Arrival, a science fiction movie about aliens visiting earth, is equally irritating and moving, but after some thought I decided the moving part has the edge. Not that anybody asked me, but here’s why.
Irritating: So, 12 gigantic pod-like spacecraft land at strategic locations scattered over the globe. Rather than attack at once, world leaders wisely decide to try to communicate with the aliens, setting up synchronized command centers and recruiting specialists, such as Dr. Louise Banks, a linguist. Louise joins a team including physicist Dr. Ian Donnelly and travels to Montana, where the army has set up a base camp around one of the alien ships. The plot follows Louise as she forms a bond with the aliens and begins to puzzle out the mystery of their language, meanwhile experiencing disturbing flashbacks.
It turns out (spoiler alert) that the aliens’ purpose is benevolent: they’re here to give us a useful tool that will blur the edges of time and help us see our experience as a fabric not a thread. That tool is their language, which is visual rather than aural and spherical rather than linear. When Louise begins to understand it, she drifts away from her own linear time line. Interesting! But how is this a benefit to humanity? There’s something about the aliens needing to return to earth in a few thousand years and so they’re passing along their language now to help things along later—but that motive almost seems tacked on. The impression left on the viewer (okay; this viewer) is that the visitors have thrown the world in an uproar and risked mutual annihilation so that one woman can see one life in a circle not a line that will affect one major choice. This kind of solipsism dominates our present way of thinking—the significance of any event comes down to what I do and what I feel. What about the rest of the world?
Moving. Maybe I’m being too hard on the creators of Arrival. The classic technique of fiction is reshaping big, universal themes in intimate, personal terms (and Louise’s discovery did prevent the alien visitation from blowing up in everybody’s faces). When Drs. Banks and Donnelly meet, he reads a passage from her latest book, which he happens to have with him:
He: ‘Language is the foundation of civilization. It is the glue that holds people together. It is the first weapon drawn in a conflict . . .’ (Looking up from the book) It’s great. Even if it’s wrong.
She: It’s wrong?
He: Well, the cornerstone of civilization isn’t language, it’s science.
No, he’s wrong, even though I suspect the distinction between foundation and cornerstone is intended. Language is foundational, and Louise will be vindicated. Science is derivative, the servant not the master, and life will be vindicated. It takes wise alien messengers to teach us this, patiently trying to communicate while humans frantically run around, compare observations, recalculate their calculations, and figure their best chances for survival.
Maybe survival isn’t quite the same as life. Maybe life is worth choosing, even if it doesn’t always occur in optimum conditions; maybe even if it’s tragically fraught and short. Maybe the last word should be Yes (as, in fact, it is).
Think back to a Spirit brooding over the face of the deep, contemplating all living things soon to be. History cries No!, recalling all the sorrow spiraling out from earth and sea and all that dwell therein. Spirit says Yes, lifting bright wings into the darkness and flooding every corner with light.
Louise makes a choice that scientific calculation chalks up as wrong. God, unbound by time, and circular rather than linear, makes the same choice. We can’t say it’s wrong.