Tuesday, July 17, 2012
Movie Trailer: Solaris (2002)
award-winning creator of Enter The House Between and author of 32 books including Horror Films FAQ (2013), Horror Films of the 1990s (2011), Horror Films of the 1980s (2007), TV Year (2007), The Rock and Roll Film Encyclopedia (2007), Mercy in Her Eyes: The Films of Mira Nair (2006),, Best in Show: The Films of Christopher Guest and Company (2004), The Unseen Force: The Films of Sam Raimi (2004), An Askew View: The Films of Kevin Smith (2002), The Encyclopedia of Superheroes on Film & Television (2004), Exploring Space:1999 (1997), An Analytical Guide to TV's Battlestar Galactica (1998), Terror Television (2001), Space:1999 - The Forsaken (2003) and Horror Films of the 1970s (2002).
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Your second interpretation has an extention that I would like to make that relates to the idea that all persons are believers, but simply have different expressions of that belief. I use the word belief not in its ideological sense as assent to an idea, dogma or literal truth, but rather in the original etymological sense of loyaly, fidelity and faith in the worthwhileness of life. I commend to you as a source for my interpretation an essay by renowned 20th Century theologian Schubert Ogden titled the Strange Witness of Unbelief, part of a collection of essays in his book, The Reality of God. Ogden opines that everyone as soon as and as often as they are human (sentient) at all asks the question, can I be assured/reassured that life is ultimately worthwhile/meaningful. This single question encompasses a whole array of other questions peculiar to every sentient being such as who am I; what's my place in the universe; why am I here and on and on. Religion is simply (easy for me to say) a cultural expression through symbols, texts and rituals of the affirmation that life is whorthwhile on some level because we could not get up in the morning and do anything if we didnt believe there was some worth in doing so - we would instead commit suicide. As Ogden's article points out, while the existentialsts like Sartre were avowed atheists, believing that theism was no longer credible in the modern world since the only theism they knew was supernaturalism and God had not intervened to prevent suffering, their writings nevertheless witnessed strangely to human beings overcoming depression to boldy live in affirmation of life. This is the strange witness of unbelief.In Solaris, science fiction witnesses to the post-modern rejection of God as conceived in a pre-scientific age, and religion as hopelessly antiquated in a post-modern world, but the questions asked in the film don't go away.Humans continue to ask them. The film itself becomes a strange witness to the meaningfulness of human life and attempts to find religious symbols that make sense in a futuristic world. My only disagreement then with your interpretation is that there is both a mirror - human conceptions of who or what God is or the purpose of our lives are; but there is also a very real manifestation of God which we can only stab at with inadequate symbols and language, but which nevertheless gives us reassurance of the worthwhileness of life, because without that we could only end it. The eternal preservation of every occaision of experience in the life of an eternal presence would, if real, make every occaision of experience in our lives meaningful. Who cares how this beielf is imaged or imagined in one or another religious system - the important thing is to imagine it at all which is what Soderburgh brilliantly does in this film. He recognizes and finds appropriate cinematic images to symbolize that there really is something more to life than our own limited conceptualizations and whether someone sees Buddha, Jesus or a child, that is not so important as discovering the ultimate reality that underlies what these symbols only portray with varying adequacy and which gives us the reassurance that life is ultimately worth living. Perhaps an expanding planet within a universe of possibilty for exploration or the beauty in the face of someone we love are somehow more effective as is the film idea itself.
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