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?

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.

Film seems to define our lives, along with other popular culture. Indeed, I found myself wondering during the film what love actually is. Can love endure within such fickle creatures as human beings? As I have said before, the reason that Romeo and Juliet is the most romantic piece of literature ever written is because they die at the end. If they did not have the social pressures working against them, they would have ended up Mr. and Mrs. Capulet-Montague having to really work at keeping love alive through farting and boredom, fencing season, and poo-poo undies. The true test of love, it seems to me, is not finding it or starting it, but keeping it alive through the mundane. Would R&J have made it? I doubt it. Surprising that any of us do.

Soderbergh’s Full Frontal kicks this idea in our faces by making us contrast the love of film with the reality of our daily lives. Let me not to the marriage of dull minds admit complacency: love is not love which thinks it is a film, or bends with the romance to swoon. Oh, no, it is a trifling bit of worry that requires imagination and work to keep alive, something that most Americans do not seem to have. With the recent talk of marriage in the Senate, I can’t help but wonder if it is marriage that kills love: indeed, nothing seems to murder passion and desire more than the quotidian. How can we, a species of such limited intellect and imagination, ever hope to keep something as eternal (if we are to believe 2000+ years of popular culture) as love alive? Impossible. Better to avoid it.

Now, I’m not suggesting that Soderbergh’s morals anything of the sort; I am suggesting, however, that he posits that love is a fickle bastard that should be considered by the minute. Love is not eternal, but momentary, something that needs thought, agency, and imagination to keep alive and active. Complacency and comfort make poor bed fellows in a relationship. Are we capable of keeping long-term relationships alive and passionate? God, we can only hope. Full Frontal leaves me feeling “wow, what a cool film,” and “damn, how depressing.” How much of our love do we buy from culture? How much comes from the essence? Is there a difference? I think there is, but don’t ask me to prove it.