Arrival
/
amy adams
jeremy renner
Language is the foundation of civilization. It is the glue that holds a people together. It is the first weapon drawn in a conflict.
~ Louisa Banks
quick fox: A | Silver
winding dragon
There’s an old parable I first heard back in elementary school called the “Blind Men and an Elephant.” It has numerous adaptations (it originates from India), though the basic story is about six blind men who come into contact with an elephant. One touches the leg and thinks it’s a pillar; another holds the tail and says it’s a rope; one believes the trunk is a tree branch; the fourth is sure the ear is a fan; the next man mistakes the stomach for a wall; and the last feels the tusk and knows it must be a pipe of some sort.
Versions differ, sometimes the men all devolve into long-winded argumentation or violence, but the main lessen drawn from the parable is the subjectivity of truth among individuals. The irony in the parable is that all are correct and mistaken at the same time—what they touch does indeed feel what they assume it to be, but their physical and metaphorical blindness prevents each man from realizing that their perspective is only a small portion of a larger picture, or in this case, the elephant.
This story popped into my head after watching Arrival because it’s a film that explores human response to the unknown. The difference here is that the proverbial “elephant in the room” is the arrival of an alien species known as heptapods. They come in 12 black spacecrafts (that kind of reminded me of giant contact lenses) scattered across the globe, which naturally leads to a worldwide panic. Looters take to the streets; the stock market crashes; governments call for emergency lockdowns and militarization; and everywhere everyone asks the same question: “Why are they here?” Linguist Louise Banks (Amy Adams) is brought to a makeshift military base in Montana and is teamed up with theoretical scientist Ian Donnelly (Jeremy Renner) to try to figure out how to communicate with the heptapods.
I want to try and avoid discussing the story beyond that, because for those of you who haven’t already heard, Arrival has a brilliant plot twist that completely changes your viewing experience if you have that spoiled beforehand. Everything is connected—even dialogue or scenes that appear trivial slowly builds to the climax and once that moment strikes, the audience is able to see how those individual pieces form together. It’s a very fitting way for this film to present itself, as it matches Louise Banks’s objective of constructing a communication method with the heptapods through dissection of language.
What I love most about Arrival is that it begins with the initial premise of aliens landing on Earth, and branches out from there to examine how people would react. We have some people who go into a blind panic—on the political, militaristic, and local levels—and take preemptive measures, but it’s never completely unjustified. China, for example, goes rogue on the world and mobilizes for an offensive attack against the aliens, but at the back of my mind was sympathy for the situation. They have language barriers and the uncertainty of the heptapod’s motivations, and the threat of an intergalactic war is imminent regardless of what China does or not. At the same time, it was a cautionary tale for anybody in the film trying to take the first shot, and the potential aftermath that might cause.
The issue of choice in an impossible situation drives the characters. Some of these choices are incredibly momentous on a global scale, while others are much more personal. Arrival is a discussion of human perspective; how letting go of the elephant’s tail or a heptapod’s tentacle and feeling another part changes your view on the world forever.