Clever Vandals

No one is supposed to look for the spirit in space. We go there for rockets and satellites and gadgets of all kinds; and for those Michelin Men, the astronauts, mannequins of masculinity and textbook conformity. Only Tarkovsky could think otherwise. A genius. Solaris a masterwork.

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The connection is broken. Adrift from the past, this man floats in a gravity-less present; with no future to ground him. And so at voyage’s end Kelvin remains on this space station, watching a life unfold across the ocean’s surface: the dumbshow of an impossible reunion, and its regret over a wrongly chosen track. This reunion isn’t real - we must make this clear. His father in the rain-soaked house is a projection of his own thoughts; for drenched in remorse Kelvin looks back on a life where the wrong path has been taken. Hari is dead. He is separated from the old man. There can be no return to a past that for a moment seemed possible of resurrection. Innocence is not reclaimable. Categorical errors cannot be corrected. The guilt they emanate a smell that no air-freshener will remove.

There is a strangely Freudian feel to a movie set in outer space that deals with the ethics of knowledge, its limits and human impact.1 The ocean - it is a living organism - brings back the guilt-ridden past, whose traumatic revival is first acted out, before ending in a feverish dream, where the hero sees the origin of his tragedy in his mother’s love. This love is too close, it is tinged with sexuality, creating a jealously that overwhelms his marriage; the source of the marital tension that led to Hari’s suicide. His past on earth, looked at through this different lens, provides a radically new perspective: Kelvin had stolen his mother’s love from his father; for which he is to pay the capital offence of his own wife. Guilt piles atop guilt, like a Viennese psychodrama. He sees it all. Not taking Hari’s threat seriously he refused to return when he knew her life was in danger. He has blamed himself. Now he knows. The tragedy of his life, and the break with his father, are given a psychoanalytic cause, which offers the prospects of redemption. Too late. It has come too late. Hari has gone. Yet for a few days a miracle had seemed possible, the old life - his past - to be recaptured and redeemed when his old love - Hari - stands once more before him. Here is the illusion of Transference, when for a short time therapy promises a wholly fresh beginning, embodied in the person of the therapist. It is not to be. Hari leaves. And Kelvin is alone; without the comforting beliefs that prettify the past making it liveable. Freud offering not an escape back into health and sanity but a thorough-going disenchantment with all of existence. To confront the Truth to remove the safe places where we hide from the horrors of our own life. A ruin of a spacecraft, Kelvin floats in space.

In Solaris we see the truest image of ourselves. It is a terrifying place, where we are tested to the psychic limit. Gibarian fails the test; Snaut and Sartorius just squeeze through, though both have come close to madness. Forced to recognise their own fault-lines, only some inner strength enables them to survive an exposure to their original sins. In Snaut there is the weakness of a man; in Gibarian the pride; while in Sartorius an aggressive inhumanity has come to life: this scientist caring more for abstract questions and impersonal experimentation than for the spirit of human beings.

Kelvin also makes it through; and is left the most damaged. It is because the nature of his experience is different. Reclaiming his lost Hari, resurrected as a newborn love, Kelvin has been offered a vision of paradise. At first he was frightened, and he tried to destroy this vision. Soon, though, the feelings of love overwhelm him, and he wants - to the point of desperation - to preserve what for him has become a second chance in life. Kelvin knows Hari is not human; that she is an artificial creation, a projection out of his own thoughts as produced by the ocean. No matter. So much of love is about the self, its need for illusions. As his love grows, Hari grows too, becoming ever more human, as she absorbs her past which Kelvin reproduces in their moments together. At first she cannot survive a second without him, her entire life dependent on his presence. But soon she has acquired enough of a past to live for short periods alone. An intense fusion interspersed by moments of separation full of a crazed fragility. This is the story of a love affair.

Watching this growth, with the changes it produces, especially in Kelvin, who comes to love this Hari for herself, not as a replica of a dead woman, we sense a metamorphosis in the theme. No longer an exploration of human love and human suffering this film has become a celebration of human creativity; the ability of art to create living things that not just equal but surpass the originals, that is their inspiration. Hari is a work of artifice, and a masterpiece.

Snaut and Sartorius have problems with this idea. Sartorius in manipulating nature deforms its shape and the human sensibility. His apparitions are suitably nightmarish. He wants, of course, to be rid of them; but in destroying his nightmare he kills Kelvin’s dream: Hari dies. Science a chisel not a scalpel when applied to the human psyche.2

Art has many sides. Seeking truth it conjures up not just beauty but unpleasantness and pain. Few wish to see these. Better no art at all than such ugliness and torment. Hari’s death is assured. Then there are the philistines, jealous of art and those who appreciate it. To destroy the arts a moral duty. They will kill Hari.

In one extraordinary sequence we enter the elder Breughel’s Hunters in the Snow. It is the most powerful moment in the film, when, for a few minutes, we live inside an art object; and are completely under its dominion. It is also the climax of Kelvin’s relationship to Hari, never fated to last long; for love like art is epiphany; a short stanza of poetry not interminable paragraphs of prose. Art, as with the cherry blossom, offers but a fleeting Elysium, before the winds return, blowing the petals to the ground. Very quickly they are trampled into the mulch of daily business. When we exit the painting Hari quickly vanishes. Kelvin is bereft, and behaves like a man with a massive hangover. Art raises us to a high plain, but afterwards, when we return to the deep gorge of home, we find its climate danker and more dismal than before. Art and love. In Tarkovsky’s cosmology they are identical.3

What does art feel? Intriguingly Solaris explores this very question. Hari is unable to live with her own artificiality. That she has no past; is a model of a person she doesn’t know; that her entire existence, even when complete, depends on somebody else…these are terrifying thoughts. Here is art’s fragility. At any moment this evanescent existence, wholly dependent upon the believer, can be taken away; art ceasing to exist when nobody reads, listens or watches. Emma, Dorothea, Stephen Dedalus, require the attention - the love - of others. Yet how fickle is that love; what consumes the reader this week, ceases to exist on the next, when Effi, Evelina or Chester Nimmo come to stay. Our bookshelves a B&B with no regulars only strangers. Then there are the larger threats: the mob, those Bolsheviks, and these social scientists and boffins. They are wary of art and would like to get rid of it: its uselessness and social prestige offends them all. Better a certain suicide than to live with such insecurity.4  

Hari tries…and fails! Art, unable to die by its own hand, lingers on.

But society is changing. In this century we have discovered the means of destruction. The ingenuities of science promising to destroy art, whose metaphysical foundations it exposes as cosmological fairy tales. Neither are art’s claims to knowledge and insight taken seriously, scientists regarding them as illusion and con. Art ceases to have purpose. Its value is suddenly in question. Failing to kill herself Hari agrees to the experiments of Snaut and Sartorius, who send brainwaves into the ocean, in the hope of stopping its creative activities. The experiment is a success: our heroine is no more. Science has freed itself of a rival.

Kelvin is alone. He watches strange islands appear upon the ocean’s surface; his own future, which at first looks like his past, is one of these. Art, like memory, a lost fantasy, where sad figures, belonging to another planet, disappear before his eyes: Hari an old photograph burning on a bonfire. Art is no longer part of life. It is an artificial island in an alien sea whose artificiality is only too apparent; modern science reducing the artistic impulse to the twisted perceptions of a damaged mind; one that mistakes made-up characters for living beings. Pierre eating a burger in Soho; Don Quixote riding down Nevsky Prospekt on his horse…. What nonsense is this, man! Such characters are toy figures. Art. It is but a child’s game, without meaning or importance. Creations of the spirit cannot be real. Are you listening to me! Figments of the imagination are just that: figments. Have you got that! After upbraiding us for our imbecility, these scientists are happy; are once again at peace, with their worldview once more secure. For the sensitive Kelvin - his name suggests the barometer of aesthetic atmosphere - this experiment has been a disaster. The spirit of his existence has been taken away, leaving him alone with himself; stranded on a space station, where he contemplates a life he can only imagine. Not even his memories are real. He makes them up, and knowing this, they immediately crumble and fade away. Alone with his own artifice, which due to its newfound fragility, this scientific self-consciousness, is forever shattering. The dream of human transcendence is over. Science has killed it off. Murderers!

(Review: Solaris)5

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1.  Tarkovsky is interested in the spiritual ramifications, rather than the epistemological concerns of Lem’s original novel.

2.  Compare the conditioning treatment on Alex in Anthony Burgess’ Clockwork Orange.

3.  Spirituality completes the trinity. 

4.  There are times we think this is Will Self's motivation with his rap on The Novel's mortality.

5.  I would like to thank Will Self for his brilliant talk on Solaris…. Go on, watch it!