Arrival (2016) — I: Memories of the Future
Picking the Villeneuve series back up with his most recent and ongoing Sci-Fi era, opened by Arrival.
Villeneuve has a unifying narrative approach that threads most of his post-hiatus films, which he applies to this film in a novel way, embracing the power of the hypothetical opened up by the genre while exploring a vision colored by the brutality of his pre-SciFi era but with a finer finish of restrained optimism. Arrival is gentle in its grief and sincere in its affirmation of truths, new and old. This is an emotionally complex story about characters embracing compatibility of choice in a universe simultaneously void of intent and in longing for them.
Here you can see Villeneuve honing an approach he had refined over the years as a final test run into the Sci-Fi genre — the decoherence of memory, dream and present experience preceding clarity (see Enemy [2013]). As well as another theme he fleshed out in Polytechnique (2008), Incendies (2010) and Prisoners (2013) — accepting that we do not control most things while the things we can change, will only change slowly, even when we come together with others.
In this story the delusions being dispelled are that we are alone in facing the future in an unfeeling universe as well as of our place in it.
In Memoria Demissus
Memory of a child. Flashes of happiness to start your day. This hollow forlornment not new but more specific now. Villeneuve begins the story with a question: what was that memory?
When we meet Louise we see she moves through her daily life as a linguistics professor with the sort of sinking detachment you might see weeks after losing the cornerstone of your personal world. She’s alone. No partner. No child. Walking through campus to her lecture with the emotional posture of something suspended in asymptotic descent, simultaneously sinking and floating. A buoy not heavy enough to go deeper and yet to find its equilibrium at greater pressures. The water above it weighing of an oppressive ceiling; the water below condensing into a viscous floor; its own emptiness the sole reason it doesn’t sink further. Chest tight, gut vacant, knees held together by chewing gum, feet mysteriously propelled. Louise feels like an automaton who might choose suicide but for constipated apathy.
Campus the next day is quiet. Surreal. Class is almost empty except the gunners. She briefly notes it, and immediately moves on with the same airiness we’ve seen. Only then do both we and Louise find out that extra-terrestrial life has arrived on Earth. And we realize the air occupies the curious dread of a world suddenly gnostic. The impossible now real, the surreal now inescapable. Villeneuve is showcasing his mastery of a story-telling skill he’s spent his career sharpening — revealing information incrementally and deliberately to create a mood.
She leaves. The world is on fire. Talks her mom down from her fear-mongered xenophobia. And goes home to snuggle with a pillow. About that gnosticism. Are we alone? Somehow. Still not clear. The next day she wakes up and goes to campus. Perfectly empty. A marionette free to the extent it can’t see its strings.
Emptiness and Mono No Aware
The emotional state that best captures Louise when we first meet her and constantly throughout is one of Mono No Aware. MNA is essentially an emotional state characterized by a gentle sadness ever pervasive in the background as life happens. We get this sense as she remembers her child. And at the end of the film, by staggering visuals and voiceovers to communicate a character’s personal truth in relation the world they inhabit (and in a way that Villeneuve has now mastered), we learn that these memories are not of the past. These are memories of the future. The gift from the heptapods was the language itself, which gives the speaker the ability to perceive moments from their life in the future as they would moments in the past.
Louise’s loneliness transmutes into a gentle optimism as she embraces who she now realizes is her future husband, Dr. Donnelly. Imagine meeting your spouse-to-be and already knowing you’ll have a child together and that she will die of cancer tragically young. Imagine not just knowing this but living those moments with the experiential tone of memories before they happen and feeling their nostalgic emotional gravity. In the midst of your newfound optimism you’d still feel the same gentle grief from when you were lonely and didn’t realize why you felt of loss. Her lonesomeness in the beginning of the movie was the forlornment of a mother to-be not having met her daughter. Her happiness at the end is similarly gentle, tempered by the knowledge of a tragic future. MNA is the subtle emotional constant unifying Louise before realizing she was seeing and feeling memories of her future loss with Louise after realizing she is no longer alone.
This leads to an important character point for Louise. She’s a vehicle for a sort of deterministic awareness. After all, the future can only be known by an individual if it is already determined. And that strongly diminishes the role of free will in your life; if the future is determined then your choices have already been made. What effect would the loss of metaphysical liberty have on your emotional state? You might feel that your “choices” are empty, a truth acknowledged by Buddhism, from which MNA emerges. That you’d be making these choices no matter what, therefore their significance would become nihil. Can you still be special or your thoughts unique? Of course not. All those 90’s movies about science needing the human element or needing heart (objectively awesome) become yet stark in their naivety. In this case, the human element is an expression of mathematics and its behavior can be perfectly predicted. What a buzzkill. You know everything that will happen but are almost doomed to do it, unable to take the train of the present off its particular tracks. The oppression of causality. A Hindu might call this the Web of Karma. A Buddhist might call this the Wheel of Dharma. To a determinist, whatever the flavor, this is the root of MNA.
While MNA comes from the Buddhist school of thought, a hard deterministic one that traditionally emphasizes asceticism to transcend dualities, Louise’s attitude seems more reminiscent of something Hindu, as expounded in The Bhagvad Gita, wherein transcending dualities is not taken to its perfect logical conclusion. Where the goal of equanimity is to inform vitality in action, divorcing action from any concern for its fruits. Embracing the journey for its own sake. Merely a softly deterministic approach if even that, but I see applicable overlap in its approach in a deterministic context. Equanimity amidst action without concern for its fruit feels exactly like acting even if you know what happens. An expression of faith in a cosmic order. An alternative to laying down and watching the world move around you.
— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —
Arrival Essay —
I: Memories of the Future
