Arrival — Decoding the Universal Language of Time
Language is the first weapon drawn in a conflict.
The preface of Louise Banks novel plays a meta-note on the movie itself; it gives away the end in the very first 20 minutes. Language is the weapon. Just that the weapon was not to be used in a conflict, but was a tool to save the alien species. Their language was a symbolic key to unlock the mysteries of time.
Denis Villeneuve seems to excite us with every step he takes forward, right from his Hollywood debut — Prisoners.
And his very first foray into this worn and wrought subgenre of sci-fi, Time Travel + Alien, gave us something special to hold tight. The movie infused the marriage of time and language together, or more like, using time as the language for the first contact with extraterrestrial beings.
The movie approaches this genre, more like an anthropological piece than just proportionated scientific rationale.
The Recurring Pattern
The number 12 has had it’s significance ever since anno domini terminology sprouted up. Religious notions have sayings that 12 messages were given to Padre Pio by Jesus, talking about the prophecies of the end of the world.
In the so-called advanced commune, the mathematicians, number 12 was the prima facto for calculations. Before using number 10 as our primal decimal system, we pivoted to the use of number 12 in our duodecimal chain of exchange. It seems both the ends of the spectrum, science & religion, were drawn to the mystique of number 12.
In a movie that focuses on making humans take a collective step ahead, bringing the ends of the spectrum meet, it depends a lot on providing relatability through meaningful hypothesis’. Time itself is a big motif cloud in the plot.
If this is like some peaceful first contact, why send twelve, why not just one?
For once, heptapods want all of us to work together, collectively, as a single species, rather than the ones divided by imaginary lines drawn on a paper. Dividing the so-called weapon into 12 equal parts makes their point.
Louise herself is seen reverse engineering the language as if it’s time-scaled, like a clock. It can be seen at several points in the movie, be her notes, the hanging clips around her desk or like the one above.
Shell opens every 18 hours. This makes them realize that they do understand the concept of time and recurring periods, maybe not similar to ours, but they do understand and follow some metric. This is such an important aspect that we as an audience took for granted, but in itself, it turns out to be a critical finding in understanding their behavior.
Multidimensional Approach
Heptapods use what we call Semasiographic form of a language, i.e., representing meaning through images, pictures instead of representing sound. Reading heptapod means reading the whole sentence, an assertion all at once. It’s not progressive and step-by-step like our language. The same methodology is used by scientists consuming state of a matter in variational physics or even teleology.
On the other hand, human language is one-dimensional. We perceive and communicate similar to our understanding of time, very one-dimensional.
Our form of writing is a wasted opportunity, passing up as a second channel of communication of what we speak.
It can be sensed in our other forms of communication too. Notice most of the shots of Louise are left-framed. Or for any other character, the one who is the messenger, conveying information or is a dominating party in a conversation, all of them are framed towards the left of our scenic view.
Well, it’s not just valid for this movie, but for others too. We read the screen the same way we read the text, L-to-R.
It’s not until we reach the shell when we start gaining a different perspective from heptapod language, then only we get to see right-focused frames. We don’t get to see a single left-framed shot of Louise inside the shell.
It’s widely discussed in the field of linguistics if taught right from the beginning, then Hopi people would have an easier grasp of Einstein’s theory of relativity. Their language has no sense of tenses. Louise tries this approach on heptapods. She even tries to check whether Before and After terms mean anything in their language or is it extraneous for them.
Non-Linear Thinking
Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis: The language you speak defines the way you think
The time paradox used in Arrival is not a trivial one. Considering time as a non-linear entity, you get to explore both the past & future in your decision making.
At one time she uses the term non-zero-sum-game, the other time she uses General Shang’s message from the future. Her using non-zero-sum-game isn’t a significant plot point here, as she’s using her past experiences in the future, which is normal. Though it was necessary to show it on-screen, to make believe the point of singularity is the present. The present is where time truly ends — a big shout out to Joe Walker’s editing here.
The movie is evocative enough to force you to lie back and find that even the screenplay follows this double-ended funnel structure. Actions start from both the ends and meet at the center of Louise’s story when the aliens leave.
Arrival explores maybe a new form of time paradox, makes sense to call it palindrome paradox. And it also makes much sense to name your kid after it, HANNAH.
There’s just so much to learn and talk about Arrival, you can have endless beer nights dissecting the 116 minutes of cerebral-foreplay. Be it cinematography, scene-blocking & framing, sound design (heck, the sound design here, when was the last time you heard something as fresh and rare, maybe xenomorphs in Alien, which every alien movie still uses till the date, or Star Wars lightsabers).
The most important sound for this movie was silence — Denis Villeneuve
Sci-fi movies have never been this feminine before, the stillness, coldness around it, the tension created by somber wind reverberations around the shell. A failed marriage. A dying kid. A sad future. Yet, she accepts every bit of it, welcomes every moment of it.
If we ever encounter an alien first contact, be it, tourists or scientists, an Arrival rulebook should be handed to every diplomat at the rendezvous. I can’t think of a more colossal achievement for a sci-fi movie.
To anyone interested in learning more about Wolfram language and the software developed to read it— Github open source page — the same software is used in the movie too.
