FAR OUT

In the movie The Arrival aliens land on earth in vessels shaped like giant Brazil nuts, that hover on one end just above the ground. Humans enter them from below, in genie lifts, and struggle to understand their language and their intentions. The aliens look like octopi with seven legs and a hairy, wrinkled trunk. They float around the top of the vessels in clouds of steam, behind windows that look like giant iPOD screens. And they communicate in inky, circular squirts that look like the stains coffee cups leave on magazine covers.

The premise of the movie (based on a short story by Ted Chiang) is intriguing, but the special effects don’t serve it well. While watching, I could only think back wistfully to Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Though that movie used mechanical effects that are far cruder than the digital ones employed in The Arrival, they were conceived simply and poetically, and strengthened belief in the story, and in the aliens themselves. In Close Encounters the spacecraft looks like an aluminum toy – a child’s vision of a spaceship. Its insides glow like the sun, and the short, big-headed aliens descend from it on stumpy, uncertain legs like infants. These designs have an elemental, archetypical feeling – they tap our emotional connection to well-known earthly things. In The Arrival the designs are at once too strange, and too banal, to believe.

Photograph courtesy of The Arrival.

March 15, 2017 by Nalina Moses

I came home late one Saturday night and stayed up even later watching Close Encounters of the Third Kind on basic cable. Like most movies that you watch on television without really intending to, in a state of semi-distraction, it was rich in incidental pleasures and held my attention all the way through. I liked the way the Richard Dreyfuss character’s suburban home is depicted (airless, crammed full of knick-knacks), and I liked that half of the NASA astronauts selected for a high-security mission are women. There’s a lyrical moment at the end of the movie when [Spoiler Alert] Dreyfuss boards the the alien spacecraft. As he walks toward the portal the long-armed, big-bellied aliens gather around him in wonder, caressing him, and lead him inside. The last you see of him is in profile, against the cloud of light spilling from the spaceship’s inside. You are right there with him. You don’t feel that he’s running away from his life and his family, but that he’s entering a finer world.

Stepping from the bare concrete floor at the David Zwirner gallery into Doug Wheeler’s much buzzed-about installation The Infinity Environment, I felt what Richard Dreyfuss must have felt. My friend and I, along with a bunch of other artsy types, had put in a two-hour wait beforehand, first queuing on the sidewalk outside, and then slumped in folding chairs in the gallery vestibule. Finally we were asked to remove our shoes and put on white slippers, and then led inside the installation in groups of ten. The space is small, about the size of a grade school classroom. At first it’s a bit of a disappointment – a sterile, bright, white box. But then, as you move further inside, away from the other visitors, you feel disoriented and then trapped and then liberated. The space seems to stretch out far in front; you cannot find a limit. In it all there’s a moment of indisturbed bliss. You’ve left all of your world behind and know nothing of what lies ahead.

February 14, 2012 by Nalina Moses