Back to Back 64 - Everything Everywhere All Over Again (Part 2)
Sci-fi epics departing from the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, bushy-mustachioed incel and horse-lover extraordinaire
The best parables should speak about time and becoming: they should be praise and justification of all that is not everlasting!
Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Book III, "On The Blessed Isles"
There is becoming, change, passage. But the form of what changes does not itself change, does not pass on. This is time, time itself, ‘a little time in its pure state’: a direct time-image, which gives what changes the unchanging form in which the change is produced... Time is the full, that is, the unalterable form filled by change.
Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time Image
Time is a flat circle.
Rust Cole in True Detective, Season 1
As discussed in Part 1, Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey made aliens an unreachable MacGuffin for the heroes to pursue on their odyssey, while the real story was the overcoming of a false god made of lies so as to enable the next stage of evolution. That the god was an artificial brain shouldn't be taken too literally, for Kubrick's attitude to AI was much more complex than a neo-Luddite "machines bad" posture. 1
Rather, the death of god that was required was the killing of a neurotic pseudorationality centred on a sterile technological outlook that stymied imagination and actually threatened human survival. Thus was birthed the overhuman, with the unseen extraterrestrials merely a plot device to achieve that end.
[THIS DISCUSSION INCLUDES MILD SPOILERS FOR ARRIVAL]
In Ted Chiang's novella The Story of Your Life and the subsequent film adaptation by Denis Villeneuve and screenwriter Eric Heisserer, the alien encounter is likewise an excuse to explore alternatives in conceiving of our own life. Instead of an arrow flowing from past to present to future, with past (our birth and before) behind us and our future (and our death) ahead, what if time was everything everywhere all at once? What if time could be perceived in its totality - what would that be like?
Just as with 2001, the aliens themselves barely figure in the story except as a plot element to reconfigure the protagonist's conception of time. Their great weapon, their gift, is a language which allows humans who learn it to experience past and future as one, a circular oneness of existence.
There's a lot of dialogue which asserts the base supposition that "learning a new language rewires your brain", as Ian puts it. Ian is the source and fount of nearly all pop science factoids, but as he's established from the start as "scientist man", these are taken to be authoritative at all times.
This positioning of Ian as arbiter of scientific truth is ironic, given that he declares right from the beginning that science is the cornerstone of civilization, not language - an assertion that is demonstrably proven false just by remembering where science comes in human history, in relation to civilization and language. Also, it's notable that he is the one most resistant to the new conception of time that the aliens and Louise have offered, his refusal to accept her ultimate decision a last-ditch defense of the linear conception of time.
Anyway, this "Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis" as it's presented here - very crudely indeed, and not with any regard to the many debates that have raged around it from the beginning - establishes the main movie magic that's in play here. Namely, that understanding the aliens' simultaneous conception of time through studying and learning their language ("the gift") brings with it that very way of thinking with its accompanying ability to see into the future as if it were a memory of the past. This "Sapir-Whorf" magic is not to be questioned; it is simply the way that we will encounter this radically different way of thinking about time and our place in it.
Though the film in general is dialogue-heavy, with a large chunk of it a kind of mysticism about the power of verbal language itself and the superhuman abilities of the linguist as specialist in this dark art of words, there are plenty of visual touches from Villeneuve which convey the imminent circularity of time. The trick is to deceive the viewer into believing that a number of scenes (those showing Louise in contact with her growing daughter and her daughter's death) are flashbacks to a past with a husband and family, whereas in fact they will be flash-forwards to her life after her encounter with the aliens and her marriage to Ian.
At the same time Villeneuve is hinting by means of visual cues that there's a circularity in play. Right at the beginning, for example, after Louise has seen her daughter die, she says “I’m not so sure I believe in beginning and endings” - a clue that what we are seeing is not the “beginning” of the story. We follow her through a hospital corridor, which - very much unlike most hospitals we might find in real life - is circular.
On her first arrival at the alien site, the helicopter takes a long circular detour before landing at the base. We travel in that descending circle in a point of view that gazes, not at the enormous alien craft, but at the group of tents in a field. We take in that simple military base immediately, there's no need to fix on it for so long, but we circle it for a considerable time. The point of this shot is not, of course, to examine the base but to travel, with Louise, in a full circle.
Time as a circle: this is the key insight offered by Friedrich Nietzsche with his "Doctrine of Eternal Recurrence". There are other cosmological conceptions of time as a recurring circle, especially in Eastern Philosophy, but although source text author Ted Chiang is of ethnic Chinese descent, he took the idea originally from contemporary theoretical physics.
However, it's as an ethical and existential challenge - would you wish live your life all over again if you felt that it existed eternally? - that it is most relevant to the story, which connects most closely to the Nietzschean version of circular time. This is how it appears in its first mention in Nietzsche:
What if some day or night a demon were to steal into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: 'This life as you now live it and have lived it you will have to live once again and innumerable times again; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unspeakably small or great in your life must return to you, all in the same succession and sequence...
Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: 'You are a god, and never have I heard anything more divine. ' If this thought gained power over you, as you are it would transform and possibly crush you; the question in each and every thing, 'Do you want this again and innumerable times again?' would lie on your actions as the heaviest weight! Or how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life to long for nothing more fervently than for this ultimate eternal confirmation and seal?
Nietzsche, The Gay Science, Section 341
It's clearly a thought experiment meant to challenge us about how much we feel our lives to be valid as lived in its totality. It questions our "now" as worthy of eternal repetition, and acts as a spur toward an affirmative attitude to our lives - at least in this first formulation. Later, Nietzsche would come to upgrade it as a literal metaphysical belief about the cosmos, a kind of replacement secular religion.
Nevertheless, most of his readers take it as the former, a provocative thought experiment about how valid we feel our life experience and our actions to be, and that's really how the film - which isn't really pushing any kind of religious viewpoint - wishes us to take it.
There are some definitional differences between a life lived once that can experience itself as a totality, its past and future as vivid as the present (as presented to Louise) , and a life lived in the 'normal' straight-line way but which is lived again and again. But for the purposes of the central ethical dilemma - is Louise right to have her daughter, knowing in advance that she would die young from an incurable disease? - they are functionally the same.
They amount to the life-affirming nature of experience itself. This is why the recurring "flashbacks" which we later discover to be "flash-forwards" of Louise with her daughter are the actual emotional substance of the film. They develop in parallel to her contact with the extraterrestrials, erupting at first as what we imagine to be traumatic scenes from her past. By contrast, Louise's relationship with Ian, as seen in this film, is sketchy at best.
The story leads us to valorize her choice to have a child predestined to a young death, for if not, how could her "unstoppable" character ever have had a chance to exist? Though there is clear recognition of the terrible consequences that come with that decision in the shots of the daughter saying directly to camera (to Louise) "I hate you!"
The "flashforwards", then, are the underlying story beyond all the plot business about aliens and international conflict. They are the key emotional charge that the filmmaker wishes to convey to the audience, using the alien encounter story as vehicle. Consequently, the film isn't "about" aliens, but rather it's "about" accepting the choices we make (and that are made for us) and affirming our lives without regret or second-guessing. There’s no ambivalance about this message, which is stated plain as day.
Craftily, there is a deft selection of these flashback/forward shots, so that the scenes of the daughter dying in hospital predominate at the start (in tragic mode), the scenes of her growing up are more numerous in the middle (the coming-of-age mode) and the scenes of her as a newborn baby are dominant at the end, with no shots of her death appearing any more. It's a reversed model of the typical biography - the pain and suffering at the start, the growth in the middle, and the wonder of new life at the end.
So in our discussion of 2001, we considered the story as underlaid by a substructure or (loosely considered) an allegory. Can we say the same is true of this story?
I can't speak to the intention of the creators behind this - text author Chiang, scriptwriter Heisserer, and director Villeneuve, but I can see an allegory of sorts. It's with the classic story of the occult scholar Faust, who famously made a pact with the devil Mephistopholes - great power and wisdom in return for his soul.
In this reading Louise is configured as an esoteric alchemist of The Wonder-Working Word (a term from Renaissance mage Reuchlin), in opposition to the rather ineffectual conventional insight represented by Ian. She makes a pact of understanding with the Abbot and Costello aliens representing Mephistopoles and his occult knowledge.
By this means she gains the power to bend time itself, violating all kinds of informational paradoxes in magicking the Chinese general's cellphone number and his great secret. But there is a cost, a curse - her exposure to the aliens has made her the carrier of death, so that as a price she has to pay, not her soul, but her daughter's life. This she does willingly because of the life-affirming experience of being with her daughter's "unstoppable" life force.
The emotional charge of the tragic Faust story is reversed, thanks to the affirmative doctrine of eternal recurrence and the amor fati or willing fatalism that goes with it. She becomes, instead of a doomed demonic meddler, a Nietzschean heroine, an overman, in love with her life and the life of a child that she can deliver to its experience. 2
As should be obvious from his conception of the project that became Spielberg's AI: Artificial Intelligence, and from the following declaration:
One of the fascinating questions that arises envisioning computers more intelligent than men is at what point machine intelligence deserves the same considerations as biological intelligence... You could be tempted to ask yourself in what way is machine intelligence any less sacrosanct than biological intelligence, and it might be difficult to arrive at an answer flattering to biological intelligence.
Kubrick in Alexander Walker, Stanley Kubrick, Director (2000), 32
For a more complete consideration of Arrival in relation to Nietzsche’s Eteranal Recurrence, see the essays
Villeneuve’s ‘Arrival’: A Deep Exploration of the Importance of Language, the Nature of Time and the Dichotomy of Human Existence, Koraljka Suton (which dwells more on the linguistic angle, but mentions recurrence in connection with free will and individual choice - and also includes a complete copy of the screenplay).
and
Life Willed at Every Second: Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival and Friedrich Nietzsche’s Eternal Return of the Same, Daniel Podgorski (which gets into the detail of Nietzsche in connection with the time conceptions of this film)