Arrival (2016)
Spoiler alert: the alien is language. While this language determines us, as in history, it is also no doubt the case that certain eldritch forms of language can dilate time, or dispel linear causality altogether, or even open the past to the future in ways that, heretofore in the west, enthralled as we are to machine-time, we have forgotten altogether, or never knew to begin with. Such methods may now be found at the limits of culture, in science-fiction, for example, or obscure forms of psychoanalysis, or perhaps divinatory witchcraft. Our heroine, learning this alien language, begins to remember the future; her unborn daughter, whom she loves most, will die young; she conceives her anyways. It seems to me that this kind of foresight (of mortality) is built into language; not that anyone wants to think that way—thinking in finitude and grim inevitability. But rather than submitting ourselves to the illusion of progress, the up-and-to-the-right movement of speculative finance (and Christian apocalypse) might we not, as this movie suggests—adapted from the Ted Chiang story—live instead inside of a chiasm? Where the tool edge of language unearths a secret from our past that allows a future where time will have flowed both ways, where presence becomes prescience—a clairvoyance of both future and past? But living in this kind of time is scary because it requires us to accept our precarity as real, to begin the work of mourning right now—and just who has time to mourn these days?
the scale of the alien ship is analogous to the scale of alien language spanning space and time
