{"id":35452,"date":"2016-11-23T22:15:10","date_gmt":"2016-11-24T04:15:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/?p=35452"},"modified":"2016-12-05T10:47:32","modified_gmt":"2016-12-05T16:47:32","slug":"arrival-when-is-now","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/2016\/11\/23\/arrival-when-is-now\/","title":{"rendered":"ARRIVAL: When is Now?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"egg-600\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Arrival<\/strong> (2016).<\/em><\/p>\n

DB here:<\/p>\n

A lot of today\u2019s movie storytelling is nonlinear. Filmmakers rely on\u00a0flashbacks, replays, and voice-overs in order\u00a0to shape our experience, sometimes in fairly daring\u00a0ways. In Hollywood these strategies got consolidated in the 1940s. Or so I argue in my Reinventing Hollywood,<\/em> now in copy-editing (or as the University of Chicago Press calls\u00a0it, copy editing).<\/p>\n

The question today is the same as back then: How do ambitious filmmakers handle these conventions? I think the ambitious writer or director faces at least three tasks.<\/p>\n

How do I innovate\u2014that is, how do I treat time shifts in a fresh way?<\/strong><\/p>\n

How do I motivate the shifts\u2014that is, justify the scrambling of chronology?<\/strong><\/p>\n

How do I make the new version clear enough for audiences to follow?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Novelty, motivation, and clarity seem to me essential considerations for a filmmaker who wants to play with time and the viewpoint shifts that often come with it.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m not alone in thinking that Arrival<\/em> succeeds in creating its particular engagement with the audience by tackling my three tasks. Director Denis Villeneuve and screenwriter Eric Heisserer innovate in handling time, and they in turn carefully motivate the device and find ways to make it clear to the audience. Today I want to consider how this all works. I have to assume you\u2019ve seen the film, so of course there are spoilers<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Back to what future?<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"louise-splat-500\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Cinema didn\u2019t invent broken timelines; they\u2019ve been used in literature for centuries. The Odyssey<\/em> has blocks of flashbacks. Literature benefits from the fact that\u00a0language has simple and direct ways to signal jumps in time.<\/p>\n

For example, the writer working in English can make flashbacks clear though time tags and verb tense. Take this passage from John Le Carr\u00e9\u2019s novel Our Kind of Traitor<\/em>. We\u2019re told that on Sunday morning an anxious Perry Makepiece is climbing into a chauffeur-driven Mercedes. Then:<\/p>\n

Last night, returning to the Deux Anges from their supper party, Perry had caught Madame M\u00e8re\u2019s boot-button eyes peering at him from her den behind the reception desk.<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cLast night\u201d tells us we\u2019re in an earlier period, and that information is reinforced by the past perfect tense of \u201chad caught.\u201d Page layout helps too: the entire flashback to the previous night is blocked out within extra spaces separated by a centered \u2605.<\/p>\n

After recounting what happened when Perry returned to his hotel last night, Le Carr\u00e9 returns to the present time, the narrative Now, with a turn to the simple past tense:<\/p>\n

The Mercedes stank of foul tobacco smoke.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Apart from the change of tense, the Mercedes mention reminds us of Perry\u2019s morning trip. In addition, the shift back to the present opens a new section marked by \u2605.<\/p>\n

On my three dimensions: There\u2019s nothing innovative about this instance, though Le Carr\u00e9 will try some unusual things elsewhere in the book. The flashback is motivated by Perry\u2019s remembering last night, and it\u2019s made clear to the reader through repetition of several cues.<\/p>\n

But what do we do with this passage?<\/p>\n

I remember the scenario of your origin you\u2019ll suggest when you\u2019re twelve.<\/strong><\/p>\n

The tenses are out of whack, thanks to that \u201cyou\u2019ll.” Then there\u2019s the very meaning of the word \u201cremember.\u201d (Replacing the phrase with \u201cI imagine.\u201d) How can you remember something that has yet to happen? This isn\u2019t just a casual slip. The speaker goes on to report an entire conversation that uses the future tense: \u201cyou\u2019ll say bitterly,\u201d \u201cI\u2019ll say,\u201d \u201cThat will be in the house on Belmont Street,\u201d and so on.<\/p>\n

This passage comes near the start of Ted Chiang\u2019s \u201cStory of Your Life,\u201d the source of Arrival<\/em>. The story is what literary scholars call an apostrophe, a discourse addressed to an absent person. Louise Banks explains how her daughter\u00a0came into existence. The story begins with Louise’s\u00a0husband asking one evening, \u201c\u201dDo you want to make a baby?\u201d It\u2019s this point in time that\u2019s marked as the present (and is rendered in present tense), but the bulk of the story shuttles between the past and the future. From the benchmark moment we get, in other words, flashbacks alternating with flashforwards.<\/p>\n

On my three-dimensional scale, Chiang gets credit for innovation. Stories told in the future tense are pretty rare, especially when the events are presented as memories. And he makes the narrational premise clear. After a few pages, it\u2019s established that Louise purports to know things yet to happen. The tenses cooperate: Present for the baby-making moment, past tense for the past events, future for the future ones.<\/p>\n

We\u2019re used to characters who know their past, but how can one know her future? For the story-maker that reduces to: How to motivate<\/em> Louise\u2019s knowing the future?<\/p>\n

The answer is aliens. In the past, Louise met her husband when floating seven-legged creatures came to earth. As a linguist, she was assigned to learn the Heptapods\u2019 language. Gradually she discovered that they had a mentality that refused causality and sequence in favor of a holistic view of time. Their language, to put it crudely, gave them access to past, present, and future.<\/p>\n

\"deciphering-400\"<\/a><\/p>\n

By learning their language Louise absorbed, to some extent, their world-view. (Yes, the untenable Sapir-Whorf hypothesis <\/a>is invoked.) Her precognition allows her to know, moments before she and her husband conceive the girl, what her daughter will do from her childhood right up to her early death. Louise also knows that she and her husband will divorce and find new partners. For us, these episodes are rendered as flashforwards from the Now, even though for Louise they are, paradoxically, memories (of things yet to happen).<\/p>\n

Chiang\u2019s story explores the emotional effects of knowing the future and deciding not to try to change it. For all I know, this may be another innovation in the realm of speculative fiction. Most time-travelers seek\u00a0to alter the past or the future, but Louise is aware of the paradoxes of time travel. If you know the future, you can freely decide to alter it by choosing differently at crucial junctures. Marry somebody else, and you’ll change what happens afterward, so you didn\u2019t really know the future. But Louise comes to believe that free will is a part of linear, causal thinking, the sort that the Heptapods have given up.<\/p>\n

The existence of free will meant that we couldn\u2019t know the future. And we knew free will still existed because we had direct experience of it. Volition was an intrinsic part of consciousness.<\/strong><\/p>\n

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?<\/strong><\/p>\n

The Heptapods know that they will need help from Earth in 3000 years, and they presumably know that they\u2019ll get it, but to fulfill that future they need to ask. The story\u2019s analogy is to the daughter\u2019s wanting to re-hear a story she knows by heart. As a\u00a0story reader replays a known tale, the aliens perform the incidents that make things inevitable.<\/p>\n

So Louise accepts her role in playing out whatever future is predetermined. For this reason she can address her (future) daughter with foreknowledge of the pains and delights that are coming, accepting them as part of a seamless whole.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Image + sound + time<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"louise-hands-500\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Lacking a tense system like language, cinema has devised other time signals. In the classic flashback we get a combination of them. We\u2019re presented with a speaking or remembering character, a track-in to her, perhaps some music, a hint in the dialogue that we\u2019re going into the past, a dissolve, perhaps a voice-over indication, and then a scene obviously situated in an earlier period. Filmmakers have discovered ways of altering some cues (cuts replace dissolves, tight close-ups replace track-ins) and deleting others (music and voice-over seem fairly optional now). Other cues are added for clarity, such as a different color palette for scenes in the past, or perhaps slow-motion imagery, or sound from the past that leaks in over imagery in the present.<\/p>\n

Of course films use written and spoken language too, and so they can deploy tenses and time tags. Sometimes that can help us understand the time status of the scenes we\u2019re seeing.<\/p>\n

Voice-over is very helpful here. Take another Le Carr\u00e9 example, this time from Fred Schepisi and Tom Stoppard\u2019s adaptation of The Russia House<\/em>. Play the clip below and you\u2019ll see what I mean.<\/p>\n