Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris
(1972) has often been termed one the greatest science fiction films ever made,
and for good reason.
This Russian film is not merely
the tale of a strange alien encounter on a distant space station, but -- according
to scholar Peter Wagstaff in Border Crossing: Mapping Identities in
Modern Europe -- “a pre-text for
reflections on man’s roots on Earth, his place in the God’s world, and his
spirituality. Identity, home and attachment to our loved ones form the key
themes to the film, for this is what makes us human….”
In
exploring these powerful ideas, the film’s unshakable mood is one of “a subtly disquieting sci-fi ambience,”
according to critic Paul Meehan (Tech-Noir:
The Fusion of Science Fiction and Film Noir. McFarland, 2008, page 135.)
In
terms of specifics, Solaris explores the notion of “guests” or “visitors” created by
an alien planet. Despite their origin, these visitors seem human and familiar,
but can’t be…at least not according to our understanding of the universe.
So
then, how to treat them?
As
memories manifested in the flesh?
As
sentient and individual beings modeled on our memories but now walking a new
path, and therefore forging a new identity?
Or
as -- simply -- Monsters from the Id? As embodiment of guilt, shame, and
remorse?
This
notion of inscrutable alien beings appearing in human guise for unfathomable purposes
has proven to be one of the most enduring in the modern science fiction canon,
from TV stories such as Space:1999’s “Matter of Life and
Death” to movies like Event Horizon (1997) and Contact
(1997).
After
a fashion, however, Solaris and all these other similar stories get at an essential
truth about mankind: We can’t really
conceive of something truly alien.
Instead,
when we explore space, we are actively seeking to find reflections or images of
mankind and his earthbound experiences.
This
view-point, says Solaris, is limiting.
We
can’t grapple effectively with the mysteries of the universe because we have
not yet grappled with the mysteries of our own identities and morality.
In the future space age,
psychologist Kris Kelvin (Banionis) is tasked with visiting the alien world
Solaris, and learning what has happened to the space station crew observing
it.
If he discovers that the planet is
dangerous to human life, Kelvin can either remove the station from orbit and cease
all “Solaristic” research or bombard the strange alien world with radiation in
hopes of negating its strange influence over the human mind.
After saying goodbye to his
father on Earth, Kelvin journeys to the space station and finds the disturbed scientists
there bedeviled by strange “guests,” physical manifestations from their human
memories.
Kelvin’s own guest soon appears
too: his long-dead wife, Hari (Bondarchuk).
Hari’s presence threatens Kris’s
sanity but also his very sense of morality.
Are these guests created by
Solaris actually living people -- shadows of half-forgotten memories -- or some
other heretofore unexpressed element of human conscience?
And why has Solaris sent them?
Is it an attempt to communicate,
or something else?
On the surface, the brilliant,
open-ended, Russian science fiction epic Solaris concerns mankind’s reckoning with an alien world, and its
coruscating, planet wide ocean.
Scrape the surface, however, and
the Tarkovsky film also revolves around humanity’s steadfast inability to
understand something “different.”
This is a result of a peculiar
brand of selfishness, Solaris intimates. As mankind gazes upon any object or person, he sees
only echoes of familiar experiences or memories.
Thus, we are intrinsically
self-centered beings.
This notion is deliberately expressed
in a line of dialogue in the film, repeated in the 2002 remake, which suggests:
“We don’t need other worlds. We need a
mirror.”
How then, can we contextualize
something that originates far away, and boasts a psyche or soul utterly
unrelated to us and our experience here on terra firma?
Solaris
suggests
that such communication between human and alien is not truly possible. This
conclusion about man’s inadequacy in the face of alien discovery is borne out
in the film’s dialogue.
“Everything we know about Solaris is negative,” says one
scientist.
“Everything has been confusing or incomprehensible,” declares
another.
Even in the scientists’ attempt
to understand Solaris’s “psychology,” personal, human assumptions sneak
in.
“It has something to do with conscience,” concludes Gibarian.
That’s his assumption based on
his personal feelings of conscience,
isn’t it?
He concludes that the mystery of
Solaris involves morality, because he questions his own morality.
Again, he is seeing through a
lens that he can’t escape, or even, truly, recognize.
In accordance with Gibarian’s
remark, some scholars have described the film as kind of “inner quest” to find the path that allows an “ethical person to develop.” (The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and
Film).
But this is just one interpretation
of the film themes, based on one character’s interpretation of the strange events.
I would suggest that Solaris’s
real point is more opaque than that. Because man is ill-equipped to countenance
a world or universe that does not include him at it its center, man instead seeks
to destroy that which he doesn’t understand, or somehow transform it into an
acceptable reflection, thereby destroying its essential “otherness.”
Kelvin’s actions in the film support
this theory.
Part of his mission involves,
essentially, lobotomizing Solaris with radiation if it proves to be dangerous
to mankind. But what does “dangerous to
mankind” really mean?
That the planet shows man
something about himself that he doesn’t understand, or rather would not see?
Is it dangerous to man,
intrinsically, to be faced -- in the
flesh -- with the consequences of his actions? With the people he hurt, or was hurt by?
Accordingly, at the film’s
denouement Kelvin broadcasts his brain encephalograms at Solaris, and it
quickly re-shapes itself into a vision from his
past, his home.
Islands of Kelvin’s memory ascend
from the planet-wide sea in patterns that conform to his (apparently subconscious)
desire to return home. Once more, the truly alien is replaced by something
human-oriented, something familiar.
Kelvin has gotten his mirror, and
yet he still can’t accept it totally, because his psyche can’t understand its
nature. But his urge here is undeniable:
to kill that which is different and make it a “mirror” of his life.
What makes the events on the
space station so terrifying to Kelvin and the others is that there is no way of
deducing Solaris’s intent regarding
the manifestation of the human-looking “guests.”
Man’s science can’t determine the
agenda, or even the nature of these guests.
Are Hari and the other visitors alive
in the sense that Kelvin is alive? Even
if they are formed only by the colored, personal memories of those who knew
them on Earth, do these beings have souls, and therefore possess the spark of
life?
If so, Kelvin is a murderer
because he dispatches the first “guest” version of Hari in a space pod,
consigning her to eventual death in space.
Again, the notion arises that man
is so afraid of something he doesn’t immediately understand that his first
response is to kill that thing.
Worse than that, the guests represent
an unresolvable spiritual crisis. How can we be certain that we aren’t all but the
sentient “memories” of other beings -- of God himself -- walking this planet,
living this life?
The “truth” about Hari exposes
the truth of our existences too.
We don’t know that we are any
more “real” than she is.
Viewers also learn in the course
of Solaris
that the guests began to appear when the station first bombarded the planet
with X-Rays. And secondly that the “guests” are made of neutrinos -- not atoms
-- held stable by some force on the planet Solaris.
One might thus conclude that
Solaris sought contact after being contacted first (with the X-Rays) by man,
and did so in a manner it thought would be comprehensible to humans.
But the “guests” represent an
imperfect or cracked mirror, and what they reflect upon the human characters is
the unsettling sense that it is impossible for a human being to really know
another human being.
Therefore, Hari is not Hari, but
a simulacrum originated in Kelvin’s (perhaps faulty) memory of her.
Such ideas get to the very heart
of what it means to exist, to be sentient, and to boast an individual soul.
Can an alien being or planet reproduce
those things which man holds to be the product and providence of divine
creation?
When confronted with such
questions, Kelvin and the others want to look away, or squash that which is
different and threatening to their self-centric beliefs about humanity and the
universe.
If Solaris can recreate us, down
to our souls, of what use have we for God?
And what use would God have for
us?
Eventually, Kelvin comes to
realize and accept that he can have Hari back in some form, but again, more
questions arise from her presence.
Can Solaris take away loss and
give back love?
Or is it providing only a facsimile of love?
Is loving Hari a meaningful and true
act, or a willful act of self-delusion?
“Man needs man,” one character asserts in the film, and that
conclusion is simply another way of stating that we can’t encounter something
truly alien, at least not when our imaginations are so limited, and so
dominated by feelings of fear.
So what Solaris really explores
is the idea that in observing something natural, beautiful and beyond our
understanding, we actually change, and perhaps destroy that very thing.
Bolstered by lyrical visuals, Solaris
doesn’t possess much by way of stereotypical science fiction imagery. Beyond
the corridors and environs of the space station, there is very little in the
film that one would recognize as conventional special effects or space age production
design or technology.
Yet Tarkovksy provides unique,
symbolic imagery which substitutes for this kind of de rigueur brand of sci-fi presentation.
For example, the film opens with a
shot of green plants waving and swaying in placid water. The plant-life --
coruscating ever so gently but also constantly -- suggests tendrils reaching out to touch something else,
and that’s a solid metaphor for the planet Solaris.
One gets the sense from this evocative
visual of something alive, but also
something diffuse and eternal.
The waves don’t stop lapping
around the plants, and as the plants move, they don’t appear to possess an
overt sign of individual intelligence or sentience.
But there is some indication
there -- in the repetition of the waves and the movement of the plants -- of
some scale of non-human intelligence. There seems to be an order to it.
Later in the film, there is a
long and apparently pointless scene of the astronaut Berton -- who has been to
Solaris -- returning to the city by car.
Tarkovsky’s camera follows the
astronaut’s car through a conventional, labyrinthine, modern highway network at
the foot of a major metropolis. The
scene goes on and on, beyond reason, beyond your patience, even, and is
accompanied by weird sci-fi sound effects.
Berton’s car darts through the darkness
of long tunnels, and then comes into the light for several intervals.
The scene also alternates between
black-and-white and color photography.
This scene may prove baffling or
be considered unnecessary to some audiences, but in another, wholly symbolic
fashion, it seems to represent the ultimate unknow-ability of another person (or
entity’s) mind, or sense of “truth.”
There are occasions of light,
punctuated by occasions of dark, and neuronal synapses (represented by the
cars) seem to fire and move about at random, heading for unknown and unknowable
destinations.
Tarkovsky’s use of color in the
film hints beautifully at this unknowability. Film scholar Richard Misek writes
that the film does not so much alternate between black-and-white and color as
it “ebbs and flows through a range of
chromatic alternatives.”
Furthermore, he suggests that “Color floats through Solaris, unmoored from meaning.” (Chromaitc Cinema: A History
of Screen Color, page 174.).
What this visual approach suggests then, is the
infinite variability of memory.
Sometimes we remember images of people vividly, and
sometimes those images are not so strong. Our memories run the spectrum from
black-and-white or sepia-tone to Technicolor.
But if our memories are not as vivid, then can we
create “accurate” representations of the people we know? Solaris suggests, through its use of
color, that we can’t. Instead, we create
facsimiles, just as Solaris seems to create facsimiles.
This painterly approach to film has been duly noted
by critics including Desson Howe, who writes:
“Tarkovsky doesn't script so much as paint and
compose; his work is a collection of living paintings, or visual symphonies,
rather than narrative movies. Though "Solaris" is one of the late
director's most plot-coherent and accessible films, its plot is still a mere
conduit for mood, atmosphere and philosophy. With cinematographer Vadim Yusov's
deft eye, Tarkovsky also creates some incredible images…His pictures, and his
sounds -- such as the symphonic drip of raindrops in a wooded pond -- tell more
than just the immediate story; they rejuvenate the mind.” (The Washington Post, June 1, 1990.)
Perhaps Solaris’s inaugural image
-- of the almost serene, eternal water -- represents the planet Solaris, and
the busy, complex light-and-dark highway of Russia represents the human mind,
always on the hunt for answers, always looking for another route to
understanding or knowledge. One can detect how these images, and these thought
processes – eternal and placid vs. eternally busy -- contrast one another,
yin-and-yang like.
No matter the particular
interpretation Solaris, based on the novel by Stanislaw Lem, is a dazzling and
memorable science fiction film, and one of the ten best genre movies of the
1970s. While many great films imagine
what the future will bring, or convincingly portray space battles in another
galaxy, Solaris reminds us that when we go to outer space, we will
still be human, and therefore saddled with all the same questions of morality
and existence that we face now.
In other words, in the space age we
will travel a very long way to meet alien life, but when we finally countenance
it, we will still want to see only ourselves in it. We will still desire that mirror.
This afternoon, I’ll re-post my
review of the remake, Solaris (2002), which -- while quite
different -- has its own virtues.
I came close to purchasing this one. I will revisit it. Thank you.
ReplyDeleteI have seen this once, I really should rewatch. All I remember is the fact that the first spoken lines came like 20 - 30 minutes after the beginning. The camera went on and on capturing the beauty of the scenery. This needs more watching, definitely
ReplyDelete-T.S.