Solaris

(Director: Steven Soderbergh, 2002)

Stephen Nottingham

The point of comparison for the two Solaris films is usually Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). However, this essay will argue that, in particular, Steven Soderbergh's Solaris (2002) is more akin in its themes and plot to the modern cloning movie.

The celebrated Polish author Stanislaw Lem saw his novel Solaris published in 1963. It was to become his most famous book. It was first filmed by the Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky in 1972. Soderbergh returns to the source material in his 2002 film, but acknowledges Tarkovsky in key instances. The Soderbergh "remake" is a more compact and focused film, coming in at around half the length of Tarkovsky. In Tarkovsky's film, Kris Kelvin (Donatas Banionis) spends 45 minutes on Earth before setting off for the beleaguered space-station on Solaris. Here he encounters a manifestation of his dead wife Hari (Natal'ya Bondarchuk). Kris confronts his past in leisurely, dreamy, and often very beautiful scenes that are confined to Solaris. Soderbergh's film starts with Chris Kelvin (George Clooney) arriving at the space-station and dishes out its backstory in concise flashbacks, which gives his film more of a dramatic edge.

In Soderbergh's film, Kelvin is sent to the space-station Prometheus, which hovers above the liquid surface of the planet Solaris. The crew appears to be in some sort of trouble, and one of the crew, Gibarian (Ulrich Tukur), requests that Chris be sent for because of his skills as a psychiatrist. In a flashback in Soderbergh's film, Kelvin is seen socializing with Gibarian. They are old friends, and it is Gibarian who introduces Kelvin to Rheya (Natascha McElhone), the women he marries - although she commits suicide soon afterwards.

On his arrival on Solaris, Kelvin finds that Gibarian has committed suicide. Two other scientists remain on the station, the highly rational Gordon (Viola Davis) and Snow (Jeremy Davies), a man who appears to be permanently on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Kelvin sleeps a deep dream-laden sleep, in which the planet senses his thoughts, and he awakes to find an apparition of his dead wife Rheya beside him. He learns that the Gibarian's "visitor" was the man's son, and that Gordon and Snow also have "visitors". In each case, the visitor is someone close to them, which the planet has replicated from their memories as they slept. They are what dreams are made of. Chris, guilty about the suicide of his wife after a quarrel, has his wish fulfilled by her return. A similar wish-fulfilment may underlie the others' visitors.

The visitors are immortal, unlike their earthly originals. If killed, they will be resurrected. In the Tarkovsky film, Hari dies four times. Firstly, when Kelvin sends her off on a one-way rocket ride; secondly, when she rips through a metal door because she does not want to be parted from him; thirdly, when she drinks liquid oxygen; and finally when she willingly subjects herself to a death ray built by the other scientists. In Soderbergh's film, Rheya (also the character's name in Lem's book) is killed three times. Kelvin sends her off into space, she drinks frozen chemicals, but she bursts through the metal door as a way of escaping Chris to rendezvous with the other scientists who will help her die permanently with the "anti-neutrino death ray" (a McGuffin that even Hitchcock might have balked at). Kelvin will remain on the failing space-station hoping that she will reappear.

It is likely (although not explicitly stated) that the visitors will not age. They are the age at which the person was best remembered. Cloning is often regarded as a form of immortality in the movies. Rich and powerful people may desire to clone themselves in order that they become in a sense immortal. Their genetics pass on unchanged down the generations. The visitors are like the clones in a range of movies (e.g. Multiplicity, Blade Runner etc.) that are created as fully-formed adults of a specific age. They have an aura of indestructibility, due to their mode of replication (although in Blade Runner the clones are specifically genetically modified to deprive them of this immortality).

In common with clones in the movies, the visitors in Solaris are regarded as inferior copies of an original. It is only over a period of time, and via an experience of self-awareness, that this inferiority starts to slip. Rheya realises that she is not the original women of Kelvin's dreams and starts to gain her own identity. From their inception, clones have their own thoughts and experiences, thereby becoming more individual with time. In Blade Runner (1982) and other movies, clones can grow to become almost human, or even "more human than human".

In Solaris, the visitor/clone's identity is filtered through another's memory, and they recall memories that are shared with the dreamer. The acquisition of memories has often been a difficult plot point to negotiate in cloning movies. In reality, human clones will be like identical twins. They will be born with no memory of who they were cloned from and have minds just like any other baby. Memory implants are the usual device for giving a newly "born" clone a memory (e.g. Blade Runner), or else residual memories persist through some unspecificed but improbable mechanism (e.g Alien Resurrection). Solaris has no need for such devices, because the clones arise organically from the mind, through the agency of an advanced intelligence.

In staying on Solaris, Kelvin (hopefully) waits the next resurrection of his wife's clone. He chooses death and illusion, rather than life and reality back on Earth. Whether she is resurrection again is not revealed in the book or in the Tarkovsky film. In Soderbergh's film, however, there is a Hollywood "happy ending" (accepting that choosing death over life and submitting to illusion over reality is a happy resolution), because Rheya returns to him. A love story reaches resolution. A Dylan Thomas poem sets the tone: "And death shall have no dominion, Though loves be lost love shall not". In Soderbergh's film, the connotations of resurrection and the afterlife also become more explicit. Kelvin's heaven is to spend the rest of his life with Rheya, whatever the status of her humanity (it's his genuine love for her that matters).

The notion of illusion over reality also enables Soderbergh's film to be read in terms of cinema itself. Cinema is an illusion we can escape into. Solaris is the film-maker (in the abstract) or even Soderbergh himself. The escapism of cinema is seductive, but it should not be mistaken for reality. It can (like all art) offer metaphors by which we can better understand reality. However, we must not (like Kelvin) mistake it for reality. Love a sex-symbol film star (get real!).

In Tarkovsky's film it is not the dead wife, but the father who is encountered in the "afterlife" on Solaris. Kelvin finds himself back at his family's rural home. He looks through the window at his father, but it is raining inside the house and not outside. Kelvin realises he is in some sort of limbo. The camera rises high above him to reveal that the family estate has been recreated on an island in Solaris' ocean. This is more a nostalgic return to childhood than a love story, akin to themes in other Tarkovsky movies (e.g. Ivan's Childhood, Nostalgia). Soderbergh's film, in contrast, is altogether more claustrophobic than Tarkovsky's. Kelvin is not seen in any open spaces on Earth and he is not nostalgic for the dirty crowded streets of Earth where it is always raining (presumable this looks suitably apocalyptic to US audiences, although strangely normal for UK viewers). The rain on the window that starts and punctuates Soderbergh's film, however, evokes Tarkovsky in spirit. When the space-station plunges towards the planet, it again appears that Kelvin has somehow returned to Earth. He finds himself in his designer kitchen, but Rheya appears behind him and it becomes clear that this is a simulacra of his home, recreated on Solaris.

The planet in the book and both films is an 'advanced intelligence' that is unknowable. It is a singular giant brain that can shape its environment in any way it chooses. Whole pages of Lem's book are devoted to describing the structures created with its fluid surface. It deciphers the brainwaves of the space-station's inhabitants to shape its surface to resemble aspects of Earth, but its motives must remain obscure. The appearance of the planet in Soderbergh's film is particularly striking. The arcing blue electricity evokes brain activity and artificial computer intelligence. Clones have usually been made in movies by humans, but a highly advanced artificial intelligence is doing the cloning here.

In a twist unique to Soderbergh's version, we learn that Snow has been a replicant ever since he was first encountered by Kelvin. As Kelvin enters the space-station, at the start of the film, he sees blood on the ceiling and walls of the entry hatch. At the end of the film, he finds Snow's body in the ceiling space above these blood marks. Snow's visitor must have killed him soon after first appearing, quickly gaining an independent existence that continues in the absence of the dreamer (just as Gibarian's son still roams the space-station). The other scientists seem unaware that Snow has been usurped by his visitor/clone. "Snow" tells Kelvin that his visitor was his brother. It is therefore likely that a replica of his identical twin has usurped Snow. In life, he was probably in conflict with his twin. As with Kelvin, it is possible that Snow feels guilt, in this case about the death of his identical twin. The twin, however, may have taken his revenge. This is Snow's clone in more senses than one. Identical twins are genetically identical, just like clones (though more so because they also share maternally-inherited mitochondrial DNA in addition to nuclear DNA); although in real-life, of course, identical twins (and human clones) will be distinct individuals. This replication explains Snow's neurotic behaviour and Jeremy Davies' extraordinary out-of-control performance (only slightly lessened for it being reprised in Secretary). The good and evil twin is a classic theme of cloning movies that explore split personality and the nature of identity. In Soderbergh's version (unlike the book and Tarkovsky's film), Snow cannot leave Solaris because he is a clone. He is left locked in his room in a state of increasing mental disintegration. Soderbergh's film is therefore a cousin of Invasion of the Bodysnatchers (1956) and its numerous remakes, and many other films were replicas or clones usurp humans without their presence being instantly discernible.

Kelvin becomes like a visitor/clone himself at the end of Solaris, when he turns his back on Earth. He will become a "shadow" of his former self. The significant moment appears to be when Gibarian's visitor (his young son) reaches out to Chris. Their hands strain to meet ᠬa god and man in the centre of Michelango's Cistine Chapel ceiling (or in this case Solaris and man). As man becomes more like a visitor/clone, the visitors/clones become more human. This links Solaris closely to Blade Runner and other cloning movies. In Blade Runner, technology makes men less human, while the replicants grow in empathy. In Tarkovsky's film, after Hari tries to commit suicide by drinking liquid oxygen, Snow tells Kelvin that the longer she's with him, the more human she will become. Kelvin later tells her that she is more real to him than all the scientific truths that have ever existed. Soderbergh's film takes this further in its conclusion, with Kelvin and Rheya meeting as part-replicant and part-human equals on Solaris. A happy ending and a chilling conclusion.

© Copyright Stephen Nottingham, 2003.