異星入境｜Arrival：Language
The hammer in our hand
Preface
After discussing the fantastic film — Knight of Cups, with the main quest of detaching the structure of frames, which also made the sequence of time being mingled letting our comprehension reconstructed by fragments of ‘visual experiences’, the myth of the heroic masculine purpose seems inevitable to ignore. Yet, before digging into the myth, let me first talk about another awesome film — Arrival, which intrinsically touched the ‘sequenced experience’ by the medium we humans mostly use as our principal thinking tool — language. The film is adapted from the novel Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang. Despite how splendid the movie is, what makes it stands out is the essence of the story. There is a nonlinear sequence of frames intertwining with each other in both the file and novel, which sets up the main core — boundaries of time.
Temporal Imprisonment
We humans primary detect time in sequence. I bet no one will stand against this point until you have read this line. We are so bound by time by its order, yet we can perceive the arrow of time, and witness our lives moving forward without being able to alter this movement. The order of time essentially leads us toward some preparation for our destiny, both fear for it. To the furthest extent, the fate of death bound us with the desire for freedom in a much more ambiguous way. The irony of man’s condition is that the deepest need is to be free of the anxiety of death and annihilation, but it is life which awakens it, and so we must shrink from being fully alive. To put it simply, life to its fullest is too much to handle for limited beings, the incomprehensible vastness of the universe and the fundamental elusiveness of its purpose, the total mystery of our existence in all its beauty and terror. It is just too much. It’s like you are staring into the sun. Consequently, we spring down from life, making it mundane and acceptable, because in our minds: if we don’t engage in life, we don’t have to engage in death, without constantly being overwhelmed by our existence and worrying about its ultimate meaning. But when we swing down too much and hide away in a protective bubble like Louise, the protagonist, we can end up missing life altogether, which is a shame, because death will still come for us. the relentless arrow of time is not hindered by our fear of it.
Free Will
If you get it here, you will sincerely realize that the ‘sequence’ of time informed us of two things: both the free will letting us feels in charge of our own life and death terrifying us throughout each moment feeling existed which seem contradictory to each other. Identically, there is an obvious paradox between being able to see the future and having free will in the present. Nothing is more obvious than the conflict between noticing both the end game and being illusioned by the tale of free will. In the movie, the new language from the aliens allows Louise to construct meaning and articulate existence in such a way that it alleviates her fear of it. As a result, allow her to choose existence over non-existence. In the speech act theory, statements like “I promise” was all performative: a speaker performs the action only by uttering the words. For such acts, knowing what would be said didn’t change anything. Everyone at a wedding anticipated the words “I now pronounce you husband and wife, “ but until the minister actually said them, the ceremony didn’t count. In other words, with performative languages, saying equals doing. By ‘performing’ the known ‘future’, Louise is encouraged by existing the construction of the time sequence, which lifts the veil of the cause of time boundaries — language.
The Hammer
The limitation of language was discussed by another article of mine. The most distinct bait is the language itself is in sequence. To be clear enough, the formation of our language, no matter oral or written, performs an extended form of context, which satisfies both shared comprehensibility and intrinsic boundaries. This specification deeply affects the way we accept time, to create cooperation, we created an inducement of fantasy which is nothing but the meaning. Yes, if you have a hammer in your hand, everything looks like a nail.
It is always asking the good questions the hardest, the only matters.
Either way, meet Denis Villeneuve, Arrival.
