Friday 24 February 2017

Whose Language, What Language: Review of the film, Arrival

Film is a media where the visual and (sometimes) the speech merge together. The visual mode easily impacts our minds so much that, despite some famous lines from movies, what we remember most are snippets of moving or still images.

Arrival, a movie starring Amy Adams, highlights this very conflict between language and image. Soon after its release the film created enormous buzz by gathering critical appreciation from different source, and through the debate over ‘accidental’ nomination of Amy Adams for the Oscars.  While such nittigritties are perfect for the gossip page, let’s talk about the film for a moment.

To summarize very briefly, Arrival is about the arrival of alien spaceships in different cities on the earth and a linguist’s, played by Amy Adams, job to communicate with them.

At first we may wonder what is a linguist doing in an alien mission. Well, her task is to decipher their language and understand their purpose of being on earth. The root of the problem therefore lies in inability to communicate with this unknown species. In this way, the film highlights human beings’ extreme reliance on spoken language as the only mode of communication. When the other species fail to do so, it causes mistrust and fear among the humans on the earth about possible impending destruction. Hence, the ‘human’ army leaders’ decision to attack the alien spaceship arises out of the fear of unknown. The aliens, with their bodies hidden behind the smoke and shielded by glass, are a mystery to the humans. They do not resemble anything that humans have seen before. By showing how human written and spoken language is illegible to the aliens, the film breaks the superiority that language assumes. It also shows that, like their language, human beings are merely another species existing in this universe. The aliens not only have a ‘better’ method of communication (one that is not bound by written scripts and does not require any sound), they are also a better race than humans having the ability to see future.

The film also breaks the conception of linearity. By moving back and forth through present and future, we are hardly ever sure about what is happening and what is yet to happen. Especially intriguing is the scene where Ian (played by Jeremy Renner) confesses his love for Louise (played by Amy Adams), and Louise can already foresee their future—marriage, child birth, and divorce—in front of her eyes. This creates confusion as to whether she was simply narrating this incident or living in it – because the first scene shows her interaction with her daughter. If she is living in the present, she is yet to have a daughter. Thus, like the split created by alien spacecraft into the earth’s atmosphere, the film subverts norms and assumptions at multiple levels.

The film shows how there is a continuous tendency of humans to ‘translate’ the unknown into the known. This attempt is showcased by Ian who names the aliens after Abbott and Costello, two famous ‘human’ comedians, thereby trying to humanize the aliens. It also shows an effort to reduce the aliens into mere comedic creatures unworthy of human attention. In the end, however, the questions remain: is Amy’s interpretation of the symbols correct? Doesn’t she ultimately impose her language and meanings onto their signs?


  

Friday 3 February 2017

Like, Unlilke, Dislike

I find the new Facebook buttons very useful. They come with innumerable possibilities of liking (which includes thumbs up, love and an over enthusiastic smiley) and disliking (which includes teary face and angry face emoticons) a post put up in social media and voice our opinions on it. I personally hoped that they had a thumbs down picture also to show ‘unlike’ (just to balance out the number of emoticons on both sides). The growing popularity of social media sites have made these terms—like, unlike—hugely popular.
My quandary with these terms however go much earlier, when I was around ten years old. At that time our school had this policy of starting second language learning—which is English—in class three. Since the usual age of getting admitted to class one (after the nursery classes) was age six, kids in class three were usually eight years old. We started typically with alphabets and words (mind you, half the kids in the class already knew these things because their parents taught them at home). So in the school we were basically refreshing our memory. Our first English teacher was one of the best teachers I have ever seen in my life. Patient as ever, she always used to answer our questions without the slightest hint of anger. Thanks to her, I genuinely grew a liking to the language.
Now fast forwarding to class five when I was ten years old. We’d already had several other teachers and they were fine too. But an incident that happened in one of the English language classes is still etched in my memory. It was a class test on sentence construction, writing meanings and the usual blah blah ‘fundamental English’ stuff. And one question among them wanted us to write the antonym for ‘like’. At that time the only knowledge of opposite or antonym I had was the prefix ‘un’. I used to think that by simple adding ‘un’ in front of any word, we will get its antonym. Going by this simple mathematical rule I wrote in the exam that opposite of ‘like’ is ‘unlike’. Here I should mention that ‘unlike’ is not a wrong word per se. But in its usage, ‘unlike’ is mentioned to refer to comparisons, or rather dissimilarities (e.g. ‘Unlike X, Y was good at sports’). So ‘unlike’ did not necessarily mean ‘not liking’ something/somebody.
As expected (not by me), the answer script came back with a cross mark on ‘unlike’. Like every other student craving for marks I asked my teacher to clarify. She said that the correct answer is ‘dislike’. At that time I did not have the nuance understanding of ‘unlike’ as now (please refer to the paragraph above), so I presented my previous argument that ‘anything with the prefix un is an opposite’. Sadly, both of us stuck to our positions. But I wasn’t giving up easily either! I went back home, checked the dictionary, found the word ‘unlike’, read that it may be used as opposite of ‘like’ too, photocopied the page as proof of my profound and correct knowledge of English language, and showed it to the teacher next day in class. And guess what? I got the mark for that answer!! No one was happier than me that day.
But as I grew older, I thought that maybe ‘dislike’ was a better answer.
However, now I am free of that worry because Facebook has come to my rescue. By popularizing the word ‘like’ and ‘unlike’ in their contrasting terms, it has given me the reason to claim that my answer in class five was indeed correct.

Now I hope future students won’t have to argue with their teachers in this matter.