“Apprehending the Limit” : The Continuous Present, Past, and Future in Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival
“People assume that time is a strict progression of cause to effect, but *actually* from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint - it's more like a big ball of wibbly wobbly...time-y, wime-y...stuff.”
Steven Moffat
Doctor Who–as played by David Tennant in this instance–often communicated to his time-traveling, universe-traversing sidekicks, in his quippy way, concepts of enormous complexity regarding human beings’ methods for perceiving the universe. Moffat, a renowned screenwriter, has a way of engaging with these concepts in ways that are playful, yet easily digestible for a viewing audience. In Denis Villenueve’s sci-fi spectacle, Arrival, screenwriter Eric Heisserer takes an approach that has more gravity (sci-fi pun intended), masterfully transforming the Ted Chiang novella, Story of Your Life, into an immersive exploration of the above concept, flippantly “explained'' by the good Doctor.
Chiang’s story is an exploration of self-imposed human limitation. In particular, the story is concerned with the concepts of language and time as possible sticking points for the progress of the human race, while also grappling with the concept of determinism. A 1999 Hugo Award and 2000 Nebula Award-winning novella, the exploration of these themes is delivered by method of a letter being written by the story’s protagonist, the linguist Dr. Louise Banks, to her unborn daughter. As is true of all good science fiction, the story strives to contextualize real-life complex theories in ways that challenge the reader to consider ideas being developed in various scientific fields.
It is challenging enough for an author to write entertaining–and most importantly, engaging–stories which communicate these ideas, but it is another challenge entirely to present them cinematically. The success of science fiction as a cinematic genre has proven its limitless potential to entertain, but less commonly does a science fiction film inform, involve, and immerse its viewers into the concepts it is exploring in a compelling way. Arrival uses careful manipulation of its source text and masterful temporal editing to such an effect as to both leave a lasting impression on the viewer and serve as the vehicle of the story’s thesis on time in important ways that its source text could not. The variance between how the novella imparts its ideas and how differently the film achieves this serves as a meta-commentary on the power of communication and language–written, audible, or visual–and their profound differences. At the same time, the act of adapting a story of this particular subject matter is in itself an interesting theoretical exploration of the “continuous present” and why this concept matters when viewed through a lens of nonlinear cognition.
The text and film both explicitly mention the idea that due to the construction of most human language, thoughts are phonologically coded: most people “hear” a voice in their heads when thinking (people who are deaf are one exception), therefore most human language communicates sounds rather than ideas. The sounds, then, are attached to the ideas. There is an extra step, in a sense. Because sounds have come to be recognized as linguistic signs in contemporary society, a film has the semiotic power to bypass that step that text isn’t afforded when we begin to form sounds in our heads while reading, which in and of itself speaks of an underlying meta-commentary on film as a language. It is, Villenueve seems to suggest, the more effective way to experience the story being told by Chiang and subsequently Heiserrer, and all involved. All of the languages involved–the director’s sense of scale and perspective, the light design, actor performance, and the score–working in concert, communicate in different ways the feeling of observing, interacting with, and describing the complex or the unknown.
The details in which the film achieves its immersion is painstaking. From the opening score, (Max Richter’s famous piece, “On the Nature of Daylight”) the viewer is injected with a sense of melancholy, though seemingly nothing has taken place yet to insinuate why. A careful listener might pick up the hint that the film knows something they don’t–or in this case, the protagonist. When the piece creeps back in at the end to bookend the film, it masterfully telegraphs the viewer's new revelation of Louise’s non-linear perception. This is information available to readers of the novella from the start. Before the end, the rest of Johan Johannsen’s score–somewhat controversially removed from awards consideration for its inclusion of Richter’s composition–underlines the thesis of the film concerning time. The arrangement plays with more exotic time signatures, the atmospheric drones and swells move somewhat uncomfortably without metric regularity all while exploring the circle of fifths–a complex but commonly utilized concept in music theory that facilitates movement between keys in a circular pattern. By toying with meters not commonly experienced in western compositions, Johannsen manages to enhance the film’s sense of discomfort with the unknown while exploiting central ideas of circular (non-linear) motion and time as a construct.
Outside of audio enhancement, which the text cannot hope to benefit from, there are many other changes from text to film that aid the story’s dramatic rendering. In the novella, the reader is immediately clued into something strange: Louise seems to be writing to her unborn daughter as if observing her daughter’s already-lived life. The use of language, itself, is essential in its telling. Lines that manipulate tenses like, “I remember once when we’ll be driving to the mall to buy some new clothes for you”, or “Now if only I can remember that sound the next time your blithe disregard for self-preservation gives me a heart attack,” display something odd for the reader: that our language makes it difficult to think in this manner, that it must be manipulated and made wrong to do so. (Chiang, 1998) Rules of tense must be defied. Language as a limiting factor is expressed to the reader even as Chiang expresses the sentiment through the written word. The tense manipulation brings up questions of medium specificity of a George Bluestone bent: “The novel has three tenses [past, present, future]; the film has only one [the present tense]” (Bluestone, 58). Both Chiang and Villenueve set to subverting such a claim, Chiang by displaying them at once in a manner that is disconcerting, Villenueve by showing them at once to much the same effect. The framing of time as nonlinear simply provides the perfect backdrop to explore such a limiting claim.
The strange way that Louise perceives memory as both the future and the past is due to her being fluent in an alien language, “Heptapod B”. In regards to her gaining these abilities, Chiang exploits (in dramatic science-fiction fashion) a controversial, but well-supported linguistic theory: the Sapir-Wharf hypothesis. The hypothesis, also referred to as linguistic determinism, essentially states that the particular language one speaks influences the way one thinks about reality. In Chiang’s story, the Heptapods have come to gift their language to the denizens of Earth in order to assist the human race in transcending the limitation of linear orthography and time. This textual Louise, in possession of the gift already, alternates fluidly in her narration between future memories of her daughter and past memories of her encounter with the Heptapods from when she was enlisted by the U.S. government for her knowledge of linguistics to communicate with the alien species that, for this Louise, have already visited and left Earth. The alternations between future and past memories and the manipulation of tense are Chiang’s methods for communicating an alien way of perceiving time in a nonlinear fashion–a gift that textual Louise has at the onset of the novella.
The film tells Louise’s story from a different perspective, one in which the viewer follows Louise more linearly to the events leading up to her learning Heptapod B. Or at least that is what the viewer is led to believe. The viewer only learns with Louise, as she gains revelatory prescience, that the opening scene in which she narrates, “I’m not so sure I believe in beginnings and endings”, did not take place before the arrival of the Heptapods, but rather after–a fact that certainly explains the size of her house in the opening when we know her as a professor of linguistics versus who she really is in those scenes: the foremost expert in a language gifted by aliens that will lead to human transcendence of time. In that same revelatory moment, the viewer realizes memories sprinkled throughout the film of her daughter, Hannah (whose name is a palindrome), are not memories of the past, but have yet to occur in a linear sense of time. “Because the viewer is primed for linear storytelling, because there are no perceived deviations from formula leading to this point, there is no impulse to think differently” (Pascual, 2022). The film, in this regard, has manipulated temporal order to have the viewer experience the disconcerting feeling of non-linear prescience as Louise does, a bootstrap paradox version of time that has been portrayed before, such as in Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar two years earlier.
It is an incredibly effective tactic that benefits from the filmic medium. The reason why can be as simple as the time it takes to view a series of memories compared to the time it takes to read them, or it can be the disconcerting nature of a series of jump cuts in the editing process that produce a disjointed passing of time. The reason could be an expression of deep sadness on Amy Adams’ face when portraying Louise interacting with her daughter, whose death she knows will come tragically early in her life. All of these non-verbal languages portray the magnitude of the alienness of experiencing the universe nonlinearly, certainly more than simply reading a study on the subject (Wojciehowski, 2018). Even the title of the film is in on the conceit: Arrival versus Story of Your Life centers perception of the film as more about a first encounter than about a mother grieving the future untimely death of her unborn daughter. Another change involves how Hannah dies. In the novella she is the victim of a fatal rock climbing accident when she is twenty-five, but “since the film is more concerned with unraveling notions of nonlinear time and language rather than the subsequent theme of determinism that would arise from the acquisition of this worldview, her death is changed to be of one involving an incurable disease” (Jao, 2017). This not only shifts the narrative to one of choice, but also pragmatically avoids any aging up or down of Dr. Louise Banks, preserving the audience's preconceived notions of watching a linear story. The viewer, encountering the prescience as unprepared as Louise is, feels the weight of the concept because they have been carefully immersed into the character of Dr. Banks, and experience the revelation with her.
All of that is not to assert a belief in medium-specificity, that film simply does these things better than text. Rather, in the instance of Villenueve’s adaptation of Chiang’s text, the film recognizes a theme and theory that can be conveyed in both the film’s artistic rendering of the subject matter of non-linear time and language as well as the meta-commentary that the subject matter carries in regard to film theory. Villenueve is having a nuanced conversation about film as language by adapting a story that harps on the limitations of language, but a story that also involves an alien race which communicates with a series of stacked circular logograms–in other words, something closer to semiotics than to text. It is an understanding that is underlined by a change from text to film regarding the Heptapods’ given names. In the novella, the Lovecraftian entities are playfully called Flapper and Raspberry while in the film they are renamed Abbott and Costello, an allusion to the comedy duo’s famous bit, “Who’s on First?”. The language that each comedian projects in the famous skit is correct throughout, in phonological terms, yet so much misunderstanding occurs as the limitation of spoken language is leveraged to such an extreme and frustrating level as to be ultimately comedic. It would appear the Heptapods feel much the same; “Heptapod A”, their spoken language is of little significance in the story, and quickly dismissed by the research team. Indeed, it is in no way related to Heptapod B, insinuating that they view utilizing more than one method of communication as natural, more beneficial (Lopes, 2020). That their logographic type of language is deemed superior to their phonological language is of interest to the meta conversation between text and film at hand. An observational proxy for this dilemma in studies of film is represented by Sarah Cardwell:
While even the medium-essentialist Bazin wrote of filmic "language," this was perhaps due more to an unimaginative use of existing vocabulary than to a real belief that film and literature were fundamentally similar (Cardwell, 2003).
In even attempting to conceptualize differences between text and film in film studies, language, particularly phonological language, plays the part of the limiting factor. It might be said that in the context of a film exploring these themes, there is an assertion that linear orthography of text might be playing the role of the greater limiter for society. It is interesting to consider, also, the role that China plays in the film’s central tension as eventual aggressors toward the Heptapods, when Chinese language is unique in that it is logo-syllabic. In some ways, their language could be considered more closely related to Heptapod B, yet their communication breakdown is the most severe (King, 2019). Despite that similarity, in the film the Chinese have a “breakthrough” in communicating with the Heptapods through chess. But, as Louise warns, the medium of chess frames things in terms of winning and losing, a language of adversarial warfare. There is, then, a tension of simultaneous resistance to the idea of medium-specificity combined with insistence on the importance of medium.
One such medium-specific claim deals with temporality and the “continuous present”, or the idea that “no matter how long a film is, every frame at the instant of its projection portrays the present–a flashback may be supposed to be occurring in the ‘then’ of the story but it is on the ‘now’ of the screen” (Kawin, 1972). What Chiang’s story, with a scientific understanding of time as a construct of human design, allows Villenueve’s adaptation to say to Kawin is this: “if you are correct, so what?” The ‘then’ and the ‘now’ are one in the same in this story and part and parcel with the continuous present as a factor of our scientific understanding of time and space. It is a position that this film, and perhaps science fiction more broadly as a subject matter, are uniquely positioned to enjoy and exploit. Indeed, throughout the film, the linear timescale is constantly subverted until finally undone by the viewer’s revelation (importantly, not Louise’s) at the end of its runtime. In fact, it seems to be having a laugh at the whole concept as flashbacks are revealed to be flashforwards and vice versa. Yet, when the viewer finally arrives at the end of the film to find themselves at the beginning, a meaningful and palpable story has been told just the same, even if they have no idea where the “present”, meant to be so continuous, is anymore.
