(Text/Yang Shiyang)
In the habitual acceptance history of many people, science fiction movies are noisy and lively. They should at least be filled with a lot of cool artillery fire and explosive sound effects. Aliens are destined to be evil and arrogant. Most humans are fearless and united. There is no suspense. After the victory, eventually, the hero and heroine will go hand in hand to the sunset.
Obviously, compared with all the familiar and boring settings, "Arrival" may make ordinary viewers have major doubts. It is cold, melancholy, and solemn, but in fact it has not been able to effectively relieve emotions until the end. It is a "reactional" to the story type of "alien invasion" in a commercial sense, but it proudly sets a new benchmark for science fiction. Those alien beings for unknown reasons are driving huge meteorite-like spaceships, suspended on the surface of human beings. They did not launch an attack, they just kept quiet. Compared with the slaughter by the artillery fire in previous stories, this constancy and quietness are more fascinating, and more importantly, its own quietness begins to reveal the philosophical significance of existence.
Objectively speaking, most of the film's achievements come from the original Ted Jiang's "The Story of Your Life". The story has a convergent length and restrained language, but it describes an indescribable grandeur. Just like the name of that work, it describes the brief life of a child, from conception to death, described in a compassionate mother's tone, but in the end, the title—you—extends from a narrow individual to a pair. The reference of mankind, in an instant, the meaning of that story became expansive and extravagant, becoming a fable and aphorism for mankind. As a Chinese scientist and writer, Ted Jiang has melted the boundary between Eastern Zen and Western rationality from his bones. He first told the hardest setting in a science fiction story-alien civilization arrived on earth, but immediately abandoned all cliché follow-ups and took over the battlefield with the unspeakable charm of Eastern Zen.
In the movie, the written language of alien creatures is a circle of ink, just like the idle brush in Chinese ink and wash, the arbitrary and restrained circles seem to be smudged but in fact they are regular. It represents emotion and reason beyond words. The combination of, can express all meanings and feelings in an instant, but immediately disappears. There is no visual form better than this to express everything Ted Jiang wants to express. He wants to dismantle all the human experience-the long-term obsession with language, communication, understanding, and time. Regardless of language or time, it has long become part of the universal experience of mankind, and when we use them, we also fall into them. Our thoughts can be expressed by language, but we are also kidnapped by language; we use time to divide ourselves, past, present, and future, and we also imprison ourselves in time. The past cannot be reproduced, the present is insurmountable, and the future is insurmountable. Delusion. From the perspective of the alien civilization that suddenly descends, human language and time concepts are so strange and inexplicable. We regard it as the content of all experience or even civilization accumulation, which seems to them more like a cage. They have brought weapons to mankind, a brand-new concept and way of knowing the world and self, which may be more subversive than any seemingly offensive weapon.
More people view our world rationally and materially. This is a kind of progress in self-knowledge after mankind entered modern civilization. The so-called science is the foundation of civilization. This is widely regarded as a universal consensus. However, human language does not belong to natural science. It belongs to culture. The content of culture always has subtle proportions, and some parts are elusive. But the operation of this world has to be communicated through language. Therefore, this story inevitably explores isolation and communication in the first place. Linguists and physicists represent two aspects, cultural and scientific. Their combination basically speaks for the foundation of all human knowledge. The female status of a linguist symbolizes the role of a gestator.
The linguist was selected because she had previously served as an interpreter when helping the U.S. military fight in the Middle East. The military said that you translated those languages accurately and efficiently. She said, and then you executed those people accurately and efficiently. This is a mockery, but it has also become a secret entrance to the whole story. The purpose of studying language is to understand and communicate. It should originally point to harmony, but in the end, efficient and accurate communication points to killing and destruction. So, what are the consequences of communication with alien life?
Humans want to figure out where the aliens come from and what their purpose is. Everything starts with language. The communication process has become self-talking. And in this process, while panicking, puzzled, and alert, it was also accompanied by some kind of graceful enlightenment. Compared with all human words and languages, which must carry logic and content through ideograms, phonemes, pictograms, or the like, the communication methods of aliens are more like direct intrusion into people's senses, brains and dreams. If communication between humans and humans requires a process of picking up language, digesting and understanding, then the expression of meaning from alien civilizations to people is more like a kind of illusion. To some extent, they can directly reach the essence. From the human point of view, this is an overly efficient process that cannot be effectively decoded. Misunderstandings and guards are born and deepened. Ironically, the guard against foreign invaders has further promoted the self-isolation and division of human beings in different civilizations. Those global linkage mechanisms close the linkage little by little. When isolation and confrontation reach their peak, crisis will inevitably come. The ultimate solution to all this is interaction and communication. In this sense, Ted Jiang and the director are like stubborn children, in a cold and solemn atmosphere, they still retain some warm cores.
Just like the subversive language system of aliens, they have also changed the human perception of time. It draws human beings out of the time node where they are, allowing us to overlook the time axis, go back to the past, or enter the future. Everything is distorted, scattered, and can be combined and changed at will, but it must not be linear. Linguists let the future self, relying on a ridiculous Chinese language, saved mankind.
Compared with the more famous Nolan's "Interstellar", "Arrival" is longer and deeper. It is based on a solid scientific imagination, but it is determined to advance to the domain of philosophy. It dismantles time and reorganizes time, both in terms of the narrative method of the story itself and the content presented by the story, using this non-linear approach. Sometimes linear means clarity; sometimes, chaos is closer to the truth. In this sense, Ted-Jiang’s writing ambition is like the language of those aliens. He wants to get rid of the logic of language and directly into the essence. Reading the text will recognize this more clearly than watching the adapted video.
From this perspective, "Arrival" is not so much a science fiction story as it is more like a philosophical lecture full of speculation and innocence. The huge flying machines of those alien civilizations came inexplicably and dissipated without warning. In the form of creating a crisis on the surface, they have resolved a certain communication crisis between human beings, and conveyed a brand-new epistemology to mankind, and then disappeared from then on. At the celebration party, the national flags were hung together, and the ink circle was printed on the last flag.
Will they come again? Or, have they been here long ago, so that we will be molded into what we are today?
(This article first publishes Tencent everyone's column)
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