A World Made of Language
Arrival and how language shapes what we feel, see, and believe.
Deep Life Reflections | Essay 121 | James Gibb
Everyone speaks a private language. It shapes what we see, what we feel, and what we believe is possible.
“Oh that the gods the gift would gi’e us
To see ourselves as others see us.”
–Robert Burns, Scottish poet.
If you knew your life from beginning to end, would you change anything?
This is the existential question facing Dr. Louise Banks in Denis Villeneuve’s 2016 film, Arrival.
When twelve pod-shaped objects touch down across the globe, panic and fear ripple through governments and nations. Louise, a linguistics expert, is brought in to help decipher the intentions of these visitors. Played by Amy Adams, she imbues the character with emotional depth and intelligence. Indeed, it’s her face and the emotions etched on it that we remember the most from the film.
Adapted from Ted Chiang’s The Story of Your Life, Arrival is a science-fiction film about the power of language and the nature of time. This is not Independence Day. There is little traditional action and no saving-the-day theatrics. Instead, it’s an intimate exploration of time, grief, love, compassion, humanity, and both the limits and possibilities of communication.
The visitors, called Heptapods, resemble something both ethereal and aquatic. They speak in sounds like whale calls and write in circular, ink-like symbols. As Louise learns their language, she begins to think as they do: non-linearly, unbound by time. The film references the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, the idea that the language we speak shapes how we think. As Louise learns this alien language, she starts to perceive her own life differently—past, present, and future collapsing into one.
Progress communicating with the creatures is steady but slow. With no answers to the critical question of why they’ve come to Earth, fear and suspicion begin to fracture cooperation between nations, as humanity’s protective instinct threatens to turn misunderstanding into destruction. It creates a chain reaction as the scientists stop sharing their findings with each other. War looms. The inability to communicate—and the refusal to try—becomes the real danger.
“Language is the foundation of civilisation. It is the glue that holds a people together. It is the first weapon drawn in a conflict.”
—Arrival
We begin to understand that the story of Arrival itself is non-linear. As Louise learns, so do we. This human vulnerability is reflected in the film’s earthy, saturated look, created by Bradford Young’s striking cinematography. Villeneuve wanted the film to feel “like this was happening on a bad Tuesday morning, like when you were a kid on the school bus on a rainy day and you’d dream while looking out the window at the clouds.”
Though it looks to other worlds, Arrival’s deepest questions are closer to home: How do we approach what terrifies us? How do we deal with grief? If we knew our future losses, would we still choose them anyway? It reflects something common to all of us: the days when communication breaks down and the fear of the unknown seeps in. Yet it also speaks to the best in us. Our perseverance. Our willingness to repair what is broken. And the fragile miracle of understanding one another.
Because the language we learn becomes the world we live in.
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