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 critics judged for another era of cinema more influenced by vestigial literary notions from a pre-cinematic age, they wouldn't have understood this neo-romantic future - based on the metaphysics of the scientific age, though I truly wonder if many of their of the literary predecessors weaned on Milton and Spencer and Blake would understand it better than they. 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 to which our minds 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 the twist ending posits - an idea whose baroque grandeur is matched by the romantic magnificence of the visual way it's conveyed.
The aliens in Arrival, the squid-like heptopods, communicate with a three-dimensional alphabet written on the air by 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 process the data of their language, each word seems to have potential to mean a dozen words, and the reason why is that their alphabet is so complex that each letter often seems to convey 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 in a sudden jerk of surprise to elicit a fearful reaction; rather, these grey beings gradually appear to us from an even grayer ether. Even on the second largest screen in the whole city, we can barely perceive their outline over a period of two minutes as the cinematography ever so gradually makes their outlines distinguishable from the cloudy mist. We don't know if we're supposed to fear these beings, but they are awesome and terrifying - 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 assimilate an understanding of their nature, and wait a while they must, because it is not only their appearance and communication that's different from ours, it is the nature of their identity and their very consciousness. The essence of their language would seem to be different at the root of consciousness itself. Even a linguist as capable as Amy Adams's character is no different than the rest of us, no human can process their memories except backwards; but Heptopod memories are not only of the past, but of the future. They do not move through time, they experience all time in present simultaneously, so therefore their memories are of both past and future. So just as advanced conceptual mathematics allows people to conceive of the world in vastly more complex terms, mastery of a language this complex allows people to conceive of the world in manners so much more complex than they'd be able to perceive without this language, so that by mastering it, one can literally predict the future. The last time I have been so awed by the conceptual thinking of a movie was twenty years ago in Darren Aronofsky's movie, Pi, in which a Jewish mathematician realizes he is on the verge of discovering a mathematical equation with a 216 digit answer that would allow him to discover the complete name of Yahweh.
This is all science fiction, and very much fiction. In no way should any of this be taken as science as we understand science, with its generally incontrovertible physical material. The philosophy and science this movie deals in is neither astronomy nor linguistics, it's metaphysics, pure philosophy, and probably not that complex either, as far as philosophy goes. But a metaphysician or a philosopher specializing in time and memory, trained in Plato and Kant and Heidegger and Bergson, would be much better equipped to appreciate this movie than any linguist or scientist whose training would prevent them from understanding that there may be states of being out there which transcend the scientific laws upon which they've based their life's work.
How similar the study of language and science is is a debate for another day, and a concept sloppily introduced at the beginning of the movie yet barely touched upon for the rest. But the promise which both fields of study hold out for us is transcendent possibility - the promise that eventually we will gather sufficient sufficient amounts of hard information, it will so upend some field of study, be it metaphysics, or metasemantics, or epistemology, or eternalism, that the entirety of humanity's consciousness will metamorphose into shapes of which our current selves cannot possibly conceive. For more than two thousand years, this was the transcendent possibility of the monotheistic divine. It's now the transcendent possibility of the science. Science is the first hard proof humans ever got that the extraordinary is possible on earth, caused by us rather than inexplicable invisible forces. Our ancestors strove to attain what they thought of as the divine kingdom, but with every new scientific development, we do not just come closer to the Kingdoms of Heaven and Hell, we can become them, we can bring the Kingdoms of Heaven and Hell to Earth, and while we still seem quite far away from understanding their consequences of the miracles we wrought, we can very much wrought feats which would have been thought divine miracles just two-and-a-half centuries ago. These possibilities are thoroughly exciting, and incredibly dangerous, but in an age when human ability to acquire information is compounded to the nth degree of the nth, we cannot possibly fathom just how much and quickly humans may begin to change. Human concept of eternity used to be an unchanging state, but eternity is now a state of eternal change and flux. Eternity has re-arrived to the human condition in reciprocal form to the previous eternity. No longer will science seem like something humans control. For better or worse, it is mankind's new god. By learning so much more about the world and the universe than we were ever capable of before mechanical computing, we have uncovered so many unknowabilities and will uncover so many more. The eternal, the mystical, the transcendent possibilities, have re-arrived to the human experience, but this time, the material that is transcended is not the divine, it is the material itself.
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