Can cin­e­ma teach us the true val­ue of human communication?

Your friends on social media all agree, 2016 is the Worst. Year. Ever. It can offi­cial­ly ​‘do one’. Jog on. Get in the sea. But if there’s one thing we can say this most abject of laps around the sun was good for, it might be this: it helped legit­imise the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.

If you’ve yet to see Arrival, Denis Villeneuve’s near­ly explo­sion-free sci-fi dra­ma, the Sapir-Whorf hypoth­e­sis is a school of thought in lin­guis­tics claim­ing that the lan­guage you use deter­mines how you look at the world. To give an often cit­ed exam­ple, the word ​‘blue’ didn’t exist in the lan­guages of many ancient civil­i­sa­tions. Which begs the ques­tion of whether they could, in fact, ​‘see’ blue at all (in ​‘The Ili­ad’, Homer makes ref­er­ence to the ​“wine-dark” sea). The the­o­ry is giv­en a new lease of life in Arrival, in which Amy Adams’ lin­guis­tics pro­fes­sor, Dr Louise Banks, is recruit­ed by the US gov­ern­ment to deci­pher the lan­guage of a group of vis­it­ing aliens. Hon­our pre­vents us from say­ing more, but the point is this is a film that illus­trates, in bril­liant fash­ion, how words can help shape and even trans­form our per­cep­tion of the world around us.

Words mat­ter. That’s a phrase we’ve been hear­ing a lot late­ly, as politi­cians scat­ter hate-words like so much con­fet­ti and online polit­i­cal dis­course increas­ing­ly resem­bles a form of trench war­fare. There’s a ques­tion in all of this: have we all for­got­ten how to talk to each oth­er? And if so, how do we learn to start com­mu­ni­cat­ing again?

In Villeneuve’s film, the answer lies, above all, in striv­ing for clar­i­ty in the lan­guage that we use. After weeks of painstak­ing research gives Banks the gram­mat­i­cal know-how to ask the aliens about the pur­pose of their vis­it, the reply comes that they’re here to ​“offer weapon”. Nat­u­ral­ly, this caus­es the world’s top mil­i­tary types to wet their knick­ers, but Banks coun­sels cau­tion – the trans­la­tion is imper­fect, things might not be quite what they seem. Lat­er, a dis­patch sent to anoth­er alien land­ing site reports that the reply they received was ​“use weapon”, sub­tly vin­di­cat­ing the professor’s argument.

Banks isn’t the only good lis­ten­er on our screens right now. In Pater­son, Jim Jar­musch puts a lit­tle poet­ry in a world of hec­tor­ing prose with his por­tray­al of a week in the life of a bus-dri­ving poet, played with qui­et sen­si­tiv­i­ty by Adam Dri­ver. Jar­musch, who seems to have a direct line to the god of small things, presents in his film a fig­ure who real­ly knows how to lis­ten – not just in the sense of know­ing when to stop talk­ing, but in his abil­i­ty to weigh a person’s words and, by exten­sion, the world around him.

Pater­son is about poet­ry as the art of liv­ing, about mak­ing your­self open to the rhymes and rhythms embed­ded in the pri­ma mate­ria of every­day life. Unusu­al­ly for a film about an artist, it also depicts a guy who is also a secret pil­lar of his com­mu­ni­ty, atten­tive to the woes of friends, col­leagues and casu­al acquain­tances and, a touch wil­ful­ly, aller­gic to mod­ern tech­nol­o­gy. (“I don’t want a phone,” Pater­son protests to a local bar­tender. ​“It would be a leash.”)

In oth­er recent films, it’s pos­si­ble to dis­cern a sense of being done with lan­guage alto­geth­er. In High-Rise, a TV jour­nal­ist resorts to grunt­ing like an ani­mal when the social order begins to break down. In both Mad Max: Fury Road and The Revenant – films about Moth­er Nature tak­ing her revenge on mankind – the view­er is thrust into apoc­a­lyp­tic land­scapes both real and sym­bol­ic with only a scant sup­ply of salty dia­logue for provisions.

But what if the retreat into silence is real­ly a redis­cov­ery of how to com­mu­ni­cate? In Embrace of the Ser­pent, the sole remain­ing mem­ber of an Ama­zon­ian tribe com­plains that the trees and rocks have stopped talk­ing to him – a silence called up, we must pre­sume, by the destruc­tion of his cul­ture. Yet by lead­ing an unwit­ting West­ern­er on a spir­i­tu­al quest through the rain­for­est, he is able to recon­nect with his call­ing as a shaman, and acquaint the West­ern­er with a deep­er form of com­mu­ni­ca­tion. ​“I wasn’t meant to teach my peo­ple,” he con­cludes. ​“I was meant to teach you.”

Accord­ing to the­olo­gian Mag­gie Ross, one of the (soft­ly) talk­ing heads in Patrick Shen’s 2015 doc­u­men­tary In Pur­suit of Silence, shaman­ism can be read as ​“a kind of his­to­ry of pro­to-monas­ti­cism, where some­one in the tribe has a facil­i­ty with silence and under­stand­ing the unspo­ken process­es of the world.” Tak­ing inspi­ra­tion from Zen Bud­dhists, schol­ars of silence, John Cage and one beard­ed fel­low who’s decid­ed to push a trol­ley cart across Amer­i­ca, Shen’s film con­tends that it’s pre­cise­ly this facil­i­ty we’re in dan­ger of miss­ing out on in the ​“race towards moder­ni­ty”. After all, how can you make sense of sound with­out its bina­ry opposite?