The Stars of Stage and Screen…Song #57/250: On the Nature of Daylight by Max Richter from the Original Motion Picture Soundtrack for the Film Arrival

Despite knowing the journey….and where it leads….I embrace it. And welcome every moment of it.

Dr. Louise Banks (Amy Adams) to her dying daughter Hannah during the film, Arrival.

In 1998, science fiction writer Ted Chiang wrote a novella entitled The Story of Your Life. This story won the Theodore Sturgeon Award, as well as the Nebula Award for the best science fiction story/novella of the year. The big idea behind the story involved the concept of how our understanding of language impacts our concept of time. It is a weighty idea that was humanized by asking the question at the heart of the quote that opened this post, which is, if you knew how your life was going to turn out, would you make the same choices along the way as you do now? In other words, would knowledge of the future impact decisions of the present? That is a question that lies at the fundamental heart of our humanity. Because, if you stop to think about it, our lives are replete with examples of loss and pain and heartbreak, and yet we move forward. We continue to live our lives even though romantic interests break our hearts when we are young. We persist even when those we love, our parents, our friends, our own spouses and children, die and leave us alone. One of the reasons we steel our resolve and go on in the face of emotional adversity is that the highs of finding love and of giving birth to children and watching them grow and being part of a family are worth the pain that the journey inevitably brings. Everyone leaves in the end. Everyone. No matter your age, gender, profession, wealth, hair colour or religion, everyone goes away in the end. But the journey together is something we all embrace. It brings immense value to our lives. Loving others and being loved in reply makes life worth living, even if all of us can predict the future and know how it ends. That thinking formed the basis of Ted Chiang’s award winning novella The Story of Your Life.  

The Story of Your Life is a prime example that there is something for everyone in the genre of science fiction. It isn’t all alien monsters and space lasers. Science fiction can be thought of as fictional stories based upon scientific principles. Sci-fi can actually be quite cerebral and deeply human, as was the case with Ted Chiang’s wonderful story. The Story of Your Life was found to be a deeply moving experience by many who read it. One of those who was touched by it all was a man named Eric Heisserer. Mr. Heisserer was a Hollywood screenwriter. After reading Chiang’s novella, Heisserer knew that it would make a terrific movie. For the next decade or so, Heisserer created drafts of screenplays and pitched them to studios, only to be rejected precisely because the story did not have monstrous aliens and space lasers. The studios kept saying that the story was too quiet and required too much thinking on the part of the audience. So Heisserer put his screenplay aside and wrote another movie that did end up being produced called Hours starring the late Paul Walker. That movie was also about life and death and family. While Hours wasn’t a huge box office hit, it received enough critical praise to raise Heisserer’s profile with the studios. Eventually he was contacted by someone who had remembered his pitch for his screenplay based upon Chiang’s novella. With a studio agreeing to finance the project, director Denis Villeneuve was hired and actors Amy Adams, Forest Whitaker and Jeremy Renner were added to give voice to Heisserer’s words. The movie was named Arrival. It was released in 2016 and was a huge critical and commercial success. Arrival ended up being nominated for eight Academy Awards in 2017, including Best Picture, Best Actor (for Adams), Best Director and several others. It won the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay for Eric Heisserer. [It was nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay, but did not win.]

Without giving away any spoilers, the plotline for Arrival focuses on the arrival on Earth of twelve seed-shaped spaceships that hover in place in twelve different countries around the world. The military are obviously concerned that these spacecraft and the aliens inside of them may harbour hostile intentions so they surround each spacecraft with high-powered weapons. But before acting provocatively, each country employs a linguist whose job it is to try and communicate with the aliens and find out why they have arrived. Amy Adams plays Dr. Louise Banks, America’s foremost authority on linguistics. Jeremy Renner plays a scientist specializing in quantum physics. Forest Whitaker plays a military leader who is directing the pair to open the channel of communications before itchy trigger fingers render that choice impossible. What unfolds is about the nature of language and how our understanding of it colours how we perceive our world.

A short primer on the subject of language and our understanding of the world goes a little like this. When we speak and listen, we organize sounds in such a way that they allow us to communicate our thoughts, feelings and ideas to others and allow us to understand what others communicate to us. When we read and write, those sounds change and become symbols or marks upon a page or screen or whatever surface you are reading or writing on. The marks on a page have no value or meaning in and of themselves until we, as a society, agree to give them a meaning. Thus, the letters that appear in order to spell “a-p-p-l-e” automatically cause an image to appear in your mind because that is what we, as a society, have agreed is the correct meaning for that series of marks upon this screen. But, if language is nothing more that sounds that we speak and marks upon a page, why is it that there is this sense of unease that comes over us when we find ourselves in places where we “don’t speak the language”? If we know how to decode marks upon a page to help us to communicate and understand our world in North America, for example, why can’t our decoding skills serve us just as well when it comes to understanding Arabic script or ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics? The answer is that our skills can be universal, but we have to take the time to learn new languages. In learning new languages, we also incorporate cultural idioms and other language/cultural-specific tidbits of knowledge that can alter the meaning of certain words when compared to how we use them in our native language. In Arrival, an example of this happens when Dr. Brooks (Amy Adams) first learns a bit about the alien’s language and decodes one of their words as “weapon”. Upon hearing this, the military springs into high alert. But upon further examination, Dr. Brooks learns that what the aliens really mean by “weapon” is the word “tool”, in the sense that we would say that “…funding will help scientists conduct research that will be used as a weapon in the war on cancer”. In this case, the word “weapon” doesn’t mean a gun or a bomb, it means an increase in our level of understanding. In short, Arrival is a movie in which the understanding of a new way of communicating helps expand the mind of Dr. Brooks. It explains why the aliens have come from the future and why Dr. Brooks says what she says at the beginning of this post. It is all thoughtfully played out on screen in a very human manner that touches the hearts of many who have watched the movie.

This brings us to the film’s soundtrack. Arrival is known for its use of music throughout the film. However, despite being nominated for eight Academy awards, the film was deemed ineligible for Best Original Soundtrack because the movie opens and closes with an instrumental composition by a composer named Max Richter called “On the Nature of Daylight”. In order to be nominated for Best Original Score, a film’s music must have been written specifically for that film. In the case of “On the Nature of Daylight” by Max Richter, this piece of music has been used in many TV shows and other movies. Most notably, it was used in the Leonardo DiCaprio/Martin Scorsese movie Shutter Island in 2012. It was just used in the TV series The Last of Us.  One of the reasons that this composition turns up so often in soundtracks is because of its ability to create emotional soundscapes within the hearts and minds of listeners. “On the Nature of Daylight” has been described as being the saddest song ever written. It was originally conceived just after the 9/11 attacks in New York City in protest to the seemingly kneejerk American reaction that the best way to respond to such a tragedy was to launch an immediate war against the Iraqi people. Richter channeled his own emotions into an album called The Blue Notebooks.  Critics have deemed The Blue Notebooks to be one of the best classical music albums of the past century!!!  For me, “On the Nature of Daylight” is sad but in a beautiful way. Richter has managed to capture, in notes, the emotion that comes from having loved and lost. The only composition that I can compare it to in terms of the emotions that it evokes would be Adagio for Strings, Op. 11 by Samuel Barber (which I wrote about in a previous post that you can read here). Even though “On the Nature of Daylight” caused the soundtrack for Arrival to be disqualified for consideration for the Academy awards, it is the perfect choice to open and close the movie. As the film opens, audiences are given the musical message that what they are about to see is going to touch their hearts in a very profound way. As it turns out, “On the Nature of Daylight” says in musical notes what Ted Chiang’s novella and Eric Heisserer’s screenplay says in words…words that ended up being spoken by lead character Dr. Leslie Brooks when she says, “Despite knowing the journey….and where it leads….I embrace it. And welcome every moment of it.”    

When I married my wife, we both pledged to love one another until “death do us part”. We already know our own future. One day one of us will leave the other. That day will be a sad day for whoever is the one left behind. But I know in my own heart that neither of us would go back in time and decide not to marry in order to spare ourselves from the inevitable heartbreak that awaits us down the line. We entered into our life partnership knowing full well how it will end one day. But in the meantime, each day together is a treasure. Knowing true love makes us rich beyond measure. We are happy with our choices. Despite knowing our journey and where it will inevitably end, we embrace it all and welcome every moment of it. Life is beautiful. That is the ultimate message that comes from the movie Arrival. If you have never watched this film, then do yourself a favour and give it your fullest attention. It is a thinking person’s film, no doubt, but don’t let sci-fi stories intimidate you or turn you off. Arrival is nothing like Star Wars or any of the Marvel Universe movies. It is a movie that uses the language of music and symbols and words to tell you the story of your own life. That is a remarkable feat of storytelling when you consider that this movie is set in and around a seed-shaped spacecraft for much of the film, and that not many of us have lives that revolve around seed-shaped space crafts. But, as Ted Chiang so aptly titled his own story back in 1998, Arrival is the story of your life. It is a wonderful movie that is built upon a foundation of musical, literary and cinematic excellence. All of the praise and critical recognition given to Ted Chiang, Eric Heisserer and to the film, Arrival, as a whole are richly deserved. This movie is terrific and I highly recommend it.

The link to the video for the trailer for the film Arrival can be seen here.

The link to the official website for Max Richter can be found here.

The link to the video for the composition “On the Nature of Daylight” by Max Richter, as used in the film Arrival, can be found here.  ***The link to a video for “On the Nature of Daylight” as filmed in Toronto and listed as Max Richter’s “official” video can be found here. 

The link to the official website for Ted Chiang can be found here. 

The official website for Eric Heisserer can be found here.

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