21ST CENTURY FILM ESSENTIALS

Cinema has a storied history, but its story is far from over. 21st Century Film Essentials offers a lively chronicle of cinema’s second century, examining the landmark films of our ever-changing moment. Each book makes a case for the importance of a particular contemporary film for artistic, historical, or commercial reasons. The twenty-first century has already been a time of tremendous change in filmmaking the world over, from the rise of digital production and the ascent of the multinational blockbuster to increased vitality in independent filmmaking and the emergence of new voices and talents both on screen and off. The films examined here are the ones that embody and exemplify these changes, crystallizing emerging trends or pointing in new directions. At the same time, they are films that are informed by and help refigure the cinematic legacy of the previous century, showing how film’s past is constantly reimagined and rewritten by its present. These are films both familiar and obscure, foreign and domestic; they are new but of lasting value. This series is a study of film history in the making. It is meant to provide a different kind of approach to cinema’s story—one written in the present tense.

Donna Kornhaber, Series Editor

ALSO IN THE SERIES

Noah Tsika, I’m Not There

Scott Bukatman, Black Panther

J. J. Murphy, The Florida Project

Patrick Keating, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban

Dana Polan, The LEGO Movie

Arrival

David Roche

UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS PRESS

AUSTIN

Copyright © 2024 by the University of Texas Press

All rights reserved

First edition, 2024

Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to permissions@utpress.utexas.edu.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Roche, David, 1976– author.

Title: Arrival / David Roche.

Other titles: 21st century film essentials.

Description: First edition. | Austin : University of Texas Press, 2024. | Series: 21st century film essentials | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2024000577 ISBN 978-1-4773-3014-2 (hardcover) ISBN 978-1-4773-3015-9 (paperback) ISBN 978-1-4773-3016-6 (pdf) ISBN 978-1-4773-3017-3 (epub)

Subjects: LCSH: Villeneuve, Denis, 1967—Criticism and interpretation. | Arrival (Motion picture : 2016) | Science fiction films—History and criticism. | LCGFT: Film criticism.

Classification: LCC PN1997.2.A674 R63 2024 | DDC 791.45/72—dc23/eng/20230224

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2024000577

doi:10.7560/330142

Contents

Introduction

Arrival as Auteur Film Adaptation

Arrival as Hard Soft Science Fiction

Arrival as a Reflection on/of Communication

Arrival as an Experience of Time

Arrival as an Experience of Space

Arrival as a Political and Ethical Experience

Conclusion

Acknowledgments

Notes

Filmography

Bibliography

Index

For my mom

Introduction

I first saw Arrival on its release in Toulouse with my friend and colleague Vincent Souladié after a long day of teaching. We stumbled out of the movie theater, basking in the emotions and sensations the movie experience had triggered, and stopped for a drink at Le Cardinal, a café on Place Wilson, hoping to maintain the feeling as long as possible. We agreed that we had probably just seen the greatest science fiction film since Blade Runner (Scott, 1982) and that, in many ways, Arrival had achieved what Interstellar (Nolan, 2014) had aimed for: hard science fiction that blends blockbuster spectacle with emotional and intellectual engagement. This book is an endeavor to put words to that first impression, which repeated viewings only enriched. It offers an in-depth analysis of the film’s formal and thematic features and their aesthetic, political, and ethical implications, which, to someone like me who started out as a literary scholar, is a worthy enterprise. In proposing a book-length analysis, I am, in the close-reading tradition, simultaneously positing and attempting to prove the work’s interest and potential contribution to the history of cinema and to our understanding of the medium.

I am not alone in finding the 2016 film worthy of interest. With an anti-war plot centered on an academic in the humanities who contributes to saving the world, Arrival is a humanities scholar’s dream come true, and its proposal to take the humanities seriously is especially gratifying for those of us working in fields deemed not scientific and useful enough, and currently under threat from neoliberal policies. There are obviously more objective reasons for choosing to write a book on Arrival. The film makes for a highly interesting case study because, like most important works, it is both typical of certain trends and highly original.

For one, it is very much characteristic of the twenty-first-century Hollywood productions discussed by Geoff King in Quality Hollywood: Markers of Distinction in Contemporary Studio Film, published the year of Arrival’s release; the 2016 film is proof of the trend’s continuance through the 2010s. In his book, King focuses on a group of Hollywood films—including The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (Dominik, 2007), Inception (Nolan, 2010), and The Social Network (Fincher, 2010)—that strive to strike a balance between qualities associated with the pejoratively connoted mainstream and the more distinguished and valorized independent sector.¹ King is well aware that Hollywood has always had a tradition of quality whose reasons and implications are very much historically determined (for instance, the wave of historical and literary movies of the 1920s as a means to counter attacks on Hollywood morality),² so he is mainly interested in assessing the late 2000s phenomenon’s singularity and place in the history of Hollywood quality productions. King interrogates both how such films came to be in a post-Indiewood context marked by the closure of a number of specialty divisions and how they seek to present themselves as better, more sophisticated, and more artistic than the usual Hollywood fare, as "doing . . . particular kinds of things that have ‘higher’ associations—in Bourdieusian terms, as holding a higher cultural capital.³ Characterized by qualities associated with both Hollywood cinema (action, spectacle, star power) and art and independent cinema (dark, gloomy and sombre; subtle and nuanced; relatively complex; serious, sometimes perhaps morally ambiguous), these films position themselves on the mainstream–art cinema spectrum to varying degrees in an effort to simultaneously establish the category of mainstream art cinema and present themselves as its exemplars.⁴ King identifies numerous rhetorical markers of distinction in the paratexts (trailers, posters, interviews) and critical responses to the films, as well as within the films themselves; these markers include literariness" (for instance, by adapting prestigious books and plays), auteurism, engagement with real-world issues, a critical (even pessimistic) attitude, in-depth characterization, lack of closure and happy endings, ambiguity, reflexivity, and, generally speaking, the sense that the film is addressing a knowing adult audience.⁵ The present book will foreground how Arrival, like other contemporary films, lays claim to such distinctions of kind, mainly by analyzing the way it not only combines formal and thematic features associated with both mainstream blockbuster and art and independent cinemas, but plays them against each other, sometimes revealing unexpected points of convergence.

Analyzing a work that is at once paradigmatic and innovative may, as the writings of Roland Barthes repeatedly demonstrate, have the potential to open avenues onto more general and notably theoretical concerns. Arrival engages, more broadly, with many theoretical questions posed by film studies and raises philosophical questions touching on both temporality and ethics. Many of these aspects have received academic attention, with articles focusing on language and communication (Engle 2016, Chamberlain 2019, Nicol 2019), time (Fleming and Brown 2018, Mamula 2018, Sticchi 2018, Bréan 2021, Simon 2021, Gervais 2022), ethics (Krzych 2018, Sticchi 2018, Noletto and Lopes 2019, Zavota 2020), geopolitics (Fleming 2020), identity politics (Mayer 2017, Longfellow 2022), and reflexivity (Jaunas 2021). This book engages with these texts, exploring some of the more obvious lines of inquiry in a new light (language, communication, and metacommentary in chapter 3; time in chapter 4; politics and ethics in chapter 6), while paying attention to aspects that have gone largely ignored (adaptation and authorship in chapter 1, science fiction in chapter 2, space in chapter 5).

This book opens with a study of how the production mode, creative practices, and marketing and postmarketing strategies sought to discursively construct Arrival as an auteur adaptation positioned at the nexus of mainstream and art cinema. Chapter 2 then proposes to situate this particular alien invasion film generically, as a rare instance of a hard science fiction film that endeavors to debunk science fiction cinema conventions and value the humanities over the hard sciences. Chapter 3 pays attention to the film’s reliance on linguistics and communication theories, not so much for the sake of verisimilitude but so as to make the humanities-based premise dramatically interesting; it then analyzes the film’s quasi-historiographical metacommentary on film spectatorship and celebration of the omnicommunicativeness of an audiovisual medium. Chapters 4 and 5 focus on the film’s explorations of time and space as thematic, narrative, dramatic, aesthetic, and philosophical stakes. Chapter 4 examines how Arrival exploits the dramatic potential of human beings’ differing apprehensions of time, before delineating it as a mind-game film that seeks to express the subjectivity of the protagonist, Dr. Louise Banks, that demands repeated viewings, and that resists narrative closure because of the precariousness of its flashbacks/flash-forwards and its affinity with the crystalline regime of time-image cinema. Chapter 5 analyzes the narrative, dramatic, and symbolic functions of places before demonstrating how the film offers an exploration of sublime space without ever leaving Earth and attempts to evoke an alien time-space through its multiple reconfigurations of cinematic space. Finally, chapter 6 argues that the film favors ethics over politics, subordinating the genre’s and contemporary blockbusters’ compulsory geopolitical backdrop to the overall theme of communication, and calling on the woman’s film as a framework with which to think through dilemmas associated with one’s quest for the good life in light of a transcendent encounter with the Other.

Although this is a book whose main argument is that Arrival is, indeed, a highly important twenty-first-century film, it explores the borders of a series of relations—between mainstream and art cinema, hard and soft science fiction, time and space, politics and ethics—and is ultimately traversed by two main ideas: Arrival is about ethics and about cinema (it is a stellar example of meta), thereby raising the question of whether it is about the ethics of cinema. The analyses herein open up venues of inquiry that go far beyond the 2016 film itself. Does hard science fiction’s interest in theory make it eminently discursive and thus literary? How relevant is the analogy between art and communication? What is cinematic space if not cinematic space-time? Does a film have the means to express an alien space-time and a hybrid human-alien subjectivity, or is the endeavor compromised by the limitations imposed by a production context, a medium, or even human knowledge and subjectivity? Arrival—the book on the film—does not provide definitive answers, but I hope that it offers insights into these questions.

Arrival as Auteur Film Adaptation

THE MAKING OF ARRIVAL

The story of Arrival is a love affair with a short story that provoked a chain reaction. It all started when Eric Heisserer, a screenwriter with a writer-director credit to his name for the 2013 film Hours and screenwriting credits for two horror remakes and one sequel (2010’s A Nightmare on Elm Street, 2011’s Final Destination 5 and The Thing), discovered Ted Chiang’s Story of Your Life, first published in a 1998 issue of Starlight magazine and collected in the author’s 2002 short story collection, Stories of Your Life and Others. Heisserer said he was so emotionally affected by the story that he became obsessed with it and wanted to share it with more people.¹ If he admitted that the character of Louise Banks somewhat reminded him of his wife,² many other features of this hard science fiction story with a focus on language and communication may have resonated with the screenwriter; raised by a mother who would read science fiction to him on a regular basis and a father who, as a professor of ancient history, had a thing for learning foreign languages, Heisserer went on to work for an astrophysicist in Clear Lake City near NASA’s Johnson Space Center and enjoyed listening to fuddled scientists concoct elaborate theories at parties.³ The screenwriter pitched the project to various producers and eventually sparked the interest of Dan Cohen, Dan Levine, and Shawn Levy of 21 Laps Entertainment,⁴ who were surprised Chiang’s story hadn’t been optioned yet.⁵ The producers then set out to look for a director.

Denis Villeneuve was by no means the obvious choice in 2013; though a big science fiction fan,⁶ the Quebecois director was not the science fiction master that online commentators of Dune: Part One (2021) were to label him.⁷ Although most audiences discovered him with his star-studded US-American films, Prisoners (2013), with Jake Gyllenhaal and Hugh Jackman, Sicario (2015), with Emily Blunt, Josh Brolin, and Benicio Del Toro, and especially Arrival, Villeneuve had already directed four feature films—Un 32 août sur terre (1998), Maelström (2000), Polytechnique (2009), and Incendies (2010)—as well as several shorts and one TV episode. His breakthrough French-language film, Incendies, had even represented Canada for Best Foreign Language Film at the 2011 Academy Awards and drawn the interest of Hollywood producers, who then approached him to direct Prisoners.⁸

Villeneuve expressed an immediate interest in 21 Laps Entertainment’s Story of Your Life project, but he was working on Prisoners and had already committed to Sicario. He was also worried the story would be difficult to adapt.⁹ For this reason, he proceeded to meet with Heisserer to discuss the project over coffee for a period of six months;¹⁰ meanwhile, the writer labored on the screenplay while pining (his very words) for Villeneuve.¹¹ When the director finally committed to the project, he told Heisserer what he tells every screenwriter with whom he is about to embark on a project:

I say two things. I’m going to be your best friend because I’ll die trying to protect the poetry of your ideas, and sometimes I’m going to be your worst enemy because I’m going to do it my own. I will digest your words and create images with them and I’m going to be a traitor. I will stab you in the back. I will not respect, I will change things, and it will become my movie. I’m sorry.¹²

Having formulated this word of warning with what sounds like a mixture of honesty and self-derision, Villeneuve kept Heisserer on the team throughout production and invited him to see two edits during postproduction;¹³ for a screenwriter used to meeting directors just to pass on the baton,¹⁴ the collaboration was unlike anything Heisserer had experienced so far. Once committed, Villeneuve then reached out to actress Amy Adams, his first choice for the part of Louise Banks. The star was planning on taking a break