Lost in the Cosmos
Soderbergh's Solaris Is Beautiful, but What Is It About?
Tools
dir. Steven Soderbergh
Opens Fri Nov 29 at
various theaters.
Stanislaw Lem is a sexist--but that is another matter altogether. More relevantly, the Polish science fiction writer is a philosopher, and many argue that his most philosophically complete work is Solaris (1961). Set on a haunted space station that's orbiting a sentient and seemingly sinister planet, the novel is not about the future or space monsters. Nor is it in "the rocket racket" or "the special-equipment business," as Vladimir Nabokov put it in his odd short sci-fi story "Lance" (1952). Solaris (which, by the way, is a beautiful word) deals with what the more dramatic existentialists call "the accursed questions": Is there meaning in the universe? If there is no God then who is responsible for all this that we call creation? And so on.
Though Solaris takes place among the future's stars, it could have taken place on the seas of the ancient past. Instead of a spaceship arriving at a mysterious planet that has cast a psychological spell on the crew of a space station, we could have, say, a sea ship arriving at an outpost or colony that's under the spell of a strange and enormous continent--and still Solaris' essential philosophical themes would be intact.
Stranger Personals
Watching the Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky's Andrei Rublev (made in 1966 and set in medieval Russia) back to back with his famous adaptation of Solaris (made in 1972 and set in the Soviet future) will demonstrate this point. Despite their radically different time periods, the films are essentially the same. They probe the same philosophical territory: the complex, internal structures of the human condition, and the emotional urges and mechanisms that make us think, remember, fear death, and go crazy. Tarkovsky, like Lem, is a philosopher. Also like Lem, he is a poet. And anyone who has read Hegel or Nietzsche or Deleuze knows that philosophers do not produce practical knowledge but fantastic poetry.
Steven Soderbergh is not a philosopher, and consequently he's not a poet. This is something he is keenly aware of. In the script he wrote for his updated version of Solaris, he opened with this line: "I'm not a poet." Also, during the actual movie, the hero of Soderbergh's adaptation, Chris Kelvin (George Clooney), openly admits to his bookish wife, Rheya Kelvin (Natascha McElhone), that he has no interest in poetry. Later, Rheya dies with a crumpled poem in her hand. Though the poem--"And death shall have no dominion," a mediocre hymn by the mediocre Dylan Thomas--is referenced several times throughout the movie, it is completely out of place in Soderbergh's a-philosophical film world. The poem could easily have been dropped, or returned to the long death-slumber from which it came, and which it deserved.
However, like his predecessors, Soderbergh is not into the rocket racket. "What's interesting about [Solaris] is it's not a hardware science fiction," he said in a recent interview. "It's a psychological drama that happens to be set in space, and that's what is interesting to me about it. I'm not interested in science fiction, but only the conceptual side of it." But if Soderbergh is not into equipment or philosophy, what is his version of Solaris about? Now that is the big mystery.
It is generally agreed that Lem's book and Tarkovsky's film are philosophical fantasies. Their content, or substance, is philosophical. We read or watch them to see how, by employing imagined plot and characters, the writer/director confronts the only philosophical problem that matters: What does it mean to be human? Because there is no philosophy in Soderbergh's Solaris, the philosophical question becomes external rather than internal--meaning the question is transferred from the content on the screen to the minds of the audience, who must now ask these questions: Why are we watching this film? What is its meaning? Why was it made? Who is its audience? What do we do with this film? The film itself--rather than the characters--is frustrated by the "accursed questions."
In the same interview, Soderbergh says that his pitch to James Cameron (who had the rights to both Lem's book and Tarkovsky's adaptation) was that the film would be 2001: A Space Odyssey meets Last Tango In Paris. In a word, the film was meant to be erotic. The passion of two earthly lovers was to be transported to the realm of the stars. This was not a bad idea; sex is an excellent alternative to poetry and philosophy. But the final film fails to provide it. To begin with, it is rated PG-13 (evidently the censors were not offended by the two or so glimpses of George Clooney's ass). There is no moaning, sucking, or fucking while floating through space. The lovers fight on Earth, and then fight on the space station. Solaris is as erotic as it is poetic.
What is this movie about, then? Why are we watching it? Is the film about capitalism? At first this seems like a promising conjecture; shortly after George Clooney arrives on the space station, one of the two remaining members of the crew, Dr. Helen Gordon (Viola Davis), explains to him that the space station was initially run by a federal agency but is now owned by a corporation. But after this scene, the economics of the space station and space exploration are mentioned only once, and like the dumb Thomas poem, both comments could have been removed without affecting the film's overall structure.
While working on the script, Soderbergh recorded and transcribed several long conversations with James Cameron, as he found Cameron's ideas useful. Considering Cameron's politics, and the important role economics play in his films (particularly his Marxist blockbuster Aliens), it is likely that the two comments Dr. Helen Gordon makes about the space business were drawn directly from Cameron's mouth. But this only explains why the doctor mentions the corporation, and not what this film is about. Why was this film made?
Like all of Soderbergh's films, Solaris is well crafted and acted. The photography and editing, which were done by the director, are terrific. George Clooney, Natascha McElhone, and Jeremy Davies fulfill their roles. The futuristic sets and costumes are convincing. And Soderbergh successfully integrates the necessary high-tech equipment--the flat, iridescent TV screens and computer monitors, the slick black telephones--into a believable future world. But is this what Solaris is about? Soderbergh's cinematic skills? If that's the case, why didn't he go overboard and make a film that was purely cinematic? Solaris is slow, even at 95 minutes, and there is nothing technically or artistically exceptional about it.
Because we will never know what this film is about--in the way that we will never know what the meaning of life is--I will leave you with a passage by Andrei Tarkovsky, explaining what his 1972 version of Solaris was about: "Solaris [was] about people lost in the Cosmos obliged, whether they liked it or not, to acquire and master one more piece of knowledge. Man's unending quest for knowledge, given him gratuitously, is a source of great tension, for it brings with it constant anxiety, hardship, grief and disappointment, as the final truth can never be known."
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