The Thing You Didn’t Understand About Arrival

This is an astoundingly great film, and while I’m extremely encouraged to see mainstream audiences so engaged with the complex subject matter and big questions prompted by the film, I can’t help but feel as though a lot of people have missed the point.

Free will (in the strictest philosophical and academic sense) does not exist in our world or in the film. The future is predetermined.

Spoilers Ahead —

The way that the alien language works is by altering one’s perception of time. As humans, the only way we have ever known time is linear, like water flowing through a garden hose. One molecule of water enters the hose, and traverses its length, eventually exiting the other end, without ever ceasing its movement or flowing backward. It’s a one way road.

Abbott and Costello and the rest of the Heptapods experience time as a swimming pool. It’s a soup. Everything that ever was, is, or will be is all commingling together with no order or reason. That explains why Louise (Amy Adams) would have random flash forwards intruding on her present, those moments in time that would have been separated by linear time are now free to reside next to each other in the “time soup” the Heptapod language unlocked.

Side note: A lot of people get this wrong, no, Louise does not flash forward until after they have begun to make progress with the Heptapods. Aside from the prologue at the beginning of the film, which doesn’t fit in the context of the narrative of the Arrival, and is told in past tense, her first flash forward is around 58 minutes into the film. Also, many people think the film cheated by not showing any other characters being effected by the language, but it clearly shows those characters being reliant on their tablets and computers to translate for them. It is my belief that Louise’s flash forwards became longer, more stable, and more frequent as she progressed into fluency. This is especially highlighted by her ability to converse, unaided by technology, with the surviving Heptapod after the bomb attack. Even before the bomb attack, she is able to write on the barrier using the Heptapod ink. She has clearly attained a level of fluency in the language that none of the other characters have achieved. So that clearly explains that.

Back to time and free will.

The major question the film poses centers on whether or not one would do something if they knew the full effect and potential ramifications of the act. Many contend that Louise has to choose to have Hannah despite knowing the truth of her short and painful life.

Except that she never had the choice at all.

“If you could see your whole life from start to finish, would you change things?” Louise asks Ian after the Heptapods depart. But the notion of changing things is not possible.

The film gives us evidence to support the argument for a predetermined future.

1. The Heptapods give humanity their language knowing that in 2,000 years they will need our help. They can already see the future, and giving humanity foresight is the best plan they can come up with? Seems pretty predetermined to me, humanity HAS to intervene on their behalf in order to achieve the outcome they have seen.
2. Louise knows Hannah’s fate but has her anyway.
3. Louise knows that Ian leaves her, falls for him anyway.
4. Louise reads the book she will someday write in order to crack the code of the Heptapod language. Most people see this as a time paradox, but it’s not because time is no longer linear for her. She can have those two moments aligned next to each other. But it is predetermined that she does right the book. And if she writes book, that means she can translate the language. It has to happen.
5. This is the big one. The part at the end with General Shang has to happen as well. Again, she is floating around in a time soup. She can access any moment of her life at any time. There is no sequential order anymore. Nothing came before anything else in terms of how she is experiencing it. So it was determined that she would be at the event, and meet Shang there. That can only happen if they figure out the language though, so that has to happen as well. In the moment where she calls the General on his private line, she is literally flipping from the ‘present’ at the Montana landing site, and the ‘future’ at the political event. It’s like she’s copying a page of writing by hand. She looks at one, then the other, and back and forth until it’s done. There is no paradox because they are literally both her present, she has the ability to hop back and forth between them.
6. “Do you want to make a baby?” Ian was always going to ask this question. And Louise was always going to say yes. She doesn’t have an actual choice to make. I give Amy Adams all the credit in the world for her acting in this scene. It’s the stuff of legends. Smiling, yet on the verge of tears, she says “Yes, yeah.” But what of those tears? She already knew what would happen. She couldn’t be surprised by the proposal. She was never going to say no. It was never an option. She was, actually, excited to say yes. They’re happy tears.

The biggest reason none of the events in the film create time paradoxes is that there is no time travel. One character goes from perceiving time as being linear, to nonlinear. The rest is all in her mind. Her flash forwards feel like memories to you and I. I can type this, then close my eyes and remember my first dog. It’s easy to do, we all do it. The hard part is what if I want to remember my dog on a specific day. That get’s harder, especially if that day lacks a landmark to guide me to it. Harnessing the Heptapod language to see forward into your life would be a jumble of nonsensical images with little to no context to them.

“I don’t understand. Who is this child?”

Indeed.

That’s why she has to rack her brain when trying to figure out what to do about General Shang. She’s trying to remember things she hasn’t done yet, but at the same time, she knows had to have occurred because of the nature of cause and effect.

I know it might seem like I’m trying to rob this great work of it’s poignancy and emotional weight, but I’m really not.

It’s already established in academics that free will basically doesn’t exist, at least not in the way that regular people conceive of it. The truth is that your brain, on a chemical level, knows what you’re going to do before you (your conscious mind) ever decide to do it. It’s predetermined.

The magic of this film though, is all about one’s attitude. I can’t say with any certainty, but I’d like to believe that if we have any scrap of free will, in whatever form, then the thing we’d have the most control over is how we feel about things. Our disposition.

To be dealt a shit hand, and be able to smile and endure it, that is the magic of Louise’s ‘choice’. She could never change the chain of events that amount to her life, but she could look on the bright side of everything. She could value her and Ian’s love, never taking it for granted, knowing that it was doomed. She could treasure every day of Hannah’s life in much the same fashion.

Philosophically the question is not very different than this. “If most relationships fail, why bother dating at all?”

Because there is intrinsic value, even if fleeting, to sharing yourself and you love. It might hurt at some point, but on balance how does that hurt stack up to all the joy and pleasure accumulated?

In that sense, the meaning of Louise’s choice shifts from “Was it right to have Hannah?” to “Would you appreciate years of pleasure if you knew it would be taken away from you?”

And that is ultimately why Dr. Louise Banks should be applauded. For savoring the moments that matter. For choosing to be optimistic. That’s the real lesson here.

If you can be an optimist, be an optimist. The string music playing over the opening and closing scenes is not a requiem, it is, in fact, entitled “On the Nature of Daylight” (by Max Richter). Daylight, itself, has optimistic connotations. And yet this beautiful, haunting music seems to acknowledge that daylight is fleeting and temporary. Yet we love it still for what it is.

“So, Hannah, this is where your story begins, the day they departed.”

Because endings can be beginnings and beginnings can be endings and on and on. It all depends on how you look at it.

“Despite knowing the journey and where it leads, I embrace it. And I welcome every moment of it.”

This, to me, is the smoking gun. Having Hannah is never presented as a choice. Louise chooses to embrace the situation, which says more about her outlook and attitude than it does any agonizing decision.

Because free will doesn’t exist in this film. Once Louise can see her future, her future is fixed. What good would foresight be if things were constantly shifting and changing anyway?

And of course, one could also presume that given Louise’s new soupy perception of time, her memories never fade. She has objective recall, with her past, present, and future all being accessible with equal fidelity in her mind. In that way, she can revisit the happiest of days with no degradation regardless of how much linear time passes.

This is one of the great films of our time, people, it truly is. If anything I’ve said here seems off or wrong, my best advice is to watch it again. Two or three times. Embrace it. Just love the time spent with the film. I can attest to its rewatchability. Otherwise, thank’s for reading. We’ll see what you have to say.