7 Visual Motifs In ‘Arrival’ And What They Mean
Arrival is one of the greatest science fiction movies ever made. I watched the film recently and wrote three whole pages of notes on it. I wanted to break down some of the visual motifs of the film along with its over-arching themes.
If you want the video version of this article, check out the video down below. :)
Let’s get into the film’s visual motifs.
Fog and Glass Windows
Let’s talk about fog and windows for a second. Obviously in the alien ship there’s a wide glass barrier separating the humans from the aliens. On the alien side, there’s a heavy layer of fog shrouding them in mystery.
These visual cues are hinted at before Louise ever steps foot in the alien ship. At home she has wide glass window panes that seemingly take up the entire back of her house that are shown numerous times.
When Louise approaches the alien ship for the first time in the helicopter, huge amounts of fog roll over the mountain landscape. Even the alien ships when they leave disappear like a whiff of smoke or fog. And what is fog? It’s water in vapor form.
Water and Swimming
Water and swimming are big recurring themes as well.
Louise tells her daughter that she loves her swimming and her poetry and all the amazing things she shares with the world.
Interesting.
Louise lives on a lake in Montana, and many times throughout the movie there’s short clips of her daughter picking up rocks from that lake.
I wouldn’t normally think much of the swimming theme, though, until Louise goes into the alien ship, where her hair and body behave as if she’s in a big body of water. Swimming.
Not only that, she also hears things as if she has her ears clogged full of water. We’ve all been there after a day at the ocean or pool, right?
So, why? Why is there a clear visual theme here centering around water and fog and swimming?
My interpretation is that it connects back to the film’s obsession with time. When we’re swimming underwater, it kind of feels like we’re moving in slow motion, right? Like we’ve almost stopped time itself and entered an entirely different world.
It also separates us from sound. This film is obsessed with sound, as it should be. It’s a movie about language for gosh sakes — and I always found it interesting that the alien’s written language is semasiographic — or has no audio component to it.
In one moment Louise takes a moment for herself away from camp, to which Ian says “It’s nice out here, huh? Away from the noise.”
The noise. Apart from the howling sirens we hear every ten minutes in this movie, the bird chirping in the cage, or the film’s obsession with loud background music, there’s one other thing worth mentioning.
Many times in this movie I found it difficult to hear what the hell people were saying. Seriously. Especially the first few scenes with Louise and Colonel Weber. I wondered whether a finely crafted film like this would be doing something like that on purpose and I arrived at YES, it would.
Especially considering that this film is focused on how much we mis-communicate with and misunderstand one another.
So for me Arrival’s water themes play directly into both the film’s focus on time and sound. What do you think? Let me know down below.
Headphones
Another common visual motif in Arrival are headphones. In their first meeting, Ian attempts to communicate with Louise in the helicopter but she can’t hear him because she doesn’t have her headphones on.
While talking to the aliens she uses headphones and everybody sitting in front of a screen at base camp seems to be wearing headphones as well.
This movie does a great job showcasing that we only hear what we want to hear half the time.
Like Agent Halpern, who is constantly interpreting Louise’s words in the worst possible light. Or the contingent of Army troops who, through the help of some Tucker Carlson doomsday podcast, start believing that the aliens are here to harm us.
We hear what we want to hear, and we believe what we want to believe. Putting those headphones on act as a barrier from reality, and can shield our ears from the real truth.
Physical Barriers
Louise and Ian, in their first excursion to speak with the aliens, have to wear about 38 layers of protective gear. Back at camp, there’s numerous plastic barriers separating cleaning and prep areas, not to mention the wide glass barrier between the aliens and humans.
Only when Louise takes all her protective gear off is she able to finally make progress with the aliens. One of the points of the film is that we live in a world where humans inherently don’t trust one another. Removing the barriers we place in between each other is essential to making real progress, and I liked the movie’s visual nods to physical barriers throughout the runtime.
Ink
I thought there was a connection between the dry erase whiteboards Louise and Ian use and the written language of the Heptapods. When the aliens write symbols on their glass barrier, it resembles ink floating around in water — which proves our water motif even more.
The ink is alive, and the Heptapods can control it mid-air with their tentacles, constantly reshaping it in real time. Then when they’re done writing, the ink simply evaporates and goes away.
It’s the same thing with the dry erase boards. Louise and Ian can write whatever they want with ink and erase it at a moment’s notice. I thought that connection might’ve been a clever way to show, subliminally, that Louise and Ian are on the same side as the aliens.
Screens
I found it interesting that the alien’s glass barrier looked so much like a television to me. Especially when Louise and Ian approach the aliens for the first time from the long hallway.
There are so many tv’s in this movie, it’s ridiculous. I don’t need to tell you that they’re there. There’s also countless screens at the US Army camp that Louise and Ian are stationed in.
So what does it mean?
I found it interesting that, for the whole movie, it seems as if we know what the Heptapods look like, but when Louise goes inside the ship by herself, we realize the aliens are way taller than we thought.
I think that was a subtle message that what we see on TV doesn’t always give us the full “picture.”
Math And Circles
Ian is a theoretical physicist. He’s a math and science guy who’s very interested in finding out how the aliens got here.
When the Heptapods release thousands of ink circles before the human’s bomb explodes, Ian figures out the distance between each of them works out to .08333 repeating, or 1/12.
There’s also 12 alien ships placed throughout the globe.
The message being that humanity needs to work together, not shut each other out. I know the Heptapod’s language is based on circles, and I thought it was interesting to think of the 12 sites like 12 separate pieces of pie making up a whole.
The circles represent a lot in this movie. Planet earth, the fact that time is non-linear to the people who learn the Heptapod’s language, and so much more.
But in this example it’s showing that we’re all on the same team.
What Is Arrival Trying To Say?
It’s time to ask the big question.
What is Arrival trying to say?
There’s a lot of messages here, so let’s break them down one by one.
We’ll start with the basic ones first and work our way up into the mind-fuck category.
1. Language is the bedrock of society
Number one, language really is the bedrock of society.
When they meet, Ian reads off a section from Louise’s book:
“Language is the foundation of civilization, the glue that holds everything together. The first weapon drawn in a conflict.”
Ian then replies that science is the bedrock of society.
Yeah, okay Ian.
What Louise writes is 100% true.
Colonel Weber, from the second he meets with Louise, is extremely concerned with how fast talks progress with the aliens. He tells Louise:
“You made quick work of those Insurgent videos.”
To which Louise replies,“You made quick work of those Insurgents.”
Later, after their first meeting with the aliens, Colonel Weber tells Louise “Teaching them how to speak and read? That’s gotta take longer!”
To which Louise replies “No, it’s faster.”
It blows my mind that they want to ask the aliens big questions like “What is your purpose here?” without understanding, inherently, all the work it takes to arrive at being able to ask it.
Let’s get to the second message.
2. Language is a weapon
Louise writes that language is the first weapon drawn in a conflict.
And when Louise finally asks the aliens what their purpose is here on planet earth, they say “Offer weapon.” Now the aliens obviously don’t mean it that way, but that’s what happens when you have “weapon” as a word in your language.
So we’ve established that two times in this film, language is referred to as a weapon. Let’s take that at face value. Language is many things, and a weapon is absolutely one of them.
Arrival has an intimate relationship with the news and television throughout its runtime. That was obviously by design. When Louise speaks to her mother in the beginning of the film, she says “Mom don’t even bother with that channel, those people are idiots.”
We’ve also established that one of the army guys gets radicalized by a podcast he listens to on the internet and decides to attack the aliens outright.
Countries use language to send threats, manipulate each other, and hide their true intentions. News stations use language to get attention, spread misinformation, and distort reality. This film is 100% trying to say something about the mass media’s use of language to turn people against one another.
Language 100%, is a weapon.
Let’s move on to tier three, which is my favorite one.
3. Our problems as a society stem from the language we use
In a dream sequence, Ian talks to Louise and says “If you immerse yourself in a foreign language, you can rewire your brain. The language you speak determines how you think.”
This is proven true later when the US discovers that China has been communicating with the aliens through a Mahjong set. Louise then warns Colonel Weber of the dangers of using a game as a basis for communication.
“Let’s say I taught them chess instead of English. Every conversation would be a game, every idea expressed through opposition. Victory… defeat. You see the problem? If all I ever gave you was a hammer…”
Later on when Louise tries to explain that each of the 12 ships were sent to get humans to work with one another, Agent Halpern replies “Or we’re one of twelve competitors for the prize.”
It’s interesting that Agent Halpern, throughout the entire movie, is constantly thinking about what’s happening through the lens of competition, betrayal, and lies.
It’s interesting that American news networks feed us disinformation every single day and, because of their biases, actively suppress the ideas of the other side.
Why would we do that?
Ian says that the language you speak determines how you think.
And Louise, when trying to explain that “Offer Weapon” could mean many different things, says that “Our language, like our culture, is messy, it can be both.”
I think this great film is trying to tell us that what we’ve become in the United States is not just our faults as humans, but the fault of the language we’re using.
English. Yes. It’s a messy language.
We know the aliens didn’t mean that their language was a “weapon,” but that’s the thing — our language is messy. We have a word for weapon. We have dozens of words for weapons, actually. But what about a word for a type of competition where everybody wins?
In one of the funnier scenes in the movie, Louise struggles to give her daughter a sciency-sounding word for win-win.
It turns out it was Non-Zero Sum Game.
The fact that we don’t have that many terms for something where we compete and everybody wins at the same time, but we have dozens of words for a term like weapon tells you a lot about us.
We are a culture that places a lot of value on competition, for instance. It makes sense that Agent Halpern would view what’s happening with the aliens through the lens of getting there first and competing for a grand prize.
That aligns with how Colonel Weber was obsessed with the “speed” of figuring out what the aliens want. It’s a game to be played, and since it’s a game, we need to hide our true intentions, not trust the other side, and wrap ourselves up in 38 layers of protective gear to approach the aliens.
That’s why the entire world is at each other’s necks. That’s why we separate ourselves up into different factions — or countries — and play a psuedo-genuine game where we engage in trade and diplomacy but secretly want to be the most powerful country in the world.
What’s interesting is that the language of the Heptapods destroys the game. It stops humanity from competing with each other because, when you really understand the language, you’re able to see the future.
If you can see the future, then you already know what your “opponent” is going to do. Imagine a football game where each team knew exactly what the other team was going to do on every play. There wouldn’t be a game anymore. It would be pointless to keep playing.
And Arrival helps us imagine a world with a language that’s actually pure, and powerful, and kind.
Be careful with your words. That’s the simple takeaway of Arrival. Choose your words carefully, because they can be used as a tool or a weapon.
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