AsianScientist (Mar. 8, 2017) – Sadly, I now do almost all my movie watching on planes. On a flight home last December, I ended up watching Episodes IV, V, and VI of Star Wars. It’d been a while since I’d last seen these classics, and they put me in a semi-mindless, thoroughly entertained good mood—until I was jolted out of it by a scene in Return of the Jedi.
You probably remember it: the one where Princess Leia, forced out of her robes into an infamously skimpy gold bikini, sits chained to her captor Jabba the Hutt. She later exacts her revenge on him in memorable fashion, but the scene still didn’t sit well—I just didn’t think it was necessary to put her in such a humiliating outfit.
But whatever, it was the early 1980s, right? I got home and promptly forgot about the whole thing. Until the next day, when, as it happened, Carrie Fisher died. Tributes celebrating her spunk, wit, and independence poured in—many accompanied by photos of that same bikini.
From bikinis to PhDs and spacesuits
All that might explain why watching the movie Arrival a couple of months later felt like balm to the soul. I suppose the fact that I saw it in a cinema and not on a screen the size of a postage stamp might also have had something to do with it, but I digress.
In Arrival—based on Ted Chiang’s novella Story of Your Life—tentacled aliens have mysteriously landed on Earth. They sit silently in their ships; no one knows why they have come, what they want, or if they are dangerous. The main character, Dr Louise Banks, is a linguist tasked with figuring out how to communicate with them.
It was refreshing to watch a woman scientist take the lead in a science fiction movie. As the male-dominated army personnel grow impatient with the lack of progress, Banks has the level-headedness and patience to break the problem down. Before a question like “Why have you come here?” can be asked of the aliens, she reasons in the movie, they need to grasp all the components of language that we take for granted: nouns, verbs, grammar, intent, and even the concept of us and them. And in turn, humans must know enough of the alien’s language in order to understand their response.
She gets through to the aliens by starting from first principles, and humanity’s first encounter with intelligent extraterrestrials is off and running.
The entire movie was mesmerizing, but one of my favorite moments was watching Banks and the main male character, a physicist, enter the alien spacecraft for the first time. Their sense of wonder, awe, and fear at having the opportunity to do what every scientist dreams of—to quite literally touch the edges of the unknown—gave me chills.
The story of a life
Arrival drops enough hints for us to speculate about why the aliens came to Earth, but that isn’t the main point of the story. Instead, it’s more interested in how Banks’ experience of a radically different alien language completely reshapes the way she perceives the world.
Without giving away too much, I’ll just say that this shift leads her to make a difficult choice that profoundly impacts the rest of her life. That story is told in flashbacks (or maybe they’re flashforwards, I’m not even sure anymore) interwoven throughout the movie.
Scientists in movies—both men and women—are often two-dimensional, but this definitely isn’t the case here. Banks’ personal story—as an individual, a wife, and a mother—has its moments of joy, but in the end is overwhelmingly shot through with loss and grief. But all that raw emotion isn’t treated as a weakness or something she needs rescuing from; rather, it’s something she accepts as a part of the conscious decision she made.
What about science itself?
Science fiction has come a long way in its portrayal of women; what can be said about science itself? On 8 March—International Women’s Day—how much progress will women scientists be able to celebrate?
Compared to say, fifty years ago, when some universities didn’t even accept women to doctoral programs, the gender gap in the sciences has certainly narrowed. But globally, women still remain underrepresented in the sciences, especially at its upper echelons. In the US, for example, women account for roughly half of science and engineering doctorates, but make up only 21 percent of full science professors and 5 percent of full engineering professors.
And while blatant sexism and misogyny is swiftly condemned today, implicit gender bias continues to adversely affect how often women are hired and how much they are paid. This problem isn’t confined to men—studies have shown that women are just as likely to show implicit bias against their own gender.
These issues are systemic and complex. But perhaps Arrival and the growing number of movies and television shows like it could present one angle from which to attack the problem. Their portrayals of intelligent, relatable women could go a long way towards shaping the attitudes not only of men, but also of women themselves.
If you couldn’t already tell, Arrival was thoroughly satisfying. My next mission? To catch Hidden Figures—and not on a plane.
This article is from a monthly column called The Bug Report. Click here to see the other articles in this series.
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Copyright: Asian Scientist Magazine; Photo: Shutterstock.
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