Arrival/arrivant: Coexistence and the Logic of Future Mourning

While the dystopian science fiction film projects current physical, social, economic, or moral realities into the future to reveal often horrific results, the alien-encounter science fiction film raises existential questions about identity, memory, and coexistence. Stories about confronting extraterrestrial lifeforms do not leap us forward into the unknown so much as throw us into the known, the strangely familiar, the human. Similar to the films Le Jetée, Solaris, and Contact, Arrival argues that the work of ethics, that is, our relation with the Absolute Other, is inextricably linked to how we conceive of mourning and time.

The poststructuralist philosopher Jacques Derrida utilizes the term arrivant to challenge how we are to conceive of species, spectrality, and specialness. To Derrida, the arrivant refers to a lifeform; it is also what ecotheorist Timothy Morton calls the strange stranger. Derrida’s concept of the arrivant can help us understand the connection between Louise’s future child, specifically the meaning behind the death of her child, and the arrival of the aliens. Derrida’s arrivant, like the film Arrival, reveals how a certain approach to mourning is required for a responsible ethical attitude. We might feel better situated in this particular reading of the film if we outline Derrida’s overall philosophical project.

Derrida is a French philosopher whose thought is placed within the branch of continental philosophy known as poststructuralism. Derrida’s main goal is to critique the outstanding belief in “metaphysics of presence,” a metaphysical structure that assumes all meaning can be interpreted through a stable, unifying central concept. Derrida accuses Western thought of logocentrism, a “metaphysics of presence” that is founded on word-centerdness. A line from Genesis evinces this theory: “And God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light.” God is presented as the origin of all things because God creates the world by speaking. Speech is favored over writing as a denotation of pure presence. Derrida is thus critical of how Western thought is structured primarily on this binary opposition of presence and absence. All metaphysical systems that derive their meaning from a pure presence, whether it is God, Self, Masculinity, or Speech, deny a sense of play and thus of an openness to the future. The notion that there is an Archimedean point through which all meaning can emanate from is debilitating for any sense of ethics. Any system built on stable or fixed meanings does not do justice to alterity.

Derrida refers to his own philosophy as a “Hauntology” because it is oriented toward deconstructing binaries and dichotomies. The ghost is thus his emblematic figure; it is neither present nor absent. The arrivant is conceived as a ghost who “does not yet have a name or identity.”1 Derrida suggests that we need a mode of waiting without the economy of expectation. To wait for somebody whom one cannot know and therefore whom one cannot expect, much less apprehend, means that this waiting for the arrivant requires an unconditional hospitality. It is a hospitality without condition because the coming of the arrivant can never be called upon or be reduced to its invitation. The arrivant’s visitation will always be radically unpredictable, its coming, a surprise. Here we can recall that the heptapods arrive on Earth without warning or invitation. We did not expect them, and therefore cannot critique their behavior based on any pre-existing forms of knowledge.

The implications of Derrida’s argument here is the way in which the arrivant unsettles any mode of thinking that takes not only our individual selves but, in the case of the film, all of humanity as self-sufficient and self-determining. In its waiting for the arrivant, the self remains constitutionally exposed to a radical openness and vulnerability to the completely other. Emmanuel Levinas, a huge influence on Derrida, posits that the Absolute Other or the Stranger is the individual “who disturbs the being at home with oneself.”2 The goal is to foster a philosophy of Being – a predisposed attitude towards ethics and life – that opens absolute dissimilarity in its irreducible and infinite transcendence. If we comprehend the ego of the other as analogous to our own then we end up reducing the other to the same. The scientists in the film, for example, do not even anthropomorphize the heptapods. Instead, they (including Jeremy Renner's character, Dr. Ian Donnelly) look at the aliens and project robots on them—they mechomorphize in hopes they can pin down their behavior to repeatable patterns. Coexisting with the heptapods will require a non-evaluative openness rather than judgment through any form of measurement or conceptual specification. We have a responsibility to affirm and do justice to the infinite transcendence of the Other, which always resists the attempt of the philosophical tradition to assimilate everything to the “totality” of presence and the same.

The impossible waiting for and responding to the arrivant includes not only the Other (think strange, extraterrestrial lifeforms such as heptapods, or think even more expansive, the nonhuman) but also the dead, those with or without a name, and the not yet born. Here belies how arrivant can help us interpret the “supplementary” narrative of Louise’s daughter: According to Freud, it is only by separating ties to the dead other and transferring our energies on to a new love object that we can overcome the trauma of mourning. We let the other go while internalizing them in ideal form. An unsuccessful mourning is what he calls melancholia. Derrida argues that a successful mourning in Freud’s sense would fail because it disrespects the singularity of the other and allow them a future. This keeps the actual other close, respecting the fact that they resist all our attempts to assign them their proper and final resting place. Despite the fact that Louise is aware of the inevitable death of her child, she does not “move on” to avoid the trauma and pain associated with Hannah’s death: instead, she mourns the death of her daughter by allowing her to live.

Most of the scenes with her daughter are notably centered on language. Either Louise is teaching Hannah how to spell or Hannah is asking her mother how to pronounce a specific word. Here, Louise repeats the linguistic gift-giving gesture of the aliens toward her daughter. However, a key distinction must be made: The gift-giving gesture offered by the heptapods reveals to be conditioned by our aid to the heptapods several thousands of years into the future, while Louise’s gift to her daughter is unconditional. As Derrida notes, the unconditional gift-giving shatters all economies of exchange and reciprocity. This unconditional gift is a giving without reason or explanation. What it is the importance of such a gift? It engenders intimate forms of human connectedness.

The logic of the gift and of hospitality is typically a circular economy of exchange that organizes itself around the mastery of the host. For the city and nation state it is: “Welcome to our country…provided you fulfill certain immigration requirements, restrictions.” For the personal it is: “Welcome to my house…now please take off your shoes and do not touch the furniture.” Arrival provides us with perhaps the best example of unconditional gift-giving and of unconditional hospitality in the form of Louise’s gift of language to her daughter. In a beautiful passage of his magnum opus trilogy Spheres, Peter Sloterdijk asks us to consider the following: “What could be a more powerful advertisement for human life than passing on the advantage of being able to speak to the speechless who are on their way to language?”3 We should also add that human life can only continue through allowing the speechless, that is, the dead, to speak to the living through the proper work of mourning. The resolute peace between humans at the end of the film is a result of Louise repeating the dying words of Shang’s wife. Through the words of the dead Louise is able to construct a considerably more peaceful future, one in which the nonhuman is incorporated into the political sphere.   

We are reminded throughout the film that Louise is a woman working in an atmosphere made up exclusively of men. There are three women in the film, and two of them are specters – Hannah does not yet exist, and Shang’s wife is deceased. Moreover, we only see Hannah and Louise. Fortunately, Arrival does not fall into the trap of representing women merely as a source of incestuous desires or as an exploitable source of nurturance.4 Louise is not the typical object of exchange that allows various segments of society to establish alliances with one another; instead, she embodies the messianic. Derrida’s concept of the messiah is not someone who will deliver the chosen people a determinate faith or message.5 It is an opening towards the promise and uncertainty of the future, one that affirms our responsibility to inherit and render justice to all those spectral others who are no longer, and are yet to come.

Kierkegaard makes plain in his Works of Love that respect for the dead is the ultimate expression of love because there is no repayment or reciprocal exchange.6 Because Louise’s child exists in the future, they way in which Louise mourns her death is literally weird: Weird from the Old Norse urth, meaning twisted, in a loop. As Morton points out, “the term weird can mean causal: the winding of the spool of fate. In this sense weird is connected with happening or becoming.”7 Through revealing that what we initially read as Louise’s past is actually to become her future, the language of the film, too, is weird. The non-linear language of the heptapods is thus reflected in the film’s temporally disjointed, yet overall cyclical structure. This semantic trick reminds us that film is a language, one that has its own lexicon, codes, and structures. Through representing Louise’s future as if it were her past, Arrival highlights how full presence is never achievable within language; meaning is actually a wriggling linguistic worm constantly turning and squirming.

The ethical insight of the film is located in the connection it creates between the impossible waiting for the arrivant and the work of mourning: Asking why the aliens have arrived will yield the same result as asking why the dead never truly leave. Their radical Otherness and spectrality shake our metaphysical grounding and make us think at temporal and spatial scales that are unfamiliar. The ethical imperative that Arrival presents is clear: We must acknowledge that our fate is inextricably tied both to the dead and to the nonhuman if we are to think of coexistence. 

1. Jacques Derrida, Aporias, trans. Thomas Dutoit (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993), 34.

2. Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority (Norwell, MA: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1991), 39.

3. Peter Sloterdijk, Bubbles: Spheres Volume I: Microspherology, trans. Wieland Hoban (Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e)/Foreign Agents), 102.

4. Lucien Scubla, Giving Life, Giving Death: Psychoanalysis, Anthropolgy, Philosophy (East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press).

5. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, The Work of Mourning, and the New International (New York, NY: Routledge, 1994), 59.

6. Søren Kierkegaard, Works of Love (New York, NY: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2009).
7. Timothy Morton, Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2016), 5.

Moonlight: Celestial Reveries and Cruel Reality

At the center of Berry Jenkins' film Moonlight stirs a volatile fusion of masculine aggression, low-class struggles, and homophobia. Perpetually looming over Chiron’s narrative arc and the social realities that the film explores is its poetic title, “moonlight.” The title of films often indicates where we might be able to derive meaning from their visuals or narrative themes. Moonlight is no exception; it is a hermeneutic compass that, with its multifarious romantic and sexually charged associations, guides us through the film’s intricate deconstruction of masculinity. The most radical subversive gestures that the film makes occur when Chiron is away from his impoverished neighborhood and is seeking solace under the ocean sky. 

The steadfast conceptions of masculinity and heteronormative sexuality that oppress Chiron loosen in the first chapter of the film when drug-dealer Juan, who at this point acts as Chiron’s only Father figure, recounts to Chiron how he was once told by an older white woman that all black boys look blue in the moonlight. Juan confides in Chiron through affirming to him that he is neither black nor blue; he ought to declare his own individuality and be his own man. While the white woman in Juan’s story may have commandeered the subdued glow of the moon as another means of disparaging black men, to young Chiron it becomes associated with Juan’s compassion and guidance. The rest of the scene has Juan and Chiron’s bodies move with a gentle but determined force against the waves of the ocean. Juan eventually picks up Chiron and, through comforting and calming him, teaches him how to float and swim. 

The semi-submerged camera angle allows us to better contrast the turbulent condition of the waves with the peace and serenity shared by Juan and Chiron. The waves may be unstable, but the ocean’s infinite depth and scope provide Juan and Chiron a sense of adventure and freedom that is denied to them in everyday life. This environmental aesthetics collapses rather than reinforces classic distinctions between self and world, body and mind. This collapse of distinctions is made more explicit later on in the film when Chiron tells his friend Kevin that when he cries his tears accumulate to such a degree that he feels he might transform into a large, single teardrop that will merge with the ocean. 

In our second seaside encounter, the film pits images of the ocean waves slowly climbing up the beach alongside the facial expressions and bodily gestures of Chiron as Kevin sexually pleasures him. A connection is made between the natural phenomenon of rising tides and sexual tension, specifically the act of a man’s hand slowly easing up another man’s leg. This combination of primal ferocity and loving compassion is found earlier in Juan, too. His rugged, masculine physique is intermixed with his tender care toward Chiron as he holds him in the ocean. The moonlight and ocean are presented as symbols of freedom, a space where the typical codes for masculinity and femininity are transgressed. 

In this way the film preserves Romantic idealism through presenting nature and darkness as an outlet from mundane cares. At night, the individual turns to the self and heaven, and liberates their soul. There is no reason at night; instead, we look at the moon and embrace madness (hence the connection between the Latin luna and lunatic). The moonlight represents the lucent transparency of clear thinking and open sexuality. With its insistence on normalcy, argues the philosopher and sociologist Michel Foucault, society remains only "straight" and therefore hostile to alternative forces of life.

The moon last appears when Chiron is anxiously following Kevin to his apartment. The most resonant aspects of the scene are the long pauses that are interspersed throughout the calm conversation between Chiron and Kevin. We must be careful not to regard the pregnant pauses in the conversation as an absence of language; such pauses induce what William Wordsworth calls awkwardness, that is, intense emotion imperfectly expressed. The silence is not cold or lifeless; rather, it indicates the heat of their attachment. The scene is exceptionally tense because the pauses highlight the gap between what can be felt and what can be spoken. It is clear that throughout Chiron’s life he would have risked great humiliation and possible physical harm if he expressed his interest in men. We also sense that it is not only sexual gratification that Chiron seeks in his life; it is a feeling of intimacy and a refuge from the world that has so terribly isolated him. The final image of Kevin embracing Chiron in his arms is a powerful one because it incites our universal desire for shared space and warmth. We further identify with a queer black man from a poor background. 

The film’s title begs an affinity with Allen Ginsberg’s 1955 poem "Howl," which also deals directly with homosexuality and masculinity, albeit in a more politically charged manner, and from the perspective of a white man. Despite their contrasts in style and the differing historically determined social realities they confront, both allude to nature and primal gestures as metaphors of freedom. While “Howl” presented poetry as a thunderous recourse to social oppression, Jenkins' Moonlight, not unlike Chiron’s moonlight, throws us into celestial reverie and conjures a bond between existentially isolated individuals. The reflective light of the film screen casts a soft glow that does not wholly enlighten but rather solicits sympathetic imagination. Moonlight wonderfully raises our perceptual awareness to the real psychological violence that is inflicted on marginalized groups who are underrepresented on the big screen. It is this characteristic that defines socially engaged cinema.

Son of Saul: Representing the Unrepresentable

In Son of Saul, Hungarian director László Nemes is tasked with representing on film the horrors of working as a member of the Auschwitz Sonderkommando. Any film that takes the Holocaust as its subject matter raises a challenging question: What is the efficacy of representing the unrepresentable? Like any other artistic medium, a film can preserve the collective memory of catastrophic events with the hope that we might remember its victims and prevent its reoccurrence; such a film has the pedagogical role of teaching us about greater injustices. Even still, films that deal explicitly with the Holocaust must question the ethics and limitations of representing such an event. Surely, we remember historical events through representation, but representation can also be abhorrent, if only because the dead cannot defend themselves. How can film, a medium known for its visual realism, depict an unspeakable event that evades any realistic representation? A respectable film that represents the Holocaust must also acknowledge the failure of its own representation.

Claude Lanzmann’s 1985 film Shoah is a documentary that does not seek to visually represent any scenes from the Holocaust; instead, it documents the oral histories of Holocaust survivors. Roberto Benigni’s Life is Beautiful, meanwhile, asks: To what degree do we allow a Holocaust film to be entertaining, or even funny? By not showing any acts of violence or cruelty in the concentration camp, the filmmakers reproduce the same game with the audience that main character and Father Guido plays with his son: We may need symbolic fictions like those that art presents to us in order to interpret and understand reality, but they can never directly show all of the world’s complexity. The young girl wearing the red dress in Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List reminds the audience of the artificial nature of the film, and in doing so, articulates that a celluloid strip of film could never come close to representing the actual event of the Holocaust.

Having been the production of such a large entertainment company as Universal Pictures, Schindler’s List feels dishonest or impure. The studio may not have approved the film with the logic that the Holocaust will sell tickets, but it must have weighed profitability as a heavy variable considering the spectacular cost of the film’s production. International films such as Son of Saul are largely state-funded, made cheaply, and do not feel as suspect to the moral trappings of Hollywood. Son of Saul is a Holocaust film that urges us to consider the moral tension between ethics and aesthetics inherent in the act of artistic production. This tension is foregrounded in the film’s cinematographic style.  

Son of Saul mercifully disorients the viewer through its busy camera work. Despite the fact that the extremely shallow depth of field allows us to see only blurry figures in the background we still feel fully immersed in the environment. In the very first scene of the film we realize with creepy horror that we are inside the gas chambers. There is a weird effect of withdrawal and disturbing intimacy all at once. Saul may always be within arms reach of us and occupy most of the frame, but he never has our full attention. We are more interested in the dark labyrinth that he is forced to navigate. In this way the film removes many of the typical cinematic codes and narrative tropes that define Holocaust films: there is no love story, no montage of terrified families being rounded up, no birds-eye-view of ghettos and, perhaps most strikingly, no music. Instead, we are perpetually accompanied with the sound of clanging metal, buckling gears, the sweeping of blood, and the shoveling of coal (or ash). This is mass murder in the banal guise of a day's work.

On the narrative level, Son of Saul is about an imprisoned man rushing to provide his son a proper Jewish burial. We soon learn, however, that this boy is not Saul’s son. Throughout the film Saul endangers not only his unit but also obstructs their plans of escape, compelling us to question both his motives and his sanity. In the final scene of the film another boy appears in front of Saul. At first we do not know if he is envisioning a phantom or a real, live child. Saul’s ensuing smile is profoundly cryptic. The film’s ambivalent ending leaves us as an active participant, full of thought. According to critical theorist Jacques Rancière, pensive endings both “extends the action” and “puts every conclusion in suspense.” The kinds of questions that the film raises concerning religion, torture, and mourning will continue to exist outside of the theater in the mind of the viewer, fostering a kind of dialogue.

One of the larger questions that Saul’s mad quest provokes is: How do we go on knowing that we are being manipulated? Religion and culture assert that there is something more than bare life. Perhaps Saul is simply choosing religious duty over the duty imposed on him by the Nazis. Religion, in this case, is presented as the last bastion of respect. Only in religious tradition do we find symbolic activities that instate meaning to life. There is still the question of Saul’s imaginary familial relation to the boy. Perhaps Saul’s delusions are a product of the Nazi’s systemic torture. Forcing Saul, a Hungarian Jew, to aid in the dismemberment of his own culture creates a profound guilt and disrupts the way he organizes the world. He may very well begin to view the prisoners whom he is tasked to escort to their death as family members. 

Son of Saul’s original visual style is informed by Jacques Rancière’s philosophy of representation. “The image is not a duplicate of a thing,” he writes. “It is a complex set of relations between the visible and the invisible.” It is this understanding of representation that makes Son of Saul unique as a Holocaust film. The background through most of the film is shockingly suspended, leaving us with a hallucinatory, psychotic experience that is at once intensely real yet at the same time uncannily withdrawn and unspeakable. Through muffled sounds and distorted images, Son of Saul succeeds in restoring not a full presence but a spectral intimacy to the event and the suffering it engendered. 

Both the “son” of Saul and the film Son of Saul ought to be interpreted as constructive fictions. One is a corpse that will inspire a character’s ensuing actions; the other is the first piece of a Director’s corpus that will inform our collective memory of a historical event. As Saul does with the child's corpse, we should take László Nemes’ debut feature film as an opportunity to respect and mourn the dead.