A few of us from work went to the cinema last week to watch Hawkeye and Lois Lane learn how to speak to aliens. Arrival (12A) is 116 minutes of intelligently shot and pleasantly contrived SciFi, but that’s not why it’s worth writing about. Nor is this a discussion of the film’s central theme: extension of the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis of linguistic relativity (which is well worth ten minutes on Wikipedia).
Instead, we’re talking about negative space.
!!Mild Spoilers Ahead!!
All images © Paramount - Click to enlarge
The film opens, as does so much good science fiction, with the arrival of a bunch of huge spaceships. But immediately we are challenged to conceptualise the visitors in terms of negative space – their ships absorb sound and light (and other EM) and give little back. Without anything to latch onto, the eye is drawn away from the dark holes they cut on screen towards the deliberately vibrant background landscapes, leaving us to carefully piece together a mental image from what’s left.
The same trick is used frequently in graphic design work (an over-cited example is the arrow in the FedEx logo) and there are also echoes of The Gestalt Principle of closure. However you want to frame it, mentally, the neat bit is that it takes work to find the shape. This means that there's then a reward associated with finding it - You feel good about whatever you've found.
Later in the film, we follow our on-screen characters aboard the ships and are presented with more negative space, this time in 3D. We cannot see the aliens themselves, so, again, we subconsciously work from what we’ve got: the walls, furniture, lighting, etc. But now we’re using the functional parts of our brains, the parts evolved for grasping, moving and using, so we start to form a subconscious preconception, not about how the aliens will look, but about how they will be structured and how they will move.
People instinctively match negative space with an imagined positive counterpart and feel a reward when the two are paired up. Babies love putting blocks in shaped holes; their grandparents do jigsaw puzzles. This use of 3D negative space is critical in product innovation and I've recently used it recently to direct surgeons to use a complex tool in a specific way - All by allowing them to assume that negative space is made to be filled.
Back on screen, the aliens have been kind enough to provide us with a dump of all of their thinking on matters such as technology, science, and (I have to assume) how to make cool spaceships. Again, negative space comes to the fore, but this time it’s made explicit. Hawkeye points out that, if plotted, the information only covers 8.3% of the possible space. There’s a lot of room for more facts, more thinking.
And of course he would notice that – Finding white-space for new ideas is how we think as a species: What hasn’t been done before? What thoughts haven’t been thunk? We instinctively work really hard to find out what we know collectively and then, based on this understanding, we take that very human step of finding the negative space. What shape forms when you take out everything that’s already been done before? What direction will we be thinking in the future? What's the new trend? What's the best bet for now?
To cut a long story short, I enjoyed Arrival (12A). You might as well, but don’t be surprised if it leaves you looking for things that aren’t there.
See you at the cinema
G
