Twisting and turning
Your feelings are burning
You’re breaking the girl
She meant you no harm
Think you’re so clever
But now you must sever
You’re breaking the girl
—The Red Hot Chili Peppers

In his Metamorphoses, Ovid is concerned with, among other things, images of woman and the men that love them. Perhaps that is a euphemistic way of saying: Ovid’s book of changes often features women as the victims of men’s desire. Ovid frequently and incisively examines how the desire of men, usually with the help of some divine force, change women, both physically and psychologically. Often, in tales like “Apollo and Daphne” and “Io and Jove,” women are broken in order to be made again, in an image that is more pliable to the desires of men.

In Book X, Ovid relates the story of Pygmalion. Ovid’s narrator here is Orpheus, but more on him in a minute. The story of Pygmalion and Galatea (who is not named in Ovid’s account) is often depicted in narratives since Ovid as a romantic tale of a lonely artist who falls in love with his perfect sculpture of a woman. The gods take pity on him, and turn his “ivory” women into flesh and blood — someone whom he can really love, marry, and live happily ever after with. Ostensibly, Ovid’s narrative is a happy one: the marriage of Pygmalion and Galatea is blessed by the gods with a child, a very real product of a real man and a real woman.

Yet, Ovid’s tales are seldom ever what they seem. Closer examination of “Pygmalian” reveals a more sinister story of misogyny, lust, fetishization, introversion, and sexual oppression. Pygmalion is the first-century equivalent of the loner, the socially ostracized man who resents the culture that marginalized him. Living by himself, he especially despises the women: he considers them whorish and is “disgusted by / the many sins to which the female mind / had been inclined by nature.” For Pygmalion, they are naturally flawed, probably because they want nothing to do with him, and by shunning him, they emasculate him. So, in what could probably be described as his skeevy little studio, he carves his idea of the perfect woman out of “ivory” — creating the perfection that does not exist in nature. His simulacrum is naked, of course, but he adorns it with shells and and ribbons, and rests the statue on his bed, between the covers, talks to it, kisses it. What a scene.

Pygmalion falls in love with his statue, so much so, he prays to Venus “if you can indeed grant all things, / then let me have the wife I want . . . / one like my ivory girl.” What follows is a grotesque fumbling and groping and poking and prodding of a now “more pliant” statue turned flesh and blood. He rejoices and continues in his lusty explorations while

She seeks “light,” perhaps an understanding of her situation beyond the rapacious form of Pygmalion towering over her. She becomes pregnant immediately. Pygmalion probably decides that he must impose his order on her, at least before she meets the emasculating women of Cyprus and is influenced by their natural propensities. So, in order for the Pygmalion creature to regain his manhood stolen by the these women, he must break their hold on him by making his own girl whom he can master.

Almost two millennia later, Edgar Allan Poe’s own Pygmalion figure, the narrator of “Ligeia,” attempts to assert his will over the nature of the story’s two women, the eponymous Ligeia and Rowena Trevanion of Tremaine. Yet, Poe’s narrator is, in a sense, an anti-Pygmalion figure, one who tries to control ostensibly through love (or lust) and hate, both of which he feels intensely — passionately. Like Pygmalion, Poe’s narrator is moody and introverted, prone to a fierce temper that his wife dreaded. He is also an opium addict, who “loathed [his wife] with a hatred belonging more to demon than to man” (1382). After the death of his beloved Ligeia, the narrator marries Rowena, but longs to be reunited with the former, calling on her and hoping to “restore the departed Ligeia to the pathways she had abandoned upon the earth” (1382).

The narrator’s will (desire, lust, passion) is so strong, that it seems to have a role in defeating nature. Yet, instead of just praying to Venus to have his love restored to him, he seems to sacrifice Rowena on the alter of his desire. She has bouts of illness and increasing irritability, like she’s becoming frightened of her husband; and who could blame her really: they live in the English countryside is an old gothic cathedral that seems to have a life of its own — an appropriate place for this horror story. Perhaps she realizes that the narrator is poisoning her wine, but becomes too weak to do anything about it. She eventually succumbs to the poison, or her illness, and dies as the narrator looks on. As the narrator watches, the corpse seems to move; this happens three times until it finally rises from its “bed of ebony.” To the narrator’s eyes, his dead wife Rowena seems to have risen from the dead as Ligeia.

Like “Pygmalion,” “Ligeia” has the inanimate become animate with the help of some external, divine power. Poe’s narrator, like Pygmalion, passionately longs for his vision of perfection to become flesh. His obsession with the dead Ligeia becomes an oppressive and violent force that literally kills Rowena — sacrificing her in lieu of the narrator’s vision of womanly perfection: Ligeia. The imperfect Rowena must be broken and recast in a form that our narrator sculpted from his own desire. “Ligeia,” a form that only now lives in the narrator’s mind, one that he has elevated above all other women, has replaced Rowena, literally and figuratively sacrificing her autonomous personality for the narrator’s oppressive desires.

Interestingly, too, Poe calls Rowena his “wife,” but his relationship with Ligeia remains ambiguous. In fact, he seems to have doubts as to whether or not Ligeia even loved him. He alludes, too, to her passion, intelligence, and will as a match for his own. He fixates on her eyes: he says that they “delighted and appalled” him. Perhaps they both reflect his desire for her and her defiance of him, so much so, that in order to possess her completely, our narrator comes to the conclusion: “I saw that she must die” (1380). These textual clues imply that Poe’s narrator kills Ligeia just as he later kills Rowena: if he cannot sculpt them into his vision of what a woman should be, then, as much as it might pain him, they would have to die. Ligeia’s return at the story’s end could be interpreted as her vampiric will defeating death, or psychologically as a manifestation of the narrator’s guilt and remorse as the ghastly form of Ligeia.

Stanislaw Lem’s 1961 novel Solaris, brings our Pygmalion story into space and gives us a science fiction (or perhaps a postcolonial) vocabulary with which to discuss it. In Lem’s novel, Kris Kelvin travels to the planet Solaris to find out what has happened to the crew — particularly why his friend Gibarian killed himself — while they were studying this seemingly alien oceanic intelligence. Similar to Moby Dick, Solaris has a fairly simple plot interspersed with expository chapters about the history of “Solaristics”: the decades of academic studies about the enigmatic Solaris. Solaristics encompasses science, physics, philosophy, religion — any human intellectual attempt to figure out a world that is utterly alien. Kelvin is both a Solaricist and a psychologist, so he seems an appropriate person to send in order to help the crew.

Kelvin soon finds what’s troubling the denizens of Solaris Station: they have been getting “visitors” ever since they began bombarding the planet with x-rays. These visitors remain a mystery to Kelvin until he falls asleep his first night on the station and awakens to find his own: his dead wife Rheya has ostensibly appeared out of thin air. I’m reminded of Ligeia coming back from the dead; Kelvin is initially shocked, but quickly becomes enamoured with and grows to love the Rheya-visitor.

She seems to have an irrational attachment to Kelvin, getting violently anxious if he tries to leave her. Kelvin eventually consults the other two scientists on the station, Snow and Sartorius, and they explain that the visitors seem to represent some sort of “psychic trauma” made manifest by Solaris. It’s as if the ocean probed their brains and made flesh that which is connected with primal feelings like trauma, passion, or desire — at least in Kelvin.

Rheya, Kelvin’s real wife, had killed herself years earlier when he left her after an argument. He dismissed her threat of suicide, but he is devastated when she actually does, carrying the guilt of his inaction with him to Solaris. The Rheya-visitor simultaneously represents his love for his dead wife and the guilt he has over her death. The intelligence that the men call Solaris has made the Rheya-visitor out of Kelvin’s memory of her, so his attachment to her is even more understandable: she is like the statue of Pygmalion, created out of the head of Kelvin and animated by some external force. The Rheya-visitor is even more perfect for Kelvin than the original ever was.

Yet, this Rheya simulacrum also has the flaws of the original, magnified by Kelvin’s psychic residue. The Rheya-visitor tries to kill herself several times, but is always resurrected by Solaris until the scientists develop a machine that disrupts their ability to return. The Rheya-visitor takes this opportunity to end her life for good, despite Kelvin’s multiple and emphatic pleas of his need and love for her. The irony is that the Rheya-visitor is created from his own memories of Rheya, but he ultimately remains ineffectual in his attempts to control her.

A recurrent theme in Solaris is first uttered by Snow, one of the resident scientists on Solaris station, when talking with Kelvin. Snow claims that humans explore the galaxy not to find the new, but because they “need mirrors” of themselves (72). Humans do not explore to find the new, but to impose the familiar: we are like immature, mad gods who attempt to create the universe in our own image. Lem seems to suggest that even our attempts at science, philosophy, and religion are ultimately to glorify our own presence in the universe, not about seeing the different. Solaris is about the impossibility of knowing the other. We make tenuous connections, but relationships seem to become battles of will: where one person’s will dominates and breaks (writes, determines) the other’s. So often, men assert their primacy through dominate ideologies, breaking the girl in order to remake her in an image of subordination and a reflection of the desires of men.

Unlike Ovid’s “Pygmalion,” Poe’s and Lem’s revisionings seem to carry with them more sinister implications. Both protagonists are haunted by the images of women they created, and neither seems to have the ability nor the will to escape. In a sense, they also become victims of their own desires. Granted, the women suffer more from these visions than the men, but the vision enslaves both.

Perhaps the latter two examples can again be linked with Ovid’s “Pygmalion” through its narrator Orpheus. Orpheus was the consummate musician: his music so lovely that it charmed death himself. After his wife, Eurydice, was killed by a serpent, Orpheus travelled to the Underworld to get her back. Hades and Persephone were so taken by his plea, they allowed Eurydice to return to the land of the living on the condition that he not look back as they make their way to the surface. He does — anxious that Eurydice might not be following — and she is snatched back into Hell. Ovid seems to comment ironically on love:ﾠ

Indeed, the Metamorphoses again reasserts what might be its central theme: the major cause of women’s suffering is the love of men. After losing Eurydice again, Orpheus becomes misogynistic, singing tales of women who do not follow the lead of men, like the women of Cyrus that Pygmalion so despised. Ironically, Orpheus sees the nature of women as the problem, not the men who try to break them.

Yes, another semester has started with a bang. I have finally finished my course prep and posted my last syllabus online for a class that begins tonight. I even have my second session course’s syllabus finished. It’s an interesting semester: I didn’t get my usual New Media senior seminar, but I also didn’t get a Freshman composition course. I have three online classes and one traditional, in-class section of World Literature 2. Should be a good semester, teaching-wise. I’m particularly looking forward to what my students do in the Writing for Digital Media course. More on that, soon.

I’ll be travelling to New Orleans in April for the national PCA/ACA conference. I wrote a proposal for a paper on Poe’s “Ligeia” and Lem’s Solaris. The abstract was crap, but I have a bit of time to tease it out. I can’t wait to get back to NOLA; it’s been too long, and since before Katrina. I’m hoping that A can go with me and that Kip will meet me there for a couple of days.

I’ve also been invited to read AP literature exams in early June. Since it’s early June, I’ll be able to go. It will be in Louisville, KY for a week. It pays a pretty good stipend, so I might be able to get away with teaching only one class in May. We’ll see. I’m still on-track to teach in London beginning at the end of June. If you’re interested in going with me, there’s still time to sign up.

Finally, I’m trying to get healthy again by eating correctly and exercising regularly. This is difficult, but so far I’m doing OK. Hopefully I’ll notice a difference soon.

Should be an interesting year…

I left shortly after teaching today, about 2:00. The temperature was a cool 68 degrees, but I had several layers and no worries. The sun smiled on me as I rode I-75 south; had it not, the ride would have been much chillier. As it was, I was a bit cool. I figured that the temperature would rise as I approached Florida, but that proved to be erroneous. The ride from Lake City to Lake Butler (a mere 21 miles) proved to be damn cold. That whole expanse of State Highway 100 is shrouded on both sides by trees, and since I was getting there late in the day, the sun was unfortunately as scarce as a bit of class at a NASCAR race. Still, I made the 230 miles in about four hours. I stopped a couple of times for rest and a clove.

I’m excited about my journey south tomorrow. I have never been all the way down the east coast, so I’m looking forward to my ride down U.S. 1. All I need to do is get to Vero Beach tomorrow, about 200 miles, or so. I plan to stop in Daytona Beach at the BMW Motorcycle dealership. Just curious. Hope the weather and temperature holds up. Should be right as rain — ugh, dry.

According to Muntius, Solaristics is the space era’s equivalent of religion: faith disguised as science. . . . Solaristics is a revival of long-vanished myths, the expression of mythical nostalgias which men are unwilling to confess openly. The cornerstone is deeply entrenched in the foundations of the edifice: it is the hope of Redemption. (Lem Solaris 173).

Unlike either Tarkovsky‘s or Soderbergh‘s film versions, both of whom seem to have taken Muntius’ interpretation of Solaris to heart, Lem’s 1961 novel suggests that Solaris remains alien, something that humanity’s cataloging and ordering cannot explain. The great ocean, despite humanity’s greatest minds, remains essentially mute and inexplicable, unable to be coded by scientific reason, explained through empiricism, or contacted through poetry. Lem seems to suggest, in the aftermath of science fiction’s Golden Age, that science is not the panacea or pinnacle of evolution and striving: it, like religion, is a faith-based language unique to the creatures that invented it. Lem’s vision seems introspective — it turns a mirror on a species that used science to create the possibility of annihilation by splitting the atom and mocks our pretenses to transcend our own human follies. While contact with the other may not be possible in Lem’s vision, perhaps the universe does contain wonders if we can just see past our own desires.

Lem’s novel is about Kris Kelvin’s exploration of his own psyche. A trained Solarist and psychologist, Kelvin is sent to Solaris to see what has become of the crew, but unknown to Kelvin, he is traveling light years to encounter not the strangeness of the alien sea, but his own troubled existence. He travels alone, strapped inside a ship he cannot control and is hurdled toward the Solaris station. Chapter one, “Arrival,” illustrates his own sense of alienation: his surroundings are familiar, but hostile to human life. He understands the academic history of the ocean planet — what he calls a useless jumble of words, a sludge of statements and suppositions . . . [that] has not progressed an inch in 78 years since researchers had begun” — but he has never experienced it himself (23). However, his mission is not to study Solaris, but to try to gain some understanding of what happened to the crew.

When Kelvin encounters first Snow, then the dead Gibarian, then Sartorius he begins to see what is going on, but his scientifically trained mind cannot accept whet his eyes tell him. Each of the crew has a “visitor,” ostensibly produced by Solaris for an unknown purpose. Snow speculates that they are meant to show “our own monstrous ugliness, our folly, our shame!” (73). He speculates that the ocean probed their brains and penetrated their deepest fears and regrets: the visitors are “a genetic substance . . . a plasma which ‘remembers.’ The ocean has ‘read’ us by this means, registering the minutest details, with the result that . . . well, you know the result” (74). Snow believes that he understands the how, but he does not know the why. The scientists cannot rid themselves of the visitors; they appear when the scientists have slept; they regenerate when hurt; they seem immortal, and, as Sartorius opines, “They are not autonomous individuals, nor copies of actual persons. They are merely projections materializing from our brains, based on a given individual” (102). Kelvin elaborates further:

The origin of the materialization lies in the most durable imprints of memory, those which are especially well-defined, but no single imprint can be completely isolated, and in the course of the reproduction, fragments of related imprints are absorbed. (102-103)

As scientists, they arrive at the conclusion that they themselves are the subject of an experiment (103).

Experiment or not, the visitors begin to learn after they arrive. Snow later speculates that: “When it arrives, the visitor is almost blank — only a ghost made up of some memories and vague images dredged out of its . . . source. The longer it stays with you, the more human it becomes. It also becomes more independent, up to a certain point. And the longer that goes on, the more difficult it gets. . .” (150-151). After that time of adjustment, Snow suggests, they become human, now a part of the life on the station. They learn from their surroundings, and begin to question; Snow states: “In a certain subjective sense, they are human. They know nothing whatsoever about their origins. You must have noticed that?” (74). While in one sense the visitors mirror the scientist’s memories, in another they are also as questioning, answer-less, and alone as humans.

Science begins to falter, offering no answers, but only guesses as to what might be happening. Kelvin begins to accept his visitor, his dead wife Rheya. Early on, Kelvin confesses that her suicide is his fault: he left her in a psychological fragile state with enough drugs to do away with herself. He left her, and she killed herself, and he carried the blame with him for a decade. Yet, when Rheya appears to him on Solaris, the scientist in him dismisses her as ersatz, a simulacrum undeserving of the status of human. He launches her into orbit, but she is soon replaced by another, one that he begins to grow attached to, despite the fact that she is not Rheya and was born out of an alien ocean. Yet, he longs to have another chance to redeem his mistake with Rheya and begins to think of this Rheya as human, someone to be cared for and loved: “It was Rheya, the real Rheya, the one and only Rheya” (93). However, as much as wishes to believe that, this Rheya learns that she is a product of Solaris and cannot accept that fact herself.

At one point, Snow offers his view of humanity’s travels into the cosmos:

We take off into the cosmos, ready for anything: for solitude, for hardship, for exhaustion, death. . . . We don’t want to conquer the cosmos, we simply want to extend the boundaries of Earth to the frontiers of the cosmos. . . . We are humanitarian and chivalrous; we don’t want to enslave other races, we simply want the bequeath them our values and take over their heritage in exchange. . . . We are only seeking Man. We have no need for other worlds. We need mirrors. . . . We are searching for an ideal image of our own world. (72)

Yet Solaris presents them with the opposite: their own fears and shortcomings, and they have difficulty accepting that. They consider that they are mad, but when madness cannot be justified, they ask why Solaris is doing what it’s doing. Science cannot answer why, it can only answer how. The Rheya simulacrum falls into this trap as well: a reflection of Kelvin’s mind, she cannot accept her own alienness, and like the real Rheya, finds a way to kill herself. Perhaps this is what humanity is, then: an exclusive club that seeks to conquer and not understand.

Lem’s novel seems to call into question the very notion of human science. Like a religious faith, science was upheld in science fiction as an endeavor that could save us from ourselves. It is a rational discipline that stands upon human reason and knowledge, not fear and superstition. However, science itself is only a human belief system, something that may hold true in our remote corner of the universe, but it cannot allow us to make contact or examine the complexities of the universe or our own minds. While science might tell us how our minds operate, it cannot disclose the implications of its operation. Perhaps Solaris suggests that having too much faith in science can destroy our own humanity, making us more like machines than beings who are capable of looking beyond our own beliefs and prejudices. Perhaps the word “human” is in need of re-articulation if it cannot encompass difference.

At the end of the novel, Kelvin decides to visit the ocean on Solaris. He lands his craft on a “mimoid,” a seemingly random structure spawned by the sea. As he considers his experiences on Solaris, he ponders his existence and that of the planet. Despite the trouble and pain of this trip, he thinks “We all know that we are material creatures, subject to the laws of physiology and physics, and not even the power of all our feelings combined can defeat those laws. All we can do is detest them” (204). He seems to shrug his shoulders at the ocean, at the defeat of humanity to make contact, to break out of its own arrogant little shell. Yet, his final thoughts might be the beginning of a new life: “I knew nothing, and I persisted in the faith that the time of cruel miracles was not past” (204). However cruel his experience, at least Solaris represented something outside the sphere of humanity. Perhaps this thought is comfort enough when our experiments fail us.

When Kelvin first arrives on the station, he quickly learns of Gibarian’s death, meets with the remaining crew members — the jittery Snow and the measured and paranoid Gordon (Sartorius in the novel and Tarkovsky film) — and begins his investigation into just what is happening. In an early scene (chapter 8 on the DVD), Kelvin watches a video journal of the dead Gibarian that echoes Tarkovsky’s: “we don’t want other worlds, we want mirrors.” Gordon echoes this sentiment later when she and Kelvin discuss the reality of the “visitors,” particularly the Rheya simulacrum:

GORDON: It is a mistake to become emotionally engaged with one of them. You’re being manipulated. If she were ugly, you would not want her around. That’s why she’s not ugly. She’s a mirror that reflects part of your mind. You provide the formula.

KELVIN: She’s alive.

GORDON: She is not human! Try to understand that if you can understand anything.

KELVIN: What about your visitor, the one you’re so ready to destroy without hesitation. Who is it? What is it? Can it feel? Can it touch? Does it speak?

GORDON: We are in a situation that is beyond morality. Your wife is dead.

KELVIN: How do you know that? How can you be so definitive about a construct that you do not understand?

GORDON: She’s a copy. A facsilime. And she’s seducing you all over again. You’re sick!

The distinction here is meant to be ambiguous, calling into question what is human. Both react according to how they interpret human and their own desires. Also, human seems to be a product, not only of culture, but of environment. How could something that appears to come from an alien ocean planet, constructed from a particular person’s memories, and manifested physically by an alien thing be “human”? Gordon, as an empirical scientist cannot buy it; Kelvin, a psychologist remains dubious. Yet, we cannot so easily discount his desires and the morality — a human invention — of calling the obviously alien construct “human.” The visitors are a fact; there’s no doubting that physically. However, since science cannot explain their appearance, the question enters the realm of metaphysics.

It always seemed to me the height of human metaphysical arrogance to create God in our own image, specifically a white man — I guess the “white” part is the product of later Western artists, as Kelvin suggests during a flashback of a dinner party: “The whole idea of God was dreamed up by man. The limits that we put on it are human limits. It designs. It creates–” Rheya interjects, “No, I’m talking about a higher form of intelligence.” Gibarian is there, too, and adds: “No, you’re talking about something else. You’re talking about a man in a white beard, again. You are ascribing human characteristics to something that isn’t human.” While Rheya listens, she becomes uneasy. Kelvin continues, somewhat condescendingly, “Given all the elements of the known universe and enough time, our existence is inevitable. It’s no more mysterious than trees, or sharks, or your mathematical probability and that’s all.” Yes, you can’t explain everything, but that, according to Kelvin and his friends, does not prove the existence of a higher form of intelligence. As Solaris shows them, how we measure intelligence becomes mute in the presence of something that it cannot explain, so we attempt to make it fit into the parameters that we invented to define ourselves. The truly alien becomes a reflection of ourselves, a mirror. In a true postmodern moment, Kelvin speculates that even if there is a God, we cannot possibly hope to understand it. Yet, faced with God, Kelvin and the rest of the scientists seek to do just that.

The pivotal scene comes when Gibarian visits Kelvin in a dream — again the “dream” part is ambiguous. The latter accuses him of not being human, a mere puppet, but Gibarian returns: “Maybe you’re my puppet, but like all puppets, you think you’re actually human. Hence the puppet’s dream: being human.” Kelvin questions him about his son, but Gibarian answers that his son is back on earth. He continues: “And that’s not your wife. They are part of Solaris. Remember that.” Kelvin continues to probe, asking what Solaris wants. Gibarian answers: “Why do you think it has to want something? This is why you have to leave. If you keep thinking there’s a solution, you’ll die here.” Yet, Kelvin cannot leave her, remembering the guilt of leaving her the first time on earth, an action that precipitated her suicide. Kelvin must find the answers; he must understand Solaris so that he can cleanse his guilt and remorse. Gibarian says finally: “Do you understand what I’m trying to tell you: there are no answers, only choices.” Yet Kelvin, like the western conception of the rational human, believes that he can find the answers to the puzzles that Solaris presents.

Soderbergh’s Solaris reflects humanity’s quest for place where we can be most ourselves. This seems a vain and solipsistic longing to make the world a reflection of our inner perceptions that gives meaning and order to the universe, but simultaneously objectifies external realities and recreates them in our own image. We want to be like gods, whose creating words become manifest in the physical world. This brings security and comfort, like we might find at home, or that a filmmaker might find in his vision of a novel.

Indeed, the final scene vindicates this quest: Kelvin is again at home; he again is slicing vegetables for dinner and again cuts his finger as before, but this time he is able to wash away the cut, to erase it with water as easily one might erase a mistake on a computer screen. The scene cuts back to Kelvin deciding to remain on the station as Solaris expands to encompass it: he will not return to earth, a place now that is alien to him, where he would have to relearn to be human. Cutting back to the apartment, Rheya appears calling his name, and he asks if he is alive or dead. She, with an expression that is mirrored through the film, replies that “We don’t have to think like that anymore. We’re together now. Everything we’ve done is forgiven. Everything.” Their final embrace suggests his acceptance of this reality that seems to be the reflection of Kelvin’s greatest desire made manifest by Solaris. Kelvin has ostensibly found his place. He is now trapped in a reality of his own making.

Like Tarkovsky’s ending, Soderbergh’s seeks to find a repentance, an idea of heaven born from our greatest desires — a reflection of forgiveness and solace, a chance to right our greatest mistakes. Yet, again like Tarkovsky’s, this ending is also a trap, one from which Kelvin will not escape. He, like his patients at the beginning of the film, is now trapped in his own mind, having succeeded in making it his reality. His forgiveness is not external, but internal: he has forgiven himself his trespasses and now feels he deserves peace in the familiar. What is love other than a reflection of ourselves, a place to feel the most comfortable and secure? While we can live in this place, it also traps us, making the real world of human interaction less bearable and ultimately impossible.

While Tarkovsky’s answer seems to be a return to nature, away form the alienating concrete and steel of the city, Soderbergh’s seem to suggest technology might provide these moments of connection, but at a price. Like our family and friends, the technology that we surround ourselves with reflects our desires and provides us with spaces where we can be most ourselves, where transgressions are quickly erased and leave no scars. The digital world mirrors how we perceive ourselves, how we wish to be perceived, and how we perceive others. It’s a haven of security on one hand, and a place to interact on the other. Yet, even though we might chat, browse, or email, we are still physically sitting alone in our own rooms looking at a monitor that, if we look closely, reflects our hopeful faces in its glass. Solaris seems to be an effort to come to terms with our anxieties about what it means to be human in an increasing age of digital technology. What will happen when the digital becomes manifest in the products of nanotechnology, genetics, and robotics. What then?

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.

There are no answers, only choices.

I finally finished watching Soderbergh’s Solaris this evening. Great metaphysical science fiction. This film does not try to promote a clear position about the universe, but suggests that we are products of what we choose to do — I guess in itself that is a position, but the ontology of the film is one of human volition in that we make our own meaning and determine our own happiness (and sadness) through the decisions we make every day. What if we had decisions to make over again; what would we do differently? This very question provides the impetus for the film and at the same time suggests our own inability to perceive and live our own lives beyond the choices we make.

Ultimately, we live in our memories. Synaptic pathways, connecting neurons, gray matter — all produce the moving pictures that illuminate our past, create our present, and guide our future. If we could live certain key instances in our lives again, would the very fact of these very real, physical, physiological characteristic determine our choices? Are we pre-programmed by our experiences (that is the actual experience and our assimilation of that experience through our senses) so much that the outcome would be the same time and again? How much of how we perceive the universe — and therefore create our own reality — affects others? Perhaps our own memory equals our reality and produces very real, tangible, ethical consequences.

The film is brilliantly shot. It’s thematic focus reminds me of the old Star Trek episode “The Managerie,” where Mr. Spock is court-martialed for attempting to return his old captain, a now crippled and disfigured Christopher Pike, back to Talos IV. Spock’s reasons become clear during the episode: the denizens of this planet have the ability to see into a person’s mind and manifest his or hers greatest desires. The virtuality of this creation does not pose a problem for the vegetable Pike (sounds like a fish soup), but the notion of reality is implicitly addressed in this episode: can we as humans knowingly live a fantasy, a lie? Because something exists solely in our minds and imaginations, does that make it any less real? Both “The Managerie” and Solaris initially suggest a revulsion toward that which we know to be ersatz, but by the end embrace the notion of fantasy by suggesting that we live in one of our own making anyway. Indeed, what is reality but a notion created through our perceptions of the physical? Even the physical, to a great extent, is a product of our perception — ask a quantum physicist.

What’s so great about reality? If given the choice, would we really have a dilemma about choosing to live in a quotidian world or living in our own fantasies? If I had a holodeck, I’d never leave the house. The problems here — and what some sf has addressed for decades — is just what would the ability to live in our fantasies do to the human race. If we all had the ability to just plug into happiness, wouldn’t that mean an end to our conception of humanity at the least, and the end of our existence as a species, at the worst? Read any Philip K. Dick lately?

The problem with Solaris is that it creates a physical reality out of desire — and we all know that there is nothing as solipsistic as desire. So, Dr. Chris Kelvin journeys to a space station orbiting Solaris — a planet of dancing fluidic lights — to see what happened to the research team. He carries with him the memories of his wife’s suicide and his guilt for not being able to help her. While there, something about Solaris creates his dead wife using Kelvin’s memories of her. The problem, something that this creation soon realizes, is that she is determined and created by Kelvin’s very biased perceptions of her. To him, she is just as he remembers. To her, she is incomplete, being only a gestalt of Kelvin’s sorrow, passion, and love. Therefore, she is doomed to kill herself again because of Kelvin’s own powerful memories of her suicide. Tough. Kelvin wants her to come back to earth, but she cannot live with the reality of being created from such a narrow perspective. Cool allegory on the nature of creation, too.

The movie ends the only way it can: ambiguously. Like Soderbergh’s other work, it mirrors life in that we are left to make our own meaning, supplying our own pessimism or optimism or indifference. We all want life a certain way, but do we realize in our quest for this perfection how we influence the lives of others, often for the worst? Is isolation the answer? I don’t think so, but a knowledge that our perceptions have ethical and very real consequences in our lives and those who are most dear to us remains a subtle and most poignant message.