Arrival and How North America Perceives the World
Movies have often very powerful messages and their themes resonate with our humanity, we see timeless stories about love, fear or exile. However, just like with ancient literature classics or Greek theater plays, the stories we tell and the way we narrate them can open a door to deeper understanding the culture that produced them.
That knowledge is embedded in the story, in the interactions, the symbols or the way people react to different events. But the same way as most of what we are as individuals may be available and understood by others, we can be completely oblivious about our own self.
In his documentary “A Perverts guide to Cinema”, Zizek tries to deal with this fact, and analyses cinema for clues about the way or psyche works. The magic of this is that cinema can be seen as a global possession, no one owns the movies that we see, as they are a part of our culture. Therefore, understanding movies gives us the power to understand the individuals that live in our culture, ergo ourselves.
The movie Arrival awaken many things in me, there is no doubt that it is a wonderful film. But while watching Arrival, I felt the need of doing a similar analysis to the one done by Zizek.
What moved me to write, or in other words what I saw in the film, is a notion of how the United States sees its role and themselves in the world.
Arrival shows us an invasion, an alien race comes to earth, landing in several places at the same time. And now humanity has to face this, and do something about it. Sounds familiar?
Of course, the refugee crisis in Europe, the fear of Islam, all those things can be seen as aliens coming to our land. People talking different languages, with motives we do not understand (why are you here for?). This is not the only problem, these aliens have landed in multiple locations around the world, which causes other current world leaders to react to the problems in different ways, which in turn creates alliances and intelligence wars.
In this scenario, the interesting thing is how the United States see its position in the world, because the problems faced in the fictional arrival world relate to the problems we have in the real world, the way they see themselves there, can give us an insight on how the average American is actually feeling.
The movie shows this very clearly, a country without strength that has lost all his allies. China and Russia have all the power in this scenario, they control the alliances and are capable of leading the world in the direction they want. In this harsh situation North America is trapped, not being able to lead, can only but react to the situation, and it does this too slow. Sure this may have worked in the past (with the Nazi Germany) but now the enemy is way more powerful. We can see this going on right now on Syria, where the Russian response to the situation left North America embarrassed, the annexation of Crimea, the territorial disputes in South China Sea or even worst the Irani nuclear agreement. In the past, such challenges to the North American supremacy would have been met with the fiercest retaliation, but so far nothing has happened.
A nation that ruled the world before, now it is unable to react. This is seem as a weakness, and the struggles outside replicates on the inside. We can see a civil war unfolding. The media influencing its own people, constantly bombarding, brainwashing. A part of the population radicalizes, and xenophobia rages on, making foreigners to blame for everything that is wrong with the country. And we witness of one of the higher fears North America has: a terrorist attack in their own land. And what is even worst: it was committed by its own people. America is divided and week.
However, there is still hope, just like in the movie, salvation is possible. An interesting analysis can arise from asking ourselves where this salvation came from, the answer is short: a scientist and a foreign leader.
How do this two people save us? First of all they do it in a language we cannot even understand, from a culture completely stranger to us. Even more the Chinese leader is more human that all the other American leaders we see in the movie. Having lost his wife he has embraced what the protagonist is yet to understand.
The United States are now week, their power struggle have made it lose his humanity (napalm bombs, waterboarding, drone attacks… the list is long), and it cannot even understand the discussions that are taking place for the future world. And what is worst, America is turning its head away from its scientist, not paying attention to what they have to say. What more clear example that what is today going on with climate change? The United States has the higher percentage of population denying climate change that any other country in the world, and scientist are turning their heads to other leaders to try and fix this situation. It is important to state that this is not a minor issue, just like with an alien invasion, climate change could lead us to the biggest crisis humanity as seen so far.
The interpretation that comes from the movie is grim. The United States are lost in a world they do not understand, and their salvation will come from abroad. The nation has lost its power and there is not much to do about it, but to integrate with the world. How will they do this? This is a hard question, since with their last presidential election, they seem to have turned their head away from the world. They have chosen Trump, climate change denier and xenophobe. Hope is fading in North America, but shines somewhere else. Only the future will tell, or the past or the present, or all of them at the same time.
