Soumil week 16 - “Arrival”



A couple weeks ago I watched a movie called Arrival, and it completely changed my idea of how language works not just to communicate but also to shape how we think and how we remember how we decide how we do anything in life. It's a movie directed by Dennis Venezuela and it is based on Ted Chinghan's “”story of your life,” The movie really focused on linguistics, Dr Lewis who is called upon to analyze an alien language after a mysterious spaceship or a pod lands on Earth out of nowhere one day.

 At first I just expected this movie to be like any other alien movie with a decent amount of suspense and explosion but this movie really surprised me. It's very calm, quiet and haunting with a lot of suspense. It's really about humans versus aliens and their differences. Lewis learned that the alien language does not follow a linear timeline but its circular which changes the way they think and even how they experience memories.


 This movie really made me think about how we remember things in general. The deeper Lewis gets into the aliens' languages the more her memories seem to shift. I'd never thought about how the way we speak or be right or communicate in general would affect how we see time and other things that hold onto our memories and keep them secure.


 There's this weird tension between memory and language that I have always felt whenever I watch movies like these I couldn't help but think about how my memories especially the ones I can't just explain are say it in perfect words early tied to what I usually speak but at the same time without language, could we even retain memories?

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2543164/ 

Comments

  1. Anthony PanMay 21, 2025 at 7:52 PM

    Hi Soumil! The whole premise of the movie seems really cool, although sort of confusing at times. That article you linked sorta cleared it up, but some of it still seems pretty out there. Not to be a downer, but the premise about a person learning a fourth-dimensional language and being able to actually see all of time at once just doesn't really make sense to me. Maybe it's just that it's such a different idea that what I'm used to, but I just can't really picture how it would work. Also, all of this talk about how language affects how people think and remember things really had me thinking about how blind and deaf people have memories. It's perhaps not as complex as time-bending like in the movie but it's interesting to think about how people who are blind or deaf experience life. I can't speak for everyone, but I generally have some sort of imagery and narration in my head on a day to day basis. But for people who haven't experienced those senses, I can only begin to imagine how their memory works.

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