18/12/2025
with .repost
・・・
In Arrival, Louise doesn’t just learn an alien language, she learns to experience time non-linearly.
It’s based on the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis: the theory that language shapes how you perceive reality.
The heptapods write in circles with no beginning or end. When Louise learns their language, she learns to think in circles. Past, present, future, all happening simultaneously.
She experiences her daughter’s entire life at once: birth, childhood, death from terminal illness. She knows Hannah will die young. She has her anyway.
Because in non-linear time, joy and pain don’t come in sequence. They exist together, forever, in the eternal now.
The film itself mirrors this, it opens with Hannah’s “death,” then reveals it’s the future, not the past. The narrative is circular, just like heptapod language.
Linguists debate if this is real. But Arrival asks the ultimate question: If you could see your entire life at once, every joy, every tragedy, would you still choose to live it?