My Golden Days
Julie Peyr, Nicolas Saada, and Arnaud Desplechin, 2015
#16, 2016 Skandies
This movie is oddly structured. The original title translates to “three memories of my youth”, which makes it sound like it’s going to be about the usual stuff of a memoir of adolescence: first love, falling out with friends, family tensions, etc. In a framing sequence, we meet a middle-aged man named Paul, about to return to Paris after a long sojourn in Asia. The first of the three promised memories is a glimpse of his childhood. Fair enough. Then back to the present—where he is apprehended at the airport and taken to an underground bunker to be interrogated. Why is his passport full of stamps from places like Tajikistan and Iran? Perhaps more to the point, why is his passport a duplicate of one belonging to a dead Australian: same name, same date of birth, same place of birth? Gadzooks! This is no conventional memoir—this guy is some kind of spy! Paul stammers out an explanation, which brings us to memory number two: as a teenager, he had gone with a school group to the USSR, and a friend of his had roped him into a scheme to pass documents and money to Jewish refuseniks so they could escape to Israel. No one would suspect a couple of French teenagers to be working for the anti-Soviet underground! This sequence is pretty darn gripping, and takes us to the half-hour mark…
…at which point the interrogator basically says, “Oh, okay, that explains it! Sorry about the misunderstanding!”, and lets Paul go. The remaining hour and a half of the movie is about Paul’s adolescence: first love, falling out with friends, family tensions, etc. The whole USSR episode turns out to be basically irrelevant. Whut?
Maile Meloy and Kelly Reichardt, 2016
#21, 2016 Skandies
This movie is oddly structured. Initially it’s fast-paced and action-packed for a Kelly Reichardt movie: we meet the first of the women of the title, a middle-aged lawyer in Livingston, Montana, who has a client who would have had a strong worker’s comp complaint after a debilitating injury on the job, but who signed away his right to sue by taking a small payout. Incensed, he rants about revenge—and twenty minutes into movie, he’s holed up in an office building with a rifle, and the lawyer is his hostage. She survives the crisis, we hit the half-hour mark, and… suddenly we’re on to another story altogether, about another woman in Montana looking to build her dream home. She has her eye on a pile of sandstone in the yard of an elderly man showing signs of cognitive decline. And… she asks to buy the sandstone. And he agrees to give it to her. And she has some family friends pick up the sandstone in a truck. A whole lot of nothing, happening at a glacial pace—now that’s the Kelly Reichardt I remember!
Then at the one-hour mark we move on to yet a third story. This time we’re even further out in the sticks—specifically, we’re in Belfry, Montana, population 218 at the 2010 census, compared to which Livingston (population 7044) looks like a bustling metropolis. A young Blackfeet woman, working as an animal handler on a ranch, randomly wanders onto the campus of the local school and into a night class about education law, taught by a nervous twenty-something fresh out of law school. We learn that the teacher had taken the job out of panic that she wouldn’t be able to find a spot at a law firm, thought the job was going to be a lot closer to her home in Livingston, and is now stuck commuting four hours each way twice a week to get there. The ranch hand, who spends day after day with no human contact, develops a powerful crush on the pretty young lawyer, and the sequence becomes a study in how the lawyer tries to be friendly without encouraging the ranch hand’s increasingly awkward advances. I saw that a lot of reviews bemoaned the fact that Reichardt didn’t just film this as a stand-alone piece—she could have won an Oscar for Best Short, they lamented. I can see why she didn’t—who watches shorts? But grafting it onto two other shorts and saying, no, really, this is a single feature (“look, it’s all happening in Montana!”) doesn’t really work.
Ted Chiang, Eric Heisserer, and Denis Villeneuve, 2016
#24, 2016 Skandies
This movie is unusually structured, though this time it’s not a mystifying narrative decision but instead the whole gimmick of the story. It is also the movie more people have written in to ask me to watch than any other: close friends, distant acquaintances, total strangers, all have popped up in my email inbox over the past six years asking, “Hey, are you going to watch Arrival? It seems tailor-made for you!” And I have told them all the same thing: that it was coming up on the 2016 Skandies list, but that I wasn’t expecting to have my mind blown, because I’d already read “Story of Your Life”, the Ted Chiang story on which it is based, back in 2007. I don’t remember much about 2007, but I certainly remember the key twist to “Story of Your Life”. Unless the movie made radical changes to the source material, I knew what I was getting into.
The changes are not radical.
That might seem like a strange thing to say, since one could argue that
the main plot of the movie is about averting a Chinese attack on the
extraterrestrial ships, a wholly new invention that gave me flashbacks
to working on screenplays: “Gotta raise the stakes!”
“We need a ticking clock!”
But the basic premise remains intact, and I was pleasantly surprised by
how many of the little details from the story were preserved.
I dunno.
I don’t have too much to say about this movie on an evaluative
level.
It’s fine.
That I would have this reaction actually defies the prediction of
one of the folks who wrote in, who said that I would “either
love it or despise it on every level”.
spoilers really
kick in about here
But that brings me to what I do find myself musing
about—why people would say that this movie is not just
good, but one that would resonate with me in particular.
There are a number of good reasons:
One: I wonder whether Lucian Smith got the same email about this
movie that I did, since Louise is a linguist and to a great extent
Arrival and “Story of
Your Life” are about decoding a language, and
Lucian’s language puzzle from The Edifice
was a landmark in interactive fiction.
As it happens, as part of my current project, I have spent the past
several years developing a language used by the characters in the
story-within-a-story.
It has two scripts, one calligraphic and one using a set of block
graphemes; in the latter, the word “arrival” translates
to 
.
So this element of the story spoke to my current set of
preoccupations quite a bit.
But I don’t think I’ve mentioned this here before now, so
this seems unlikely to be the connection people were expecting me to
make.
Two: Arrival, like “Story of Your Life”, plays with chronology the way that some of my old stories do, and the way that back in the 1990s I explicitly said that I liked. I still think that presenting events out of order can be a powerful storytelling tool, and of course it’s essential here, since the central idea is that Louise, like Dr. Manhattan in Watchmen, develops the ability to see the entirety of the timeline in which she lives, transcending such concepts as “past”, “present”, and “future”. What we are initially led to believe is backstory turns out not to have happened yet, but it’s all the same to Louise. But I no longer give stories bonus points for playing with time the way I might have a quarter of a century ago, and in fact I have spent much of this century un-scrambling the chronology of stories I originally developed in the previous one.
Three: because one of the defining events of my early life was my sister’s death, a lot of the stuff I have written, including the two biggest projects I have ever worked on, focuses on doomed girl-children, one of whom plays a huge role in this story. I think the problem here is that Louise’s doomed daughter in Arrival doesn’t really get a chance to register as a specific character with a voice of her own beyond “generic precocious girl-child”. Much the same is true of “Story of Your Life”, even though Louise’s daughter lives to twenty-five in that version rather than having her life cut short at twelve. Ted Chiang may be hailed as a pioneer of “humanist science fiction”, but he is waaay more interested in ideas than in characters.
And then there is four. Though I’ve just dinged Chiang for failing to impress with the “human” part of “humanist SF”, I have to confess that I’ve been a party to many conversations that would not have been entirely out of place in a Ted Chiang story—conversations that started with a discussion of relationship problems or other life crises and ended with bitter remonstrations against the structure of space-time. Take a wrong turn on the road, and you can back up to the last fork, or even to your starting point, and choose another path. In the temporal dimension it’s not so easy. I imagine that most people reading this are probably familiar with the passage in The Bell Jar in which Esther Greenwood compares her life to a fig tree:
From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn’t quite make out.
I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn’t make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.
This is an oddly optimistic passage in the middle of a pessimistic reflection—Esther is ruminating about how she has no marketable skills and therefore no career prospects, and yet here are all these wonderful futures for her to choose from. The only thing keeping her from one of them, as she tells it, is indecision. I can certainly relate to the agony of choice when walking through one door means forever closing countless others, but knowing that whatever future you select will be wonderful is a pretty good salve. The problem is that not all futures are wonderful. The real agony comes from knowing that one branch will take you to a juicy fig and another to a wasps’ nest, and not knowing which is which.
I once read a math book that claimed to demonstrate a clever solution to this sort of conundrum. Imagine a woman who wants to maximize the chance that she ends up with the optimal husband for her, it said. What is the best strategy? Some math ensued, and a transcendental number popped out of the calculations. She should determine the number of suitors she would have in her lifetime were she to reject them all, the author concluded, and instead reject only the first 1/e of them—roughly 37%. After that, the first one who comes along who is better than all previous suitors, she should marry. Clever indeed! The only sticking point is that it’s left unstated how in the world she would go about determining her number of potential suitors without being able to see the future and use that knowledge to change it. Otherwise, great plan!
So that’s what really spoke to me about Arrival, watching it in April of 2022. My all-consuming conundrum at the moment is that I lack crucial information about the future, and it’s bollixing up my ability to make decisions in the present. Specifically, I don’t know how long it will take to finish writing this book. I can’t even estimate the completion date by setting a pace of a certain number of words per day, because I can only make the wildest of guesses at how many words will get me to the end. (And that’s putting aside the question of how long it might take me to come up with the right words on a given day.) I also don’t know what kind of income I might be able to generate at different points in the future. Consequently, I have no idea how much time, if any, I should be setting aside to keep my finances afloat—initially I had planned to work on the book full time, and was making solid progress, but then as the calendar turned to the new year, I looked at my balance sheets and panicked: no way would my savings last long enough for me to get anywhere near the finish line. So even though I was not yet acutely in need of money, I took on a bunch of tutoring students, for fear that with more and more colleges dropping their standardized test requirements, there might not be any tutoring students for me to take in the months and years to come. In retrospect, this was a big mistake. I cannot keep any momentum on creative projects when I have a day job to attend to—no matter how much free time I might theoretically have, if I have an appointment listed in my day planner, I cannot focus. (Hence all these Calendar articles—I figure that if I can’t make progress on the book, I can at least try to chip away at the movie list I’m six years behind on.) So whatever the completion date of the book might have been, it is now three months further in the future. Louise, with her ability to see the totality of her timeline, knows that the future has immense grief in store for her. But I still envy her. At least she isn’t flailing around in the dark!
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