Enough of the suffering, more of the suffrage!"

Rating: 4/10 (16 November 2016)

Arrival is science fiction cinema for women.
The film shifts science fiction cinema's preoccupation with re- enacting colonial conflict and discovery as "a violent, penetrative act that scars what it explores" (Malcolm, Jurassic Park) to a relationship drama played out between linguistics expert Dr Louise Banks (Amy Adams) and physicist Ian Donnelly (Jeremy Renner).
'Arrival' refers to the appearance of twelve enigmatic alien spaceships on Earth and to the yet to be born the birth of Banks's and Donnelly's baby girl , who we see as an infant and as a young adult in the film's opening moments. As memories of a life that has not yet occurred unfold for Banks, so does her ability to understand the Aliens' purpose in visiting the earth.
So 'Independence Day' this isn't, thank goodness. Arrival is, instead, a wistful, dreamlike exploration of the meaning of human suffering. At the same time, it explores the way reality is gendered by culture and the categories by which we perceive reality. Differences between masculinity and femininity are sometimes expressed in the opposition between 'hard' and 'soft'. On the science fiction literary scene 'hard' or even 'radically hard' SF is characterized by its focus on engineering, the physical sciences and humanity as little more than meat.
In contrast, Arrival knowingly foregrounds the soft (humanistic) science of linguistics, communication and emotion. The hard sciences are represented by Donnelly (a physicist. But SF cinema's masculine focus on war, conflict, and destruction is relegated to a threatening backdrop against which Bank's and Donnelly's relationship and Bank's attempts to communicate with aliens are played out.
In place of quantum physics the film explicitly references socio- linguistics and, in particular, the 'Sapir-Whorf hypothesis', that language shapes or even determines our perception of reality. As an aside, it was Sapir's student Benjamin Lee Whorf who was responsible, in an article 'Science and Linguistics', for spreading the academic urban legend that Eskimos have anything from four to a thousand (!) words for snow. Whorf's main legacy is a linguistic relativism that posits language determines perceptions whether that be perceptions of the alien (here, the film utilizes the time honored convention of representing the alien 'other' as a kind of squid) or of men and women. In a culture where gender difference is a fundamental way of categorizing the world, time itself can be gendered.
Masculine time is characteristically linear, goal directed and enacted in the public sphere, feminine time is cyclical, marked by repetition and enacted in the domestic sphere. Fundamentally, feminine time is organized around child birth and child care. While this will strike some ears as over generalized and prejudicial, what way time should be spent forms part of the core of sexism (and racism) in, for example, women's experience of employment. Whorf himself used a study of the Hopi to exemplify the way conceptions of time can be culturally relativistic. He, contentiously, argued that the Hopi have no concept of time and that the Western concept of time as flowing smoothly from the past to the present is culturally specific. In Arrival, the Aliens work with a cyclical (feminine) conception of time.
The cyclical way the Aliens live in time is represent by the aliens' language – which consists of circles of ink and by the name Bank's gives her child – 'Hannah', a palindrome that can be read forwards and backwards. The Aliens' purpose on Earth is reciprocal – they are here to help us so that in three thousand years we can help them. Or should that be we have helped them so they would help us? As Bank's learn the Aliens' language so her experience of time changes and past and present become one. Here family memories turn out to be memories of the future – if we cling to the model of linear time.
While Arrival seems to challenge confining stereotypes of cinema science fiction, appearances can be deceiving. My first disappointment was that the film argues that only by working together can humanity secure a better future. But, despite the appeal to the Chinese mark place, the script balks at collectivism and returns to an all too familiar appeal to one man making a difference or, in this case, one woman with the help and protection of a couple of men.
But more troubling there seemed something insidious about the film's world view. It does address an audience of women and it does place as center stage much of what the Sci-Fi genre leaves behind. And cultural feminists have argued that what liberal feminists see as discriminatory stereotypes are actually real lived differences between men and women that are to be honored and valued.
By advocating acceptance of the inevitability of life and death, the absolute already determined past and present the film also feels like it is advocating acceptance of the way things are, including gender difference. No room for protesting here, or for radical rethinking the nature of gender. What will be, will be. What is, is. The birth and death are for women to celebrate and mournfully embrace.
Arrival, and the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis around which it is built, encourage predetermination. The result, replicated in this review, is a conflation of linguistic categories with lived experience. Whether positively or negatively valued, those categories of masculinity and femininity are constraining.
There's no place in Arrival's world of the inevitable for the collective action of women now demonstrating on America's streets against male determination of their bodies and their future. What is needed at times of change is another, more open construction of time in which time's arrow and cyclical time are both replaced and remade as something new. Now is again the time for less acceptance of suffering and more embracing of suffrage.