A defence of Philosophy in ARRIVAL (and in other films, too).

A response to Rob's article on the problems with Philosophy in film.

Arrival - last year’s science-fiction film directed by Denis Villeneuve - is not a film that sugarcoats its intellectual ambition. Essentially a much more somber and thoughtful take on the classic ‘alien encounter’ story, the film stars Amy Adams as an interpreter sent to aid the US government in communicating with one of twelve spacecrafts that have mysteriously arrived on Earth. It’s philosophical range is pretty spectacular, earning it rave reviews…and some raised eyebrows.

A few months after the film released, our own Robert went to see the film and came back with what I thought was quite an unusual response: that films which place extortionate weight upon the philosophical ideas at their core are unable to use these ideas as a ‘springboard’ to greater storytelling, or even simply to further explore the philosophical idea in depth. In short, the ideas at play act as a sort of cinematic dead weight that drags the film down, albeit not to the depths that other more ‘mediocre’ films plumb.

At that time, I hadn’t seen the film yet so refrained from really delving into what Rob was saying. Now, months later, I have finally gotten around to seeing Arrival and upon revisiting Rob’s article, was interested (though not surprised - I did just graduate from a Philosophy course) to find myself at quite great odds with his impression of the film. Not only did I find Arrival to be a contender for cinemas best depiction of the philosophy of language, but I also found it to be an ultimately beautiful and occasionally profound story. On the less pretentious side: it doesn't hurt that the film is also really gripping.

My goal here is to provide a response to Rob’s article: both to demonstrate the extent to which I agree with his central thesis, whilst also mounting a defense of Arrival along with countless other philosophically inclined movies that are not weighed down by their intellectual baggage.

Note: There will be SPOILERS for Arrival within. I'll mark where they are when I get to them, but really you should go watch Arrival first. It's great.

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Firstly, let’s agree on at least one thing: a film that is purely in service of the philosophy they espouse would be incredibly tedious; the sort of movie where you wonder why on Earth the author didn’t just write a thesis or an essay and have it over with.

On the one hand, there’s an argument to be made in terms of the communicative power of a movie when it comes to philosophy. Certainly the amount of times Memento is used in Psychology and Philosophy classes across the country as a reference point for anterograde memory loss or fatalism is pretty staggering. And it works! You can communicate philosophy through movies in a way that can be much harder to do in a book.

But then, this doesn’t really feel like a satisfying answer; after all, films aren’t purely for the education of the viewer. I don’t watch Indiana Jones and wonder why the idea of Nietzche’s ubermensch isn’t being adequately enough tackled. And all this talk just seems to obscure the key problem that I'm coming across here: namely that there aren’t actually that many films which are purely in service of their philosophical ideas. I’ve thought about it for a while now and I’ve come up with Prometheus and that’s it. Prometheus isn’t even really a film with many philosophical ideas – it just asks questions and never answers them, which makes it less like a philosophy textbook and more like the ‘reading group questions’ at the back of the textbook book. Even Batman V Superman’s omnipotence paradox, whilst utterly lame and narratively incoherent, could be argued to fit into the broader themes of the movie and the psychology of Lex Luthor if you can be bothered to spend the hours trying to make it fit. The only other item to toss onto the pile would be Batman Begins, which is basically two hours of characters explaining the movie’s themes and their own motivations over and over again until the credits roll, but even then the line between psychology and philosophy is a bit too murky to double down on.

Long story short, not many films are purely philosophical and often films of the kind which are bad, usually are so for other reasons than philosophical content (Batman V Superman, I look at you once again).

So if we can agree that pure philosophical content in mvoes both a) sucks and b) isn't really a thing, then we can dive properly into what Rob is arguing for specifically – not that films are purely focused on philosophy, but that the overt inclusion of philosophy becomes a cumbersome obstacle to the film’s development. So what is there to be said about this?

For me, it comes down to two things:

PART ONE: THE FORM

If we first turn to the immediate, naked structure and writing of a film – it’s form – we run into the simple question of philosophical exposition; how the philosophy of the film is communicated to the viewer. Now there seems to be this weird trend amongst internet critics (largely imdb commenters) and video essayists that any exposition in movies is bad - that it stops the film dead and appears clunky to the viewer. To this, I quite simply call bullshit. Exposition is a part of storytelling – without it, I’d wager over half the movies that exist would just disappear and I can promise you that a lot of those movies would be ones that you like. To me the ‘problem’ with exposition isn’t that it is itself an inherent negative, but rather that the problem comes from when it is done poorly (much like CGI in that aspect). When done well, the exposition can become as thrilling as any other part of the film, or just become simply invisible to the viewer.

So how does this factor into philosophy? Well, let’s look at two examples that Rob raises in his article: Batman V Superman and Inception.

Let's start with BvS as our example of 'How Not To Philosophy In Film' (side note: BvS isn't exactly what I would consider a philosophically-minded film on the same level as, say, Blade Runner, given how most of the 'philosophy' in it is textural rather than a meaningful part of the film's identity. But hey, I guess that's part of why it's our 'bad' example) Rob mentions the omnipotent paradox in his article as an example of philosophical themes utilised incorrectly. Check out it’s use in the movie (it happens at about the 0:45 mark but you should watch the beginning for context):

So on a purely textual level, the motivation powering Lex being rooted in his abusive father powering a revulsion of any deity-like figure is...not especially awful. Anything of interest that we can parse out, however, gets buried by the presentation. There's no motivated reason as to why it appears in this scene specifically and it isn’t raised organically (Why is Lex saying this? Why is Superman listening?). More tangibly (and probably the reason it grates the most), the explicitly on-the-nose nature of the line: "If God is all-powerful, then he cannot be all-good" does not gel well with the already overly self-serious tone of the rest of the film. Combine that with the A-Level textbook phrasing and it becomes unfortunately distracting and try-hard.

Now, let’s look at a scene from Inception, which Rob rates amongst his favourite science fiction films (ditto, by the way). In this scene, Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) is teaching Ariadne (Ellen Page) the mechanics of the dream world and how it works.

This is basically the complete opposite of Batman V Superman’s scene – completely motivated by not only the needs of the narrative (we need this information to understand how the rest of the film works) but is also motivated by the needs of the characters within the scene (Ariadne is new to this, much like the audience). Notice that instead of just vomiting philosophy into the audiences lap in the hope it will look clever, the scene instead is largely consistent of mechanical exposition that enable us to understand the way the heist will work later in the movie. However, the scene is also laying the groundwork for the themes that will come later in the movie: the idea of dream as creation, that the creation can ‘overtake’ reality if absorbed for too long, which in turn leads to the film’s final statement (SPOILER) that the ‘realness’ of reality might not be as important as we think it is. The way that Nolan sets this up in a way that's still incredibly thrilling to watch is just part of what makes Inception (and most of his movies) work as pieces of mainstream entertainment.

Oh and lest we crap all over philosophy-vomiting in movies, you can absolutely make that less-subtle approach work too, as a little movie called The Matrix will now demonstrate:

A guy sat in a chair explaining philosophical science-fiction to another guy in a chair sounds like the most uninvolving, most un-cinematic thing ever, yet it’s impossible to turn away from this scene, as it is basically any scene from The Matrix. Great performances help here, but note how the information delivered will fundamentally change the way we and Neo go on to view the reality of the story (which is treading a bit on Part Two of this defence, so I'll stop there for now).

--SPOILERS FOR ARRIVAL START HERE--

Now, in Arrival, the exposition is often beautifully unsubtle, both in its form and in its thematic link to the rest of the movie. Take for instance, The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis – the theory that the language we speak also has the ability to shape the way we think (which also echoes Wittgenstein’s famous quote “the limits of my language are the limits of my world”). The theory is not only explicitly explained to the audience, but is integral to the film’s reveal that the circular nature of the alien’s language allows them to perceive time in a non-linear fashion – an ability that can be gained by all those who speak the language. This is not bad exposition; in fact this is very good exposition in that it still keeps the plot breezing along and is motivated. However, it is noticeable, largely because its content is unconventional and because we are unaware of its significance until later in the film. At the point of deliverance, it can appear as though the line is thrown in the movie simply as more evidence of Louise’s (Amy Adams) knowledge of interpretation and linguistics. Taken into account of the entire movie, however, I'm struggling to think of any meaningful way that Arrival fumbles its exposition.

I think exposition and the way in which philosophy takes shape within film can affect our reaction to it, even when it isn’t actually the philosophy that is the problem. However, I also believe that the focus on exposition forms only a small part of philosophy’s place within cinema - the part concerned more with the tangible feeling of Philosophy rather than its content. We can find out why an audience might revolt against the exposition by looking at the presentation of it, but to explain why I think Rob is wrong with regards to Philosophy encumbering the potential of the overall narrative, we have to look at the bigger picture.

PART TWO: PHILOSOPHY AND NARRATIVE

Why have philosophy in film and not simply within an essay? Because placing philosophy into a narrative beholds it to conditions and elements that you do not have to meet in an essay; conditions such as characters, themes and the development of these elements over the course of a narrative. An oft-observed purpose of science fiction movies is to use technology and scenarios as a way of commenting on us as people. It’s a fairly introspective genre and so it’s no surprise that philosophy often sneaks its way into cinema through science fiction. By placing philosophy into a construct that involves characters and plot where the purpose is to entertain rather than inform an audience, you are surrendering philosophy to the need to focus on people rather than the ideas that are being espoused. Philosophy on its own can be stale and inhuman when analysed academically. Philosophy in cinema is, by and large, a tool. Rarely have I found it to be at the heart of the movie, even if it is a large part of what gets us there and dominates our discussion once the film is over. Case in point: if Arrival wanted to argue for the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, it wouldn’t do it by ending with time-manipulating aliens. It’s an exploration of the concept and it’s a great way to introduce it to an audience, but it is the means, not the end, of the narrative.

Arrival is a film with a lot on its plate. Most obviously, this is a film about communication: not just the philosophy or the development of it, but the need for it. Think back to the scene where the governments of the world slowly cease their communication channels, leading to Louise’s plea of ‘…we need to talk to each other!’ Or how about the mechanics of the alien’s plan to force the Earth to communicate with itself, given the lack of a singular leader. It is a film that begs us to talk to each other, to understand each other or be lost in the dark, which makes it an especially pressing film given the current ‘divisive’ state of Western politics in the world at the moment. Is it subtle? No not particularly. But it is loud, clear and vital.

This is one half of what Arrival has to say.

An alien film about communication isn’t unheard of. In fact, the communicative aspect of Arrival strikes me as a somber and tense spin on the narrative of Close Encounters of the Third Kind – a film where communication plays a recurring theme, although that film is much more ‘magical’ in its overall tone. Arrival’s final reveal and what I feel to be the crux of the film is the positioning of humanity within a non-linear perception of time. The aliens gift humanity with the ability to see time as a whole, ‘remembering’ the future similarly to how we remember the past. In Louise’s case, this involves gaining knowledge of her own daughter’s death by an incurable disease – a daughter that she doesn’t yet have. It’s a reveal made all the more impactful by the way in which the film’s structure places us inside Louise’s head, with the ‘flashforwards’ being disguised as such until we learn their true nature at the same time that Louise does. The culmination of this comes with her question to Ian (Jeremy Renner) who she knows will eventually become the child's father

"If you could see your whole life from start to finish, would you change things?"

Ian’s answer to this is based largely on his immediate feelings, but Louise’s own, unspoken, answer is the more pressing of the two. She decides to have the child, knowing all along that she will eventually die and that there is nothing that can be done about it.

There’s a layer of ambiguity in the way the film portrays this choice. One flashforward explains how future Ian derides Louise, saying that her choice was a wrong one, but it’s fleeting and the film never fully commits to it. Instead, we’re left with Louise, heading to a future that she knows is fated to end badly, but is also full of so much more than just that. Maybe you find her choice wrong, maybe you find it inspiring, but after two hours of emotional build up, it feels earned and is a point of the film that will more than likely be mulled over for a long time.

This, to me, is a fantastic example of Philosophy within film; philosophy used not to its own end but to be pointed back towards its characters and, by extension, towards the audience. This is the kind of thing I see in so many great science-fiction movies, from Inception’s use of dreams and unreality to comment on the nature of guilt and anguish, to the way in which The Truman Show explores the effect a simulated world has on an individual, as well as the complexity of the decision to leave that world. These stories could not exist without the ideas that fuel them, even if these ideas may not the ultimate point of the story they are powering. I love Arrival for it’s intellectual ambition but it's impossible to separate that ambition from Louise and the enormity of her decision at the end of the movie.

We really can’t have one without the other.

#arrival #denisvilleneuve #thematrix #inception #batmanvsuperman #exposition #philosophy #closeencountersofthethirdkind