Arrival arrived into theatres this last weekend, and moviegoers generally paid it heed. Due to overwhelmingly positive reviews, it snagged the third spot in opening weekend, losing only to Marvel’s Doctor Strange and Fox’s Trolls. Arrival stars Amy Adams, Jeremy Renner, and Forest Whitaker. It’s a sci-fi thriller from director Denis Villaneuve, a love-him-or-hate-him auteur who thrives in the “thriller” genre but is new to “sci-fi.”
The film centers on an alien “arrival.” Twelve vessels land across the globe, and each nation employs its best language experts to try and communicate with the visitors. We experience this endeavor through experts played by Amy Adams and Jeremy Renner, who both turn in some of their career-best performances. Adams and Renner are the United States’ representatives who are tasked with discovering the motives of the visitors – to ask them, “Why are you here?”
Arrival plays its cards close to the chest, waiting until its third act to show its hand. Much like Villaneuve’s Sicario, the final act of the movie takes the audience in an unexpected. It would truly be a shame to spoil it, as the payoff and the surprise are one of the most rewarding parts of this movie and are integral to its affect. This movie is, after all, begging or interpretation, much like the film’s aliens. But Villaneuve avoids being heavy-handed by having a delicate touch and by heightening the stakes. This is truly not a knock on the movie, which appears for most of its run time to be a simple parable before opening up and becoming magnificently complex and leaving you with a haunting sense that it might stay with you for a while and cause some fruitful discussion.
Arrival contains plenty of interesting themes that are made clear even in the trailers. In short, this movie is about language and translation. Amy Adams’ character Louise is brought in not because she is the foremost scholar in language, but because she has a particular view of studying language. She believes that language is the foundation of any society, in both a creating and limiting capacity. A society’s language shapes their identity and culture in an unmistakable way. When the US military considers another translator, she tells them to ask him the Sanskrit word for “war.” When they return, she confirms to them that the Sanskrit word for “war” literally means “the desire for more cows.” Louise is chosen for the mission because of her nuanced understanding of how language shapes us, not just how we shape language.
As the various countries deal in their own way with translating the aliens’ language and communicating with them, they start to arrive at different conclusions. We learn that some cultures do not have different words for “weapon” and “tool,” which becomes a stumbling block when trying to discern the motives of the visitors. The point here is endlessly fascinating: how does language shape and limit our ability to imagine, especially with those who are completely different from us? I thought of the old saying, “The Inuits have 50 words for snow.” How limited is our capacity in English to talk about and think about snow, versus the Inuit language, which allows for nuanced, detailed conversations about it? How much is their relationship to their physical world different from ours?
In the movie, one country uses a game to communicate with the aliens, and Louise remarks that if the only form of communication is competition, than the only imaginable outcomes are that one side will win, and another will lose. If you frame a conversation as adversarial, will it not be impossible for an outcome to be a win/win? Interestingly, it is only here that the movie veers into a bit of American exceptionalism – we are, of course, the ones going about it the right way, with some hiccups, while other countries are the aggressors. If this movie were made somewhere else, perhaps we Americans might be the ones pushing the plot forward with our impatience and tendency toward overreaction. Nonetheless, the movie suggests that different languages, and by extension cultures, create realities that limit possible outcomes.
One word I’ve heard lately more than any other time in my life is the word “rhetoric.” Think of all the language of this election season: “bad hombres,” “deplorables,” “WRONG!” The accusations of racism, elitism, xenophobia, etc. all came from the language that surrounded the candidates themselves and that we in turn repeated back at each other. We are all probably ready for the “divisive rhetoric” to be over. And yet, it remains and has amplified even since election day. The language we’ve spent decades cultivating around elections, candidacies, and politics in general has limited our imaginations and our possibilities. We all heard something like this during the election: “Whoever wins, we lose.” Our political rhetoric has created a limited set of possible realities, and none of them were hopeful.
As Christians, we may too often forget that we have our own language, a totally different vocabulary. Words like grace, joy, love, sin, hope, peace, judgment, God, atonement, sacrifice, baptism, Eucharist… These are words that either don’t exist in popular culture or take on different meanings when uttered amongst God’s people. We have an entire rhetoric of our own that we forget to use in the real world, out of which it first came to describe the truth that God is making all things new. Perhaps we Christians are guilty of not using our shared language enough and falling for the limiting, divisive rhetoric of the culture at large instead of the language of love. It’s a tragedy, after all, not only that Republicans and Democrats fail to communicate, but that conservative and liberal Christians are similarly unable to find common ground. The Table of God is big enough for all, and our language should reflect that as we engage in the toughest conversations. May we let our language be filled with faith, hope, and love. And may we then begin the work of translating to our culture, bringing our language of hope into a culture of division. Arrival, then, serves to remind us of the importance of language and the way it limits us, shapes us, and provides opportunities for true connection.