When Arrival came out in 2016, audiences were lead to believe essentially one thing about it - that its about alien first contact, somewhere between 1997’s Independence Day and 1977’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind. But Arrival turned out to be so much more than this. A fact revealed in the film’s beginning as it depicts with great emotion Dr. Louis Banks memory of her daughter’s birth… life… and tragic young death. Causing us to wonder what relationship might there be between Louise' memory and the film’s advertised arrival. If you’ve seen the film, you’ll know the answer. And yet it appears director Denise Villeneuve has left something even more significant for us to find in repeat viewings, something which explains, for instance, why he wanted the film’s spaceship to stand oddly balanced in this way, contrary to the way spaceships have typically been depicted in film. It’s in this ship that, of course, the heart of Arrival takes place, as Louise comes to perform her central role as a linguist, deciphering the language of the Heptapods in order to ask and then answer for the world why they are here. And it’s here in the ship that she discovers the visual key to decoding their language. Whereas we, humans, communicate in a line, one word at a time, moving from beginning to end, the Heptapod’s communicate in a circle, expressing their thoughts all at once, in a form with neither beginning nor end. Which means the Heptapods also differ from humans in their relationship to time. Humanity’s written line matches the way we see time. We experience each moment, one after another, the past known, the present becoming known and the future not yet being known, a one-way experience known as the arrow of time. But the complete wholeness of the Heptapod’s circle indicates that for them past, present and future are all equally known and or remembered. And this is what Louise comes to experience as she learns their language. At first, Louise struggles with the memories of her daughter’s life and death... but as Louise comes to more fully understand their language, the film reveals that the past (the memories we’re shown at the beginning of the film) is, in fact, the future, as Louise realizes she now remembers her future like her part. By coming to think as the Heptapods, Louise has transcended the arrow of time, remembering the whole of her life even as she continues to live out the present. The film’s plot is circular, coming full circle in the end, where Louise chooses to embrace all the joys and sorrows of the life she now knows she will live. But Louise’s ability to mentally travel to the future by learning a new language isn’t meant to be taken literally. The title’s appearance here at the end, for the first time on screen, invites us to watch the film again. Though the film connects the title Arrival to the Arrival of the Heptapod’s, in the end, we find it’s only appearing in this place traditionally reserved for the words The end.” Thus, ending the film with this punch of a more profound meaning. Arrival is more than about the coming of the Heptapods its about OUR Arrival in seeing the film through to its conclusion, the complete whole, by which, in hindsight, we see the film’s true meaning. For instance, watching Arrival the first time, we couldn’t see any meaning in THIS shot of Louise walking in a circle after the death of her daughter and it being juxtaposed with this shot of her walking a straightline in the very next scene. But watching the film a second time, we recognize the theme later developed in the film as it foreshadows Louise’s transition from linear to circular thinking, a meaning which we can now see as we've undergone Louise’s same transition, remembering the end from the very beginning. In watching the film a second time, we’ve come to see Arrival as Louise has learned to see her life, experiencing the true significance of each moment in light of our knowledge and connection to the whole. The Heptapod’s language and logogram represents this whole, the key to meaning and interpretation which philosophers refer to as the Hermeneutic circle. The whole defines the meaning of its parts even as the parts define the meaning of the whole. For instance, If I say the word “hand”, its natural, given our past experience, to assume I’m referring to the most common meaning of that word in our language. But “hand”, depending on the words which follow it, may, in the end, reveal that I meant something else, like help or applause. That’s because there’s no automatic relationship between a sound or written symbol and the meaning it’s intended to convey. The same symbol, like hand, may have any number of meanings which only the connections of a complete context reveal. And we see this also at work in film. In my last video on Memento I discussed the Kuleshov Effect, how we instinctively understand the meaning of an image by the image which comes after it, even as we understand the last image by the one that came before. Whole and part of a text are working simultaneously together to form a texts true meaning. Which means to truly understand the meaning of any part we have to first come to know the whole. One of the ways Arrival shows us our need for the whole is found in the international crisis created by the Heptapod’s Arrival. Though the film focus’ on Louise’s experience in one ship, we’re told the Heptapod’s have landed in a total of 12 ships, leading the 12 nations in which the Heptapods have landed to come together to share and learn from one another, a unity which the film represents in these 12 video feeds. But when just enough of the Heptapods language is learned to finally ask them their purpose. The answer is understood as “offer weapon.” Leading the nations to quickly disconnect from one another out of fear. The Heptapod’s sign for purpose has been translated through the lens of past human experience. But Louise believes she needs more information to know exactly what the Heptapod’s mean. She returns to the ship and asks to receive what they’re offering. And in this highly symbolic moment, Louise is invited to write along with them their language on the screen. Here she experiences even more flashes of future memory before at last being shown this cloud of signs. You might have noticed this but clouds appear everywhere in Arrival. From the introduction to the ship, to the atmosphere in which Heptapod’s reside and finally to the title’s appearing in the end. But it’s in this particular cloud, that we learn why. The cloud’s empty or incomplete space reveals that the language Louise has learned thus far is incomplete. The Heptapods have limited the world’s present understanding by portioning out the whole of their language across the 12 ships. Requiring the nations to bring their respective parts together in order to understand precisely what each of their symbols mean. And yet the meaning of these 12 parts isn’t only about unifying the nations. 12 also represents a clock, in other words the parts and whole of time. Just as the nations must come together to completely understand this language, so Louise must piece together her life’s unfolding timeline Time in Arrival is being compared to a language. And it’s this metaphor which explains how Louise comes to know the future. the language you speak determines how you think. According to the Sapir-Worf hypothesis, the language we speak is none other than hermeneutic whole by which we interpret everything. Yeah, it effects how you see everything. The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein famously put it this way: the limits of my language means the limits of my world.” The Language we speak is the whole of what we know, the boundaries by which we interpret the world around us. But if we think about it, the limits of our present language are really the limits of our memory, our present experience of time, as we know our language and its meaning only by the accumulation of experiences which hold together in our minds. Thus to grow in our experience of time, adding new moments to our memory, is to be in a real and figurative sense learning a new language, a new way of seeing the world. Language is the result of experience, and therefore learning a new language, even an alien language can’t literally cause Louise to remember a future she hasn’t yet lived. But she can know the future in the way we sometimes know what’s going to happen next and that’s when we remember or re-experience something we’ve already lived. Like watching a film again. It’s no accident that the Heptapod’s circular language echoes Arrival’s circular plot. Just as it’s no accident that the screen upon which the Heptapods write their language looks like a typical theater… Where language was seen as an expression of Art The language of the Heptapod’s is the language of film and memory and the language of Arrival itself. Denise Villeneuve has taught us the language of film through Louise experience within this film. The time-consuming and often confusing process of learning a new language is the same process by which we learned the story and meaning of Arrival. And it’s this same process by which we are, right now, moving towards the meaning of life. The Heptapod’s ship symbolizes the whole of Louise’s life. This is the reason Denise Villeneuve wanted this spaceship to stand contrary to convention. In it, he alludes back to 2001: A Space Odyssey, and more specifically the mysterious black monolith that appears suddenly and without explanation throughout that film. The monolith in 2001 repeatedly appears before great leaps in human evolution: the dawning of man… man’s movement into space… and finally to Dave just before his death… and rebirth. Stanley Kubrick, 2001’s director, would later explain in interviews that the monolith is the technology of an advanced alien race, guiding humanity through its evolution. And in that, he said, it symbolized his view of God. God, for Kubrick, wasn’t so much the anthropomorphic… personal diety… of western religion but an abstract mystery, a doorway, concealing and yet also revealing the answers to life. Inside the ship, we’re shown Louise arriving at the end of life. The light at the end of a tunnel is an image often associated with death. Just as the memories Louise sees through the circle on the screen echoes the memories of life which are commonly said to flash before the eyes of the dying. And it’s in this the same way, Louise’s fear and trembling before the alien Heptapod’s represents an after-life encounter with God, the Beginning and the End. Hey, thanks so much for your patience. I know it’s been a while since my last video. I hope you can see, Arrival is so close to what this channel is all about that I wanted to do this video justice. Thanks to Brian Christopherson of Legend Point Media. This is the first Logos Made Flesh video with its own original score. And as always, a big thank you to my Patrons who also had their hand in making this video and all the videos you see on this channel. Got a lot of videos up on the channel already, with a lot more to come. So subscribe and hit that bell for notifications.
