I'll focus on the opening misdirection: we think Louise is a bereaved mother, and that this explains her apparent moodiness and disconnection from other people. We’re introduced to this warm, loving character, bonding with her daughter across many years, and then we see her left in a state of desolation following the daughter’s death. She walks alone, with her back to us, along what appears to be a circular hospital corridor. The image implies that she’s trapped in a cycle of perpetual grief and isolation, and that she has turned her back on the human race, so that when we next see her – ignoring the crowd in front of the TV, delivering a lecture to a nearly empty theatre – we assume that this is a formerly loving, affectionate person, driven by grief to alienate herself from other people. In short, this looks like
Up (or any number of lesser Hollywood tearjerkers), and we expect the film to chart Louise’s reluctant re-emergence into the land of the living, facilitated in some way by the arrival of the aliens.
As a couple of posters have noted, on a second viewing we can read her behaviour as indicative of loneliness and even depression, but I think it goes deeper than that. Louise, as it turns out, is a difficult and somewhat cold person. She tends to act alone, without communicating with others, and although she creates and accomplishes wonderful things (her daughter, figuring out the heptapods’ langauge, saving the human race, winning Ian’s love, etc.), she also tends to drive people away. Her grief over the loss of her daughter does not trigger a temporary hiatus in her capacity to love. If anything, it is the time she has with Ian and Hannah that represents the hiatus in her life: she was alone before this, and will be alone afterwards. Unlike in Chiang’s story there is no reference to a second husband. The shot of Louise walking along the hospital corridor is, chronologically, the ending of the film. While it doesn’t insist that she will
always be alone, and while we still have a sense that the heptapod/Ian/Hannah experience has transformed and opened her up emotionally, Louise’s personality – both her capacity for warmth and love and her difficulty in connecting and communicating with others – is integral to the future she foresees, to the successes and failures of her relationships with both Ian and Hannah.
This is an important idea to bear in mind when discussing the film’s treatment of free will and determinism, as matrix and Sausage were a couple of pages ago. The future may be pre-determined, but our choices are still dictated by our character. Louise and Ian have certain personality traits that suit them to the roles they play in the heptapod encounter, and to the unfolding of their lives afterwards.
Louise says at one point, ‘Trust me, you can understand communication and still end up single.’ She is cagy and withdrawn when talking to people. She has a bad relationship with her mother (echoes of
Enemy here): we only hear Louise’s side of that phone conversation, and it seems to suggest that the mother is both needy and over-solicitous, a burden on Louise who needs to be repeatedly reassured and comforted (‘how many times must I tell you not to watch that channel?’), but in whom Louise cannot confide. If this were a healthier relationship, the film’s central mystery would be ruined from the outset, because instead of saying ‘you know me, I’m about the same... Mom, I’m fine...’, Louise would talk to her mother about her personal life and we would find out that she simply hasn’t managed to form a sustained connection with anyone yet – that she hasn’t yet had children. This one detail says a lot about how and why the film misleads us in these early scenes. It’s not just holding back information so there can be a twist later – it needs us to understand that holding back information is something Louise habitually does, and perhaps that this stems from a troubled childhood.
When Louise first meets Ian, he has to tell her to put the headphones on so she can hear and speak to him. He has read her book, and engages with it – he initiates their professional and personal relationships, and it’s not entirely clear whether she ever comes to love him as much as he does her, or whether on some level she uses him to get a daughter. Maybe Ian leaves her, and resents Hannah, because he realises he’s been used; maybe she tells him about the disease because she sort of wants him to realise this, and to leave her. I’m not suggesting that she’s simply cold and manipulative. When Ian declares his love for her, he does it by saying that she was the most ‘surprising’ thing about the entire heptapod experience. Louise is surprising, and brilliant, and the saviour of humanity; and one of the surprising things about her is that despite seeming so cold and detached, she ends up being such a loving mother. Maybe she didn’t get that love from her own mother, and therefore seizes the chance to do better when she has a daughter of her own. But this ‘surprising’ aspect of her character is double-edged.
Louise’s effective but dysfunctional mode of communication is manifested several times. She makes up the ‘kangaroo’ story to manipulate Weber (‘it’s not true, but it proves my point’ – in the short story she uses this anecdote in lectures but then tells the students it isn’t true). She goes rogue in the spaceship without discussing her plans with anyone, and on a first viewing we might think this indicates that she is so grief-stricken she doesn’t value her life anymore (‘everybody dies’, Ian says significantly, before following her lead and taking off his hazmat suit), but in fact it underlines her aloofness and presumption. Stupid as the bomb-subplot is, it’s important to note that Louise’s impulsive, unexplained behaviour exacerbates the soldiers’ anxiety, and makes them more ready to let her die when she decides to go back into the ship; it’s sort of understandable that they see her as part of the problem. Ultimately, her withholding of information from Ian, and her habit of making decisions on her own, will destroy their marriage, and might even taint her relationship with her daughter (when Hannah screams ‘I hate you!’, is this more than a teenage temper tantrum?). Perhaps the heptapods chose her as the recipient of their gift precisely because she is both a brilliant, independent-minded linguist – and therefore capable of learning an alien language – and an innately un-communicative person who can therefore be trusted with knowledge of the future.
Chiang’s story discusses the free will issue in more depth, but (typically for a short story) it doesn’t allow for much character development. There, Louise wonders whether her over-solicitous behaviour drove Hannah to pursue rock-climbing as a hobby, thus ultimately causing her death, and we get some hints that theirs was a complex mother/daughter relationship (she finds her daughter ‘maddeningly not me, not someone I could have created on my own’, hinting that she might have been happier if Ian’s input hadn’t been required), but there isn’t space to flesh any of this out. In
Arrival, Louise can’t blame herself for Hannah’s terminal illness, but there is a stronger causal relationship between the person we get to know in the course of the film and the events and actions that define her life.
There are a few things to say about Ian as well. In his first scene with Louise, he argues that ‘the cornerstone of civilisation isn’t language, it’s science’. This tells us that he is as fixated on science (i.e. knowledge) as Louise is on language, hence Weber’s comment, ‘that’s why you’re both here’ – they balance each other out. But in a nice extension of this idea, Ian’s flaws mirror those of Louise: it turns out that he is as bad at dealing with the knowledge he acquires as she is at communicating. Although he knows that ‘everybody dies’, this is precisely the fact he won’t be able to come to terms with when he learns of Hannah’s illness. He says that if he knew exactly how his life would pan out he might express his feelings more readily, hinting at his incompatibility with the more repressed Louise. Unlike her, he will not be able to control his grief over Hannah’s impending death, and so will not be such a good, loving parent as Louise is (this is partly taken from the short story, but again I don’t think Chiang gives as clear a sense that Ian’s behaviour is ‘in character’ – it’s just how he happens to behave). Ian does things by the book, and is a natural follower rather than a leader. This is why he is able to appreciate and fall in love with Louise, but also why he cannot get his head around the heptapod language, or view time the way they do. If Louise understands language without being able to communicate, Ian acquires knowledge without fully understanding anything, and again his failures as a husband and especially a father stem from this limitation. Jeremy Renner is well-suited to this kind of role. He’s good at playing a reasonable, stable and articulate character, but also at looking perpetually ‘out of the loop’, like he’s not quite one of the Avengers, and in this case not quite operating on the same level as Louise.
One of the early posts in this thread criticised Amy Adams for her monotonous ‘cute deer in the headlights’ act, and I suppose there is something wholesome and winsome about Adams that makes her vulnerable to such a reductive assessment. That winsomeness is what made her such a perfect casting choice in
Enchanted – but what also made that performance interesting was that there was an ironic edge to it, and a slight sense of cold artificiality that undercut the Disney-princess cliché, and left room for the character to develop as the story progressed. Adams’ ability to convey warmth and coldness alternately, or at the same time, is harnessed beautifully in
Arrival.
This ambiguous quality is part of what helps Louise to bond with the heptapods. We can speculate about their emotions and how they express them, but to all appearances they are remarkably cold and matter-of-fact when it comes to mortality and grief. When the bomb is about to go off, Costello sprays ink onto the screen and swims away, without any sentimental final embrace between him and Abbott (which in a different kind of film there probably would have been). Abbott himself shows no signs of distress. When he taps the screen we might think he’s alerting the humans to the bomb, or asking them to please switch it off, but really he just wants Louise to put her hand on the screen so she can receive the aliens’ gift. Afterwards, Costello says nothing about missing or grieving for his friend; he just says ‘Abbott is death process’. Nor does Louise respond with an emotive outpouring of sorrow. This doesn’t mean they don’t feel anything. ‘Abbott is death process’ is one of the most deeply moving descriptions of death I’ve ever heard, all the more so because of the philosophical attitude it implies.
If you experience life sequentially, death and loss are terrible, surprising and traumatic, and they fuck up everything that comes afterwards (and beforehand, if you know they’re coming). But if you see things from the heptapods’ perspective, or from Louise’s, these events (while still incredibly painful) are elements in an ongoing process. Knowing that his partner is about to die is no reason for Costello to behave any differently; knowing that his own life is about to end is no reason for Abbott to panic or neglect his duties. They have both experienced this moment, and all the ones before or (for Costello) after it, already; they experience their own lives and the time they’ve had together all at once, so there’s no need for the kind of ‘carpe diem’ expressions of feeling that Ian talks about. In the same way, Louise’s seeming coldness indicates her philosophical perspective on life, which I think precedes and facilitates her learning of the heptapod language. She is sad when Hannah is born, knowing that she’ll die; and she is sad when Hannah dies; on both occasions she says, ‘come back to me’. I hate using the phrase ‘always already’, but it seems appropriate here: Louise has always already experienced and processed her divorce from Ian and Hannah’s death, but unlike Ian she can also bring ‘back’ those she has lost, experiencing her loved ones before, during and after the processes that take them away from her. So of course she accepts everything that happens, as though it has always already happened.
Rather than being a cheap, manipulative trick, the misdirection in the opening sequence tells us something important about Louise. The first shot pans down very slowly from a dark interior – like a withdrawn academic leaning back at their desk, the camera stares up into nothingness – towards a twilit exterior (on what turns out to be the night of Hannah’s conception), and then into the Hannah montage; it ends with Louise walking along the corridor, away from the darkness behind her and towards a dimly-lit future; after a fade to black, we then see Louise heading towards her lecture on the day the aliens arrive. This is the arrival of her ‘destiny’ in the sense that it will cause everything we’ve just seen to happen, but there will also be a tragic continuity (suggested by the segue just referred to, and by the circularity of Louise’s movement along the corridor, ‘looping’ back into the past) between post-Hannah Louise and pre-Hannah Louise. It is appropriate, therefore, that we initially read her aloofness as being related to the loss of her daughter, because although the former is not literally a consequence of the latter, what causes Louise to end up alone in the future is (we infer) what caused her to end up alone in the present. On the other hand, it is also appropriate that we see Louise, from the start, as a person with a hidden capacity for warmth and love (because she is), and that we feel this capacity is hidden because of her daughter’s absence (because it is). The twist is that this opening isn’t a misdirection at all, it just shows us the protagonist in heptapod terms. We’re introduced to Louise ‘all at once’, from both sides.
One other really clever thing I wanted to point out is the ‘non-zero-sum-game’ sequence. In Chiang’s story, this is the moment when the twist really starts to emerge clearly: Hannah asks Louise the question, she says her dad would know but Hannah doesn’t like talking to her dad, then we see Ian (in the present) using the phrase, then Louise remembers it and tells Hannah, commenting that the dad’s knowledge about such things must have rubbed off on her after all. This is a pretty strong hint that what have appeared to be flashbacks are in fact flash-forwards, and that Ian is Hannah’s dad, and from then on the story makes this clearer and clearer. Chiang’s habit of playing around with tenses (stuff like ‘I remember that when you are three you will...’, mixing past, present and future), and it’s hard not to notice this and start figuring out what it means. In the film, there isn’t a line like ‘all those years with your father, some of it must have rubbed off’; there is a reference to the dad being better at ‘science questions’, but it’s a more subtle hint. Nor is there any indication, so far, that these clips of Hannah are anything other than flashbacks. Because the sequence gives less away than in the source text, it has a different effect, and one that is tailored to the specific needs of the film – or rather, it amplifies one of the effects of the original passage, and tones down the others. The sequence confuses us by making it seem as though a comment Ian makes in the present comes into Louise’s head in the past. It’s actually a flash-forward to a moment of conventional ‘remembering’, where Louise recalls the phrase Ian used and relays it to her daughter, but the primary effect of this moment, on a first viewing, is to gently introduce the idea that the chronology of these events is fluid (i.e. the future can be present in the past), so that it will be less jarring later on when General Shang gives Louise information in the future that he knows she will need in the past, none of which happens in the story. It’s one of many sequences that illustrates what a sensitive and intelligent adaptation this film is, even if some of the added ‘drama’ is cumbersome.
Mr Sausage wrote: Mon Feb 20, 2017 5:22 pmmatrixschmatrix wrote:The other assumption I make about time travel is iterative loops- in other words, one arrives at a fixed loop because a loop will play out again and again until it reaches a steady state. So, let's assume on the first loop, Adams fails utterly, everyone dies. This gives information to her past self, which means she will now behave differently. After that, each loop will inform its own origin point, again and again, as Adams tries every conceivable solution and sees the outcome of it. The only way this stops is when the end point of the loop results in a set of actions that would not change based on knowing the end point- at which time, everything seems perfectly locked and fate-driven, and the actual decision points happen in loops that have now been overwritten.
I like this and you may well be right. But as Adams experiences the future simultaneously with the present, it's odd that her visions would not simply change with each change in her behaviour, every action producing another vision of the future, her brain crowded with an infinity of possibilities all passing in waves. I wonder how she would even get to have iterations. I think your iteration argument might work better with an actual time traveling device, so that the intention to use it could instantiate the loop. I think we're bumping against the limits of our ability to conceive, here.
This reminded me of an early Philip K. Dick story called 'Meddler', which played with this idea in a memorably chilling (and brain-boggling) way.
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