Arrival - of what, exactly?
Looking back (or forward) ten years to Villeneuve's breakthrough
The imaginary must be imagined, accurately and with scrupulous consistency. A fantastic setting requires vivid and specific description; while characters may lose touch with their reality, the storyteller can’t.
Ursula K Le Guin, review of The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro
Is there any more point to science fiction?
The history of any genre is driven by the dynamic between convention and invention; science fiction, though, is meant to have an extra feature. Steve Aylett parodied it in his satirical biography Lint, in which the titular hack-genius writes for pulp magazines called, “Astounding [Stories], Bewildering [Stories]1” (also “Confusing, Baffling, Frazzling, Scalding, Mental, Marginal, Fatal, Useless, Appalling, Made-Up and Meandering” stories). Science fiction’s USP is meant to be its particular inventiveness, assumed to be found in a given story’s idea or set of ideas. Fans believe this is proof of the genre’s vitality as compared to others. Critics believe it’s an excuse for what they see as science fiction’s otherwise particular conventionality in terms of language, feeling, plot, character, clichés.
These century-old arguments, clichés themselves, obscure the fact that genre is always an opportunity, not only for inventiveness of ideas but everything. Conventions of a genre - ways that a type of story has been told, and so is told - are like walls. They mark the shape of things and seem to close them off, but they’re also what can be climbed to get elsewhere. You can think of art-making then as a constant coming up against walls: being faced by a series of problems and finding solutions. Can Gravity make a space film feel wondrous after the end of the Space Age? What was the body-snatching story unable to do in the past, and what can Upstream Color do with it now? And how do you tell these stories so they have their fullest impact? With what language?
One of the first questions you need to ask when doing a story about humans and aliens is: will they understand each other’s language? Most stories take an easy (or efficient) way out: super-intelligent aliens condescend to use our Earth tongue; a limpet on the back of the neck allows psychic communication, and so on. The 2016 film Arrival didn’t look for a workaround but saw the problem as the point.
It told the story of Dr Banks (Amy Adams), a grieving mother and linguist recruited by the US Army to enter one of twelve giant ships that’d materialised around the Earth. Her mission, to translate a literally alien language so we could ask our visitors Why They Are Here.
The key to the alien, ‘Heptapod’ language was that it came in two forms, Heptapod A and Heptapod B. A was spoken, B written, or rather squirted from tentacles to hang in the air in circles of disintegrating toner dust. Circles, because Heptapod B was non-linear: a sentence in it had no beginning or end. And it was ideographic too: a circle could stand for a word, an idea, a whole circular story.
The more fluent Banks became in Heptapod B, the more she started to think like a Heptapod. Coming gradually through in reveries, she started to understand that the aliens’ objective was their language, because of how it changed your mind and so your perception of reality. To learn Heptapod was to experience past and future moments in your own timeline, out of order, as with your DMT-user or Tralfamadorian from Slaughterhouse-Five.
This gave the film its emotional pay-off: what we thought were flashbacks to Banks’s dead daughter were actually flashforwards to a daughter she’d not had yet with her new colleague Donnelly (Jeremy Renner). By knowing this, Banks could accept her fate with Vonnegutian ‘So it goes’ equanimity. Donnelly, we were told, would not. (Presumably he was less fluent in Heptapod B).
Communication, time, fate. These were the big ideas—so what did the film do with them?
Its first real moment of interspecies communication took place when a pair of Heptapods, who till then had been blaring through the glass at the non-plussed humans, interacted with Dr Banks, who appeared to be the first to think of trying visual as well as aural communication.
The Heptapods replied with the first of their Snapchat teacup-stains. Me Human, You Heptapod.
But what if the Heptapods had taken ‘HUMAN’ to be the name of the human holding the whiteboard in front of her like a badge? Or thought that ‘HUMAN’ was the label for the whiteboard, or this whiteboard in particular but not whiteboards in general? Or thought that ‘HUMAN’ meant the act of gesturing? Or more specifically ‘to gesture at a whiteboard’? Or more specifically still ‘to gesture at this whiteboard and not others, at this point in time, but not in general’? And all this and more would have to be considered when one of the Heptapods replied in kind. Not to mention whether it even was replying in kind. Maybe it had just told the humans to piss off.
Sketching out these complications is not to nitpick that the film’s initial moment of communication was implausible, but to regret the first of many missed opportunities. Banks herself alluded to these complications, placating her impatient boss Colonel Weber (Forest Whittaker) with a tall-tale about first contact in Australia, when the English asked the name of a certain animal and the Aborigines replied ‘Kangaroo’ (= ‘I don’t know’). Filmmakers don’t need the gulfs of space to generate mystery and wonder; even the gulf between two kinds of language can be enough.
Because language, like all the everyday parts of our world, is as pointlessly complicated as anything with a history. This is the meat and potatoes work of science fiction: taking a naturalised concept - not just the big abstracts of space, time and origin - but the textures of everyday existence, and through exaggeration, omission or recombination, defamiliarising them: the tradition of great art. How else might things change if we adjusted the parameters or our point of view? How much can change, be different, is possible: the ethic of art. Which ought to have its greatest champion in science fiction.
With respect to the Maude Lebowski Fallacy, I’d never demand a Hollywood blockbuster have esoteric lessons in linguistics. Even so, it’s worth considering how the communication in Arrival was suspiciously uncomplicated—between the aliens and humans, but also between the film and audience. But then the film came out of a different ethic entirely…
Nevertheless, Arrival is science fiction and we should treat it as such. It’s not using an otherworldly premise as a kind of poetic metaphor as with Melancholia or Another Earth. On the other hand, not all science fiction has to be ‘hard’, apologising for itself with maximal plausibility. Neither Snowpiercer’s social or train engineering are well worked out, but that doesn’t stop the film from being any good.
But what a film should pay attention to and how is not a quality that maps easily from film to film. Arrival’s other idea - that time is non-linear - was both treated without enough rigour and with too much caution. Fittingly for a story that looped around with time, Banks’s daughter was to be called Hannah. In case we didn’t get why, Banks explained to Hannah that her name was a palindrome. Then she explained palindromes. (I suppose Hannah could’ve been named ‘Race car’.) It was this worry that we might not get it - maybe not completely unfounded - that determined the rest of the way the palindromic idea got dramatised. The film used flashback-and-forwards, both sonically and visually, but glossed the device with a voiceover; otherwise, there was one major sequence where the past was caused by the future: on the verge of a panicked military-strike on the aliens, Banks recalled a moment from her future when the Chinese leader General Shang would have had told her his wife’s dying words (the weird tense is important). Back in the ‘present’, she relayed these words to him, proving something momentous but unwarlike was happening with the aliens and persuading him to stand his army down.
If this is as far as the idea was going to be taken, it remains a cliché of the genre. And you don’t need to be an aficionado to think so. The complaint isn’t that it’s already been done in a story in some obscure pulp magazine; only two years before, Interstellar relied on the same causal loop (or ‘bootstrap’) plot device. The rest of Arrival suggests it was down to a general lack of thoroughness: in a time-travel film where the changeability of events had been put front and centre, it would suit for a climax to be a tense gun chase; in Arrival, where the theme was peaceful fatalism, the same climax suggested the filmmakers didn’t understand the kind of story they were telling.
This was what Le Guin (again) warned of, when she wrote that a certain literary novelist dabbling in dystopia, “uses essential elements of a serious genre irresponsibly, superficially.” In Arrival’s case, we can add: obliviously.
What happens if we diminish these ideas even further? Without reference to them, how can we make the case Arrival is good science fiction film?
Lots of people cited the visuals, and it definitely has ‘a look’. Director Denis Villeneuve is a master pasticheur of cinematic impressionism: dreamy shallow focus, POV shots, thoughts and memories visualised at the point they occur to the character with warm-coloured inserts - call it Nolanese, or the Music Video High Style. Otherwise, the film’s serious themes came in those reliable forms of chilly lighting and stately dollies. (A challenge: make a serious film without using a dolly-track). Beyond this look, the film did little else. Apart from a sequence that followed an army helicopter and took us into the bizarro-gravity alien ship for the first time, Arrival looked like TV.
Unfair? At one point Banks, home alone, ended a foreshadowing call with her mother, and we watched their phone patter outro, for some reason. This might sound perniciously pernickety. But any thorough filmmaker would have a feel for when and why we ever need to see the ends of phone calls. Especially in a film that otherwise trades in a certain style, which is not realism where such a shot might linger. Take for example the closing scene of The Sopranos episode ‘A Guy Walks into a Psychiatrist’s Office’. We see Tony and Carmella make domestic chit-chat for a good two minutes, but it’s tense with subtext. The lesson being that nothing in art is intrinsically good or bad but how it’s used. Because where else do we otherwise see the goodbyes of phone calls? Soap operas.
Maybe in a sf film it’s less important how we see than what, the genre being an exhibition of the strange and new. The Heptapod alien design glimpsed through fog was original, and consistent too with the rest of the story, their radial structure matching their language signs, the same way our number of fingers might have led to our Base 10 counting system. On closer look the texture of the Heptapods seemed to be cut from the same skin as every other alien since the Star Wars prequels. As for their spacecraft, we saw in one of those Maximus ‘grazing fingers’ extreme close-ups that it was made of some kind of expensive kitchen-top. Arrival, Ex Machina, Westworld, Black Mirror: science fiction is stuck in its Granite and Hardwood period, as if to say these are grown-ups that no longer shop at Ikea—they shop at Habitat. Accordingly, the Heptapods picked up Banks near the end of the film in a sort of corporate art pseudolith, while the film itself began and ended at a lake-house, that symbol of troubled bourgeois contentment in everything from The Godfather Part II to What Lies Beneath.
Meanwhile, accompanying those bookending lake-house scenes was ubiquitous Max Richter weepy ‘On the Nature of Daylight’, used in everything from Hamnet to the YouTube supercut ‘Julianne Moore likes to Cry’ (which condenses all the times in films Julianne Moore has cried). The wider soundtrack too, by Jóhann Jóhannsson, was full of references: the drones and blarps of the trailers of Inception and Dr Strange but most of all the electronica artist Murcof.
At least beyond the look and the sound, Arrival had some great character actors, if not great characters. Forest Whittaker’s main deal was to sound like he’s from Bahston, Michael Stuhlbarg’s that he’s Michael Stuhlbarg. Their talents were put to speaking such action movie dialogue as “Give me 20 minutes!” / “We take off in 10.” Again there’s nothing wrong with such conventionalities: it’s that they jarred in a film that was otherwise so insistent on its seriousness. Early on, in a clever man’s glasses, Donnelly quoted Banks as saying language is the cornerstone of civilisation, to which he countered science is. Who talks this fatuously? And why set up such an intellectual opposition only to then not use it? In fact Donnelly’s character was pointless other than as a love interest and future father; I guess that’s progress for you. Even with that in mind, the two leads didn’t have chemistry so much as Renner continually giving shoulder-rubs in close-up. (Loud whisper: I think he likes you.) Meanwhile China was slightly ridiculously represented by General Shang (Tzi Ma) – “China’s Military Chief” (but why not also the Chairman / President? What was going on there?) - anyway, those warlike and suspicious Chinese went on communication blackout when they got spooked by a mistranslation suggesting the aliens had a weapon, only after which did the United States react in kind.
As conventional as that all was, the true peak (or drop) was when the alien ‘Costello’ (nicknamed after one half of the comedy duo, since pop-culture references from the past are classier) explained in Heptapod A to a recently conversant Banks where its partner had gone. The explanation was shown for the benefit of the audience in squid-inky subtitles: ABBOTT IS DEATH PROCESS. If we’re going to cheat, why not go the whole hog and have the alien say this in word-dropping foreignese, say an uncredited Cumberbatch performance.
Or to sum up in the words of Vulture.com: “Arrival’s Big Opening Weekend Is Great News for Fans of Original Filmmaking”… Villeneuve’s films since then: a Blade Runner sequel and the Dune re-adaptation.
So why was Arrival called, “a big, risky, showy movie”, a movie made “calmly, unfussily and with superb craft”, a “beautifully polished puzzle-box of a story whose emotional and cerebral heft should enable it to withstand nit-picky scrutiny.”
When there’s a consensus about a cultural product there’s usually something else going on. To apply some of that nit-picky scrutiny, it must partly to have been to do with the release date of the film: November 2016. Many reviewers put this front and centre: Arrival, with its message of reaching out to others over cultural barriers, with its portrayal of a resilient female hero, was consoling, circumstance turning the film into a Trump-l’œil that made people see a more substantial film than was really there.
Other people have their own bias for films that get made outside the studio process, which is not even expressed however by being more indulgent of them; even before we get to that, these films come pre-packaged with indie prestige. Take a cliché criticism of science fiction, in film maybe more than literature, but that you still get despite all the evidence and so is a kind of generic bigotry: that it lacks when it comes to character, feeling and art. Hence your discriminating reviewer, who’s glad for any science fiction that feels at once clever and humane. (“Yes, it’s set among space beasties, but it is a movie absolutely about the human condition.”) But despite suffering from those very lacks, Arrival was taken, in an amazing re-evaluation, as its total converse. How?
In Villeneuve’s previous film Sicario, Benicio Del Toro’s did an angry-boy Cormac McCarthy monologue about how the drug war was “a land of wolves now.” (No Land of Wolves for Old Men?) This effort to be taken seriously, this desire to be looked up to… Arrival was as hokey as any Doctor Who episode but it dressed smart, like someone who goes to a cosplay event in their own clothes. For though it strained tell us ‘it’s not like those other films’, by doing so it ended up belonging to another set: the kitsch of science fiction—or sfk, for the purists.
In sfk a story coasts on the fact that it’s semi-fantastical. As with others in this category - Midnight Special, Robot Frank, even Interstellar - the ideas are proud of their presence, as though simply being science fiction is audacious enough. Few surprises lay beyond that. The focus instead is on appearances: both the actual look and in the sense of an appearance of invention, an appearance of ambition. This is why sfk is usually glossy—to put a sheen over what is so often glib.
Films can and should use short-hand; the problem is when it’s used in the wrong places, and worse, without realising it’s glib and instead taken as artful. With Arrival, in case the relative weirdness of the first half spooked the audience, the film eased up with a montage in which Jeremy Renner’s character updated us on What We Know So Far. The film also ended where it began—but having a story about non-linear time go full-circle should be a first draft idea, not in your final version.
You often see sfk films described as mind-fuck movies (see the cottage industry in Ending Explainer videos that Arrival and its ilk have spawned). It’d be more accurate to call them mind-wank movies. And this is less of a cheap shot than it might sound: these films are safe, inward-looking, they repeat and reaffirm what you already know. And in the end it’s a bit disappointing.
In the coda of Arrival, Donnelly (rubbing Banks’s shoulder) told her he’d always been searching the stars but what surprised him most “wasn’t meeting Them… it was meeting you.” It’s important, though, to distinguish here between schmaltz and kitsch, since the confusion is one of the reasons why people will nod gratefully through a film like Arrival and groan at a film like Contact.
Contact was unashamedly schmaltzy. This had less to do with its much-maligned ‘daddy-god at the end of the universe’ climax than the earnestness of its Y2K culture war chit-chat coming from the outstandingly named Palmer Joss (Matthew McConaughey). Even so, Contact still surpassed Arrival as filmmaking (it knew how to tell its story regardless of how cheesy that story might seem). Because Zemeckis et al took the challenges of their ‘first contact’ premise head on. How to top the star-gate sequences of so many other sf films? How to credibly convey an incredible global event in the Age of Information? Newscasters doing grim announcements on fake TV channels had gotten too trite to be convincing any longer and yet Arrival opted for just that. (20 years before, Contact manipulated real news footage, with Jodie Foster’s character digitally inserted into Bill Clinton press conferences.)
By no means did all of Contact’s solutions work but at least it tried. With Arrival, we went backwards. By making sure via its sound and production design that we wouldn’t think of it as schmaltz, it missed the point that the value of a sf film can’t be just its ‘sophistication’. The ending of Close Encounters of the Third Kind had a simple message to the point of homily (first contact will be magical not scary). But its climax was artistic, cinematic, symbolically so, depicting a human audience in a dim space dazzled by sound and images. (And you might want to go Full Adorno and say this is a Bad Thing, but it’s undeniably a formal exercise).
The question all science fiction filmmakers should ask themselves today is will they tackle constraints beyond the logistical? In other words, is the only task the filmmaker faces to ‘get their film made’, especially in the current market?
Tackling logistical and market constraints can itself be part of the artistic process. The initial question of Coherence must have been how to make an ultra-low-budget film, set in technically one real location, and still be great science fiction (and a film that, without giving too much away, marries its idea with its execution). Having to strive in the same market as Arrival, the films Ex Machina and Under the Skin weren’t perfect but still superior, because they did something with and for the genre. (They crossed genres, subverted them, though the latter isn’t the same as shunning them.) Ex Machina might’ve seemed like a standard men-talk-ideas-in-rooms set-up, but it played with those very (and gendered) expectations; meanwhile Under the Skin, to start with at least, fulfilled director Jonathan Glazer’s stated objective “to keep it alien.”
Speaking of gendered expectations, Arrival settled for another convention: that of a serious female character needing to have some traumatic past (whereas a man can simply be serious). The convention was exploited to accomplish the sleight of hand that made us think she was grieving over a daughter who it was later revealed didn’t exist yet.
This playing with cinematic tense was where Arrival had its most potential. There’s an obvious link between the film’s ideas about non-linear time and the non-linearity of film itself. All films are experienced in the present tense. We can know from convention that flashbacks are set at a different point in time to the main plot, but this a convention that’s so naturalised that you forget that it had to be learned. There was a time when watching mountaineers under an avalanche then watching them test their climbing gear at home, you’d think— well how did they escape? So, while films might ‘be’ in the present tense, they’re also not intrinsically linear. And you can depict non-linearity because scenes and shots can be omitted, repeated, shown from different angles and perspectives; a film can even be understood running backwards. (It takes a lot more effort to do this with written language, especially when you don’t speak Heptapod B.)
You might worry that a film playing even more fast and loose with order and cause-and-effect wouldn’t be possible, let alone watchable. But think of what fun you could have with a character who starts to experience different moments in their own timeline. But in Arrival we had the same device repeated: inserts with an explanation via voiceover. Imagine it used instead things as simple as multiple images, dissolves, split-screens, Enter the Void style morphs. Or younger and older actors playing the same part within a same scene. Or a scene itself occupying two moments of space-time via merged sets, as briefly in Cloud Atlas. Or a character leaving a scene at one point in their history then entering a scene at another. Science fiction is not hostile or indifferent to creativity and artistry; if anything, it should be ideal for them.
A working definition of art: the appearance of excess that is in fact a total control. In The Red Shoes the ballet fantasia sequence keeps going longer than what is functional, than what you’d ‘reasonably’ expect. This excess doesn’t have to be taken literally (longer tracking shots, vaster production design). Nor does it have to mean elaboration. Arrival has a subplot in which an unnamed soldier is alarmed by the Heptapods, radicalised by YouTube, and finds accomplices to try and blow-up the aliens. Compare this with a similar subplot in Contact; in that film, the man who tries to disrupt alien contact through bombs is teased throughout. But he isn’t more fully realised because he has more screen-time—he is given dramatic attention by being presented as a third axis in the film’s cold science/ humanistic faith opposition: he is the fanatically religious Luddite. (In Arrival, the mutineering soldier is nothing but Fear.)
The appearance of excess is simply when you go beyond the received wisdom of how something is meant to be, its formula or form—in other words, formal invention. The word ‘formal’ shouldn’t be taken to apply only at the macro level (say like a time-travel film told as a self-correcting documentary; a novel about future mental illnesses told as the DSM-XXVIII). It can also take place at the micro level, a form’s devices, a genre’s tropes, literally everything that constitutes the work.
Doing something formally inventive is different to just being original. Arrival could be called ‘original filmmaking’ because of its surface-level difference to bigger studio science fiction films. At the same time, it’s not that Arrival should instead have been cowed by its debts to Contact, Close Encounters, The Day the Earth Stood Still etc.—these debts are as inevitable as any history. It’s that the history of the genre isn’t something to repeat or homage but to use: to justify that history and to revitalise that genre.
Genres exist across art-forms. They’re realised through formal elements - science fiction in film is told through cinematic techniques and devices - and so are subject to the material history of a form: in the past certain stories couldn’t be told the way they can be now. But genres, as concepts, are less materially constrained than forms. A film can’t be a billion hours long (yet), but a science fiction story can use the devices of its given form to try and tell a billion hours.
It’s through lacking historical perspective that criticism itself becomes conventional, resting on useless false binaries: in film, studio versus indie; in literature, realism versus experimentalism (as though there’s never been innovative realism or a complacent avant garde); and in whichever narrative form, the ‘marketing category’ of genre versus ‘authentic’ art. But the trap of this way of framing things doesn’t fall into place until Establishment Modernism reminds you all art-forms are exhausted anyway. There’s nothing left to do! So any residual desire for invention has to come from the market, from a pathetic anxiety of being out of date or the vanity of wanting to do something first.
But what if that was all true, but at the same time it was an act of freedom?
Realising a limit is not insurmountable but something that can be transcended, a problem that might be solved, is - in art, as in life - a kind of freedom: expansiveness, new space to move. And so an artwork can be, in a science fiction way, a tinker-toy model of what is possible. Yet it’s never enough; each form becomes a formula, the new space builds its own walls, and the walls become naturalised. Until the arrival of history and the artist to take apart this next so-called ‘natural’ state of affairs.
Despite this historical process, the future of science fiction isn’t inevitable. How could it be? It’s made by humans. That potential, though, is always there. If science fiction is to be for anything, it’s to show in form and content what is still and always possible.
Science fiction, to end on one last cliché, often gets compared to a hallucinogenic drug. And if films can be mind-altering too, how much more potent for the climax of Arrival to have been a real coup-de-cinema. Its story of how our languages, our concept of time, even our fear of death and loss aren’t natural facts but artifices that can be dismantled and restructured into something better, told through a genre and form that are themselves made up of conventions and limits that can be dismantled and restructured—this should’ve been such a fortune, in the many senses of that word. To put it another way, Arrival should have changed our minds.
This piece first appeared at Pornokitsch (RIP). Thanks again to Jared.