A Book Review by Thomas M. Puhr.

Entertaining to everyday audiences without sacrificing philosophical complexity or skimping on actual research.”

For nearly a decade now, Denis Villeneuve has worked exclusively within the science fiction genre. Thanks to his popular Dune saga and the cultural legacy attached to his sequel Blade Runner 2049, his position as one of the century’s preeminent sci-fi auteurs—one with a Nolan-like ability to produce mass entertainment that retains a distinct authorial stamp—is secure. And his passion for the genre shows no sign of flagging; among his many projects in development are Dune: Messiah and an adaptation of Arthur C. Clarke’s seminal Rendezvous with Rama. Given the buzz that has surrounded Dune in particular—the star-studded cast, the ever-expanding budgets and box office returns, the awards buzz—it’s perhaps easy now to overlook the film that started this phase of his career: Arrival.

David Roche shines a spotlight on what he considers “the greatest science fiction film since Blade Runner.”

With his book-length analysis of the 2016 film—about a linguist (Amy Adams) recruited by the US government to decipher the mind-bending language of visiting aliens—David Roche shines a spotlight on what he considers “the greatest science fiction film since Blade Runner.” Aptly entitled Arrival, it is the latest release in the University of Texas Press’s “21st Century Film Essentials” series. If the idea of ranking this film among the most important of the past quarter century strikes you as a bit of a stretch—a quick glance at other entries, which include monographs on Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban and I’m Not There, will tell you that series editor Donna Kornhaber is not interested in ticking off the greatest hits ala There Will Be Blood or The Social Network—then Roche’s impressively researched, theoretically challenging explication may very well turn you into a believer.

Part of the film’s unique power, Roche claims in his introduction, is its position “at the nexus of mainstream and art cinema.” Although his first chapter, “Arrival as Auteur Film Adaptation,” primarily focuses on how screenwriter Eric Heisserer adapted Ted Chiang’s short story “Story of Your Life”for the big screen by incorporating elements of classical tragedy and drama, Roche also gently rebuts the conception of Arrival as a strictly auteur film (“The making and marketing of Arrival are … typical of many contemporary Hollywood productions: the idea did not originate with the director”) and instead argues for what he calls the director’s and crew’s (and marketing team’s) “collective auteurism.” It’s fitting, then, for a film that economically straddles two cinematic worlds to also narratively do so; this is the focus of his second chapter, “Arrival as Hard Soft Science Fiction,” which explores how the film interweaves elements of both “Soft” (alien invasions, military action, dramatic explosions) and “Hard” (technical references to an actual field of study: in this case, linguistics) science fiction to craft a meta-narrative in which our heroine’s efforts to stop the government from blowing up the visiting Heptapod aliens can be read as an attempt to keep Arrival itself from devolving into a brainless action movie.

This dissolving (or, perhaps, fusing) of binaries structures much of the text, both within and across chapters. As an example of the former, Roche’s final entry considers Arrival’s political and ethical interests before arriving at the conclusion that “ethics … are not disconnected from politics; they are its very foundation.” As for the latter, the book’s middle chapters deftly juxtapose the film’s temporal (“Arrival as an Experience of Time”) and spatial (“Arrival as an Experience of Space”) implications, underlining how the two “are by no means separate but form a continuum.” Throughout these analyses, Roche illustrates how Villeneuve’s directorial choices mirror Arrival’s philosophical concerns. Consider, for instance, his detailed explication of how the mise-en-scène during each of the characters’ visits to the alien spaceship embodies a different conceptual understanding of cinematic space: from flatness versus depth (visit 1), to straight lines versus circularity (visit 2), to texture versus shape (the last visit). All of which dovetails with the film’s conception of “a multiplicity of presents competing against each other for relevance.” Like the film with which they’re preoccupied, these chapters address some heady stuff, and Roche strikes just the right balance between explicitly stating certain connecting threads and guiding his readers toward inferring them.

Arrival (2016) - IMDb

Make no mistake: Roche is not afraid to get deep in the weeds with some of his theoretical frameworks. One chapter, “Arrival as a Reflection on/of Communication,” cites Baudry’s “cinematic apparatus” framework, Bordwell’s writings on the “active spectator,” and Marks and Sobchack’s theory of “embodied spectatorship,” among others. The final (and longest) chapter, “Arrival as a Political and Ethical Experience,” hinges on an understanding of “the main tenets of Emmanuel Levinas’s moral philosophy,” specifically his writings on the power of transformative experiences with the so-called “Other.” Roche sometimes struggles to succinctly convey such dense theoretical systems to the lay reader (among whom I count myself, to be clear), but patient (re)readers will be rewarded with eloquent insights. His political/ethical chapter culminates, for example, with the moving claim that the protagonist’s time-bending journey with the aliens exemplifies the notion “that true knowledge can be achieved only through an encounter with the Other founded on generosity.” In such passages, you can really sense Roche’s love for Arrival—and understand his insistence that “a mainstream film can have as much to say about cinema as an art film.”

My metric of success for any monograph can be boiled down to a simple question: When I finish reading nearly two hundred pages about the same movie, do I feel sick of thinking about it or eager for a rewatch? The fact that I had the latter reaction is a testament to Roche’s ability—not unlike Villeneuve’s, come to think of it—to entertain everyday audiences without sacrificing philosophical complexity or skimping on actual research. Good prose stylists, like good filmmakers, can have it both ways.

Thomas M. Puhr lives in Chicago, where he teaches English and language arts. A regular contributor to Bright Lights Film Journal, he has published Fate in Film: A Deterministic Approach to Cinema with Wallflower Press.

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