Sun Jun 11, 2023 2:33 am
I keep returning to this film in my thoughts so many times. I’ve recently recommended it to someone who was talking to me about a sense of circular time… and she read the short story first, before watching the film, ‘Story of Your Life’ by Ted Chiang.
So that II could talk to her about it, I have now read the short story too, and found it interesting in its similarities and differences. The story is about 60 pages, well worth a read, if you want to immerse yourself more in this Heptapod world, and Louise’s mind.
Spoilers ahead, so only read on if you don’t intend to read the source material, or you don’t mind the spoilers. (Knowing the future, ha!)
I would like to say that all the changes in the film are for the better, except I wonder why they changed Hannah’s cause of death. In the short story she dies in a climbing accident when 25. Knowing this for a mother ahead of time would be a heavy burden enough, I’d have thought. The terminal cancer starting in childhood was perhaps more hard-hitting, but not a necessary change, I don’t think. I guess it provided a reason for Louise to confess to Ian that she knew this would happen. In the short story the parents split up too, but we don’t know why, and it’s not even hinted at, that it’s because of Louise’s “choice”. In fact it’s more likely that he leaves her for another woman as both Louise and Gary (different name in the short story) recouple, and Gary’s new partner is always referred to as “whatshername”.
We do have confirmation though that Gary never learns the language of the Heptapods. We never learn whether Gary ever finds out that Louise knew what would happen to Hannah. (By the way, in the short story she doesn’t have a name, and the story is written to her.)
In the short story the heptapods leave without revealing their purpose on Earth. I liked that there was some feasible explanation of that in the movie.
I would say the short story is very interesting, but leaves a lot of questions unanswered and doesn’t seem to dive deep enough into some things we want to know more about. The movie has done a much better job of that.
But there are some great passages that are very much in line with some of our conversation above regarding free choice and what it is like going through life when you already know what is going to happen.
Such as Hannah protesting when Louise changes things in the story of Goldilocks. (Eg, instead of porridge, papa bear’s bowl is full of Brussels sprouts)
’You have to read it the right way! […]That’s not how the story goes.’
‘Well if you already know how the story goes, why do you need me to read it to you?’
‘Cause I wanna hear it!’
Here is the moment when Louise makes her “choice”:
Working with the Heptapods changed my life. I met your father and learned Heptapod B, both of which make it possible for me to know you now, here on the patio in the moonlight. Eventually, many years from now, I will be without your father, and without you. All I will have left from this moment is the heptapod language. So I pay close attention, and note every detail.
From the beginning, I knew my destination, and I chose my route accordingly. But am I working toward an extreme of joy, or of pain? Will I achieve a minimum, or a maximum?
These questions are in my mind, when your father asks me, ‘Do you want to make a baby?’ And I smile and answer, ‘Yes’, and I unwrap his arms from around me, and we hold hands as we walk inside to make love, to make you.
This is the end of the short story. So yes, from this conclusion, it feels Louise didn’t really feel she had a choice, or she did, and chose to make the one she already knew she did. So is that still a real choice? In fact, the writer of the short story argues that ‘free will’ is only an important concept to us, when we don’t know the future and we want to feel and practice the power of shaping it. If you already know the future, the concept of ‘free will’ becomes irrelevant, but not at all as a negative.
Freedom isn’t an illusion, it’s perfectly real in the context of sequential consciousness. Within the context of simultaneous consciousness, freedom is not meaningful, but neither is coercion; it’s simply a different context, no more or less valid than the other. It’s like that famous optical illusion, the drawing of either an elegant young woman, face turned away from the viewer, or a wart-nosed crone, chin tucked down on her chest. There is no ‘correct’ interpretation; both are equally valid. But you can’t see both at the same time.
Similarly, knowledge of the future was incompatible with free will. What made it possible for me to exercise freedom of choice also made it impossible for me to know the future. Conversely, now that I know the future, I would never act contrary to that future, including telling others what I know: those who know the future don’t talk about it.
So there is a simple explanation why Louise wouldn’t tell the father that their future baby together will die very young. Though I’d like to think it’s much more complex than that, we certainly have made it so in our conversations above. But perhaps it’s just that simple.
Finally, one of my favourite passages from the short story was the explanation of how Louise experiences her life:
Before I learned how to think in Heptapod B, my memories grew like a column of cigarette ash, laid down by the infinitesimal sliver of combustion that was my consciousness, marking the sequential present. After I learned Heptapod B, new memories fell into place, like a gigantic blocks, each one measuring years in duration, and though they didn’t arrive in order all or land contiguously, they soon composed the period of five decades. It is the period during which I know Heptapod B well enough to think in it, starting during my interviews with Flapper and Raspberry and ending with my death.
Usually, Heptapod B affects just my memory: my consciousness crawls along as it did before, a glowing sliver, crawling forward in time, the difference being that the ash of memories lies ahead as well, as behind: there is a no real combustion. But occasionally I have glimpses when Heptapod B truly reigns, and I experience past and future all at once; my consciousness becomes a half-century long ember burning outside time. I perceive - during those glimpses - that entire epoch as a simultaneity. It’s a period, encompassing the rest of my life, and the entirety of yours.
