The Story Never Stays the Same

On Denis Villeneuve's "Arrival" and the importance of re-watching films (and re-reading books).

I don’t typically issue spoiler warnings. I assume (fairly, I think) that if you haven’t read or watched the book or film in question, you have enough sense not to read an essay discussing it in detail. In this case, I rather like the irony of cautioning my readers who don’t want to know how the film Arrival ends. (I suppose you need to know the film’s ending to understand the irony – like the apocryphal turtles, it’s irony “all the way down”.) Here we are: I’m going to talk about how the film begins and, therefore, how it ends.

Denis Villeneuve’s 2016 Arrival is made for repeat viewings. I’d even say that to see it once is to have an incomplete experience. The film cleverly hijacks our expectations of narrative chronology, using Kuleshov editing to make fun of causality (we assume, incorrectly, that the second scene is influenced by the first). Watching the film a second time allows you to be in on the joke. Villeneuve knows that we’ll approach the opening sequence as if it is the beg…