Mars Demands Your Language

Arrival and the circle of colonial thinking.

I mentioned my ebook collection Yet Another Heart of Darkness earlier this week. So I thought I’d share an essay from the collection with you all. This is a review/discussion of the 2016 film Arrival.

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Colonial narratives conflate time and space. The future is always invading the primitive past; the trip to a remote land is also a trip back in time. The anti-colonial film Arrival (2016) tries to turn this dynamic back on itself. By the logic of colonial narratives, war and genocide depend on time travel; if everyone lived in the same time, you’d put an end to war. It’s an ingenious solution—but one which accepts as given the eugenic basis of colonial fiction. As a result, Arrival doesn’t change colonial tropes so much as it freezes them in an inescapable tableau.

Like many a space invasion narrative before it, Arrival presents the squid-like heptapods as coming out of some future sky. Twelve enormous obelisk-shaped ships, with seemingly magical technological control over gravity and atmosphere, land mysteriously at different points across the earth. Human science can make little of them, except that they are beyond human science. The aliens have discovered things we haven’t yet; they have reached the future ahead of us. Arrival even cribs a Darwinist developmental analogy directly from War of the Worlds. H.G. Wells said that his Martians were exterminating the English just as the English exterminated the Tasmanians. In similar fashion, hard-bitten colonel G.T. Weber (Forest Whitaker) reminds linguist Louise Banks (Amy Adams) of what happened to the Aborigines. “A more advanced race almost wiped them out.”

The heptapods, though, come from a less genocidal future than Wells’ Martians. They make no effort to wipe humans out. Instead their ships simply sit there, inert—opening occasionally to let humans in to talk. It’s humans who are, more or less haplessly, the aggressors. Raised on stories of survival of the fittest, people think that the future is out to destroy them.

Human’s stories make them fear time. The heptapods, in contrast, aren’t afraid of the future, because for them it’s happening now. Heptapod language is, Louise learns, written, via emissions of an ink-like substance, as a series of circular and semi-circular symbols. Physicist Ian Donnelly (Jeremy Renner) describes the heptapod written language via analogy: it’s as if humans started writing a sentence with both hands, starting at opposite ends of the paper. You’d have to have the entire thought, including the spacing of the words, complete in your mind before you started. Time doesn’t progress across the page but exists all at once on the page before it starts.

The heptapods may be a human future, but since the future for them exists at the same time as the past, then that means they’re just humans, now, with the rest of us. They tell Louise that they have come to give humans a gift to save them, so that humans in the future can save the heptapods. Recognizing that we all live in the same time makes it possible to break out of the colonial narrative of invasion and genocide. If there is no time for war, there can be peace.

The heptapod gift for humans, specifically, is a different language about time and colonialism. With a silent tentacle wave to Samuel Delany’s Babel-17, the film cites the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which suggests that the structure of a language determines the cognitive experience of those who speak it. The heptapod language is structured as if there is no time. Therefore, when she learns to think in heptapod, Louise begins to see the world as squid-things see it, which means that she is able to experience her whole life happening at once. She can effectively remember the future.

Seeing the future and the past as one doesn’t just untangle the colonial dynamics of the alien encounter. It deescalates tensions with other nations as well. Louise remembers a future encounter with China’s leader General Shang (Tzi Ma) in which he thanks her for convincing him to end the international, inter-human conflict precipitated by the alien arrival. Not only does he thank her for changing his mind, he tells her how to do it, giving her his private number and telling her his wife’s last words. Louise then remembers what he told her in the past and is able to avert a possible world war. One time creates one world.

Or does it? The heptapods’ language says it has evaded colonial tropes in escaping time. But the idea that time and space are connected is itself a colonial trope. Just because you have better guns doesn’t actually make you more advanced or more futuristic than the culture over there; you both live in the same present. Different people are different because people can be different, not because one person hasn’t advanced as far along the timeline as another. In cosigning the connection between colonialism and the clock, the heptapod spray of ink reinscribes Wells’ presuppositions even as it erases them.

You can see those familiar colonial scribbles, particularly, in the film’s presentation of the East. China, in Arrival, is the most warlike and impatient nation on Earth—the most bound to the wheel of time and to colonial fiction expectations. It is China which believes the aliens are a threat, and China which prepares to launch a war against them, cutting off communications with other nations in the process.

Yet, at the same time (as it were), the heptapod philosophy is clearly based on Eastern sources—or at least on Western conceptions of Eastern sources. It’s a cliché to contrast Western ideas of progress with an Eastern philosophy of stasis and recurrence. Arrival in this sense is not a repudiation of colonial logic, but is a familiar Orientalist story, along the lines of Dr. Strange or Iron Fist. Louise, as an exemplary white person, acquires mysterious, alien Eastern knowledge, and through its use becomes more powerful and wise than the subordinate Easterners from whom she acquired it.

General Shang, when he meets Louisa, virtually fawns on her, talking about how her mind is beyond his, and gushing about how she transformed him. It’s an odd and uncomfortable scene, which doesn’t seem to fit with what we know of Shang as a ruthless military ruler. But the encounter makes much more sense if we see it in the colonial tradition of the invaded giving reverence to the invader—from Conrad’s native people’s choosing Kurtz as their leader, to the Ewoks kneeling to C-3PO. The white hero’s depredations, or appropriations, are validated when people of color elaborately acknowledge his (or in this case her) superiority.

If Louise is herself a variation on the great white god (or goddess), then her embrace of the heptapod perspective starts to look less wise, and more ominous. The movie’s narrative is structured around Louise’s personal tragedy. It starts with her recounting her relationship with her daughter, who died in adolescence of an incurable illness. Because we see this tragedy play out first, we assume that it happened before the aliens arrived. But by the end of the film we realize that Louise’s daughter’s birth and death occur after the alien invasion. She “remembers” her daughter while she is with the aliens because she is now able to see into the future. Ian, the sweet and somewhat doofy physicist she meets while working with the aliens, is her future husband, who she will lose when she tells him she knows that their daughter is going to die.

“If you could see your whole life from start to finish, would you change things?” Louise asks Ian. Her answer is no. Even though she knows her daughter dies and their marriage disintegrates, she decides to marry Ian anyway. The heptapods have taught her to act as if linear endings are more important than the moments that lead to them.

This is sad, and beautiful. But it’s also, in the context of colonial narratives, a kind of quietism. Without time, there is peace, but there’s no change.Injustice in Arrival is simply miscommunication—an illusion to be magicked away by a white savior, or an inescapable truth to be wisely accepted as part of a broader pattern.Arrival tries to eliminate oppression by eliminating time. But the oppressed don’t benefit when you take from them the language of the future.