Mini-Cast #16: Re-Arrival - Part IV - Two Thirds

Warning: Here be massive spoilers.

So what then... what has arrived in Arrival?

Like I said last week, it's not a great movie by the metrics of Sarris and Kaufmann, or even Kael, but those film critiques were critiquing for another era more influenced by old notions, they wouldn't have understood the future - even if I wonder whether many of their of the literary predecessors weaned on Milton and Blake would have. Many reviewers thought the movie ineffably moving and human - moving it absolutely is, it seems to levitate from beginning to end in a state of grace almost Christian. But human? Most definitely not. Even the surprises are unsurprising, the characters behave not as human beings but servants to plot devices. But what a plot...

In the face of a plot this overwhelmingly mystical, the kind of fully realized and evolving characters one gets in Ozu and Altman would only get in the way. The point of movies like this is not the people, but the metaphysical states of mind to which people are capable of ascending.

What makes Arrival much more than a mere gimmick is not the twist ending, it's the nature of the idea it posits. An idea whose baroque grandeur is matched by the romantic magnificence of the visual way it conveys it.

The aliens in Arrival, the squid-like heptopods, communicate with a three-dimensional alphabet written in the vaporous ink they secrete, an alphabet that looks much like Eastern calligraphy. Like Chinese and Japanese, their written language is pictographic, but the pictographs are so nuanced that when computers processes the data of their language, each word comes up with the potential to mean a relative infinity of words, because as it turns out, their pictographs are so complex that each letter conveys an entire sentence. A particularly knowledgeable listener will immediately hear the kinship in this idea to what's probably the most famous story by Jorge Luis Borges, Tlön Uqbar Orbis Tertius. But this idea takes this Borgesian concept to its next logical step, and discovers a visual style to match its vastly magnified sublimity.

When we first see the aliens, they appear to us not as a sudden jerk of surprise to inspire fear, but these grey beings gradually appearing to us from the ether, even on the second largest screen in the whole city, we can barely perceive their outline over a period of two minutes the cinematography gradually makes their outlines distinguishable from a grey and cloudy mist. We don't know if we're su  supposed to fear these beings, but they are awesome and terrifying. They are as unfathomable to us as the divine.

As we begin to learn about them, their unknowability only increases. the stoicism of these beings seems eternal and unchangeable. They wait with seemingly infinite patience for a human to begin processing an understanding of their nature. Because it is not only the appearance and communication that is different from ours, it is the nature of their identity, and their very consciousness. These are not individual beings but a single collective being whose physical touch is part of its own language. By a mere touch, it can communicate the nature of this eternally consciousness to a linguist like Amy Adams's character who like us all cannot process memories except backwards. So therefore their memories are not only of the past, but of the future. They do not move through time, they experience all time but the present simultaneously, their memories being of both future and past.

This is science fiction, and very much fiction, but this is not science as we generally understand it, with its generally incontrovertible physical material. The philosophy and science this movie deals in is neither astronomy nor linguistics, it's metaphysics, and a metaphysician or a philosopher specializing in time and memory, trained in Plato and Kant and Heidegger and Bergson would probably be much better equipped to appreciate this movie than any linguist or scientist whose training would prevent them from understand that there may be states of being out there which transcend the scientific laws upon which they've based their life's work.