![]() This is the paradox of Arrival, and arguably the most complex and mentally taxing part of the movie. Thanks to the omnipresent perspective given to Louise, these sequences simply exist free from the constraint of time. As it turns out, the palindromic function of the story tells us that these scenes of love and loss are neither flashback nor flashforward, but one in the same. Framed with Terrence Malick-like photography and Max Richter’s haunting song, “ On the Nature of Daylight,” we firmly believe we’re watching flashbacks of Louise’s tragic past. When the movie begins, we are thrust into the bleak worldview of Louise and the subsequent illness and death of her child. When Louise tells her daughter, Hannah, that her name is a palindrome, she is also explaining the structure of Arrival. They communicate across the temporal sphere, and their language is unbound by the past, present or future.īy this point, it’s abundantly clear that the only person better suited to the job than Louise is Mr. It’s no wonder, then, that the Russians were sorely confused by their local Heptapods who said, “ There is no time.” Unfortunately, their linguists ignored the simplest explanation of all: that the Heptapods meant the phrase literally, and that their form of communication is utterly independent from the human construct of time. Indeed, the ends of their circular symbols never fully touch, perhaps implying the infinite possibilities inherent in their mode of communication. ![]() The Heptapods, however, rely on a form of semiotic communication that tells a full story unbound by time in one fell swoop. ![]() We write and speak sentences in a literal line (usually from left to right), where the images we depict are dependent on the way we order our words. Part of Louise and Ian’s initial difficulty in translating Abbott and Costello stemmed from their own well-entrenched mode of language. Instead, this linguistic expression is essential to understanding the nature of the Heptapods’ language and the symbols they use to communicate. Nonlinear Orthography: Arrival screenwriter, Erik Heisserer, admitted he never expected the phrase, “ nonlinear orthography,” would make it off the film’s cutting room floor.The dream world merges with a flat chronology that irrevocably changes her perception of time and memory. Midway through the film, Ian asks Louise if she dreams in foreign languages, and indeed, the more she understands the Heptapods’ communication, the more she experiences waking visions of her future. The well-worn hypothesis suggests that the language we speak is inimitably tied to the reality we experience. Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis: Much is made about the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis in both Arrival and modern academia. ![]() While the details of the mechanics are largely left to our imagination (after all, it is Louise the linguist's story, and not Ian the scientist's), Villeneuve and Chiang do allude to several key components: Arrival treads lightly with explaining the machinery of the Heptapods’ nonlinear language and perception of time. ![]()
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