Eli Solt

Time and cinema are two deeply interwoven concepts that have been a subject of fascination since the first moving pictures were created. Russian filmmaker and film theorist Andrei Tarkovsky once suggested that, “No other art form is able to fix time as cinema does.” As an audience, sitting down for a couple hours to watch a film, we have no choice but to witness the experience in the order the filmmakers have chosen for us. We put faith in them to guide us through the narrative in the most effective and entertaining manner possible, without hiding anything. But what if they are?

In the 2016 film Arrival, director Denis Villeneuve breaks down cinematic expectations of both the science fiction genre and film in its entirety by constructing a story that places the audience in the same position as the main character, Louise. While there is no shortage of time travel films, this movie in particular uses its structure to create a new kind of cinematic experience; one that is less involved with spectacle as it is with the nature of humanity and the construction of narrative. The Film explores time as a fixture of cinematic language and part of a concept that is commonly referred to as the postmodern condition. Through a non-linear narrative structure and uses of the “flash-forward” technique, the film uses the theme of time to explore scientific determinism, the existential conflict of linguistic relativity, and the postmodern gaze on the human condition.

The notion of time as a concept has existed for thousands of years with early lunar calendars starting to appear around 6,000 years ago. From that period and beyond, humans have attempted to create methods of measuring and physically conceptualizing such an abstract concept. Early sundials date back to 1500 BC in Egypt and even more precise instruments such as the water clock or clepsydra were developed long before our modern clock. Yet, despite these methods and attempts to understand, humanity has still always struggled to definitively answer the question: what is time?

We can describe time as a progression of events or a continual flow of existence but we define it as such simply because that is how we experience it. We view time as an unstoppable progression that moves forward in one direction. But what if that isn’t the case? As early as the 5th century BC, philosophers have entertained the notion that time may not exist in the manner in which we perceive it, in fact, it may not exist at all. Greek philosopher, Antiphon the Sophist, suggested that “time is not a reality, but a concept or a measure” (Toulmin, 369). Another pre-Socratic Greek philosopher, Parmenides, added that “time, motion, and change are all illusions” and create natural paradoxes.

In Buddhist thought, time is commonly viewed as an illusion yet, it is an illusion we are still subjected to. Time is an impartial and apathetic entity. As Buddha suggests, “the poor do not have a minute less; the rich do not have a second more” (Mulamadhyamakakarika, 133).  

Arrival toys with the notion that our understanding of time is limited by our understanding of the world and of language. As soon as Louise fully learns the language of the aliens, reading it non-linearly, she can perceive time like they do, like a circle. With this perspective, the past can influence the future and vice versa. St. Augustine of Hippo struggled to explain this idea in Book 11 of his Confessions, coming to the conclusion that time is a “distention of the mind” and in this regard we can “simultaneously grasp the past in memory...and the future by expectation” (Augustine, 227).

Arrival is by no means the first film to explore time and use a non-linear narrative structure. Other films such as Christopher Nolan’s Memento, Federico Fellini’s 8 ½, and Stanley Kubrick’s The Killing all use a distorted timeline to reflect a certain confusion within characters and hide the reveal of the truth until the end. Other previous science fiction films have also explored this concept of time like Rian Johnson’s Looper, Terry Gilliam’s 12 Monkeys, and The Spierig Brother’s Predestination. However, very few of these films have gone to the extent that Arrival has in structurally building the plot to appear a certain way when in reality, it is something else entirely. Many of these films suggest that time is a fourth dimension, an extension of our own universe that we can “travel through” but Arrival explores the idea that time is more of a numerical order of material change, more of an understanding that can be grasped if we view the universe from a different perspective.

In the film, our main protagonist Louise joins the U.S. military in Montana where they are trying to make contact with one of the twelve alien ships that have landed. She joins physicist Ian Donnelly and a larger group of linguists and scientists in order to communicate with the mysterious alien beings which are dubbed “Heptapods.” After a few unsuccessful attempts, Louise manages to get the Heptapods to demonstrate what appears to be their form of written language. However, their words are not really words at all. They are circular symbols that convey meaning but aren’t read in any particular direction. In other words (no pun intended), their language transcends spatial and temporal limits by conveying all the desired meaning at once. Later in the film, when Louise begins to fully understand the language, she begins to see events that take place in the future, including memories of her with a daughter who she’s never seen before. This big reveal uses the audience’s expectations of narrative and previous cinematic familiarity to flip everything upside down. Upon first viewing, the audience believes that all of the jump cuts to Louise’s daughter are flashbacks when it is actually the future she is witnessing, having broken the mind’s limited perspective on time and information.

Just like the language of the Heptapods and the name of Louise’s daughter, Hannah, the film’s structure is cyclical. The end is the beginning and the beginning is the end, it all depends on the context it is placed in. In this regard, one could view this film as a more expansive experiment of the Kuleshov effect, a concept prevalent in many other non-linear films.

The Kuleshov effect is a cinematic editing technique that demonstrates the nature of how an audience interprets the meaning of images when placed in context with other images. By placing different shots before the image of an expressionless face, for example, humans naturally place different emotions onto the face based on what came before (and after) it. In an early scene in the film, when Louise is walking through the college campus to get to her class, the audience interprets her silence and reservedness as depression and melancholia because the sequence before was a montage of the birth and death of her daughter. It’s only later that we learn her daughter hasn’t died (or been born) yet and we simply attached the negative emotions to what we saw of her in the beginning. Through this technique, Villeneuve further suggests an alternative view of time, one in which the future could have influences on the past.

Another major thematic element of the film that ties into time is the philosophical concept of Linguistic relativity, the idea that the structure of a language can influence the speaker’s perception of the world around them. Also known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, Louise mentions this idea and how our understanding of the world is shaped by language and the specific one we speak. The Heptapods have the ability to see into the future because their language does not limit them to specific moments within space-time. Their language and their thoughts are not distinct but completely intertwined. Ancient sophist philosophers tended to believe that we were only capable of experiencing our physical world through the construct of language which, in essence, placed the concept of truth in a state that made it susceptible to varying aesthetic preferences. However, the Greek Philosopher Plato argued against this notion, stating that the universe is built on bigger, more abstract ideas that transcend language and that our own language should be able to reflect these ideas in an accurate manner. Plato understood the biological limits of our brains as well as the inevitable imperfection of language. English writer and actor Stephen Fry once said, “A true thing, poorly expressed, is a lie.” The means by which we communicate dictate our own individual experiences within the world.

There cannot be content without form and there cannot be thought without expression. Abstract ideas in our heads can’t exist within a shared physical space until we properly communicate them. This is where Arrival shows how limited our perspective is compared to the aliens. To them, the mind is not a thing but a process. Unlike humans, who so often seem to have irrational fears of the progression of time, growing older, and even death, the Heptapods have transcended those fears because the future is not a mystery to them. There cannot be a failure of communication on their end because their language accounts for the one element human language cannot rectify: time. As Louise muses at the beginning of the film, “We are so bound by time. By its order.” If we could receive the alien’s gift in the film, then perhaps the world would be filled with less conflict and hate as a result of miscommunication and not understanding each other.

Another recent science fiction film that explores the theme of time like Arrival is Christopher Nolan’s 2014 film, Interstellar. In this blockbuster, pilot Cooper and his crew must take a spaceship through a wormhole in hopes of finding a habitable planet that humans can move to as the earth slowly runs out of food. Their journey is set against the backdrop of time and the idea that time can work differently in different areas of the universe. If they take too long or stay on a specific planet for longer than they intend to, they might not be able to save humanity in time and Cooper might not ever see his daughter again.

Like Arrival, this movie explores humanity’s transcendence through time both literally and as allegory. In order to resolve the main conflict, both characters have to use their “time-altering” abilities to influence the past. Time appears symbolically through many aspects of the film as well. The spaceship that Cooper takes, called the “Endurance,” looks like the face of a clock, with twelve different rooms that spin in a clockwise direction. The scene when Dr. Mann attempts to dock on the Endurance so he can return home acts as a metaphor for the crew’s mission. As the Endurance implodes it begins to spin rapidly, representing how time is moving at a different pace in comparison to earth and is running out for the crew. The twelve rooms on the ship are also significant in comparison to the number of alien vessels that landed on earth in Arrival: twelve.

Interstellar while unique in its science fiction plot, has a story that has been told before, namely in Joseph Conrad’s 1899 novel Heart of Darkness. Cooper and Dr. Mann reflect the characters of Marlow and Kurtz respectively. Like Marlow, Cooper ventures out on a journey through very poorly traveled territory. He suspects he may find Dr. Mann, who, like Kurtz has a respectable reputation that precedes him, yet he isn’t sure. When he finds Dr. Mann, he soon discovers that the nature of isolation on the foreign world has driven him slightly mad to the point where he has lost a basic sense of humanity and returned to more naturalistic survival instincts. This madness occurs as a result of unprecedented acts of imperialism. Both Marlow’s boat and Cooper’s spaceship act as metaphorical time machines. Cooper takes his into a wormhole which he describes as a “literal heart of darkness” while Marlow observes that his ship “takes him back to the earliest beginnings of the world” (Conrad, 74). Much like the wormhole, the river through the Congo represents a linear flow of time on which Marlow can travel up and down, transcending the normal constraints. Like Louise, both Cooper and Marlow don’t know what they are going to find in their journey through time and none of them are entirely prepared for the knowledge that they are soon to gain.

The non-linearity and exploration of time in both films can be viewed as a postmodern response to that which has come before in art, film, and literature. While David Dickens and Andrea Fontana suggest in their article “Time and Postmodernism” that the change in the perception of time and space in postmodernism stems from “the advent of new technologies...especially in communication and transportation” (Dickens, 3), I would argue that the changes have occurred simply because we need a new way to see the world. This new type of postmodern narrative is an idea that arose not only in response to modernity, but in direct conflict with it. In a modern, postindustrial society, we are constantly faced with existential crises about what our place in the universe is and if there really is a bigger meaning to our lives at all. Like the Kuleshov effect, we need to place meaning on the world around us in order to make sense of anything, especially in our modern society that is plagued with violence and close-mindedness.

In Arrival, Villeneuve uses the Heptapods as a metaphor for humanity’s own basic fear of time and fear of death. The film asks us to face the fear of existence. We often hide away from existential thoughts and deep ideas about life and death because it can just be too overwhelming. Our brains weren’t designed to see our lives or time in that manner. The film constantly suggests that we are so limited by our biology, like in the scene in the helicopter where Louise must put headphones on just to hear what Ian is saying. Our own bodies make it difficult to see things the way the aliens do yet there are things that can surpass those limits like love.

On the surface, the film leans toward a deterministic view of the universe, suggesting that all the events that occur are decided by forces external to the human “free will.” In order to stop a war, Louise has to realize that the universe is deterministic and embrace the inevitability of what has to be done. This view of time can be found in ancient texts like in the book of Ecclesiastes in the Old Testament where time is described as “a medium for the passage of predestined events”. While the film seems to embrace this idea for the majority of the plot, a crucial moment near the end defines it. The moment where Louise decides to give birth to Hannah, despite knowing where “her story ends” gives Louise the individualistic power of free-will and choice and allows us to see that our decisions do matter even in a world where we could see the outcome.

Like the film Arrival, there are no beginnings or ends in life, a concept difficult to define with our limited language. Some words in English do come close to describing this cyclical construct. “Milestone” is the end of one part of a journey but the beginning of the next. “Solstice” refers to the ending of one season as the next one begins. Greek comes a little bit closer with the word “Ouroboros” roughly translated to “all is one.” Commonly used in alchemy, the word represents the cyclical nature of life and a “transcendence of duality” within the natural universe. Perhaps the only way to truly describe it would be through using the language of the Heptapods. In the film, Louise asks the aliens the big question: “What is your purpose on Earth?” But really, she is asking us, the audience. That is the question we have been trying to answer for millennia, how do we fit into this world? Even without aliens visiting us, is there a way we could perceive the world in a different manner and transcend time so that these answers could be known? We may never know yet, through art and film, we can explore the possibilities. Cinema is a human dream. It acts as some vague attempt to fit our confusion into the existential jigsaw puzzle of life. Through a non-linear narrative structure, Arrival uses the theme of time to explore scientific determinism, the existential conflict of linguistic relativity, and the postmodern gaze on the human condition. And as Tarkovsky put it himself, “Film is simply a mosaic made with time.”

Works Cited

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Chiang, Ted. Stories of Your Life and Others. Vintage, 2016.

Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness. Penguin Books, 1999.

Dickens, David R. “Time and Postmodernism. “Symbolic Interaction, 1 Aug. 2002, www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/si.2002.25.3.389?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents.

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Nolan, Christopher, director. Interstellar. Warner Brothers, 2014.

“Ouroboros - A Thorough Explanation. “Token Rock, www.tokenrock.com/explain-ouroboros-70.html.

Santiago, Silviano, and Ana Lucia. Gazzola. The Space in-between: Essays on Latin American Culture. Duke University Press, 2002.

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Munodawafa, Davison. “Communication: Concepts, Practice and Challenges.” Health Education Research, vol. 23, no. 3, 1 June 2008, pp. 369–370., academic.oup.com/her/article/23/3/369/639974.

Villeneuve, Denis, director. Arrival. Paramount Pictures 2017.

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