To science? It’s a fraud! No one will ever resolve this problem, neither genius, nor idiot! We have no ambition to conquer any cosmos. We just want to extend earth up to the cosmos’ borders. We don’t want anymore worlds. Only a mirror to see our own in. We try so hard to make contact, but we’re doomed to failure. We look ridiculous pursuing a goal we fear and that we really don’t need. Man needs man!
–Dr. Snauth
Tarkovsky’s Solaris portrays humanity’s attempt to understand that which is beyond the scope of our creation. The characters make contact with the truly alien and try to conceive of this presence in terms dictated by their science and ration understand, but fail miserably. Solaris addresses the futility of our technology in the face of something that cannot be translated or incorporated into the body of our knowledge, but humanity’s arrogance and faith in its own paucity of knowledge and understanding drives the characters to code and codify a being that is truly alien. Solaris asks if “reality” can be measured scientifically through the subjective perceptions of humanity. It seems to suggest that it cannot, and bids us be happy with the small comfort that we can give each other.
Tarkovsky’s poetically shot Solaris begins with his trademark views of nature on the land of Chris Kelvin’s father. Kelvin, whom we are told is “working too much,” walks among the pastoral serenity of this place that eschews the new, but seems to be troubled by the world that is slowly encroaching upon it. Kelvin is about to leave for Solaris as the final decision maker about what is to become of the station studying the ocean world; he leaves behind his own troubles, instead concentrating on his job in determining the future of Solarist studies. He will break the impasse that surrounds the controversial discipline; he will measure the “facts” against the passions of the “hearts” of those that have been there.
The mood of the entire film is one of foreboding and uncertainty. Human understanding and technology seem at best conditional above the swirling mass of cerebral consciousness that is the Solaris ocean. Images of flowing and swirling water emphasize the uncertainty as Kelvin seems to be slowly traveling deeper into his own subconscious full of pain and repressed grief for the loss of the innocence he once possessed, his unclear relationship with his “mama,” his current professional responsibilities, and the suicide of his wife ten years previously.
His encounters with the living and the dead precipitate Kelvin’s own journey inward: the dead Dr. Gibarian on a video tape, Dr. Snauth who warns him not to trust anything he sees that contradicts the facts, Dr. Sartorius who has a hardline scientific approach to problems, and finally his dead wife Khari brought back to life inexplicably. A scientist himself, Kelvin soon looses confidence in science’s ability to explain what his senses tell him is real, but his mind tells him cannot be. Reality, Dr. Snauth tries to warn him, does not work here the same way it does on earth; it’s something like “insanity” that prods and pokes at conscience, much like science does to its subjects. Indeed, they only began having trouble when Gibarian began bombarding the ocean with x-rays. Perhaps in retaliation, the alien sea/entity seems to be able to plumb the depths of the scientist’s minds and manifest physically what it finds there for the scientists to deal with, in an irony straight of of Lem’s novel.
Tarkovsky’s film attacks notions of scientific difference and our certainty in them, like sleep and consciousness, simulation and reality, and even our ability to perceive color. The film will suddenly switch from brilliant and sharp color to an almost murky black and white without any obvious reason. It also conflates video with reality, so sounds, dialogue, and time become uncertain, ostensibly interacting so that both the audience and even the characters themselves become confused: was that sound on the video or coming from outside the room. None of us are certain. Many scenes of sleep and delirium are juxtaposed with those of philosophical discourse; images of idyllic landscapes with those of bristling cityscapes; and sounds from childhood with unearthly scrapings and crashes. The flow of the images in the film come like those of a lucid dream, seemingly connected in our dreamscape, but utter nonsense against morning coffee and newspaper.
Science, at least how we understand it in our human isolation, cannot encompass the cosmos. Indeed, as Snauth says above, we are not really interested in discovering that which is beyond us, but only endeavor to change the other to fit our definitions of it. Science itself changes that which is studied: if it does not do what we want it to do, then science can change it to make it fit a mold, a meaning, and a classification. The Solarists are at an impasse about just what the Solaris ocean is, but that does not stop them from imposing their desires on that which is utterly alien. Science does not accept that there might be things which are beyond science — more things in heaven and earth, Horatio.
What is reality if it is not of our own making? The “visitors,” as the scientists call Solaris’ manifestations of their minds, are part of the scientists’ own perceptions of reality. Khari is not “real” in the sense that she has had her own life experiences as an autonomous human being, but is a physical representation or simulacrum of how Kelvin perceived her — his flawed and subjective memories of his dead wife. This determines the pseudo-Khari’s actions: since Khari killed herself in Kelvin’s past, that’s how he determines the simulacrum Khari’s future. She must kill herself over and over again. However, the more time she spends with Kelvin, the more human she becomes. That is, the more of her own experiences she is able to have and the more she begins to understand Kelvin’s own troubled reality. At one point she even says “I am becoming a human being,” suggesting her own free will even though her inexplicable creation comes from the mind of another. Here is true objectification.
Man needs man seems to be what the film is finally saying, even though it gives no clear suggestion as to what that ultimately means. Indeed, if we don’t understand ourselves, what hope can we have of knowing the cosmos? The why of things ultimately gives way to the now of things. We cannot know the why, the film suggests, but we can know the now, the here, the immediate. Here is where love exists; here is where happiness resides:
When man is happy, the meaning of life and other themes of eternity rarely interest him. These questions should be asked at the end of one’s life. . . . The happiest people are those who never bother asking those cursed questions. . . . To think about it is to know the day of one’s death. Not knowing that date makes us practically immortal.
Snauth becomes anti-science, a humanist foil to that of Sartorius. The latter seems inhuman as he refers to Khari as a thing, something to be experimented upon, to be dissected, to be studied. Kelvin remains in the middle: “We don’t know when our life will end, that’s why we’re in a hurry. . . . We question life to seek out meaning. Yet to preserve all the simple human truths we need mysteries. The mystery of happiness, death, love.”
By the end of the film, Kelvin has ceased his questioning, desiring instead to return to a state of naive innocence, like a child at his mother’s breast. He only wants to love Khari, even though he knows that love means the death of all that has given his life meaning and drive up until that point. He wants to cleanse his memory of these questions, and retreats home. Yet his home, too, becomes a literal island of memory on the surface of Solaris. The final scene has him kneeling before his father as if begging the latter for forgiveness, guidance, acceptance. As the camera pulls up and away, we see his father’s home has been recreated on Solaris, and the soundtrack suggests a defeat, rather than solace we might have expected. Has Solaris won, or has Kelvin finally returned home? Perhaps the two are not so far removed.
Tarkovsky will not supply any answers, as if there could be any. This ending seems like a Luddite retreat away from science and technology to a simpler life in nature. We seem to be part of both our own technology and that from which we evolved; could we repudiate one for the other and still remain human? The cosmos is perhaps unknowable in our current state of evolution, but does that mean we should slink back to our mamas, never to venture into that which might make us question who we are and why we’re here? Kelvin has been defeated, losing his sense of the cosmos by isolating himself in a reality of his own construction, materialized of course by Solaris. Perhaps his solution is a caution to us: continue to move forward with the tools we’ve developed, but never get complacent or arrogant so as to forget to notice our brothers.
