The reason behind events transcending time — on “Arrival” following James Hillman
Contains spoilers for “Arrival”
The film “Arrival” by Denis Villeneuve (2016) tells the story of Louise, a linguist called to investigate the language of extraterrestrials who have arrived on Earth. While working with them and on them, she acquires abilities related to the non-linear circular structure of the aliens’ language, which also affects her perception of time. A perception that becomes two-way.
The film’s cinematic structure shows us the basic trauma of the heroine: her daughter died of a rare disease. So we see her walking around the campus where she teaches and immediately explain to us who she is and what her situation is. She is sad and lonely, she lost her home. The whole story already describes to us the crisis she fell into and from which the film seemingly begins. Only toward the end of the viewing does the viewer understand that what he saw in chronological order of the film, did not happen chronologically in the timeline of the story. Everything that the viewer interprets for himself as a trauma, as the basic story of the heroine, took place in his mind and only there.
James Hillman describes in his letter “Living life backward” (Babel Publishing, translation to Hebrew by Mor Kadishzon) a fascinating worldview that is a reversal of the narrative-linear thinking pattern and the psychological assumptions of the 20th century. He claims, in essence, that man is a man in the present at every stage of his life, and therefore the point of view should always focus on the present he experiences and tell the story and not cling to the past (even the traumatic) to build a story that is an axis that deals with the past and its implications.
“Here I develop the idea of the acorn and its importance to imagine life in the opposite direction, backwards, not in terms of time, from birth to death, but in terms of its meaning […] The oak tree is no longer itself after four hundred years and as soon as it is cut down . He’s always him.”
The timeline according to Hillman is a two-way axis where the past shapes the future and the future also shapes the past. His words can be understood as follows: since man is a supertemporal entity and not only one that develops in a constant process from childhood to old age, it is possible to create an inversion between cause and effector. The future could be the reason why you went through things in your childhood so that you were shaped the way you were. In this, he goes against the accepted psychological concepts but also against our concepts about narrative, meaning, and as I will describe later: conflict.
Think before you act
The main tense moment in the film deals with the moment when she calls the president of China to prevent a Chinese attack on the aliens and, possibly, a world war. She obtains the phone number of the President of China in the future, having already succeeded in her plan and celebrated it at an international event. In the same event, the President of China leans towards her and whispers his wife’s last words to her, through which she will convince him in the past to cooperate with her. A dramatic event that raises many questions about its theoretical programming.
The film “Arrival” evokes many thoughts about time travel, the programming of the narrative sequence as it happened, and the gap between fate and choice and with them also meta thoughts: about the non-linear cinematic language that shapes a non-linear worldview in us. I will focus first on the question of choice and vocation. The husband of the film’s heroine divorced her after he found out that his wife knew in advance that their daughter would die of an illness and yet decided to give birth to her. However, the film does not show us the heroine’s hesitation and the complex process regarding this question. He does focus, as I described earlier, on the drama in front of the President of China as a significant and dramatic cinematic moment. The rest is told to us in a kind of casual way, like a thoughtful montage, without emotional debates and tearful dialogues.
Louise Banks chose whether or not to live her life in a certain timeline that is too difficult to interfere with. And I want to comment that the very question of her intervention or non-interference with fate, a question that accompanies every time travel film we know, is wrong in this film because it is a question of people traveling through time in one direction. Sorry. It is not a film about time travel because the character is always physically and mentally at one point in time, but his perception of time is different. This is a concept that does not challenge the existence of time but, like Hillman, the meaning of time, the perception. The thought that certain lives are worthy for a certain reason (for example, that you will not die as a child because a fulfilled life is a mature life) is a thought that sees a person as a developing character. Hillman claims that “growth is secular redemption” meaning, in my understanding, it comes to compensate for the lack of a religious redemption dimension that is above time and the tragedy of placing childhood as some sort of personal compass (“the inner child”). Or as Nadin Shenkar, the admissions lecturer at Bezalel, used to say: The next world is not the next world from the NEXT language but the next world from the COMING language. A world to come.
The renewed perception that Louise acquired did not give her prophetic powers, but they allowed her to live without the need for imagined progress and destiny, both in marrying a man who would leave her and in bringing a life that would end prematurely (“prematurely”? As Incks would say: “How can a life end prematurely?”).
Conflict is overrated
Years after watching the movie I pondered what came before what. After all, even if she foresaw in the future the last words of the wife of the President of China, something should have motivated the President of China on that occasion to give it to her. Because every event has an event that precedes it and motivates it, and it is impossible for a person to voluntarily initiate a process if he is not aware of the desired result he is trying to achieve at the end of this process.
But now I understand what a fool I am. And here it is indeed related to a cinematic sequence that is not interested in and cannot show us the sequence of actions surrounding an event for it to occur, and on the other hand shows us what Hillman calls “the possibility that is truly yours”, that is, the possibilities that are meant for you and are relevant to your possible story minus the many irrelevant possibilities. The desire to rearrange the timeline so that it is logical and causal is not relevant in such a film, because like the alien language it is designed to open the mind to another dimension. The question is different. Similarly, the question about Lewis’s intentions and lack of action is not relevant because she did not experience this as a hesitation regarding action affecting the plane of time. After all, where she is there is no point and desire to affect the timeline at all. There is only the present.
One of the things I never understood is the definition of conflict as the basis of any drama. I was also drawn to discuss and think about it and develop my theories, but something at the base of this premise never felt accurate to me. Why do you need conflict to understand a character? Can every mental reality in our everyday life be defined by some kind of conflict? Between desire and need? Between values? I feel it barely describes 10 percent of conscious human existence and I’m not sure much more than that on the unconscious level.
And the film, as I will see, subverts exactly this concept. Louise’s character is not driven by conflict throughout the film. She acts and acts again out of doing what is right in her eyes. Sometimes she is right, sometimes she is wrong, but she never places two values on the scales (isn’t this a “zero sum game”, where everyone wins?). Even the famous “refusal to adventure” does not exist here. This is the stage where the hero avoids entering into an adventure that will change his cinematic life. Louise is not only ready for adventure, but she also makes sure that her competitors are filtered according to her dictates. We assume at first glance that since she is lonely and sad and has lost her child, she has nothing to lose. But this is known to be untrue. Even the moment when the great conflict takes place is not really like that. She risks her life to save the world but this is not a real conflict. Are there any of us who would, from a value point of view, behave differently in such a situation?
So where is the big conflict then? Later. On the question of whether to marry someone who will leave or give birth to a girl who will die young, and whether to tell it or not when it is still possible to seemingly change the future. All these seemingly great dramas are not told as a cinematic drama at all, but as a kind of atmospheric montage, a flashback, like at the beginning of the film. Louise is not at a loss as to what to do. We only see her determined. She explains to her daughter that the disease is unstoppable as her personality is unstoppable. and named her daughter Hannah as expressing this duality of her temporary super-personality. Even during the events themselves, Louise does not prevent or take the initiative because the question asked is not whether it is right and appropriate to have a baby. Her partner asks her: “Do you want to have a baby?” And she answers out of the moment the truth: yes. she wants a girl A truth for its time as an eternal truth.
In this sense, to put the cinematic drama around a conflict is to reduce the dimension of time and human nature to cause and effect only. Because the assumption is that characters strive to achieve something and thus are less present in the continuous present of the film.
another time
It seems to me that only recently are we open to challenging absolute basic concepts and assumptions such as the existence of a definite timeline, and as the film claims, art and language have an important role in shaping new worldviews even without setting it as a goal or destination. Two other cinematic moments are particularly memorable to me in this context and I will end with them. The film “TENET”, like ‘Hannah,’ is a polyandrous break of the narrative linearity of the timeline. As I wrote in the film analysis, time travel is not something technical to be solved like in “Avengers — End Game” or a scientific puzzle to be solved. Time travel has a lot of the supratemporal point of view that has an equanimity towards processes. Full disclosure, I have no patience for ‘TENET,’ but I watched one scene and there was something wonderful about it. The scene depicted the explanation for the ability to move time back while dealing with the question I raised earlier: how can you start a process whose outcome has already happened in reality?
The answer is instinct. Instinct is an involuntary and unintended action with a conscious purpose that we perform all the time. What the film offers is an extension of the instinct to actions that are voluntary in nature. And something is charming about it because the assumption that we always recognize a direct connection between cause and effect is an unproven human whim. On the other hand, the ability to expand the instinct contains within it an assumption that we have hidden senses that have a deep connection to reality that can only arise from the place where we are physically morbid rulers of our lives.
When the hero fails to catch a projectile lying on the table in reverse gear, the coach tells him: “You have to have dropped it”. That is: you will not be able to catch a projectile that you did not drop. See this reality as a necessary, inevitable reality, even if it happens in the future. Or as Louise says: Unstoppable.
