Arrival: Contact with aliens is a good thing

The movie Arrival is one that I have wanted to see for some time.  OK, its just seemed like forever.  The family has not been as excited about seeing it, and the reluctant wife took pity on me on Friday and went with me to see it (she liked it - a lot).  The most enthusiastic encouragement came from a colleague who suggested that it was a "new kind of movie."  Somewhat skeptical, I was also intrigued.  It was in the water that it was about contact with aliens - and the aliens turned out to be benign - and that it required a woman to figure this out - and to embrace them.  This led me to believe that it was a Kumbaya movie which, while I felt it might be timely to our installation of Trump as an isolationist president, and that it might serve as a hopeful alternative view of how to react to aliens - be they Mexican, Muslim or extraterrestrial, might be too simplistic to be a persuasive alternative vision.  

My advance intel was fine as far as it went, and, thankfully, it spared me from the disorienting/orienting plot twist that I will try to spare you as well.  This film stands as a powerful rebuke to the notion of isolationism, but it is far from a simple feel good film.  The engagement that it endorses is complex and will lead to deep and powerful shifts in the functioning of the protagonists, and to the viewers, if they take the underlying messages to heart.  It is a complex film - more complex than it appears at first.  I left the theater feeling disappointed by the movie - that it hadn't lived up to my colleague‘s hype.  As I have chewed on it, though, I think it has more heft and many more layers to it, though it was a plenty satisfying movie to begin with. 

This movie, as you will know from the trailers, is about a linguist.  And she is called upon – the trailers make her seem more passive than the movie portrays her – she steps forward – to engage in a novel process – to learn the language of and to teach our language to – extraterrestrials.  This seems like it should be pretty straightforward.  When I was a kid and lived in West Palm Beach, Cubans who had escaped Castro came to our school and I was tasked with teaching one of them English.  I didn’t go to some class (English maybe?) and instead hung out with him in the courtyard and pointed at things and tried to get him to learn the English names of them and to elicit from him their Spanish names.  What I didn’t know at the time was that his parents had told him NOT to learn English as they were Cuban and Spanish was their language.  Even if he had been willing, it would have been tough.  The extraterrestrials seemed willing enough – and competent enough to bring 12 ships to earth and have them perched at various places and to engage with the people at each of these 12 places who then would intermittently connect with each other as they tried to figure out what this contact was all about.

I’m not sure, but it seems to me that the aliens, like the Cuban refugees, might have been playing dumb.  They were competent enough to bring 12 huge ships to earth from someplace quite distant and to have them hover in pre-selected places.  The cover story is that they have to find shared referents and need a chalkboard to do this, but how hard can it be to share data?  As one aside pointed out - the Fibonacci sequence is seen as being universal.  Let's start with numbers - or pictures of stuff just outside the ship.  

I think that, in so far as they were playing dumb, they might have been doing this to buy time - because their wish is for us to really learn their language, not some pidgin version of it, and it requires immersion in their language in order for the communication between earthlings to take place - communication that is essential to our working together.  And we need to actively do this work - it is not something that can be done for us.  So, the movie makers created a great deal of suspense around the efforts of the terrestrial central pair, the linguist Louise Banks (Amy Renner) and the physicist Ian Donnelly (Jeremy Renner) who work diligently to teach and learn the foreign language to the central alien pair whom they nickname Abbott and Costello.  Part of the apparent problem is that they don’t know what shared referents they have.  In fact, as it turns out, this foreign language is not just a new set of words, but requires – or enforces – a new way of thinking in order to become fluent in it.

I have often thought of psychoanalytic training as learning a language.  Psychologists generally, and psychoanalysts in particular, share a vocabulary – a jargon.  That jargon is something that we try to avoid using in describing our patients in, for instance, test reports.  I teach my students to write in Plain English.  That is all well and good, but it means that we are in the position of translating not just jargon (which we need to do anyway, since people use the jargon in confusing and idiosyncratically defined ways) but a way of thinking into plain English.  Because, you see, psychologists, but especially psychoanalysts think differently about the human condition than run of the mill mortals do.

As Louise and Ian learn the language, as they immerse themselves in it, it begins to alter them.  Ian asks Louise if she has started to dream in the alien language.  Louise hesitates to acknowledge that she has done that, but as she does, we see that she has a waking dream – an hallucination – where Ian looks like the aliens and sounds like them.  She has gone native; or, more precisely, alien. As the movie progresses, it becomes clear that the aliens have brought many "gifts", but the primary one is their language.  Interestingly, then, the consensual translation at multiple sites of this is "weapon".  Language, in so far as it structures our thinking, is integral to who it is that we are.  Learning a new language has the potential to destroy us - to invade us - to create an alternate version of us - we know that we have been caught in the cross hairs of the weapon when we begin to dream in the new language - we have become someone different from who it is that we once were.

The structure of the alien language in the film is different because it bears a very different relationship to time – using this language leads us to see our way into how it is that things in the future will come to pass.  The movie takes a literal interpretation of this.  But I think it is worth thinking about this as a metaphor.  I think all language allows us to see our way into the future because it allows us to articulate what it is that we are imagining and it facilitates that imagistic process as well.

Psychoanalysts view time differently than others do.  They see the past as present and assume that what was done then is informing and shaping what is done now so that what we do now is necessarily shaping what will come.  Altering the ways in which we function by default – the thoughts and behaviors that are a product of reacting to what he have done and what has been done to us – occurs over time and through effort to create new ways of being with another person – that person, the analyst, then becomes a new touchstone – a new cornerstone on which to construct a way of functioning and a new way to create the future.

Psychoanalysts and their patients create new languages.  They have names for concepts – and for things that have occurred – that are idiosyncratic to the pair. This works its way into the functioning of the analytic pair – they dream and think about each other as they learn this new language that is dominated by the patient’s native tongue, but is certainly influenced by the language and person of the analyst.  As they learn this new language, new ways of thinking about the future open up.  What had been a relatively static expectation of the future becomes fluid and filled with options that weren’t previously imaginable.

Outside of analysis, we worry about the minds of millennials.  They are being programmed by the devices that they are using.  The static baseball cards of my childhood have been replaced by MLB games in which the batting average of every player on every team is available and referenced every time that you, playing a pitcher whose stats you also know, face them.  This will, as the movie points out, irrevocably reprogram the mind – not just with content, but with how that content is accessed – externally in terms of the devices, but internally – how do we have a mind that can hold that much data?  We need new ways to think.  A classroom is suddenly a very dull place to gather data.  But isn’t it a great place to integrate it?  Well, maybe, but it requires a different way of interacting –not with a device, nor even just with a human, but with a whole group of them.  This can be scary for those who are used to using devices to communicate.  So we have to teach old skills in new worlds.

The film is filled with tension precisely because the future is unknown.  Somehow seeing one’s way into the future does not mean that the future is inevitable.  In fact, in a climactic moment, it is essential that something in the future occur in a particular way in order that something in the present can happen in a way that we certainly want it to.  And the decision to live one’s life in a way that will allow what has occurred to occur is still an open one.  The tension between a future focused language and a world which is not determined is not worked out in detail in the film other than through the realization that people may – or may not – choose to follow through on the paths that are open to them - and knowing a particular path that is open to us - not as a fantasied future in which everything is perfect, but as an actual, lived experience with all of the heartache that every such experience includes, means choosing to live with the good, but also the bad and the ugly. 

What determines what will happen, then?  Ultimately it is the character of the people who are making the decisions.  And the film’s greatest commentary on current events – and our President who would be an isolationist – is not that the aliens need us all to work together so they give each of us a piece of the puzzle – though that is surely applicable – but that our stereotypes and prejudices are played on.  We think we know who the bad guys are and why – and when we actually meet them, they turn out to be very different than what we believed would be the case based on their portrayal by the media.  Actually living life, actually engaging with others, leads us not to reduce them to a stereotype, but to appreciate just how complex and rich they are.  (Could it be that Donald Trump is more than just a flagrant narcissist?)

The reluctant wife recently read a book about the Supreme Court – The Nine - and one of the central theses of the book is that there is a correlation between the justices who have become more liberal during their time on the bench and the amount of travel, especially international travel, that they do.  It seems that actually having contact with people from other cultures leads us to have more faith in humanity.  When we don’t have that contact, we fear strangers.  We let our prejudices, and our frequently unearned faith in the tribe, trump our need to connect and be interdependent.

This movie is ultimately a film that teaches us to embrace rather than fear life: to live fully despite or maybe even because of the fact that we will die.  Its final message is that living life – being alive – not some weird final destination – is what we are here for.  If there is an aim, it is to support others having a chance at this incredible thing.  And this message – this very Buddhist or alien message – is one that frequently comes to us from a source like science fiction – a source that is disorienting – where things are – as this film portrays – literally upside down but, despite that, the film has the gravity to make the case that we should engage in life, one moment at a time, appreciating it for what it is, while preparing for what is to come.

The reluctant son was born in 1999.  This is no accident.  In the seventies, I read a book, The Limits to Growth, that predicted the world would end in 2000.  We would be suffocated by smog or run out of coal and gas or we would be inundated by Uranium poisoning - all of their models led to the prediction of doom and gloom.  This movie would, I think, have encouraged me to go ahead and have a kid, even if the future was dark.  I doubt that it would have convinced me.  But I appreciate the film makers making the effort.  Simultaneously, the film supports the idea that we have to work to make the world a place that our children will want to live in.  There is both a commitment to creating the best world possible and an acknowledgement of the limits of that world - even with clear sight, we cannot avoid what may - and in the case of death - must - befall us.


Post Script:  It is now some time later and the DVD has come out.  It, apparently like the first release of the film, does not include 8 minutes of footage that are critical to some of the observations I have made above - particularly about the openness of the future.  The film as first released and currently available on the DVD that we saw makes it look like the future is inevitable - and the alien language simply articulates what will necessarily occur.  I like the longer version better - it is much more subtle and, I think, true to life.  When we see how the gears mesh - when we recognize how our lives have been determined by the forces that have guided them, we have some degree of freedom to rethink our future path.  This freedom is likely quite limited - we are more like ourselves than not, even after engaging in something as arduous as an analysis - but we have a skosh more freedom.  The movie is suggesting that, even knowing what we are walking into it, we can still embrace it.  This is a powerfully optimistic message.

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