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 beginning of the story. A clue to the truth lies in Louise’s voice-over when she says, “I’m not so sure I believe in beginnings and endings.”
Arrival opens with a montage that, with the rare bedfellows of economy and passion, conveys the depth and love of a mother-daughter relationship, until the daughter dies in her teens. By the end (beginning?) of the film, we will learn along with Louise that although this opening feels like a flashback, it is in fact a memory of the future. Her daughter, Hannah, has not yet died – has not yet been born – and her seemingly unexpected death is known ahead of time. With causality refracted like this, trauma becomes tragedy. I’d almost think of Villeneuve as sadistic in the way he inflicts this on us, if I didn’t so masochistically want to return to it over and over again.
The way Arrival recontextualises Hannah’s death imbues this otherwise senseless, random loss with a sense of narrative and meaning. What is, in the first instance, awful misfortune becomes, with reappraisal, the foreknown consequence of a choice Louise makes – the choice to become pregnant with Hannah knowing that she will die young. Why would she make such a choice? Maybe her decision is made with the logic of a child. In ‘Story of Your Life’ by Ted Chiang, from which the film is adapted, Hannah wants to hear the bedtime story she’s heard countless times before. Louise asks, “Well, if you already know how the story goes, why do you need me to read it to you?” to which Hannah replies, “Because I want to hear it!” It’s as simple as this, at some level; I may know how the film goes, but I want to see it again.
Besides, as any reader or cinephile knows, in a great work the story never stays the same. We change and bring new things to it, and in turn take new things from it. The books and films that last do so thanks to a continual process of recontextualisation, which runs throughout Arrival. For instance, in the beginning/end of the film, Louise’s new-born daughter cries in the arms of a nurse, and Louise takes the child back, whispering, “Come back to me. Come back to me.” Moments later, we watch Louise sobbing over her teenaged daughter’s emaciated body in a hospital bed, pleading, “Come back to me. Come back to me.” The same words, a different context, an entirely new meaning.
This idea of “recontextualising” can be understood differently by using a word far less ugly and more apposite for Arrival: “translation”. Louise is a linguist and translator hired by the US government to learn and then teach the language of the aliens (called Heptapods) that have come to Earth. From this premise we see countless variations of things that are understood differently with repetition. When she first meets Ian, the physicist on her team, he quotes her own book at her: “Language ... is the glue that holds a people together,” he begins, having to repeat himself after she’s turned on her headphones (thus proving the point: they can’t connect without communication). He continues, “[Language] is the first weapon drawn in a conflict.” In her book, Louise intends this metaphorically, as the context for how civilisations form and operate. Later in the film, when the joint venture to learn the alien language unites disparate countries, the word “weapon” (translated perhaps inaccurately from Heptapod) undermines their unity. The metaphor has become literalised.
In Strong Opinions, Nabokov took an appropriately hard line on translation, claiming that the translator’s only job is to offer the reader a foreign text composed of equivalent words from their own language. As hesitant as I am to argue with the master, I’m not convinced that there is such a thing as “equivalent words” between languages. Milan Kundera, in The Art of the Novel, goes as far as rejecting “the very notion of synonyms” and with them the notion of equivalent words within a language. He argues that “each word has its own meaning and is semantically irreplaceable”. A thesaurus might supply alternatives so that the basic meaning of a sentence remains, but its deeper implications may not. If a character “hollers” or “screams” they are, in either case, speaking loudly, but the first conveys an aggression that the second, with its intimation of fear, lacks. Similarly, a thesaurus taken to Hemingway might retain the literal meaning in one of his repetition-loaded paragraphs, while losing all of its melody and emphatic rhythm.
It’s common for a certain kind of reader to fret over what they lose in being unable to read Dostoevsky in the Russian or Proust in the French, but we rarely take stock of the fact that Russian and French readers who have no English will lose our version of those novels. Both sides get only one view of the thing we’re all trying to read. The optimistic take on this is that it shows how that our translations can be generative. The fact that there are no exact linguistic analogues means that we’re forever compelled to offer new versions of the things we translate. We must discover other truths, other stories, other questions and answers in these subtly (or, sometimes, dramatically) altered texts.
Translation can even reveal meta-questions that we might not have otherwise thought to ask. If the original novel poses “Question X”, then the translation might ask, “What does Question X mean in another culture?” Louise gestures at this when she explains that she must first establish the fundamentals of the Heptapod language before asking them, “What is your purpose on Earth?” If they don’t understand the concept of purpose, or they take “your” to be singular rather than collective, or if they don’t grasp the nature of a question (perhaps they only communicate declaratively) then what really matters will be lost, as they say, in translation. Learning what others take for granted when they speak allows us to see, with sudden, sometimes shocking clarity, our own hidden assumptions.
Arrival is, of course, another kind of translation, one from literature to cinema. There are always those for whom the measure of a successful film adaptation is how closely it adheres to the source material. This is checked off against a list of trivial details, from the esoteric mythology of the world to the backstory of a character. Such viewers are invested not in the artistic value of the work, but in what the story represents to them in sentimental terms. Every time a favourite novel is adapted to screen, whether it’s The Lord of the Rings or The Great Gatsby, cries of “It ruined my childhood!” can be heard across the internet. Not far behind are the nerdish monologues about how actually the reason Dune 2 fails is because it doesn’t spend enough time on the economics of spice trading and there are no guildmembers present at the... etc, ad infinitum. As amateur critics, they’re closed to any innovation or new interpretation of the source material.
Ted Chiang’s readers seem a more mature bunch, because the reception to the adaptation of his ‘Story of Your Life’ has been widely approving. There were several changes, some quite significant, required to translate the story to cinema. Take the matter of Hannah’s death. In the short story, Hannah dies at the age of twenty-five in a rock-climbing accident. In the film, she’s in her teens when she dies of an “unstoppable” disease. Eric Heisserer, screenwriter of Arrival, explained that if Hannah had lived to be much older, they’d have had to “age up the actress playing Louise”, which would have revealed too soon that what appears to be in the past is actually in the future. Why, though, the change from death in an accident to death by disease? This is the result of a clever insight by Heisserer.
The central thrust of ‘Story of Your Life’ is that the universe is deterministic and Louise must make peace with this. Nothing Louise does can stop herself from having Hannah nor prevent Hannah dying in that accident. Her future is as fixed as a repeat on television: what will happen has happened and all Louise can do is embrace that stubborn fact. Heisserer thought it would be interesting if, in the film, Louise “has a choice ... and can change the future, and yet she chooses to have Hannah”. In other words, she can opt to have Hannah, but if she does, she chooses it knowing that Hannah will die. ‘Story of Your Life’ exists at the intersection between a deterministic universe and our desire for freedom; Arrival centres on the collision between what we can control and what we cannot. This simple reimagining of Hannah’s death offers us something new, something different from the short story.
Revisiting the past need not be about capturing things precisely as they were. It can be about finding something new, discovering what exists only in the retelling, in the translation. The forward momentum of progress is not always linear; it can take a cyclical form. Perhaps this is what Kierkegaard meant when he wrote that “life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards”. All great films and books are worth looking at again, but Arrival is a special kind of film that makes re-watching the only way to fully watch it. If you think you know everything worth knowing about a book you’ve read or a film you’ve seen only once, it might be worth taking another look. Just as you will have changed, it might have changed too.
Further reading:
• Arrival, dir. Denis Villeneuve, screenplay by Eric Heisserer (2016)
• ‘Story of Your Life’ in Stories of Your Life and Others, Ted Chiang (2002)
• Strong Opinions, Vladimir Nabokov (1973)
• The Art of The Novel, Milan Kundera (1986)