Arrival

0:00:03.1 Natalie Dowzicky: Welcome to Pop and Locke. I’m Natalie Dowzicky.

0:00:05.3 Landry Ayres: And I’m Landry Ayres.

0:00:07.0 Natalie Dowzicky: Twelve mysterious spacecraft with alien life forms on board land on earth, and a linguist saves humanity. But Denis Villeneuve’s 2016 hit “Arrival” isn’t just another alien movie. Here to discuss the true art of language is film critic and senior culture reporter at Vox Alissa Wilkinson.

0:00:25.5 Alissa Wilkinson: Hello.

0:00:26.5 Natalie Dowzicky: And the host of Right Now on Rightly, and author of the forthcoming book “How The Force Can Fix The World,” Stephen Kent.

0:00:32.0 Stephen Kent: Hey, nice to be here again.

0:00:35.4 Landry Ayres: One of the central tensions of Arrival is between this descriptivist’s scientific viewpoint of Jeremy Renner’s character, this utilitarian military point of view, and Dr. Banks, who is this sort of, I guess you could say, relativist or maybe constructivist idea. It’s vague enough that a lot of labels could work here, but there is distinct viewpoints that all of these characters are coming at this issue of the heptapods’ arrival from. How does this movie deal with the question of whether or not we are all experiencing this same reality? How are we dealing with all three of these or possibly even more perspectives?

0:01:23.2 Alissa Wilkinson: Yeah. I think one of the things that struck me most when I first saw this movie… So I had just finished talking a little bit about theories of language and language shaping reality with my undergrads, and I was very excited as soon as I started watching the movie and thought, “Oh, my goodness, I know what this movie is doing.” But in the years since that I’ve watched it over and over, I’m sure we’ll talk a lot about that, but in the years since, I think what I’ve come to realize is, of course, there is a linguistic hypothesis happening in this film. But it also is more fundamentally, I think, about metaphors, which are really important to language, and we know that, and how metaphors change the way that we think about the realities that we’re encountering together, the way the framework that we push situations through has a lot of… It does a lot to determine how we’re going to interact with them and thus shape our own realities.

0:02:28.6 Alissa Wilkinson: So if I understand all of our relational interactions as being transactional and you understand them as being something else, then we’re going to have a different perspective of what our relationship is. And I think that part is really important for looking at these characters in the way they’re encountering the world, but also more broadly, this is a little bit of a film about geopolitics, and it’s encountering it from that direction.

0:02:55.6 Stephen Kent: And the whole aspect of perspectives in this movie is something that I have been coming at from a little bit of a different angle, just because I watched this movie again for the second time yesterday in preparation for recording this, and I just finished writing the last chapter of my book, and it’s on free will and choice. And in all of the reading that I dove into on the concept of free will versus determinism, which I’m never good at describing it makes these things, but basically are things set to happen a certain way, are we on a trajectory, sort of like a treadmill in life?

0:03:33.4 Stephen Kent: One of the most interesting things that I came across there was that the whole concept of free will and determinism is tied to how we are told to see the world and to see ourselves, and all of the different possible outcomes that we can face in life. And when this movie started framing language as the way that you see the world and the way that it sort of like governs your ability to think in different ways, I went, “That’s exactly what I was writing about,” which was just your range of experiences and who people tell you you are over the course of your life has a huge role in determining who you become and the different options that you can pursue down the road, or at least your perception of those options.

0:04:19.9 Stephen Kent: So, I just watched this movie and I thought this was a big commentary on free will, which I was not expecting, and I think that that’s how the movie ends as well, with the main character, Louise, knowing that her daughter is going to die and then driving her family apart and wrecking her marriage.

0:04:41.5 Natalie Dowzicky: It’s funny that you bring that up, Stephen, ’cause I’ve seen this movie probably three or four times now, and from my memory, I was thinking, “Oh, this language… This film is largely about language, and the power of language, and the different things you can… People gleam from reality through language.” And then when I was watching it this time, most recently, within the last week or so, I watched it, I guess, from a much more meta level of how language is tied to free will and determinism, like you were talking about. And I think there is this idea that, obviously throughout the film, and for those of you haven’t seen it, we get little tidbits in the beginning of Dr. Banks’s, who we perceive is her daughter, and her daughter, she… Her daughter passes away from a… I don’t think they ever say exactly what she had, passes away from an uncurable disease, and we learned that pretty early on, and most viewers assumed that that has happened in the past, so… Just the way the film presents it. But then as we are going through the film with Dr. Banks, who’s actually Amy Adams, which I think is a very interesting casting choice in this sense, just because I’m not really used to her in this type of role, but as we go through the film, we actually learned that that hasn’t… What we had seen about her daughter hasn’t yet happened.

0:06:14.2 Natalie Dowzicky: And that’s kind of like the big plot twist, spoiler alert, but this movie came out quite a few years ago, so I don’t feel all that bad about it. But it’s really interesting, the ongoing conversation from a meta level, not only how language ties into it, but this idea of our lives being pre-​determined. And I think it all, like Stephen said, comes to a head at the very end of the movie when they’re asking… Where Jeremy Renner and Amy Adams are having this conversation, and they’re asking very philosophical questions about would you still live your life if you knew how it was going to end or you knew what was happening, yeah, next, or you knew someone was going to be in pain from something that you did in the future. And I thought it was kind of a brilliant way to frame a sci-​fi movie. ‘Cause that’s what I wanted to say, it’s not like your typical alien movie. It’s not Mars Attacks, it’s not Independence Day. It has a lot more philosophical meaning to it than those films.

0:07:16.6 Stephen Kent: Yeah. I would say it’s right up there with Natalie Portman in Annihilation in terms of the big, weighty topics that it’s taking on in the context of an extraterrestrial supernatural event. And one of the favorite things I like about this move, it’s just metaphor is just rolled inside metaphors. And when you get to the end of the movie, you finally learn the name of the daughter, and her name is Hannah, and that is a palindrome, and the whole point is that it reads the same way forward and the same way backwards. And you can think then about the movie, once you’ve reached the finish line, how it all can be read the same both ways. ‘Cause in the very beginning of the movie, you think Louise, Amy Adams, lost her daughter and was going through a divorce. And frankly, she is just like, she’s sad. She just looks really sad. She is going into class very humdrum, the news is breaking that aliens have landed, and she just walks to her car like nothing is going on. And panic is starting to break out. And she goes to bed at night, just like with the news on, and she’s able to sleep. It’s like she doesn’t… It’s like it doesn’t affect her.

0:08:21.6 Stephen Kent: And so when I first saw the movie, and I actually forgot when I was watching it the second time, I made a little note which was, “Amy has nothing left to live for,” [chuckle] because I thought she had lost her marriage and her child. And then I got to the end, I was like, “Oh, so she was, in the beginning, she was just kind of a depressed person anyways.” It changes the entire way that you see the movie, but it also changes nothing.

0:08:48.7 Landry Ayres: And I think that is really interesting because it speaks to the mechanics of the heptapod language, which becomes a big plot device and leads into deus ex machina or resolving the big climactic moment where war is imminent, because you’ve got the language where it is written all simultaneously. Like they said, “If you could write your language with both hands, you would start at the end, but you have to know where it ends and where it starts and bring them together at the same point.” And I thought this was actually really interesting as well, is that Ted Chiang, who wrote the short story that this is based on, which is called “Story of Your Life,” in an interview about his writing process, he had written that his usual process is to start with an ending scene, and then he will start the first scene, and then he will fill in the gaps between the two of them. So the fact that he was able to take that method and embed it.

0:09:56.0 Stephen Kent: And you think often that stories are always written that way. Yeah, your perception is often that stories are always written with an ending in mind, and then you’re working your way towards that. Just recently, JJ Abrams is talking about what went wrong with the Star Wars final trilogy, and like, “Oh, I wish we ‘ve kind of known where we’re going, and how to plan.” And you often think that this is the way it always works. But when you are writing a story or a book, you need to know what is the synopsis of this story, so then you can help finish and write out all of those details. And I was thinking, when they described that scene of writing from the front and the back, it’s my number one problem when I am writing on paper, and I’m really glad that we don’t have to ever write on paper anymore these days, ’cause I just would always run out of room. And when I’m writing a birthday card to somebody, I always end up having to cram stuff in those final lines ’cause I have no sense of what I’m gonna say and how I’m going to say it, I just go. And it kind of breaks your mind when you think about the way that they constructed sentences in this circle as a completely fleshed out thought. I absolutely love it.

0:11:07.2 Alissa Wilkinson: Well, I think one fun challenge with this story is that it did start out as a short story and then has been translated to a medium that’s… So obviously narrative literature and narrative films are both linear, we start at the beginning and we have a perception of what we’re looking at as being the beginning of the story, or maybe we’re like, “Oh, it’s the middle and it tells us four days earlier,” or something like that, like they love to do on television these days. But one thing that I think is challenging about this is that, in film, the filmmaker has even more control over the pace and the perception you have of the story. You can read slower or faster. You can’t really do that with a film. I guess you could speed up or slow down, but that’s psychotic behavior, don’t do that to a movie. [laughter] But if you’re watching a movie that way, we also… Obviously I was thinking about this the fourth time I saw it because I’m a film critic, and one thing that film has taught us over a hundred and some years is that generally we’re watching the beginning of a story, and then as the movie goes along in time and we go along in time, literally sitting on our couch for two hours, that time is progressing forwards.

0:12:30.3 Alissa Wilkinson: And filmmakers have been breaking this perception of chronological time movement in film. Throughout film history, certainly different people have done it in different ways, we’ve gotten used to non-​linear stories, we’ve got Pulp Fiction and we’ve got Memento, and we’ve got all these films that mess with that, but still our general mode of interacting with film is to think of it as a metaphor for time passing. It’s like a structural metaphor that we’re experiencing, and we know time isn’t actually passing at the same rate, but that’s the experience we’re having.

0:13:05.5 Alissa Wilkinson: And so one thing I love about Arrival is that even on that meta level breaks that and says, I can remember the distinct moment at which I realized what was going on with the perception of time, I felt like my own brain had some leap bent into a circle. [chuckle] I was like, “Oh, oh my goodness.” And it wasn’t just like I was, “What a neat trick they did,” but it was actually my own perception suddenly bending back on itself. And for a split second, I understood what it might be like to understand how to perceive language the way the heptapods do in these circles. One thing I wanna say that always amuses me is that the language, they were having a lot of trouble figuring out how to design the language, the heptapod language. And apparently it’s literally molded after a coffee stain.

[laughter]

0:13:56.9 Natalie Dowzicky: Yeah.

0:14:00.3 Stephen Kent: That makes total sense, when you look at it with that context.

0:14:03.0 Alissa Wilkinson: It tells you a lot about how that would be. But again, there’s all this extra stuff going on in this movie that you wouldn’t necessarily have in a narrative story, and that way we’re even experiencing language slightly differently, ’cause now we have a visual language and we have all this extra stuff that we’re contending with. And something that we were saying before is that this isn’t a sci-​fi movie where… It isn’t a sci-​fi movie ultimately where the aliens are attacking, but we are attuned, as is everyone else in the world of the movie, to think that’s what’s happening, because that’s the language we have for aliens arriving on our planet. And that’s the language we have for watching disasters happen on TV. So I think there’s a lot of that that’s even being played with way below the surface.

0:14:51.4 Landry Ayres: And that gets brought up specifically because everyone is trying to communicate with the heptapods, but they are all coming at it from different angles and using their own respective languages to understand where the heptapods are coming from, and it becomes a major plot point, specifically when the Chinese military and government they discover or assume has been using the game of mahjong to communicate with the heptapods, and the American scientists and military believe that this is dangerous because it is ultimately competition and a power dynamic and a struggle between two sides, and it will lead to conflict, which I thought was interesting and is certainly a sort of understandable conclusion that you could get to, but it is also… I wonder if it’s an assumption about the way that games are played and are perceived in that there is a struggle, and there’s an inherent violence or conflict as opposed to what games have been historically, which is people coming together to think creatively and do things differently.

0:16:05.8 Landry Ayres: And I don’t know if it’s necessarily intrinsic to the format of games. Now conflict, in and of itself, is a part of human nature. And we talk about competition and predatory behaviors, I don’t think you can ignore the possibility of those, but I did think it was interesting that they framed it in that way. And something that Natalie had written about was why did… Why were the Chinese military very much singled out?

0:16:38.2 Natalie Dowzicky: Yeah.

0:16:38.6 Landry Ayres: And I think part of it might be playing off of like we had Cold War fears and films where Russia was always the evil villain, pulling the strings and doing crazy experiments, and not understanding the dangers of the technology that they were trying to deal with and understand. And there’s probably a lot of cultural baggage that is bound up in fear of China currently, and I think that’s definitely being played into here.

0:17:07.1 Stephen Kent: Well, watching it, watching that movie post-​COVID is an entirely different experience, just when you have had two years to stew on Chinese secrets and the way that they play with the truth and obscure their activities from the public. But all of those things that happen in that movie are based off of failures of mutual cooperation, and just lack of trust and language between people here on Earth, and the world that we live in suffers from our inability to sense that we are all tied together and have things to gain. And you were talking about how they were teaching or trying to communicate with the Chinese with a game, and that sort of made US generals nervous. And somebody mentioned chess. How would you talk to them if you’re playing a game where there’s a winner and a loser, and the daughter later on asks the mom about a scientific or science-​y name for a game where both sides win. She says that it’s not compromised, and then they come back with the title of a non-​zero sum game.

0:18:08.0 Stephen Kent: I had actually never heard the term zero-​sum game until listening to The Ezra Klein Show, ’cause he uses that term all of the time to describe politics, it’s one of his favorite expressions. And so I was like, “Oh, you know what, I actually disagree about that analysis of it,” ’cause chess is like there is a winner and a loser, but the actions throughout a chess game are not zero-​sum. You can trade up pieces, trade down pieces. There are situations where you can make a decision to have both sides lose a piece, but then one still comes out on top or it’s an equal. There are so many different ways to express power and conquest in a chess game, and I was like, “I actually don’t know if that is right,” but I suppose in the end it’s conflict.

0:18:55.6 Alissa Wilkinson: Yeah, the whole idea is that it’s still zero-​sum in the sense that someone wins and someone does not, although I guess there’s such a thing as a draw in chess, so maybe. But even then, you can win a chess tournament, someone wins. But I do think, watching all of that, I thought a lot about the concept of language games and the idea that whether we’re speaking or communicating in different ways, we don’t have these set and enclosed systems that are established that we arrive into, and they never change. They’re always evolving, they’re always changing. Games might be the most set, but also, there’s other ways to play chess, and there’s new rules that get added. I’ve been relearning how to play chess and discovering, “Oh, this rule was added in like 1816.” I’m like, “What?” You know, but…

[chuckle]

0:19:45.0 Stephen Kent: Yeah, pawns moving up two spaces at the beginning, it’s a recent invention, yeah. [chuckle]

0:19:48.8 Alissa Wilkinson: Exactly. Yeah, and that happens in sports. I watch baseball, and Major League Baseball is always changing the rules a little bit to make the game more interesting. And so they develop within a specific community that is trying to accomplish certain goals, and I think that’s what is so interesting about this film, is how well it recognizes that, and how well it recognizes that… I wish I could remember the citation for this, but I was reading something years ago that was saying science, just science developed in European languages. And because of that, it has certain characteristics and certain ways of treating things that might have been different had it developed in a different kind of a language, one that conceived of time and space differently or something like that. Or the fact that some languages conceive of numbers, and I’m using language in a large sense here, not just literal words; conceive of numbers in logarithmic ways while we think of them as sort of one, one, one integers.

0:21:00.0 Alissa Wilkinson: And all of that is always very fascinating to me, and of course, philosophers of language have been talking about it for a long time, and recognizing that mahjong or chess would be a different way to talk and have a different end goal, is really just a recognition that there are rules that govern that, those interactions that are set that may evolve, but they’re not the same as the language you have that maybe when you speak with your child, you hope. [chuckle] Although, and that’s a zero-​sum game, too, sometimes.

0:21:29.7 Alissa Wilkinson: It did make me think a lot, though, about… I had just watched it last year when the pandemic was starting, and I was like, “You know what book this reminds me of is World War Z, Max Brooks’ book,” which is sort of similar, in some ways. It posits like: What if a zombie apocalypse actually happened? How would different countries and communities respond to it, and what would they literally do based on their understanding of the world? And I have talked to Max about it a couple times since then, and he’s like, “Well, I was right about a lot of things. I kind of wish I hadn’t been, but just proclivities that are kind of built into the way we communicate with one another affect the way we interact with the real world, and give us a set of rules for interaction that can be hard to break out of on our own.”

0:22:20.9 Stephen Kent: Yeah, and we’ve been hearing about some of this subjectivity versus, I don’t know, I won’t say fact, but subjectivity versus the opposite in popular news these days. Any time I turn on Fox News, it seems like they are talking about how some California school district is trying to get rid of the rules of math because it is rooted in European practices and white supremacy. I don’t know. I never get the good coverage on these kinda stories that I would like ’cause I would really like to understand where some of these discourses are actually stemming from, but it is exactly what this movie and this conversation is getting at, which is like: Why does one plus one have to equal this thing called two? And the value of that being the case is so that we don’t have miscommunications so that we all understand a shared sense of ways to do business with each other and live our lives. And I totally, on a conceptual basis, I understand why it could be the case that one plus one doesn’t have to equal two, but it keeps us from blowing each other’s heads off when we’re negotiating the prices of different objects in a pawn shop. That’s how the world is ordered. And they talk about that a little bit in the movie when it’s the fake anecdote about explorers coming to Australia and assigning the word…

0:23:41.6 Natalie Dowzicky: The kangaroo? [chuckle]

0:23:42.9 Stephen Kent: Yeah, the word “kangaroo” to the hopping creature with the pouch. They’re like, “What is that?” And the Aborigines were like, “Kangaroo.” And so then they started calling the thing a kangaroo. But then it turns out that was their word for “I don’t understand”.

0:23:56.1 Landry Ayres: Which I thought was really funny because Amy Adams, when she acknowledges that she says it’s not true to Jeremy Renner’s character, she says, “It’s not true, but it proves my point,” which was, I think there was a backlash to this movie, originally, when it came out. It was minor. I mean, a lot of people really enjoyed it. But the idea that language constructs reality and informs the way you experienced the world is a sort of dumbed down version of the Sapir-​Whorf hypothesis or sort of the linguistic determinism. And what they called the strong version of that hypothesis is that your language helps you… It determines the way you perceive the world. Whereas, the weak version, which is, I think, generally more accepted today, and it’s hard to ignore that the strengths of it is that it is linguistic relativity, which is that language can influence the way you see the world, but it is not definitive. But you could easily say the same thing about the message of this film. It’s like, “Well, this isn’t necessarily true, the way that her learning the heptapod language allows her to completely change her perception of time and it being non-​linear, but it is true what the metaphor for this is about,” going back to what Alissa said, which is about perceiving the world and how we use language to negotiate meaning and come to fruitful ends in that way.

0:25:22.6 Stephen Kent: Yeah, and I think part of what you mentioned there, going back to the determinism thing, is I had to delve into, of course, Sam Harris’ writings on the whole subject ’cause he’s popular these days and people like to talk about him for whatever reason. And one of the ways that I thought he described our construct for free will pretty effectively was he was like, “You go to a restaurant and we think we have free will because we look at a menu and we pick an item off of that menu, ‘I chose that thing.’ ” And he’s like, “That is true, but what you’re talking about is when you read one of those old books and it’s like, ‘Choose your adventure,’ and it gives you options A, B and C. It doesn’t give you an option to write in the next chapter of the story; you have to pick from something. So there’s only a certain set of options available to you, and our options are our choices,” or I’m sorry, “Our connections in life, the people that we know, the neighborhoods that we grow up in, or it can also be the language and the words that we have available to us to describe the things that we want or the dreams that we have. If we don’t have the language to describe a certain thing or a word for a certain thing we’d like to do, then our choices are limited and we don’t have ‘free will’.” And that’s been what’s been racking my brain lately about this whole subject is I’ll say, “Oh, my God! Like what if language is really, really stinking limiting to what we can even think?”

0:26:41.8 Alissa Wilkinson: Or what we can see. Or one example I often talk about with my students is that certain cultures develop very specific words for very specific emotions that don’t even exist in… So my favorite one is there’s a, I can’t remember the exact people group, but there’s a language that developed a word for the feeling you have when your neighbor borrows each of your possessions one by one until you have no more left. And that beyond being a delightful idea of an emotion to experience that’s so specific that you have to develop a word for it, it’s just something I can’t even conceive of having that emotion. And a lot of it does, I think, have to do with having a word for it. And if that word exists in your language system and in your community, then it’s available to you, or sometimes, I talk about… If you talk to someone who is a fashion designer or a painter, they have many more words to describe colors, and in some kind of a sense, they actually see those colors as distinct in the way that your average person probably doesn’t.

0:27:55.0 Alissa Wilkinson: So yeah, I think a lot of that is linked to what’s going on in this story, but it’s also using that to explore a big philosophical question that I think everyone grapples with, which is: “If I knew that I was gonna experience pain, would I choose it?” And movies like to do this as well, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind being a clear one, but that big question like: “Why do we… ” We actually, if you fall in love with someone and you’re like, “I wanna spend the rest of my life with you,” you know that in almost every case, it ends in a bad way. Somebody’s gonna die or leave, and we know this. This is the… If you have a child, you know that this will not be a perfect life that they’re gonna have, but yet, we choose to do it, so we’re exploring that impulse in an even more exaggerated way. That just plays into something we all experience.

[music]

0:29:00.2 Stephen Kent: Alissa, when you were describing what you talk to your students about with language and sort of projecting more complicated thoughts into an expression, do you think that this is the case for why memes are actually good?

[chuckle]

0:29:14.7 Alissa Wilkinson: Oh, yeah, honestly.

0:29:14.9 Natalie Dowzicky: The case for memes.

[chuckle]

0:29:17.7 Alissa Wilkinson: I mean memes and emoji, too, I think, in a sense. There’s some really good work on this being done in the linguistics world. Gretchen McCulloch’s book, Because Internet, is full of really fascinating stuff on this. And yeah, that’s exactly what memes do. And it helps show us that I can look at a meme and you can look at a meme, and we may get slightly different ideas of what’s happening here based on who we spend time around on the Internet, but… Or like a, I guess in a broad sense, these repeating metaphor jokes that appear, or you adopt the rhythm of a funny tweet in order to tweet. And sometimes, you just you see it, and you know this is a joke, but you don’t know what the joke is about; you just know it’s supposed to be funny. Yeah, I think all those ways of conversing with one another, they’ve always been here and they’re gonna continue to be here, and they’re just going to continue to evolve, and that’s fun and rich, and it also drives people crazy.

[chuckle]

0:30:22.8 Natalie Dowzicky: Another interesting part of the movie that we haven’t really touched on yet is there’s obviously the larger discussion of free will going on and determinism, and the element of us perceiving our reality and using our language to inform us or inform others. And to me, the visual elements, the visual aesthetic of this film is very spot-​on in the case, and I think it does feed into the larger discussion and the bigger life questions that the film is trying to answer or really speak to. And I was trying to read a little bit more up on it, but in the very beginning of the film, we see her in her classroom, or we see her at home, it’s very dark and it’s wide frame. And there’s a lot of other visual elements that speak to this idea that’s gloomy or that she is…

0:31:20.6 Stephen Kent: And that she is small, right?

0:31:22.4 Alissa Wilkinson: Yeah, exactly.

0:31:22.9 Stephen Kent: Small in the wider frame. She’s always just taking up a quadrant.

0:31:28.9 Natalie Dowzicky: Yeah, and I think these visual elements, and you guys are welcome to jump on here, add an even additional layer to the meta-​discussion that’s going on in the film because not only are are we trying to consume this film in a way that we’re learning about free will, and we’re trying to see the language that these heptapods use, and we’re trying to see how they conceive of time in the larger sense, but the visual elements, I think, really add to the aesthetic. And I don’t think this film won an award for… It won one Oscar, but I don’t think it was for visual… It’s not, I’m gonna have to go back and look it up, but the whole aesthetic of the film, and it’s that way the entire time. And a lot of things on-​screen come up circular or oval-​shaped, partially just because of this idea of time being circular, rather than linear. But I really appreciated all of those elements throughout the film that just added an extra oomph to the meta-​discussion of the film.

0:32:37.0 Stephen Kent: I think it’s a good best practice to yield to actual film critics like Alissa for these kinds of questions.

0:32:42.6 Natalie Dowzicky: Yeah.

[laughter]

0:32:45.0 Alissa Wilkinson: No.

[chuckle]

0:32:45.9 Stephen Kent: The only thing I will put in, ’cause I usually don’t have much to say about this kinda stuff, is I was just thinking about when they first enter the ship and they’re going up the hallway at a funny angle, they’re upside down, and they’re going towards the white light, and it’s silent until you see the white light, and it’s like…

[vocalization]

0:33:06.0 Natalie Dowzicky: Yeah. [chuckle]

0:33:07.0 Stephen Kent: Really, really scary big sounds, and it just made me think of, I don’t know, the ways that we’re scared of the things that are in front of us, humans and their aversion to really thinking about the future. It’s like every time they’re walking towards the white light, it’s like, “Oh, my God! This is scary!” And this whole movie is about understanding and being at peace with what is in the future.

0:33:30.0 Alissa Wilkinson: Yeah, I’m just looking now, and it was nominated for a lot of Oscars, but the one it won was sound editing, which has since been collapsed into the sound mixing categories, so just Sound now, which is probably better. But I had… I’m glad that’s among the things it actually earned because I had forgotten how incredible the sound is. It’s been a long time since I saw it in the theater, and my system at home is decent, but it’s not like going to a theater. But I think what you’re pointing at is that the film is trying to make us feel just slightly dislocated, and everything’s a little uncanny. Again, encountering the aliens, for these people, is not just like, “Oh, these are beings from another planet and they speak a different language from us.” They’re existing outside of time and space and gravity and all kinds of things that are the rules for human existence, no matter where on the planet you live.

0:34:41.1 Alissa Wilkinson: And so I think the film does a really good job of dislocating us from that, and I think the sound editing, again, is a really great way that that happens. There’s this, if I’m remembering correctly, there’s almost a vacuum sort of silence to it when they encounter the aliens. These odd moments where you’re hearing something that sounds wrong to you and you don’t even know why. It’s because everything that we live has a sound to it that we’re sort of used to. And that’s one thing I just love about film. And again, another thing you can’t really do in a short story is giving people that actual experience to freak them out, rather than just describing it to them.

0:35:24.7 Stephen Kent: Alissa, what is the trend in movies of this kind of genre, where the soundtrack is what we’re describing here, where it’s just incredible silence, and then deafening warbling sounds where it’s like somebody… [laughter] It’s like Trent Reznor just falls onto the synthesizer and hits all of the keys at once, and it sounds haunting and horrible and like a haunting, but in your ears. And I feel like this is a trend that is picked up in the past couple of years ’cause I see a lot of it.

0:36:03.0 Alissa Wilkinson: Yes. It is, I think of it as the Christopher Nolan thing. [chuckle] Although…

0:36:09.3 Landry Ayres: This movie is particularly much better mixed than a lot of Christopher Nolan movies, though.

0:36:14.7 Alissa Wilkinson: Yes, it’s very, very true. But I think… Actually, I have… My best theory about this is that home entertainment sound systems, and in particular, headphones that people watch on, have become much better over the past 15 years or so. And so there’s a lot of stuff you can do in sound that is able to be picked up, both whether you’re in the theater or you’re at home. But it also pops up in other places. I don’t know if you all saw the Sound of Metal, which was nominated this past year for an Oscar, but it really effectively uses sound, again, to tell the story and not just freak you out, which I think, sometimes, is what’s happening with Nolan’s movies. But yeah, I think of that as the Hans Zimmer score in all sorts. [chuckle] It’s not just rumbling in your gut, but it’s clashing the inside of your head. David Fincher likes to do this, too. It’s not just Nolan.

0:37:15.9 Landry Ayres: Yeah, yeah. And it’s interesting because score was actually one of the things that this movie was not nominated for. They did the thing that they did to Birdman, which is that, except it was specifically for one song. There was a Max Richter composition that had apparently had been featured prominently in Shutter Island. I didn’t remember this ’cause I didn’t… I think I saw Shutter Island one time and I was like, “It’s fine.” But it’s featured in this movie as well, and they were like, “Well, because of that, the score isn’t completely original, so we’re not gonna consider it,” but… Which they did with Birdman because there were all these classical music cues that were really diegetic so they hadn’t considered it part of the score, but the rest of it was. So it’s interesting ’cause the music is really beautiful, but it was really not considered to be its own thing, which I personally would disagree.

0:38:10.0 Alissa Wilkinson: It is, it’s a bummer because it’s Jóhann Jóhannsson who’s since passed away, much too young, but he was such a virtuosic composer. He worked with Villeneuve all the way through the Blade Runner 2049 score, and then that ended up going in a different direction. But he died a few years ago, and it was very sad. He was so great, but the Max Richter track that’s in here, which I believe is called On the Nature of Daylight, I have always thought of as the saddest song in the world.

[chuckle]

0:38:40.1 Natalie Dowzicky: Yeah, it is really sad.

0:38:43.0 Alissa Wilkinson: It was in seven movies that year, and it’s just… I once actually jumped down a rabbit hole trying to figure out what about it as a piece of music just communicates incredible sadness, but maybe it just is part of the mystery that the whole movie is involved in, in how do we communicate, even when we can’t describe why we’re responding in a particular way to something.

[music]

0:39:12.3 Natalie Dowzicky: We’ve been giving a lot of praise to the movie and I, and I loved it, first time watching it and watching it more recently, but one thing now that I think about it that stuck out to me, that was a little bit odd is the Banks-​Donnelly romance. I guess I didn’t really… Usually in films, I’m used to seeing there’d be a real build-​up of chemistry and it being very predictable, and maybe that’s just because I watch bad romance films, but I guess I didn’t… It’s not that I couldn’t, I didn’t predict that he was gonna be the father, but I guess I didn’t really see them really build that relationship throughout the film. Did anyone else get that feel, like that was… There wasn’t a build-​up of chemistry or really a moment where they’re really fostering a relationship, it seemed more of an abrupt type thing.

0:40:08.0 Stephen Kent: I liked that they were in this experience together as professionals and experiencing something huge and magnificent, and they were focused on it, and we were not subjected to really catty flirting between the two for the course of the movie, that would have been… That would have been really aggravating, and so I just like that they stayed focused and did their thing. And then when they got to the end of it and were watching the ship take off in the distance, then we get the really corny line about how like, “Oh, I always thought that I… ” “Nothing would ever surprise me in the universe, but then there was you,” but that felt like if you were going to do it, that was an appropriate place to do so. But I think relationships, they don’t always just combust or ignite in that one moment, so I like that this was their introduction to one another, and maybe they start dating here in the weeks after the movie, that’s good.

0:41:00.5 Alissa Wilkinson: It is also, I will say a very Villeneuve take on this. I love all of his movies, or most of them, I’m not a big fan of Prisoners, but I think of him often as the world’s least humor, the most humorless major Hollywood director, which there’s a lot of competition for that title. But he is incredibly skilled and makes these really emotional movies, but there’s not a lot of emotions I often recognize as human in them, and this is probably the most human. So, not surprising to me.

0:41:40.7 Landry Ayres: Yeah. The one human moment that I really enjoyed, that I got a good chuckle out of that is this great little tiny bit of thing that you could read into the relationship between the two of them is, and I don’t remember when they introduced this, I might have missed it, but I caught it when Amy Adams’ character is in the ship by herself talking to the heptapods towards the very end and the, getting the last bit of knowledge from them and going completely into it, is that she’s like, “Where is Abbott? Where is Costello?” And I forget that they named the two heptapods Abbott and Costello, as this goofy pair between the two of them. And I can just imagine them sitting down at some point being like, “We’ve been introducing ourselves, what do we call them?” “I don’t know, Abbott and Costello?” I just thought, that’s a really human, cute flash.

0:42:36.2 Stephen Kent: Yeah, in terms of things that I just didn’t quite understand throughout the course of the movie, in terms of narrative was when the bomb went off inside the ship, was that the result of rogue soldiers putting that in there? Because I remember we were looking at the news and they were showing some Alex Jones talk-​radio guy blathering on about how the government response was bad and how we needed to show up, show force or whatever, and then it cutting away to two soldiers in the barracks looking at each other and listening to this like, “That’s an idea.” And then there was a bomb in there, and I had no idea who did it or why, but it wasn’t the military elites, it was just random?

0:43:18.6 Alissa Wilkinson: It was soldiers. I think it’s one of those…

0:43:22.1 Stephen Kent: Okay. It wasn’t an order though…

0:43:23.3 Alissa Wilkinson: No, it’s a destructive fear response on their part. Yeah.

0:43:30.3 Natalie Dowzicky: Yeah, and Steven, I think you even wrote this down. Throughout the film, there’s a confusing background going on, we’re getting weird news snippets from Venezuela or ATF bans, and then there’s protests in Washington, and some of that stuff didn’t tie in as well as they probably hoped it would. And I thought, yes, it adds some more context to the movie, that the world’s freaking out because there’s aliens. Whereas technically, we found aliens, technically, we acknowledged that UFOs exist recently and no one freaked out, but…

0:44:13.2 Alissa Wilkinson: Well, they haven’t made landfall yet, so maybe suspend your, suspend your… Yeah.

0:44:16.6 Natalie Dowzicky: Yeah, we’ll wait for them to make landfall, and we’ll call Amy Adams.

[laughter]

0:44:23.5 Alissa Wilkinson: That’s right, yeah. I think, if I remember correctly, the mass world response is panic, but their panic is working its way out differently in different…

0:44:31.4 Natalie Dowzicky: Yeah.

0:44:31.5 Alissa Wilkinson: You could really watch, but this does also have the hallmark of being a movie where several scenes were deleted. So I wouldn’t be surprised if there was more of that at some point.

0:44:42.6 Stephen Kent: I’m one of those people who, whether it’s this movie, a Marvel movie or whatever, I love seeing the things that are happening on the television in the background, and seeing how news media in these fictions are covering stuff. So I did love some of the inclusions of one, the ATF banning new gun licenses from being sold during the midst of this crisis, fat chance.

[chuckle]

0:45:11.2 Stephen Kent: That… Gosh, talk about something that you could stop with an injunction so quickly, that’s a frightening idea, but I didn’t view that as particularly realistic. And also I was wondering, so the Dow tanks 2000 points in this crisis, and I was actually wondering, with all the disaster porn that goes on on Wall Street, I almost imagine stocks might go up. I feel like it always does the opposite of what you expect it’s going to do. But I do love seeing some of those things going on around the world and watching the radio pundits talk about the government response as a total failure and how they obviously know better ’cause boy, howdy, do we live in that world?

[music]

0:45:54.9 Landry Ayres: And now for the time in the show where we get to share all of the other things that we’ve been enjoying with our time at home, this is Locked In. So Alissa and Steven, what else have you been enjoying? Do you have any other suggestions for our audience that they might enjoy books, movies, TV, games, whatever?

0:46:12.9 Alissa Wilkinson: So I feel like I have been watching movies at home non-​stop for a year and a half, because I have, ’cause it’s my job. So I have just genuinely been so happy to finally go back into theaters and go to press screenings, which means some of what I’ve seen is just stuff everyone will see soon, but In The Heights was definitely the best of them.

0:46:37.5 Natalie Dowzicky: I can not wait to go see that.

0:46:38.1 Alissa Wilkinson: But there was also… Super fun, really excited for people to see it. I actually really liked A Quiet Place too, and I think not just because I was seeing it in the theater, but other than that, and I actually just wrote about this. I have returned to watching baseball on the television, and a lot of it has to do with, I think there is narrative in baseball and there’s an arc and all of that stuff, but it’s not done by writers, and I’ve just really appreciated that, not… Having a relatively non-​manipulated experiment, at least it’s manipulated only by rules we all agree upon or somebody agreed upon. But other than that, I’ve just been doing a lot of reading, and reading is something that I haven’t always gotten the time to do, I just finished Christine Smallwood’s novel, The Life of the Mind, last night, which is a cynical in satirical but short novel about an adjunct English professor who’s going through it and it’s all inside of her head, or it’s not all inside of her head, but we’re inside of her head, and I just thought it was really well and smartly constructed. I believe that just came out this year. So yeah, that’s been pretty great. Other than that, I feel like I’m constantly playing catch-​up. Oh, you know what, I’ll say one more thing. My favorite TV show at the moment is Mythic Quest on Apple TV Plus.

0:48:06.8 Alissa Wilkinson: And if anybody has gotten Apple to watch, I don’t know, Ted Lasso or something, then just float on over and watch Mystic Quest. It’s a workplace comedy set in a video game development company, and you definitely don’t need to play or be interested in video games to enjoy it. I don’t do either of those things, but my husband who does also enjoys it. But it was created by some of the guys from It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, but it has a very different cast to it, and every season they have a couple of really stand-​out episodes. It was the only show that managed to make a good lockdown episode last year. So Mythic Quest, super fun, very much recommend.

0:48:48.6 Stephen Kent: I and my wife are just finishing up our second watching of the Sons of Anarchy on FX. This was a show that ran, I don’t know, 10 years ago, six years ago, I think it finished in 2014. So we’re just finishing up season six of that show right now, and we are absolutely loving re-​watching it. So this is the show of a, the story of a Northern California biker gang, running guns and dabbling in drugs and prostitution in Northern California, and all of their really messy interactions with law enforcement, Mexican biker gangs, the Aryan Nation, and all sorts of other mess in California. It stars Charlie Hunnam and Ron Perlman, and it is just really, really good. There are moments where the show devolves into being a cartoon of itself, but at its heart is a really, really cool Shakespearean story. It’s a biker spin on Hamlet, and it also just… It also is just a time capsule of a different time in American media where the conversation on crime policing and very much race was very different. The way that we talked about race and crime in 2013-14 is nothing, [chuckle], is not like we do now, and it’s just fun to go and re-​watch that again and see it in a different light, and I do highly recommend it. It is deep and layered, and it can also be incredibly trashy and fun at times, and I highly would like y’all to watch it.

0:50:30.1 Stephen Kent: I’m also finishing up a book which I just wanted to plug real quick. I am reading The Lives of The Stoics, the Art of Living from Zeno to Marcus Aurelius. I just picked this up a week ago, by Ryan Holiday, and I always wanted to learn about stoicism because conservatives can never stop talking about it as if everybody should know what this is, and I’m like, I was just tired of having people throw Marcus Aurelius quotes at me as if they are that important and relevant. So I am reading this book now to get on the same page that I can actually duke it out. And it’s been a lot of fun. You should read that too.

0:51:02.1 Natalie Dowzicky: For me, I actually just watched, me and my housemates just watched A Quiet Place, the first one. And that was actually the first time I watched it since I saw it in theaters. Completely different viewing experience, watching it in your living room. Not quite as good, so we were all watching it in order to prepare to go see the second one in the actual theater. So I’ve high expectations there. And then the other show I’ve been watching recently is The Boys on Amazon Prime. It’s a… Let’s call it generally about superheroes, but it’s a kind of a spoof. I’ve been enjoying it so far. Again, it a recommendation from one of my friends, but it’s one of those shows that is good to have on in the background, and it’s easily bingeable and watchable. I’d also like to point out that, and Landry knows this, I am a huge Survivor fan, and Survivor is finally coming back [chuckle] at the end of the summer. So I can’t wait, can’t wait for that to get going again. Because of COVID they couldn’t, obviously they couldn’t film to, film in foreign locations. But they, Survivor is coming back, so be ready for all my Survivor hot takes.

0:52:15.9 Landry Ayres: I recently said goodbye to a series that I lovingly watch every week, and it’s not a TV show, it is a Twitch stream. I’ve talked about it before on the show. I’m a big fan of Critical Role, which is a Dungeons and Dragons campaign where a bunch of voice actors that you might have heard from anime or video games or other things, play Dungeons and Dragons. And they have been playing the same campaign for three years, and they play for three to four hours every single week. And so I’ve been watching these characters for three years, every single week, and they’ve gone off and saved the world and done all this stuff. And they finally released their final episode of this campaign last week as of this recording. Which is bittersweet, because I love watching it every day, but it was great, and they’re gonna do more as far as I’m aware. So if you have a lot of time on your hands and like Dungeons and Dragons and you wanna get into it, I’m sure you’ve probably heard of it already at this point. But if you’re just even curious, you might as will dip in. You don’t have to watch all four hours at once, that’s what intimidates most people, but they are a lot of fun and the cast has great chemistry, and you’ll fall in love with the people as much as the story that they tell. So you might be interested or you might be like, “That’s too much for me,” and that’s fine too.

0:53:38.3 Landry Ayres: I also had a long drive recently to visit some family, and I wanted to play some music and listen to that. So I re-​discovered a couple albums that I really, really like that are good, relaxing, fun, road-​trip albums. One is Country Sleep by Night Beds, and Kacy & Clayton and Marlon Williams. So really, really beautiful folk Americana songs. For instance, if just to get started, you should try and listen to Plastic Bouquet, which is like a… It’s like a classic murder ballad that is specifically about roadside memorials, and they call them plastic bouquets. And it’s all these stories about people that have these plastic bouquets left for them, and uses that to explore the tragic stories with great harmonies and melodies and stuff. So yeah, Kacy & Clayton and Marlon Williams.

[music]

0:54:38.4 Landry Ayres: Thanks for listening. As always, the best way to get more Pop N Locke content is to follow us on Twitter, you can find us at the handle @popnlockepod, that’s Pop, the letter N, Locke with an E like the philosopher, Pod. Make sure to follow us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen as well. We look forward to unraveling your favorite show or movie next time. Pop and Locke is produced by me, Landry Ayres, and is co-​hosted by Natalie Dowzicky. We are a project of lib​er​tar​i​an​ism​.org. To learn more, visit us on the web at www​.lib​er​tar​i​an​ism​.org.