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Arrival: A short review (Spoilers)
Villeneuve is a unique director. His movies use bizarre settings or scenarios as a backdrop to tell intensely human and personal dramas.
In Bladerunner 2049 he evolves the 1982 movie's dystopian frame into its full aesthetic. Skyscraper mausoleums, home to living creatures with dead souls and dying creatures with living souls. The ruins of Vegas. A glimpse, briefly, into a potential uprising. All in service of a story where a nobody ensures that a somebody has final closure.
In Enemy, it is not clear, even by the end, whether the story takes place entirely inside the unreliable narrator's mind. Huge spiders roam the city, eventually invading the protagonist's very living room (or mind?).
While Villeneuve's unsettling aesthetic is at its peak in Dune I and II, I consider them two of his weaker movies. There are two characters in Herbert's Dune: the planet itself, and the directed inevitability of massed humanity. What is personal must be in service to this setting. Instead, Villeneuve's interpretation foregrounds individual agency.
Fortunately, Villeneuve has already directed his SciFi masterpiece in Arrival. The alien ships are massive ellipsoids hovering impossibly mere meters from the earth. The aliens themselves walk on tentacle appendages, grotesquely squid-like. The camera frequently takes a near-first-person view, with panicked and claustrophobic breathing emanating from all speakers (1). These moments of enclosed fear are juxtaposed against equally breathtaking cinematographic vistas. The slow panning as the helicopter approaches the alien ship with low-lying clouds roiling across the Montana prairie. A human hand reaching fingers up as the alien's tentacles stretch downward.
Amy Adams is perfectly cast. In 2016 she could pass for 30 or 45 or anywhere in between, key to the time-bending unfolding of the plot. She treats her character, Louise, much like Villeneuve treats the movie: with understated grace and moments of sublime. Louise's loneliness palpably exudes in the first third of the movie, before running an emotional gamut from fear, hope, acceptance, and finally transcendence.
The science is inaccurate (2), but Villeneuve perfectly captures the academic aesthetic.
The idea that language constrains and shapes our experience of reality is thoughtfully if subtly explored (3).
While there are nods to liberal sensibilities (when a general tells Louise she made short work of insurgent Farsi recordings, she retorts "you made short work of the insurgents"; a soldier turns rogue following a phone call with his inconsolable wife and listening to the in-universe stand-in for Alex Jones), Villeneuve rarely lets politics infect his storytelling.
This movie feels quasi-religious and transcendent (4) in its celebration of life and meaning in suffering and loss. Louise through her contact with the aliens is able to view her life outside of time, revealing memory-like sequences of her future. This future includes myriad happy moments with her daughter, but concludes with her daughter's devastating death from cancer. Arrival climaxes with Louise joyfully embracing this future despite knowing that it means the premature end of her only romantic relationship and the heartbreaking loss of her daughter. The time that she will have with her daughter is worth it all.
Last week's discussion on Down Syndrome prompted this post. How many parents who have Down syndrome children would trade those children for nothingness? How many, if they had perfect foresight, would still choose to have the child? Age begets wisdom, experience shapes us, and relationships become our great source of meaning. A couple choosing to abort their Down syndrome child are doing more than making an expedient choice. They are depriving themselves and their child of a rich tapestry of experience; one that is perhaps more challenging and painful, but also one that can and should be fulfilling. A life of short cuts is a life cut short; not in time but in meaning.
(1) Watch this on a big screen and with surround sound
(2) At one point a whiteboard displays the "top 10" most famous equations including Black Scholes...none of which would be relevant to alien first contact. It is also preposterous that we perceive time linearly solely due to our linear language.
(3) Yes, the fact that this is the "reason" behind Louise's ability to view her life outside of time is not "subtle", but this reveal is blink-and-miss-it: my guess is most viewers would simply associate her time-bending ability with prolonged exposure to the aliens.
(4) Villeneuve grew up Catholic
Thanks for the writeup. This is probably my favorite movie of all time, or at least top 3. Incredible story, incredibly acted and directed and scripted. Love it so much.
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The implication seems to be that you should have children with as many different neurological disorders as possible rather than boring neurotypicals. Is that really your position?
Not OP but that doesn't seem to follow in the slightest, no. The child is (obviously) denied a rich tapestry of experience and so is the parent. This doesn't imply that on the parent's side it's worthwhile to maximize for diversity of weird and unpleasant challenges. Only that if they do get a child with those differences, they're missing out on something by not experiencing the child and the relationship they'd have had with him or her.
As an inveterate baby-maker (on the male side) myself, my concern isn't for the burden on my wife and I. We'd rise to it well, I think. My concern is for the dampening effect it might have on the lives of my other children. I don't see murder as a reasonable solution, though; if I did, I can think of a lot of other people whose deaths would probably also improve my children's lives.
Does a Down syndrome child entail a richer tapestry of experiences for the parent than a neurotypical child? That's the tradeoff being made here.
This seems to assume that having a Down syndrome child precludes having another child afterward, which strikes me as odd.
A Down syndrome child is such a massive sink of resources that it DOES (if not absolutely preclude) make it much more difficult to have another child afterwards.
As for the "rich tapestry"... an afternoon being subject to torture is a richer tapestry of experience than taking a nap, but all things considered, I'd take the nap every time.
Waiting for a promotion opportunity can feel like torture too. How much easier might life be if your boss unfortunately, unexpectedly passed away when you're the obvious candidate to replace him? Or if that competitor who's making business hard just vanished one day, not to be heard from again? It'd probably be really good for your kids, too.
If you're not going to get a promotion unless you murder your boss, you are better off changing companies. Obviously there's no equivalent of that in the analogy... so you're not getting that promotion (or having that next child)
I don't find early-term abortion tantamount to murder, so the analogy really doesn't convince me.
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If you want to argue that's it's immoral to abort a down syndrome baby, go ahead - but what you're doing is arguing that the parents are missing out, in fact impoverishing themselves, by not having a disabled child.
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It obviously does, on the margin, since the options are:
Humans have a limited fertility window and most people are trying to hit some target number of kids. However, even if you are just trying to maximize the number of kids you have until you hit menopause, you're trading off a neurotypical kid for a down syndrome kid. Exception would be situations like "you're over 40 and you probably can't get pregnant again".
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Arrival is probably a Top 5 movie all time for me.
Aborting your child after finding out it has down syndrome is understandable in a material world, which is what most of our society lives in. Pain and suffering in a material world is a variable that must be minimized or eliminated. We all get that. In the spiritual world, pain and suffering often have meaning, and people who see that tend to understand something that a life of comfort sometimes cannot.
That is one of the core points of disagreement is it not?
You say pain and suffering are variables that must be minimized or eliminated, and I say that this attitude is dysgenic and fundamentally incompatible with human flourishing.
The downstream effects are dysgenic and anti-human, but my comment leans more toward those effects seeming to be symptoms of a deeper immaterial or spiritual problem. I see the materialist culture as having no strong category for meaningful suffering. That is where belief in the immaterial or spiritual tends to matter at scale. It does not make suffering pleasant, and it does not require one to pretend that pain is not real or that it is good in all cases. But it does give people a reason not to treat suffering as the ultimate evil to be avoided at all costs.
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I think 'human flourishing' is a dodge; a nice-sounding but ultimately empty referent. Sure, just wave vaguely in a direction that most people agree has appealing vibes. But is that really a basis on which to build any sort of worthwhile moral system or institute policy?
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This is a false dichotomy, most who would abort a downs child would then go on to have a normal child. Not nothing. Everything in life have an opportunity cost.
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Arrival was good, but it mostly missed the point of the short story, in that it shouldn't have included time travel.
https://gwern.net/story-of-your-life
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