An encounter with the unknown evokes two separate but equally powerful spheres of emotion: fear and fascination. In the film Arrival (2016)by Denis Villeneuve, linguist Dr. Louise Banks (Amy Adams) is tasked with peacefully bridging the dangerous gap of language between humans and the existentially threatening aliens— named heptapods—that have just landed on Earth. The tension between the two parties is immediate: military outposts, constructed within hours, surround the heptapods’ monolithic ships. Everyone, from the characters to the audience to the film’s poster, is haunted by the same question: “Why are they here?” Louise and her team of scientists, witnessing the aliens within the ship—massive, tentacled deep-sea creatures speaking in pulsating whale calls—find themselves at once terrified and deeply invested in decoding the heptapods’ movement and language. The barrier of mutual understanding in encountering something entirely foreign bars both empathetic communication and material self-evaluation. Yet, as powerful a force as Louise’s fear may be, her fascination with what is unquestionably deemed “other” drives her to make first meaningful contact with the heptapods. This same liminal conflict between repulsion and attraction is what defines early experiences in childhood, including and especially those with film, which not only serve as a demonstration of this contradiction, but a resolution of it.
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