Heptapod Hermeneutics
The Imaginary and Symbolic in Arrival and “Story of Your Life”
Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival adapts Ted Chiang’s short story “Story of Your Life” for film; both of which depict a linguist named Dr. Louise Banks who, tasked with translating an alien race of “heptapods”, ends up embodying their radically different relation to time. While both works generally align in their narrative content, they differ in their artistic form. As a work of cinema, the realistic unity of visual and sonic imagery within the film evokes a sense of sensory immediacy within the viewer. On the other hand, as a work of writing, the short story lays bare what Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure describes as the “differential” basis of language, producing linguistic value through negative opposition. Thus, with a greater emphasis on difference and negativity, “Story of Your Life” evokes the phenomenological chasm between Louise and the heptapods better than Arrival; producing a stronger unity of form and content.
On paper, Villenueve’s film faithfully adapts the core plot of the original story. Louise narrates “Story of Your Life” on the night her daughter is conceived, recalling both her past encounters with the heptapods and the future death of her daughter. In her communication with the heptapods, she learns that they “experienced all events at once, and perceived a purpose underlying them all” (Chiang 134). As she dwells in this alien language, she begins to embody its simultaneous structure and develops “memories” of the future. In the end, the aliens inexplicably leave and Louise embraces her fate in spite of its inevitability. While Arrival notably inserts a conflict between the U.S. and China as a factor in the Earth’s interaction with the heptapods, it retains the core narrative of the original. It, like Chiang’s story, depicts Louise’s past interaction with the heptapods, the future death of her daughter, and her present choice to conceive her daughter. A mere comparison between the content of both works might stop here, or devolve into an infinite survey of details. Yet, the vast formal difference between the film and the short story goes beyond the realm of narrative.
The formal qualities of cinema and writing produce fundamentally different modes of perception. While both forms of media alike communicate meaning, cinema emphasizes the signified content of language: the mental concept that words depict. Seeing a shot of a tree on screen immediately conjures up our past memories and knowledge of similar objects. Therefore, the signs employed in cinema are first and foremost iconographic: they “visually resemble their objects”, as articulated by American polymath Charles S. Peirce. It presents a kind of mirror to our world, one we temporarily recognize as our own until the film ends. In this way, cinema is the artistic medium par excellence of what structuralists call the imaginary, “defined by games of mirroring, of duplication, of reversed identification and projection” (Deleuze 172). Conversely, writing emphasizes the signifying form of language: what Saussure describes in his Course in General Linguistics as the “psychological imprint of the…sound-image”, here referring to the symbols we use to represent our concepts. It lays bare the chain of signifiers in a phrase as a collection of squiggly marks in a line, with any resemblance to its signified object coming as a result of our reflective interpretation. While we have learned to read in writing positive and stable values, it emerges from a basis of “opposing, relative, and negative entities” (Saussure, 119). If cinema embodies the immediacy of an imaginary signified, writing embodies the mediate character of signification: language structures our world, inserts itself as a “third order” (Deleuze, 171) beyond the traditional binary of reality and image. Rather than unify; language segments, parcels up “the indefinite plane of jumbled ideas and the equally vague plane of sound” (Saussure, 112). These qualities do not exist as absolutes: cinema is symbolic and writing is imaginary. Yet, at a basic level, writing evokes mediation, difference, and negative absence.
Chiang’s original choice to render “Story of Your Life” through the medium of writing evokes the story’s core themes better than Villenueve’s cinematic adaptation. If nothing else, it is a story of an impossible mediation between fundamental chasms: human and heptapod, past and future, chance and necessity, causality and teleology, life and death. At once, it must depict each term and the gap between them. Writing, as a bifurcating medium, perfectly conveys the sense of separation and difference proper to the text. Take for example, the way the short story describes the heptapods:
“It looked like a barrel suspended at the intersection of seven limbs. It was radially symmetric, and any of its limbs could serve as an arm or a leg. The one in front of me was walking around on four legs, three non-adjacent arms curled up at its sides. Gary called them ‘heptapods’” (Chiang, 97).
Here, Chiang simultaneously signifies the appearance of the heptapods, opposes it to the humans in the implicit negative image of our form, and gestures at the vast chasm between both terms through language’s impossibility to simply be the thing it depicts. In the film, Villenueve simply shows us a cinematic rendition of the two aliens emerging from a sea of fog (Arrival, 32:43). When we see the heptapods, we instinctively compare them to the hundreds of aliens depicted in science fiction films past. When we see their writing, the shape suggests an inkblot or Rorschach test. The act of viewing; whether we know it or not; evokes an inevitable scramble for familiarity. Isn’t the point of the story precisely the opposite? Rather than subsume the difference between human and heptapod within the realm of mental similarity, writing draws out the electrifying dance of difference between the two creatures. Furthermore, the film’s dominance of image loses sight of the indexical weight heptapod writing bears upon the reader. Though she learns enough to gain memories of the future and think in a different temporal grammar, all of this is conveyed to the reader through linear (on the word-to-word level) English. Ironically, we are forced to understand the teleological worldview of the heptapods through the causal framework of human language. As a result, we are only granted access to the effects of heptapod language through Louise’s narration: the effects of an effect. Though not entirely absent from the film, Chiang’s short story is a far richer exploration of its themes by necessity of its artistic form.
The medium of writing best conveys the impossible chasm between human and heptapod through its internal foundation on difference and negativity. While “Story of Your Life” makes fiction of scientific concepts, it bears little resemblance to the kind of science fiction preoccupied with visuality. When we read texts like Chiang’s short story, we often imagine what it would be like as a movie because its content suggests a rich visual landscape beyond the limits of writing. Yet, rather than seek to fill in the gaps between writing and its signified content, “Story of Your Life” uses the inherent limits of writing to fuel its meditation on the ways in which language structures our reality. Consequently, Villenueve’s cinematic adaptation of the short story falls short due to the radically different strengths of cinema. Just as heptapod thought can never fully translate to human knowledge, the narrative of “Story of Your Life” can never fully translate to the medium of cinema.
Bibliography:
Chiang, Ted. Stories of Your Life and Others. Picador 2015.
Deleuze, Gilles. Desert Islands and Other Texts 1953–1974. Semiotext(e) ; Distributed by MIT Press 2004.
Saussure, Ferdinand de et al. Course in General Linguistics. McGraw-Hill.
Villeneuve, Denis. Arrival. Paramount Pictures, 2016.
