Oscar Best Picture Nominee “Arrival” and the Bearable Heaviness of Being

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Arrival is gripping and smart science fiction, provoking profound thoughts about language, time, and memory, as well as the complicated ways that fear, rivalry, and conflict can inspire and feed off of one another. But what made the movie truly special for me was its deep spirituality. (Spoilers lie ahead — don’t read the next two paragraphs if you haven’t seen Arrival.)

The film opens with a brief montage of a woman (linguist Dr. Louise Banks, played by Amy Adams) lovingly mothering a newborn, and then playing with a toddler, pre-schooler, and school-aged girl. Next the girl appears older (perhaps a late teen) and terribly sick. Finally, she’s dead, with her mother grieving over her. Once the main story of alien first contact gets underway, we assume that the montage had been a flashback to the main character’s past: She’s endured immense suffering — the death of her child. But by the time the film draws to the close, we’ve come to understand that this opening, like the other glimpses of Louise’s life with her daughter that have been revealed along the way, are in fact visions of her future, events that haven’t yet taken place. Louise comes to understand it, too — and yet she still deliberately chooses to begin the chain of events that she knows will bring her daughter into existence, and ultimately bring them both horribly wrenching pain.

It’s a beautifully rendered counter to the ethic of utilitarian control that pervades child-rearing in the modern Western world. None of us wants to endure the suffering and death of a child. But our strenuous, technologically aided efforts to insulate ourselves from such anguish can end up depriving us of the fullest experience of self-giving love — an experience that Louise freely chooses to take on when she acts to hasten a very different kind of arrival into her well-ordered life.

The tragic beauty of Arrival is one small shot against the bow of George Steiner’s claims about the death of tragedy. It is about the beauty of accepting the necessity of our finitude–of how much depends upon our understanding of limitations not only in terms of lack or happenstance, as Kundera does above,  but as the very stuff of the form (delimited by definition) that even in the most extreme suffering gives our lives their meaningful beauty.

The following quote from Simone Weil’s Gravity and Grace, which also doubles up as a great definition of Original Sin, was actually the first thing that came to mind after I had fully processed Arrival:

Not to accept an event in the world is to wish that the world did not exist. That is within my power—for myself. If I wish it I obtain it. I am then an excrescence produced by the world.

Arrival is a bout as close as you’ll come to a cinematic retelling of the Pietà, another story of a mother who consents to bring a child that will pierce her heart into the world.

The weight of being human is bearable, no matter how deep the temptation to throw it off. The dark days will be many, but there is also sweet light.

I’m not surprised Arrival didn’t win best picture, because it doesn’t grab for the spotlight. I’m happily surprised it got this far. I’m tempted to say winning would go against its message.

You might also want to take a look at 1 Thing Nobody Noticed about Oscar Best Foreign Film Winner Ida

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