So you are saying you would want to be transformed this way if it were possible?
I mean, I don’t even watch movie trailers, or previews for upcoming episodes of TV, because I hate having the surprise ruined that much. So I suppose I could be the outlier. But isn’t there a tragic myth about someone whose predictions about the future are always accurate but cannot be prevented?
I have never said I would want to have it happen to me. But it happens to Banks, and she does not seem to regret it; if anything, she is exhilarated. It is not horrifying to her.
The discussion of whether having knowledge of the future would be horrific is an interesting one, but it’s clearly not what this movie is about. There is a language to film, and this film is practically shouting at us that this is about love and pain and how we choose to find beauty in the former despite the latter.
Her knowledge of the future is not horrific. Practically all of her future memories are idyllic. Romping with her fantasy-costumed daughter in warmly-lit fields of grass is not the scene that filmmakers portray when they want to convey existential dread.
This is not a Cassandra analog. Cassandra was cursed to know the future and not be believed. That doesn’t happen in this movie. The main character is believed. Jeremy Renner believes her. Chinese General guy believes her. Not all stories about foreknowledge of the future are tragic.
This is not an Invasion of the Body Snatchers analog. Invasion is about losing your humanity. The main character of this movie doesn’t lose her humanity. She embraces it, all the messy joy and sorrow and passion of it. Not all stories about undergoing a transformation are horror stories.
But why would you assume that version? It’s totally extra-textual. The movie is about as explicit as it can be that she has a choice. Because it’s the central moral dilemma of the movie. You can decide that you can’t extend your disbelief enough to accept that both free-will and fore-knowledge can coexist in the universe, but this story does not present them as exclusive concepts. She has free will in this movie. She chooses to have her daughter despite the pain she knows she will feel.
I have two daughters. I know my daughters will die. So why did I choose to bring them into the world, knowing they’ll suffer and die?
It’s true that I don’t know the exact ways my daughters will die, unlike the character in the movie. But it is certain they will, and nothing I can do will prevent that. But I did it anyway.
So am I a monster?
Are you trapped in existential horror at the thought that you can’t change the past? When you look back at your high school days, do you shake the bars the the cage and rail against the fact that you can’t change that you didn’t ask Jennifer to the prom?
You could have asked Jennifer to the prom. You didn’t. You had a choice, but you can’t change the choice. Same with the premembering in the movie. She remembers things that will happen in the future, and her choices make that future happen, but in the future she’s already made the choices that will cause that future to happen.
If a universe with free will is the only sort of world where life is worth living, what you would do if you discovered that free will doesn’t exist? Kill yourself? Except if free will doesn’t exist how could you choose to kill yourself? You’ll either kill yourself or you won’t, but you won’t be free to choose either.
Walrus,
(1) it seems like you missed that I specifically said I believe the person I was dialoguing with got the intent of the script wrong in the way they analyzed the power of the alien language. They were also the ones, not I, to say it made her like an alien. But I was interested enough in the tangent this created to engage with that version, without asserting it as my own.
(2) It’s easy to say, as you just did, that the movie is presenting free will and certain knowledge of the future as not being in conflict. And I could write a script for a movie in which an immovable object acted upon by an unstoppable force are not in conflict. That doesn’t mean that this assertion actually makes any coherent sense.
I’m sure many people will just say I’m picky, but this is a common problem I see with movie scripts, especially SF ones, that have some kind of twist to them. The whole intent is to make the audience go “whoa”, and they may succeed to varying degrees (obviously to a significant degree for this movie). But the vast majority of the time the “whoa moment” is a cheat, or a product of woolly-headed woo, that doesn’t hold up to close examination or reflection.
Examples of where it is done successfully for my standards are few and far between. But the Stanley Kubrick film 2001 has featured both kinds. The moment when we hear “I’m sorry Dave, I can’t do that” is a genuinely freaky “whoa” that holds up. But then all the nonsense in the last 20 minutes or whatever it is of the movie is groan inducing, curiously abandoning the carefully constructed SF environment for a kaleidoscopic mishmash of pure woo.
Lemur,
When I read the first sentence of your last paragraph I was going to reply by pointing out the paradox but then you did it for me.
Although I did actually take Jennifer to the prom, I don’t agonize about the past precisely because I do still have an unknown future to look forward to. As I said upthread, remembering both the past and the future but not being able to change either or be surprised by anything sounds like torture to me. Not knowing the future preserves the illusion at least of free will, and most importantly promises surprise is still in store.
When I am reading a book, I have the portion I’ve already read in my left and the part I haven’t read to my right. When I get to where there’s nothing more to the right, I stop reading the book. It loses interest to me and I move on to one that still has unexplored material to discover. To my metaphor being dead and just haunting my life because that’s what it seems like if you know how every day will turn out.
That’s your viewpoint, and it’s a valid one. But it’s not the heptapods’, and ultimately, it’s not Banks’s. Theirs is different and yet it’s just as valid.
By this logic (or philosophy), how can we judge any movie better than any other?
And what a gripping story that would not make.
I don’t buy that this analogy holds. Prophecy and free will are not necessarily in conflict.
You can see the possible future outcome of an action, and still have free will to take it or not. I know that if I drop a hammer, it’s going to land on my toe, but that knowledge doesn’t leave me without agency. In fact, I think there’s a pretty good argument that having more knowledge about future events gives you more free will, since you can make meaningful decisions in light of the consequences. She doesn’t have perfect knowledge of the future any more than we have perfect knowledge of the past. She has memories. The future isn’t guaranteed to out exactly as she remembers it any more than the past was exactly as we remember it. She has some additional amount of foreknowledge of what might be.
Hardly a complete refutation of the concept of free will.
I’m sure it does, but that’s not what’s portrayed in this movie.
Walrus, being prescient but being able to choose to change the outcome to a different result sounds fine to me. But the implication of time being non-linear suggests a future that is as unchangeable as is the past, and this is the way Lemur and Elendil seem to be interpreting it. It seems also to have been Chiang’s intent in the source material.
I haven’t read the original story, so that might well be the case. I think the movie is telling us something quite different.
When her daughter asks why Daddy doesn’t look at her the same way any more, she says “When I told your daddy, he got really mad, and he said I made the wrong choice.”
The final scene of the movie is him asking her if she wants to have a baby and, with a flash-forward to everything that means, her answering “yes.”
If this were a movie where she doesn’t have a choice, all they’d need to do is cut the final line of the film.
We do basically agree on what the filmmakers intended, although I think it gets muddied in the mixture with the story, because if it can be changed then it’s not like everything just happens at once or whatever.
Have you ever re-read a book?
Maybe you’re the kind of person who doesn’t like to re-read books or see movies you’ve already seen. Or do things you’ve already done. I like taking walks through the forest near my house, even though I’ve seen that exact same forest before. I like preparing Thanksgiving dinner even though it’s the same menu every year.
Just because you know what will happen if you choose a certain action doesn’t mean that you don’t have free will. Here’s the thing. She can see what will happen in the future. If she chooses to do something other than that, she won’t remember that future, she’ll remember the future where she chose to do what she did. She remembers a future where she chose to have Hannah, because that’s what she chose. If she had chosen not to have Hannah then she wouldn’t have.
If living in a universe with no free will is torture for you, it’s only because you’re predestined to believe it’s torture. If you could choose not to regard it as torture, it wouldn’t be, but you can’t, so it is.
That’s fair. I can see that there is a conflict between “non-linear time” and “free will”. It just wasn’t a big enough conflict to pull me out of the movie, which in my opinion totally works and was excellent.
Fair enough! For me it was like Sunshine. The first half (roughly) of each film had me thinking they were among the all-time great sci-fi films (great films, period, in fact). Then I got increasingly disappointed by the second half. *2001 *fits in this category for me as well. But I am admittedly a “tough crowd” when it comes to endings: I can’t think of a Stephen King novel whose ending satisfied me, no matter how much I liked the earlier parts; and the TV show *LOST *went from being my favorite show to being bitterly hated.
Or re-watched a bad sci-fi movie? 
I just watched this on an airplane yesterday, and I have two big problems with the plot.
First, here’s an advanced life form that has developed technology we can’t even begin to understand, and their experience transcends linear time. Yet when they arrive they have no way to communicate with us, and we learn their language faster than they learn English.
Second, it’s a commonly accepted notion that language can affect your thought processes and worldview, but the way a human perceives time is much, much more than a worldview. It’s baked into our physical existence. It’s not a perception issue.
Oh yeah, three. There are sensors that would do this job a lot better than a bird. We can even detect atmospheric composition on other planets.
In the book, the aliens weren’t interested in learning out language, they were just here to observe. In the movie, the aliens needed us to learn their language so we could save them in the future.
And there was a ton of additional sensor equipment apart from the canary. The canary was there in case something unaccounted for by the sensors was present which was dangerous to earth lifeforms.
My only experience is the movie, and so my points don’t relate to the book. They could have saved everyone a lot of time if they had simply put up English words that said, “We are here to give you valuable information in our language so you can help us in the future. These ink blots you are about to see are our language.” They could even have sent such a message in advance of their arrival. Of course, that would have obliterated most of the plot and drama.
The issue of free will is explored extensively in philosophy and there is a viewpoint that free will is an illusion. One can argue that every decision you make is a result of the sum of the personality you were born with and develop through your lifetime and the total knowledge of your experiences. That is, if an Oracle could have perfect knowledge of everything about you and your history, they could perfectly predict every decision you would make. Your decisions would be deterministic. If we were to ask you about those decisions, you would still believe that you are weighing the factors and willfully making a decision, even though the Oracle was certain what decision you would make before you were even given the choice.
Beyond the philosophical angle, there are also different viewpoints about how time works, and whether there is one fixed future. If knowledge of the future can allow you to change the future, there must be a virtually infinite number of futures, because people can make a virtually infinite number of decisions that would lead to different outcomes. So if you could have knowledge of the future, which future is it that you would have knowledge of? If you make one decision in reality, then why would the future you foresee be the future of an arbitrarily different decision? Let’s suppose that Louise made a different choice, and after seeing the future chose not to have a baby to spare her child a painful death and to save her marriage. Let’s say she does this because she saw a future she didn’t want, and changed it. Then why didn’t she simply see a future that had no baby in the first place?