‘Arrival’ hammers home uneasy truths about communication

KRISTEN PAGE-KIRBY

IS A HAMMER a tool or a weapon? That’s Arrival’s most intriguing question ( and one of the only intriguing things in the movie).

Arrival , out now in cinemas, follows Dr Louise Banks (Amy Adams), a linguist recruited by the military to figure out how to talk to the aliens who have parked their spaceships at 12 locations around the world. Since spoken language doesn’t work – the vocal system of the heptapods, as they’ve come to be called, is wildly different from ours – Dr Banks writes on a whiteboard to teach the visitors English and uses some crazy software to teach herself heptapodian.

As the linguistic chasm between human and heptapod narrows, there are obstacles – the biggest one being that hammer question.

What is a hammer? In one pair of hands, it pounds nails. In another, it shatters windows. In another, it cracks skulls. The fact that the definition of a thing can depend on circumstance is a difficult one to communicate to a species that looks like a hulking Wacky Wall Walker.

Of course, humans communicating with humans is often more difficult than talking to aliens, an idea Arrival emphasises. While the movie shows humans can be stupid, selfish jerks who would rather talk than listen and hate rather than empathise, it never really addresses why that’s the case. And part of the answer is right in its riddle: some of us see a hammer as a tool, some as a weapon.

What’s becoming clearer and clearer is that we seem absolutely incapable of asking the other camp why they see what they see and listening to their answer. We would rather just prove them wrong or, if we can’t do that, grip the hammer so tightly that our hands atrophy. If we can’t convince the other side to see the hammer our way, we figure, we might as well make damn sure we won’t see it their way.

We need to admit that the definitions of words shift with the context in which they’re spoken. You’d think “American” would have an immutable definition, but it’s pretty clear it doesn’t. Same with “feminist” and “Christian” and “privilege”.

What Arrival does well is show how imperfect communication can be, that the atmosphere surrounding the words carries meaning as well. Once we realise that, we can stop using language as a weapon and start using it as a tool. – Washington Post

Arrival. The visual language of the aliens in