Hello, welcome to The Gemsbok. Today’s topic is Arrival, a 2016 film directed by Denis Villeneuve.
"IMAGINE YOU WANTED TO WRITE A SENTENCE USING TWO HANDS, STARTING FROM EITHER SIDE.
YOU WOULD HAVE TO KNOW EACH WORD YOU WANTED TO USE, AS WELL AS HOW MUCH SPACE THAT IT WOULD OCCUPY."
Arrival, based on Ted Chiang’s novella “Story of Your Life,” is a film that
shares much with the tone of the cerebral and philosophically adventurous science fiction of
twentieth-century speculative-fiction masters like Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, and Rod Serling.
Helmed by Villeneuve, Arrival’s simultaneous full command of modern moviemaking practices
and fidelity to that earlier era’s penchant for intellectual curiosity
make it an excellent film. But as much as Arrival’s sleek production and classic style make
for profuse praiseworthy and analytical fare—and have featured in reviews, essays, and explanations aplenty—
it’s another relationship that I haven’t seen mentioned anywhere that interests me more:
the overlap between the premise of Arrival and a philosophical concept known as ‘eternal recurrence'
or ‘eternal return of the same’ that was most famously championed and explored
in western philosophy by Friedrich Nietzsche. Both the film and that concept ultimately come
around to raising the same question: what would it mean to actively, enthusiastically, and fully
will every moment of one’s life?
"DESPITE KNOWING THE JOURNEY, AND WHERE IT LEADS, I EMBRACE IT."
Like just about every aspect of Friedrich Nietzsche’s philosophy,
eternal recurrence has been subject to fairly widespread misunderstandings in the years since
he wrote about it. In the case of eternal return, the most common misunderstanding is the idea that
Nietzsche was intending the concept every time he mentioned it as an entirely serious,
proto-scientific account for the nature of reality. But—while he did present the idea
with increasing sincerity over the years—there is a large amount of ambiguity among his various
presentations of it, and Nietzsche’s first explicit formulation of eternal recurrence is as
a straightforward hypothetical question. In order to understand the purpose of the hypothetical,
and thus the deep and abiding concern which kept Nietzsche fascinated with the concept,
let’s look at section 341 of Walter Kaufmann’s translation of The Joyous Science:
“What if someday or night a demon were to steal after you in your loneliest loneliness and say to you:
‘This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable
times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought
and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you,
all in the same succession and sequence—even this spider and this moonlight between the trees,
and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down
again and again—and you with it, speck of dust!’ Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your
teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when
you would have answered him: 'You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine!' If this
thought gained possession of you, it would change you as you are or perhaps crush you; the question
in each and every thing, 'Do you desire this once more, and innumerable times more?' would lie upon
your actions as the greatest weight! Or how well disposed would you have to become to yourself
and to life to crave nothing more fervently than this ultimate eternal confirmation and seal?”
Like much of Nietzsche’s mature writing, The Joyous Science is written in an aphoristic style—
meaning that the work is constructed of short, episodic aphorisms, stories, poems,
and snippets of this sort. For those accustomed to the analytic apporach employed by many twentieth
and twenty-first century philosophers—where every idea is spelled out as precisely and unambiguously
as possible, and then explored and explained at considerable length—philosophy like this can take
some getting used to. I mention all of this only to underscore that I am not leaving any details or
arguments out of that quoted passage; you have all of the material you need, from Nietzsche’s
perspective, to reach or explore your conclusions. In those lines, one can see relatively plainly
(as straightforward as anything in Nietzsche’s writing, at least) that he considers thinking
about eternal recurrence to be a philosophical exercise related to one’s will, and in particular
related to one’s psychological orientation toward the willed actions and experiences of one’s life.
Nietzsche distinguishes two categories of existence for the purpose of his hypothetical:
(1) existing in such a way that one would not want to experience the same existence repeated
even once, and (2) existing according to willed actions and decisions which would not only satisfy
but fulfill and excite a person if the sum of existence containing them were repeated again,
or even again and again without end. The idea is that, given this strange hypothetical,
one would prefer to be in the latter camp; and given that this is so, one may in practice
strive to behave, decide, and follow wills in ways that are in accord with that disposition.
This notion is tied closely together with another key term in Nietzsche’s works:
amor fati (which means ‘love of fate’). Amor fati is also classed as a disposition
Nietzsche recommends cultivating. Between eternal recurrence and amor fati there is an overlap as
well as a tension; the overlap is in the idea of being so disposed as to accept and love existence,
whereas the tension lies between that which is in one’s control and that which is not.
In order to attain the height of authenticity and power, contends Nietzsche,
one would need to simultaneously love—that is, accept, embrace, and relish—all occurrences of one’s life,
whether chosen or not, while they also actively choose and act in such a way as that they would
be willing to so choose and so act forever. Now, as we turn to the movie, the nature of this video
is such that it requires spoiling major plot details of Arrival, so you should only continue
watching after this section if you either do not mind spoilers or have already seen the film.
"LOUISE!"
"I JUST REALIZED WHY MY HUSBAND LEFT ME. MY HUSBAND LEFT ME . . ."
"YOU WERE MARRIED?"
Consider now some new, related hypotheticals: Would you behave any differently if you knew the
time and circumstances of your own death? Would you treat a friend any differently if you knew the
time and circumstances of the dissolution of your friendship? Would you treat a date differently if
you knew at what point and for what duration of the evening the two of you would argue?
These are the sorts of questions that may be raised by watching Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival.
At the center of Arrival is the character of Louise Banks, a linguist excellently portrayed by Amy Adams,
"MM, WE DON'T WANT TO KNOW WHY 'JOE ALIEN' IS HERE; WE WANT TO KNOW WHY THEY ALL LANDED."
who is tasked with decrypting the rounded symbols of a language used by a race of
cephalopod-like alien visitors whose appearance on earth is the most obvious of the possible
meanings of the film’s title. Upon successfully decoding the language at the climax of Arrival,
Banks becomes aware that to think in the alien language is to think extra-dimensionally.
To be specific, the conventional dimension that is transcended by the alien language is time.
This is significant because the universe of the film represents (somewhat hyperbolically,
perhaps) a linguistic theory which is broadly labeled linguistic relativity,
whereby the language or languages one understands circumscribe, influence,
and possibly even determine both the thoughts of a person and even a person’s method of thinking.
"YOU KNOW, I WAS DOING SOME—SOME READING, UM, ABOUT THIS IDEA THAT
IF YOU IMMERSE YOURSELF INTO A FOREIGN LANGUAGE, THAT YOU CAN ACTUALLY—REWIRE YOUR BRAIN?"
"YEAH, SAPIR-WHORF . . . HYPOTHESIS." "HM."
So, when Louise Banks conceives of the world through the extra-temporal alien language, she becomes
simultaneously aware of her entire life after and before the present moment. She gains access
to the heptapod alien’s extra-temporal method of thinking. As far as is discernible in Arrival,
this language is intended as (and acts as, geopolitically) a gift that facilitates peace.
Yet it is plain to see that such a gift is also a burden; Banks, after all, sees the cut-short life
of her eventual daughter in her first glimpses of her own life-to-come throughout the film.
In both Nietzsche’s concept of eternal recurrence and Arrival’s concept of four-dimensional thought,
the consequence of the premise is that one is choosing experiences which have somehow gained permanence.
In eternal recurrence’s case, it is through potentially infinite repetition.
In Arrival’s case, it is through stabilization; that is, each moment now gains a fourth-dimensional
position which is steady and unchanging, which can be visited by fourth-dimensional minds.
The endless procession of existence depicted in Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence
shares much in its potential discouragement of a person with the isolated, brief, and terminal
life and relationships which Louise Banks comes to recognize as her own. Nietzsche’s ultimate
maneuver in answering the potential discouragement of this (and other aspects of his thought) is to
theorize the übermensch or overman, a figure that acts as an idealized goal for humanity.
As Nietzsche puts it in the pseudo-archaic style of his book Thus Spoke Zarathustra,
“Let your will say: the overman shall be the meaning of the earth! [. . .] remain faithful to the earth,
and do not believe those who speak to you of otherworldly hopes! [. . .] One must be a sea
to be able to receive a polluted stream without becoming unclean. Behold, I teach you the overman:
he is this sea; in him your great contempt can go under.”
This goal is the pursuit of a full affirmation of life, existence, and reality—to the exclusion of hollow, other-wordly,
and after-life concerns—which would restructure human values and constitute an approach to life
which, if eternally recurring, would be not just bearable but joyous. For her part, Louise Banks
seems to pursue a similar ideal. In light of her new knowledge, she proceeds as an agent who
welcomes wholeheartedly the full breadth of her coming experiences—including both their highest,
love-filled highs and their lowest, tragic lows. Banks confronts the future death of her daughter and the
preceding, related unraveling of her marriage; she is able to incorporate those events into her
self-identity. They are not desirable to her in this incorporation, but they are a part of
elements of her life (her romance and marriage as well as her relationship with her daughter)
which she is affirming to be so worthwhile and central to her future self as to justify accepting
the tragedies that they inevitably tend toward. In all of our lives, every relationship does in
fact tend toward an ending—possibly an ending that comes too soon or follows suffering, or possibly
an amicable or due ending. The character of Louise Banks differs from reality only insofar as she has
access to precise details concerning such events. Her choice to take on parenthood is ultimately
symbolic of the choice that we all must make in merely seeking out relationships and positive
experiences: to attempt to construct, whether implicitly or explicitly, a possible structure of
affirmation and joy within an absurd and, whether repeated, finite existence. The arrival of Louise
Banks’ child then becomes the second, and no less significant, meaning of the film’s title.
Now, before I close out here, there is a further complication to Arrival’s treatment of these
themes that is worth mentioning, which results from the movie’s implication of hard determinism.
To be clear, there are possible contradictions of determinism in the film, such as the scene where
the protagonist seems to gain insight by paging through a book she has yet to write,
as well as the surprised demeanor of the character during her meeting with General Shang.
But barring those arguable cases, Louise Banks, in the end, may not actually have any choice in
the matter. Her cognizance of the future does not necessarily imply her ability to
choose to do otherwise than the future she sees. After all, the film never depicts her
seeing multiple alternate versions of any given future event. So Banks’ decision, such as it is,
may be a decision not of action but of disposition and psychological orientation. If even that—
after all, it’s hard to conceive how actions could be determined without the desires and wills
that accompany those actions being determined as well. But free will and determinism are far more
prevalent themes in Ted Chiang’s original novella than they are in Denis Villeneuve’s film, so we’ll
leave the concept of amor fati to the book, and return to our focus on eternal recurrence.
"IT'S THE KIND OF THING YOU WRITE AS A PREFACE.
UH, DAZZLE THEM WITH THE BASICS." "YEAH."
In actuality, all such purported permanence, whether it be from eternal return of the same
or from Arrival-esque timeless thought, may of course be illusory. For eternal return of the same,
Walter Kaufmann himself (the acclaimed Nietzsche scholar whose translations were quoted earlier)
points out that it is perfectly consistent from a logical standpoint that there be finite matter and
infinite time without any guarantee of the same combination of events ever recurring.
Borrowing an argument from Georg Simmel, Kaufmann writes,
“Even if there were exceedingly few things in
a finite space in an infinite time, they would not have to repeat in the same configurations.
Suppose there were three wheels of equal size, rotating on the same axis, one point marked on
the circumference of each wheel, and these three points lined up in one straight line.
If the second wheel rotated twice as fast as the first, and if the speed of the third wheel
was 1/π of the speed of the first, the initial line-up would never recur.”
And as for time travel, in thought or deed, it still involves loops, paradoxes, and contradictions which do not
find any resolution in our current understanding of physics—certain as-yet-unconfirmed quantum
theories notwithstanding. So what, then, is the value of a narrative like that in Arrival, or of a
hypothetical like the one presented earlier? Well, as I hope I’ve made clear, the value as intended
in the mid-career work of Friedrich Nietzsche (and as praised by Walter Kaufmann, and perhaps
as intended by Ted Chiang and Amy Adams and Denis Villeneuve) is in the mere possibility of its
reality, and in the thought experiment itself. One does not have to be literally assured that
one’s actions participate in permanence in order to feel, in Nietzsche’s phrasing, the burdensome
weight of it. Such investigations are formulae for evaluating the trajectory, content, and decisions
of one’s life. Perhaps even in the absence of Arrival’s fourth-dimensional perspective
or Friedrich Nietzsche’s ‘time as a flat circle,’ it may be possible for one to actively,
enthusiastically, and fully will every experience that one finds before oneself in existence.
"IF YOU COULD SEE YOUR WHOLE LIFE FROM START TO FINISH, WOULD YOU CHANGE THINGS?"