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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   18751 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 8, 2026

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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

Arrival at this point is a movie that I like more because it introduced me to the source material than for the movie in itself. Yes, the direction is good, but they way they butchered the original concept is inexcusable (thank you screenwriter Eric Heisserer).

In the original work the idea is that only your perception of time changes, your consciousness can't time travel and everything you do still has to make sense in a linear, causal view of time. Learning the language lets you remember the future just as you remember the past but it also dispels you of the illusion of free will. The aliens came to earth not because "they know that some day we will help them or something" but simply as explorers. There is no big action scene where the protagonist averts a catastrophe by using her knowledge of the future.

The part about her daughter (it's a daughter in the book) underscores this. She dies not of an incurable illness but of an easily preventable rock climbing incident. Except that she can't easily prevent it because that's just how it happens, just like you can't change the past.

The movie muddles all this, probably to make the big action climax. I imagine somebody at some point figured out it would be callous for the protagonist not to warn her daughter that she's going to slip and die. Maybe they didn't even get the concept of the original story, in between the lines of coke they were doing. But it doesn't solve anything, if she can consciousness timetravel why not have a child the month before, or the one after. Why specifically pick the one born with an incurable illness? Yes they would be timetravel aborting him but no more so than all the other dozens of children they are timetravel aborting instead.

Yeah, the movie decided to take it in a different direction. Personally, I think that's because the concept behind the original novella is dumb and the movie is much better for abandoning it.

Not sure how much Ted Chiang you've read, but here's his formula:

  1. Find a moderately interesting/counterintuitive idea in philosophy or science. What if we could communicate with the other worlds postulated by (a bastardized read of) the Many Worlds Hypothesis? What if, to make a true AI, it has to start with a child-like mind and grow up in real time like a person? What if the Second Law of Thermodynamics? (Exhalation, I mean. This one's actually pretty good.) He rarely chooses something really out there, but perhaps its enough for the average reader.
  2. Figure out how to wring interpersonal drama out of this idea. What if your alternate self is more successful than you? What if your AI program is running out of money, but perverts on the internet will pay you a fortune to fuck the child-like AIs? This is rarely amazing, and often rather paint-by-numbers, but it's generally competent.
  3. There is no 3. 1 and 2 are all you get, and neither is particularly deep. Once I worked out what the concept was for one of his stories, I don't think he's ever told me anything new or interesting about it. He just hopes the idea itself and a little surface-level exploration will be enough. (And it might be, if the idea is good and you haven't encountered it before, but I've never had that experience with the stories of his I've read.)

Stories of your Life has a somewhat better human side (which is why I think its his most popular story, despite not in my opinion being anywhere close to his best) and a below average concept; it doesn't actually make sense if you think it through any more than he wants you to.

Say you learn the alien language and flip into this alternate mode of perceiving time: what exactly does this look like in your brain? Well, it can't look like anything in your brain, can it? Because brain state is part of the world state that makes those future events inevitable. If perceiving the future actually affected your brain in any way at all, then it would absolutely change the future. But if there's no difference in brain state, how can there be a difference in mental state? Dualism just isn't a serious scientific or philosophical position and it hasn't been for a century at least. Even if it were, your body still acts only on information it could gather without knowing the future. Is there a separate you who perceives time normally and makes all the decisions? What is the you that can perceive the future, then? In what sense is it actually you and not some outside observer?

In the original work the idea is that only your perception of time changes, your consciousness can't time travel and everything you do still has to make sense in a linear, causal view of time.

The original work is very interesting although I’m not sure it’s very good. It raises some interesting philosophical questions. The story is probably the best possible story you could write about a form of pseudo-precognition in hindsight that makes immediate, near-term sense to a reader.

But its deliberate ambiguities exist more to paper over the questions than to answer them. Gwern presents the most plausible explanation which is that nothing physically / cosmologically interesting is going on, the protagonist is basically just ‘reflecting’ on her life, in the standard past tense, in a kind of holistic way enabled by the alien language. But that also makes the story a lot less interesting.

Learning the language lets you remember the future just as you remember the past but it also dispels you of the illusion of free will.

I don’t think it even does this. I think it just lets you view your life, in hindsight, in a way that projects memories of the future you actually experienced (in normal linear time, you’re old now) onto your younger self.

I'm not even sure there is any difference between those explanations but still:

Was it actually possible to know the future? Not simply to guess at it; was it possible to know what was going to happen, with absolute certainty and in specific detail? Gary once told me that the fundamental laws of physics were time-symmetric, that there was no physical difference between past and future. Given that, some might say, “yes, theoretically.” But speaking more concretely, most would answer “no,” because of free will.

I liked to imagine the objection as a Borgesian fabulation: consider a person standing before the Book of Ages, the chronicle that records every event, past and future (...) The Book of Ages cannot be wrong; this scenario is based on the premise that a person is given knowledge of the actual future, not of some possible future. (...) The result is a contradiction: the Book of Ages must be right, by definition; yet no matter what the Book says she’ll do, she can choose to do otherwise. How can these two facts be reconciled?

They can’t be, was the common answer. (...) The existence of free will meant that we couldn’t know the future. And we knew free will existed because we had direct experience of it. Volition was an intrinsic part of consciousness.

Or was it? What if the experience of knowing the future changed a person? What if it evoked a sense of urgency, a sense of obligation to act precisely as she knew she would?

(...)

Similarly, knowledge of the future was incompatible with free will. What made it possible for me to exercise freedom of choice also made it impossible for me to know the future. Conversely, now that I know the future, I would never act contrary to that future, including telling others what I know: those who know the future don’t talk about it. Those who’ve read the Book of Ages never admit to it.

Even though I’m proficient with Heptapod B, I know I don’t experience reality the way a heptapod does. My mind was cast in the mold of human, sequential languages, and no amount of immersion in an alien language can completely reshape it. My worldview is an amalgam of human and heptapod.

Before I learned how to think in Heptapod B, my memories grew like a column of cigarette ash, laid down by the infinitesimal sliver of combustion that was my consciousness, marking the sequential present. After I learned Heptapod B, new memories fell into place like gigantic blocks, each one measuring years in duration, and though they didn’t arrive in order or land contiguously, they soon composed a period of five decades. It is the period during which I know Heptapod B well enough to think in it, starting during my interviews with Flapper and Raspberry and ending with my death.

I could not disagree more, I love this change from the source material.

In order to have that version work everything after her perception gets rewired functionally makes her a zombie, unable to perform basic actions like suggesting her daughter not go rock climbing today, because she has seen the future and is unable to change it. She is functionally a prisoner inside her own life as she is forced to read from a script. Her take away is to relish the good times and try to remember every detail of them since she can relive those moments ad nauseum, which is a lovely take away from what is essentially a nonsensical horror story ending.

In the movie she sees potential future but retains some agency. Which the science works less well than in the book, it avoids the question of what exactly is forcing her to act out the script and instead focuses on the question of if she believes the good times with her husband and daughter are worth the bad. This is a more beautiful and meaningful ending IMHO, it gives her suffering meaning because she went into it with both eyes open in order to grab onto the good that comes with it instead of her being locked in her head screaming that she wants to pick up the phone and tell her daughter to do anything else today OTHER than rock climb but being unable to do so because she is locked out of agency by 4th dimensional vision.

That worked fine for Doctor Manhattan because part of his story was that the 4th dimensional vision and associated super powers altered him so much he was no longer meaningfully human, and I really liked those parts of Watchmen. But they explained it better and worked with it better.

I got the Ted Chiang Short story collection this story is from, and frankly I found The Story of Your Life (the one Arrival is based on) to be the best one despite my many problems with it. I was pretty unimpressed by Chiang tbh.

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