By Ali Darwish
In this essay, Ali Darwish provides an in-depth exploration of theories of language in Denis Villeneuve’s sci-fi motion picture Arrival and the short story it’s based on, Ted Chiang’s “Story of Your Life.” Drawing on film studies scholarship, textual analysis, and linguistic theories both discussed within the texts and applied to them, Ali argues persuasively that in the world of the film and story, “communication conquers all”—while also effectively highlighting the heptapods’ language’s specific particularities. Well-researched and readable, Ali’s paper provides a useful model for students looking to undergo film or literary criticism themselves.
—Zefyr Lisowski, editor
Ted Chiang’s “Story of Your Life” and Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival—an adaptation of Chiang’s story—focus on competing ideas about how language can affect humans’ actions and thoughts. The film brings to light how communication can be the difference between war and peace. It also discusses the notion that written language is not always the same as spoken language, as embodied by the alien heptapods. In addition, the film and the story both uncover the different ways language can be written.
Chiang had two main inspirations for his short story: the variational principles of physics and real stories of people coping with death. The first fascination, according to Bran Nicol, a professor of English literature at the University of Surrey, draws on principles relating to “The science of calculating the minimum or maximum expenditure required in order to find a solution” (Nicol 112). Chiang’s other inspiration was a one-man show called “Time Flies When You’re Alive,” by Paul Linke, about his wife’s battle with cancer and her inevitable death (112). Chiang incorporated the theme of coping with the inevitable from his inspirations through the story of Dr. Louise Banks’s daughter’s death. He bridges that storyline with that of the aliens’ arrival using language. If not for their ascent and the government recruiting Dr. Louise Banks, the story’s protagonist, to learn their language, she would have never met her daughter’s father. Her linguistic education simultaneously leads to the knowledge of her daughter’s birth and death.
Equally important to the main story arc of the film is the translation and comprehension of the heptapods’ language. Louise Banks and Ian Donnelly, the heads of the project, discover that the heptapods experience time in a circular motion. That perception relates to the heptapods’ writing style in their language. Humans experience time linearly, so they write in a straight continuous manner. The heptapods, on the other hand, write in logograms, circular symbols with flaring edges. Each logogram is considered a full sentence. Nicol contends that “The individual clusters do not relate to each other in any particular way but when seen all at once, they produce an image of life that is beautiful and surprising and deep” (114). It bears the notion of how a being’s language is expressive of its thought process and ideology.
The film and the short story are littered with numerous linguistic elements such as semasiographic language, performative speech, and palindrome words. All these tools enhance the story while educating the reader on linguistic subjects. Semasiographic language is a device that is used heavily in the story in the development of the heptapods’ written dialect. Film scholar Francesco Sticchi described this device as a language that “conveys meaning, [but] does not represent sounds” (Sticchi 57). Louise’s knowledge of the subject is what enables her to decipher the logograms. A palindrome word is also used as Louise’s daughter’s name, Hannah, to represent the fluctuating organization of the story. Palindrome words are words that are spelled the same backward and forwards. As Sticchi notes, palindromes are a suitable metaphor due to their “chronotopic construction, [as] the film also resorts to a retroactive causality, showing simultaneously future and past events influencing each other” (Sticchi 60). Lastly, Chiang integrates performative speech as a justification for the heptapods having language since they already know everything that would ever happen to them. Performative speech means the words that are uttered are the action itself, such as the verbs: agree, warn, and promise. In his story, Chiang explains this speech, stating that “heptapods already knew what would be said in any conversation; but in order for their knowledge to be true, the conversation would have to take place” (34).
Moreover, one of the main linguistic theories that is discussed in the film is the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis. The theory combines two main ideas, linguistic relativity and linguistic determinism. The film and the short story mainly focus on linguistic determinism, which is the concept that if a person immersed themself in a foreign language, they could rewire their brain and change how they think (Štrkalj Despot 374). Dr. Kristina Štrkalj Despot, a senior Research Fellow at the Institute for the Croatian Language and Linguistics, elaborates on the theory by saying, “Our mother tongue shapes and influences our conceptualization, thinking, and interactions with the world, forming a unidirectional relationship between human language and human thinking” (374). Louise displays signs of this theory when she becomes fluent in the heptapods’ language. Through her understanding of the language, she is capable of reconstructing her brain to gain the ability to envision the future. The whole ordeal gives her a new perception of time itself. As scholar Mathilde Van Dijk notes, Louise “comes to view time like they do: as being nonlinear. For her, everything happens at the same time” (Van Dijk 17).
Furthermore, the film and the short story dive into this theory of linguistic determinism to the point where the main character dreams in heptapods’ language. It is a fascinating idea to postulate that humans could open their minds to new concepts if they learned a foreign or even an intergalactic language. Štrkalj Despot explores an experiment that could prove Louise’s experiences are plausible. The experiment examines Russian speakers in the way they differentiate between shades of the color blue faster than English speakers. The phenomenon was credited to the fact that the Russian language has different words for different shades of the color. Russians have been differentiating between the shades since childhood. Their language physically changes the way they think to detect the different shades of the color, and is similar to Louise’s ability to see the future and dream in the heptapods’ language after she begins to learn it as well (Štrkalj Despot 377).
The heptapods’ written language has no correlation with their spoken language. Brett Esaki, a scholar in Asian American studies with a focus on popular culture, explains, “This is a colorful description of nonlinear orthography, which is writing that does not move in a sequential order (e.g., left to right), but rather has all of the words equally present” (56). The heptapods use their written language as a second line of communication independent from their speech. It also relates to how they think. Unlike speech, a logogram is not bound by the constraints of time. It allows the heptapods to write complex sentences in mere seconds. They can communicate several events and concepts all in their writing all at once. The theme of non-linear communication relates to the way Chiang and Villeneuve chronicle the events in their stories. The film and the short story both alternate between scenes in the future and the present. Esaki even states “The debate rightly continues so there is no right place to end the story, or Chiang should have written a conclusive end to the debate” (56).
However, the manner of the heptapods’ spoken or written response is useless if they do not understand the meaning of the question. There is a scene, which is only present in the film, where Louise attempts to explain to Colonel Weber her methodology for communication with the heptapods. The scene perfectly demonstrates how words can have their meaning misinterpreted or lost if communicated to a being whose language has a different syntax. Every language has syntactic principles for its combination of words and sentences to be clear and concise. Chiang even writes, “Perhaps their verbs could be written as affixes to a noun” (11). Louise’s main point is that she wants to teach the heptapods English syntax so she can ask them why they came to Earth. Francesco Sticchi, a professor of film studies at Oxford Brookes University, argues that, for proper linguistic structure, a language needs “a common semantic framework, so that they can interact without continuous misinterpretations and confusions” (55). Louise needs to make sure that the heptapods understand what a question is and who is being asked. She is unsure if the linguistic elements of a pronoun or a question even exist in their language due to the non-linear structure of their writing style.
Most importantly, the key to decrypting the heptapods’ language is international communication. Louise, as a linguist, is obviously the first to advocate for clear communication between all nations. She understands that without all the collected knowledge from all nations, they would never be able to decipher the heptapods’ language. General Shang represents a clear opposition to this idea. The general’s lack of communication with his heptapods would have led to a disastrous war if not for Louise’s intervention. The form of communication he chooses with the heptapods is not a friendly one. Shang choses to use games of mahjong to communicate with the heptapods, which raises some concerns that the aliens would see humans as nothing more than competition. Louise warns the Colonel about the dangers of this learning fashion. She knows that all conversations conducted in that manner would either end in victory or defeat. This way of learning sparks a lot of violence and friction between the people conversing. This is evidently seen in the film when General Shang converses with the heptapods that landed in China. It doesn’t take long before the Chinese are preparing for battle with them. That event also leads Russia to take the same standpoint then after creating a horrible butterfly effect. Louise proves how communication conquers all in her effort to reach the general, which leads to a cease that eventually spreads to all nations.
In conclusion, Ted Chiang and Denis Villeneuve both depict a riveting narrative of interconnecting storylines. The plot points are all tied together using the unifying power of language. The many linguistic elements serve as fine conduits for both entertainment and educational purposes throughout the film and the short story. Louise was ultimately left to cope with the consequences of the changes to her thought process due to her mastery of the heptapods language. Louise’s change in her narrative lays out a very interesting concept of how language changes our behaviors, depending on how we learned it: whether through games, through speaking, or through writing. These things may seem trivial to the native speaker, but they represent a world of obstacles for the learner.
Work Cited
Chiang, Ted. Stories of Your Life and Others.” Tor Books, New York, New York, 1998, pp. 1–39.
Sticchi, Francesco. “From Spinoza to Contemporary Linguistics: Pragmatic Ethics in Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival.” Canadian Journal of Film Studies, vol. 27, no. 2, 2018, pp. 48–65, https://doi.org/10.3138/cjfs.27.2.2018-0003.
Van Dijk, Mathilde. “Living with Time: Spirituality and Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival.” Religions (Basel, Switzerland ), vol. 12, no. 1, MDPI AG, 2021, p. 17, https://doi.org/10.3390/rel12010017.
Nicol, Bran. “Humanities Fiction: Translation and ‘Transplanetarity’ in Ted Chiang’s
“The Story of Your Life” and Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival.” American, British and Canadian Studies, vol.32, no.1, 2019, pp.107-126. https://doi.org/10.2478/abcsj-2019-0008
Esaki, Brett J. “Ted Chiang’s Asian American Amusement at Alien Arrival.” Religions (Basel, Switzerland ), vol. 11, no. 2, MDPI AG, 2020, p. 56, https://doi.org/10.3390/rel11020056.
Štrkalj Despot, Kristina. “How Language Influences Conceptualization: From Whorfianism to Neo-Whorfianism.” Collegium Antropologicum, vol. 45, no. 4, Institute for Anthropological Research, 2021, pp. 373–80, https://doi.org/10.5671/ca.45.4.9.
