Alien Art: An Off-the-Wall Reading of "The 5th Wave" and "Arrival"

Warning: Spoilers ahead. Read at your own risk!

This year America has been graced with two mainstream alien movies: The 5th Wave and Arrival. I didn’t go see The 5^th Wave in theatres, but I read the book and talked to one of my students who saw the movie, so I feel like an Expert. (Please refer all questions to my friend Kari, who has read the entire trilogy.) I did go see Arrival in theatres today, though (although I have not read the short story. So it goes).

Frankly, I do not think it at all interesting that America would start showing alien movies this year. Or that aliens have been spreading in the collective American (un?)conscious for the last few years, as the History Channel’s ridiculous series Ancient Aliens predicted.  Why? Because little green aliens share the same linguistic word as illegal immigrants. Aliens are other, and, in fact, movies often call aliens “other” instead of, you know, alien.

What I find fascinating are the differences between The 5^th Wave and Arrival.

The 5^th Wave is the story of how aliens come to town in “waves.” In the first wave, which coincides with their dramatic arrival, the electricity goes. Then comes earthquakes. Then plague, spread by birds. Then the fourth wave, which is aliens appear among humankind. The premise of the first book is humanity preparing for the fifth wave, which is undetermined yet. The main characters are hampered in preparing for the fifth wave as the aliens look human, so there is no way to distinguish between good (human) and bad (alien). Everyone looks human! Even the hominids that aren’t. 

Look at those guns. 

Cassie, the main character, has a single goal: To rescue her younger brother from a military compound run by the “military” (really the aliens in human form that have taken over the American military) after the aliens kill her father and the plague kills her mother. She is aided in this by (guess who) an alien. Except this alien is an outlier from general aliens, because he has fallen in love with Cassie and has decided to betray his own kind.

Cassie’s boyfriend is the assimilated alien. Once part of a foreign other, he has accepted traditional American values and assists Cassie as she wages war against his own kind, the aliens.

I should probably mention here that, according to my student, in the movie the boyfriend is half-alien, half-human, which leads me to two conclusions: One, the aliens are going to be redeemed in the future (hard to believe after THEY’VE WIPED OUT HALF OF PLANET EARTH but you know what white people have done worse). Or two, we need to Americanize the boyfriend even more, so instead of wholly assimilating, he can tamp down his alien other half and focus on the stronger, purer White American™ blood coursing through his veins.

Let’s talk about Arrival now.

My new dream job is alien language interpreter.

                             

Unlike The 5^th Wave, which focuses entirely on America because, duh, the electricity has gone out and there is no way to phone Europe and see if they are good, Arrival focuses on the globe as a whole. Dr. Louise Banks is the main character, a linguist at an American university who has been contacted by the military (hello darkness my old friend) to come see if they can communicate with this strange spaceship that has appeared in Montana. The spaceship is, ironically, one of twelve (hello Jesus my Lord and Savior and all twelve of his sidekicks) that are situated randomly around the globe. There’s one in China, one in Denmark, and there is one that is located in the middle of the Indian Ocean, oddly enough. (The movie doesn’t really focus in on that spot, probably for obvious reasons.)

With the assistance of Ian, a mathematician, Louise makes contact with the aliens, which are very distinctively other in that they look, as one of my favorite students put it, “like a squid.”

(Other students said octopus but I think the winner is squid, because squids have some bonelike structure and aren’t just blobby inky things like octopi.)

(For the record, the aliens are called heptapod, which means “seven” so both octopus and squid are wrong but this is a digression of a digression.)

Louise’s job (and Ian’s, to a lesser extent) is to make contact with the aliens and to trade language. She must learn the heptapod’s language, which is circular (literally and figuratively: the heptapods do not see time in a linear fashion, which is reflected in their grammar, and their language looks like the circular mark left on a napkin after a coffee spill) while also trading her language with the aliens. Most of this is expressed in written language, as the heptapods cannot form human sounds and vice versa for the humans.

The heptapods have come to give humanity a tool, but they have come in twelve ships for a reason: Each country has only 1/12 of the puzzle (0.83 of the puzzle in case, like Ian, you like math) and so they must work together to put it together. The only problem is China wants to blow their spaceship up and start a global war (huh, I wonder what cultural fear this stems from!). Louise must use her language skills to A) Prevent China from blowing up half of the planet and B) Communicate with the heptapods.

Of course, people want to stop Louise. There is an unnamed soldier in the military compound who I referred to as The Silent One or The Expressionless One who is witnessed, as the general calls it, “watches too much TV”—or, there is a scene where we catch The Expressionless One watching Rush Limbaugh, which inspires him to try and commit violence against the aliens.

You’re starting to see my case here, aren’t you?

This year two alien movies came out, and it both I am able to see two very different responses to the “threat” of illegal immigrants. In The 5^th Wave I see an illegal immigrant suppress his culture to help his girlfriend. The other illegal, alien immigrants are violent, with the end goal of wiping out humanity and taking over America for themselves. (Somewhere, a Native American is laughing. Wait, no they aren’t. Haven’t you been following DAPL?). Worse, though, is that no one can be sure who is an alien and who is not. In Arrival, Rush Limbaugh incites violence while others seek communication and inter-planet dialogue. The others look and sound alien, but they are not enemies. They have come bearing the gift of language and unity between America and China. Also, they talk about the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which made my little English major heart happy.

I’m also going to leave the fact that Arrival actually feints at diversity here (the top general is black, we have a Chinese man playing a Chinese general, pretty much everyone else is white white white), whereas as far as I can tell without having seen the movie, The 5^Th Wave didn’t even pretend to try. I am not going to say that having a whopping two PoCs makes Arrival any better, but it is a glance in the right direction. EXPECT AND DEMAND DIVERSITY IN MOVIES.  I have seen enough movies about the Travails of the White Man™ and I am ready for something new.

Now that our president-elect is Trump, art has become more and more important. We need art to comfort us and to challenge and to persuade. We need movies to tell complex and diverse narratives for a diverse and divided America.

I shared both movie trailers with my class on Tuesday. Any guesses as to which movie they preferred?