Andrew Wiedenmann: "To Vina Jie-Min Prasad: A Perfect Ending is the Arrival of Fulfillment and Closure"

To Vina Jie-Min Prasad: A Perfect Ending is the Arrival of Fulfillment and Closure

By Andrew Wiedenmann

I was looking forward to the last week of Speculative Fiction Studies. We were assigned Ted Chiang’s “The Story of Your Life” over the weekend, and Ms. Townsend promised us that we would spend the last classes of the year watching its 2016 film adaptation, Arrival. This was welcomed news; I knew I couldn’t handle much more in the craziness that is the week before finals. I read the novella and enjoyed it, but didn’t think too hard about the story, the ending, or its meaning. I was just happy to complete my last assigned reading of the year.

I settled into the comfy lecture hall chairs on Monday as Ms. Townsend took attendance and was thankful that there was no way that this class could go any worse than the chemistry test I had just taken. I didn’t know what to expect from Arrival. I had never seen the film or heard much of it, and the novella was fine, but I was not prepared for the visual experience that was Arrival. After the film, I can comfortably say that Arrival is one of my favorite movies of all time, primarily because of the masterfully crafted ending that provided both fulfillment and closure.

An ending should not explain everything, but it should allow the reader to draw connections and conclusions from previous events. The pieces simply fell together at the end of Arrival. Nothing was directly shown or overly foreshadowed, and the experience of watching the entire film was fulfilling. The emotional reward at the end of the movie that I experienced was because of the realizations that I made. In the end of Arrival, Louise sees her current partner Ian in a vision, and she explains to her superiors how the alien language that Earth has been gifted can change one’s perception of time. At this point, I realized that what I thought had been flashbacks sprinkled throughout the film were flashforwards. By learning the alien language, she had begun to view time non-linearly like the aliens and the audience was being shown what the future holds for Louise. By carefully and subtlety including the flashforwards, then introducing the discovery that the language changed perception of time, then showing Ian in one of Louise’s visions, all of the pieces were given to the audience. I felt as though I had solved a puzzle when I realized what had been happening as Louise learned the alien language. An ending does not need an “aha!” moment or an actual puzzle for the audience to solve. However, when an ending requires mental “work” or interpretation to make sense, the audience becomes more emotionally invested in the experience. As conflict becomes resolved in the story, the audience will experience more fulfillment.

Finally, an ending provides closure without creating a complete and total finality. This last piece may seem obvious, but it is vital. Closure is an important part of creating fulfilling, meaningful, and memorable endings, and it was something that I found to be extremely well done in Arrival. The movie had an ending that wasn’t the end of the story. An “end” to a story should not imply finality – the end is the point when the audience ceases to exist as observers, but the characters and their interactions still exist within the universe that the story was set in. The closure that I received from Arrival came because this chapter of the story in the Arrival universe had ended comfortably. All 12 countries released the messages they received from the craft, the craft departed, and Louise discovered how learning the alien language changed her perception of time and the future. This all contributed to a comfortable ending of Arrival’s story. However, much was still left unanswered, and Louise’s life was not over. Even though some of her future had been revealed through the flash-forwards, much of the future was still left untold. Following the ending of the movie, I was reminded of a quote from “The Story of Your Life”. Ted Chiang wrote “[f]rom 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 maximum?” (Chiang 145). What else would Louise’s life hold? The story had ended, but within the Arrival universe, her entire life was still ahead of her.