commentary going through my head the entire time, which really made it hard for to enjoy the movie. For example, I don't think I ever took a historical-comparative linguistics course (I assume that's what she was teaching at the beginning) that would have started with talking about the history of the Portuguese language (if she had started by talking about something more obscure, like Pirahã, I probably would have believed it). Wouldn't it have been better if the class had been discussing linguistic universalism vs relativity (since this actually is kind of a major theme of the movie. Also, they could bring up Pirahã again). What is her specialty exactly? Translation? Knowing Farsi and Mandarian (an unlikely, but I suppose not impossible combination)? Also knowing Sanskrit? First language acquisition? Second language acquisition? Just kind of a generalist? Why would they only get one linguist? Wouldn't more than one, with different specialties be more ideal? It really seems like a lot of the confusion in the movie would have been cleared up if they had someone who specialized in language acquisition, someone in pragmatics, another in semiotics, someone in sociolinguistics...

He says he really liked the movie overall though.

[domino harvey]

This is why doctors and nurses don't watch medical shows

[swo17]

All the same, I'll confess that for me, that aspect of the film lacked a certain degree of sophistication that might have otherwise added to the intrigue of the whole scenario.

[chiendent]

I also have a degree in linguistics and I wouldn't say I had a hard time watching the movie but your brother makes some good points. The most baffling part to me was why she'd been previously given security clearances to translate Farsi, as if it's some arcane language only a member of academia could possibly decipher. It's a pretty popular language that unsurprisingly receives a lot of attention from the government in terms of intelligence/interpreters.

At any rate, including some discussion of linguistic universalism/relativity and bringing up languages like Piraha or Aymara would've been neat but considering most people watching the movie would think linguistics consists solely of learning a bunch of languages (an impression the movie doesn't exactly avoid), I'll take a discussion of the history of Portuguese and the occasional mention of Sapir-Whorf. It's almost an Indiana Jones sort of situation imo: nobody really wants an accurate depiction of academia.

[Feiereisel]

I'm not sure the clearance has as much to do with the language as it does the associated military operation the line "You made quick work of those insurgents" implies she was privy to.

[chiendent]

But why would they need a linguistics professor in the first place? There would surely be interpreters/translators already available with some level of clearance. I guess if the insurgents spoke a more obscure Iranian language but it didn't seem like she was an Iranologist or anything.

[matrixschmatrix]

As I recall, there was a severe shortage of capable Farsi translators during the second gulf war- and perhaps one could assume she needed to be able to translate between three or four different languages

[Feiereisel]

It also evidences the fixed viewpoints of military figures that factor heavily into rest of the film's story by establishing almost immediately that there are things they simply cannot understand.

[chiendent]

It also evidences the fixed viewpoints of military figures that factor heavily into rest of the film's story by establishing almost immediately that there are things they simply cannot understand.

That seems like a bit of a reach. It just came across to me as lazy exposition. My point is that Persian is not some kind of alien language that requires a professor of linguistics in order for the military to decipher it. It's an Indo-European language in the top 20 of number of speakers. Sorry to nitpick and get off topic but the reason I brought it up in the first place is that it reflects a couple of my pet peeves: 1) the misconception that linguistics is just about learning languages and 2) Persian is some arcane language when in fact it's pretty darn close to English as far as languages go.

[Feiereisel]

Your insightful point about Farsi as it relates to the real world is duly noted, but the idea that things presented early on in a film--however indelicately--connect with and foreshadow things that happen later in the film is not something I would describe as "a reach."

[Mr Sausage]

If the film's depiction of a linguistics professor seems odd, it's because in large part the film is actually depicting a philologist, the older and now mostly defunct (sadly) academic/intellectual role that eventually split off to form the modern humanities (including linguistics). I've no idea if that's deliberate or an accident of ignorance, but there we go. Louise is a philologist.

[chiendent]

If the film's depiction of a linguistics professor seems odd, it's because in large part the film is actually depicting a philologist, the older and now mostly defunct (sadly) academic/intellectual role that eventually split off to form the modern humanities (including linguistics). I've no idea if that's deliberate or an accident of ignorance, but there we go. Louise is a philologist.

I mean sure, a lot of the film centers on translating writing and she's teaching some kind of comparative linguistics class and I realize the definition of philology varies a bit depending on if you're in the US or UK but I don't see how you came to the conclusion she's a philologist or that depicting her as one makes any more sense . Plus a philologist's knowledge of modern languages like Persian or Mandarin would be pretty heavily skewed towards their classical incarnations and even less applicable to modern-day translation work.

[Mr Sausage]

If the film's depiction of a linguistics professor seems odd, it's because in large part the film is actually depicting a philologist, the older and now mostly defunct (sadly) academic/intellectual role that eventually split off to form the modern humanities (including linguistics). I've no idea if that's deliberate or an accident of ignorance, but there we go. Louise is a philologist.

I mean sure, a lot of the film centers on translating writing and she's teaching some kind of comparative linguistics class and I realize the definition of philology varies a bit depending on if you're in the US or UK but I don't see how you came to the conclusion she's a philologist or that depicting her as one makes any more sense . Plus a philologist's knowledge of modern languages like Persian or Mandarin would be pretty heavily skewed towards their classical incarnations and even less applicable to modern-day translation work.

I never came to any conclusion about whether it makes more sense. I only said Louise' depiction is more in line with a philologist than a modern linguist.

I decided she is a philologist because she is fluent in a wide array of languages (ie. she doesn't merely study their linguistic components) that she teaches in context with each other and the specific meaning of whose words she argues about with colleagues, all of which is what philologists historically did. The definition of a philologist is wide and has been for a long time, given that it preceded modern academic specializations.

Although philology historically dealt with classical languages, there is no prescription for that (and indeed the earliest Greek philologists in Alexandria dealt with their own still-modern language).

[barryconvex]

I really got this one wrong. I think i committed the cardinal sin of judging this movie by what wasn't in it, or by what i thought should've been in it, instead of reacting to what was. I thought at first the climax was especially underwhelming but in actuality the third act's subtleties went right over my head. The entire movie's subtleties, in actual actuality actually. It's the kind of movie that rewards repeated visits but the amount of stuff i missed the first time around is embarrassing. Mea culpa...

[tenia]

I think the core issue of Arrival is precisely how it's disdainful of its audience, focusing more on how it can be smarter than it in order to trick it, while actually stumbling along the way because, precisely, of its own tricks.
But I think it's something I already expressed in the dedicated thread, and that ultimately, the film felt extremely shallow to me. It just felt like a vast pretentious trick to me. It feels very highly of itself, probably more than it's actually really worth.

[nitin]

Arrival is not disdainful of its audience, that is a really long bow.

[tenia]

Arrival is not disdainful of its audience, that is a really long bow.

It's just my 2 cents of course (which are certainly exacerbated by my strong dislike of the movie) always difficult to settle for whether a movie can feel pretentious, or if it also feels like it's looking down at its audience because how intelligent it seems to think it is. I felt Arrival to be in the 2nd category, though it of course can be debated, and probably is semantic more than anything. But I certainly never felt any respect from the movie. It thinks too highly of itself for this.

[Persona]

Arrival is not disdainful of its audience, that is a really long bow.

It's just my 2 cents of course (which are certainly exacerbated by my strong dislike of the movie) always difficult to settle for whether a movie can feel pretentious, or if it also feels like it's looking down at its audience because how intelligent it seems to think it is. I felt Arrival to be in the 2nd category, though it of course can be debated, and probably is semantic more than anything. But I certainly never felt any respect from the movie. It thinks too highly of itself for this.

I guess I can see why someone would feel that way. The short story the movie is based on doesn't come off that way at all, it's a really lovely, emotional, and humane work by Ted Chiang, and so having read that first it perhaps colors my understanding and reception of the film where I don't feel like I'm being looked down at all, I feel like the film wants to engage with me and sort of immerse me in this different experience of time or the relationship of consciousness to time and the choices we make towards life.