Solaris

The cinema of Andrej Tarkovsky has grown on me slowly, it is rather advanced, and I´ve needed some time to assimilate the fullnes of his ideas.

Allow me to first mention my cultural background in brief. I grew up in a place with virtually zero access to sci-fi, of any kind. When I moved to the capital city, the library had a pathetic collection of sci-fi. Not until I moved to england in 1996 did I find a usable collection, the tiny city of Maidstone had an infinitely better library than my countrys capital. Norway is a rather culturally poor country.
Incidentally, it was here I saw my first star trek movie in a cinema, I had never seen an episode of the TV-series, and no star trek movie has ever been shown on film in norway.

So, needless to say, aquiring, or even hearing about Stanislaw Lems book Solaris, is sort of a pipe dream if you grow up in norway. And I only managed to download a copy of it in english two years ago from the world wide internet(illegal, yes i know).

So, I´ve seen the movie a few times in art-cinemas, and I bought a dvd of it and watched it at home a few times more. Then Steven Soderbergh makes a remake of it with George Clooney as Kelvin.

I didn´t know what to make of it. My first thought was something like "disgusting".
I then thought "why?"
and then I thought "have they even seen Tarkovskys version?"

And then, finally, i thought "forget about it, just forget about it, forget about it"

Until a couple of days ago. I was bored, there was nothing in the video-store I really wanted to see, I had a bottle of red wine to keep my spirit up... so I rented it.

I think they got the planet right, obviously there wasn´t digital fx technology when Tarkovsky made his.

The rest of it I think illustrated the difference between the european and the american mentality more clearly than anything I can think of. I hardly know where to begin:

I think it was drenched in sentimentality, devoid of poetry, bombastic.

After watching it, I immediatly watched it again with the commentary track, I hadn´t realised James Cameron had produced it, I´m an old fan of his.

Cameron and Soderbergh said they thought Tarkovskys version was cold, clinical and sterile. I, ofcourse, couldn´t disagree more.

But this is really about psyche, and not film-making. As we meet the unknown, how do we face it? If we were to meet another intelligent species in the cosmos, how would we react, how could we understand?

In star trek and many other shows like it, the other space-faring species humanity meet usually walk on two legs, have easily identifiable(human) motivations, speak english(or the universal translator has no problems). It is interesting in the history of sci-fi that one of its greatest authors simply avoided this problem in most of his books(Philip K. Dick), whilst another(William Gibson) poses the problem but no solutions in neuromancer; and he speaks not of an alien species, but an artificial intelligence built by humans -but it is still alien enough that one cannot make heads and tails of its thinking.

I have no clue, nor had Lem or Tarkovsky, or Soderbergh, but while Lem and Tarkovsky at least pose the problem, soderbergh goes american and makes the problem be about humanity. Kelvin is struggling with his lost love, not an alien species, right out of some soap opera. And it is remarkable, when you look at the film landscape, how many of the films that could be classified as high art are european and how few are american. While europe looks out, america looks in, while europe more or less conquered the world a few centuries ago, america now tries to make world become america -so it won´t need conquering. And ofcourse, the european conquest failed, as will the american one.

We cannot even reconcile the different wants and needs of our own species, much less the fullness of cultural differences(which many would argue is what star trek is really about), and as a result, war has raged for millenias. I am no historian but I think I can say with some degree of certainty that there hasn´t been peace since the days of the roman empire. Long distance communications seems to have only made problem bigger. Rome is still with us.

And now the war is global, no longer about nationality, or even economy, or even religion. It is about hatred, we hate what we cannot or will not understand, we destroy what is different from us, we look ever more inward. Not in the narrow sense of nationalism, but into ourselves as individuals, excluding everything that costs any kind of effort to grasp.

Modern technology gives us all a television channel. A one way output for ourselves, people can talk back through their own one way channels, and as such, we talk ever more. And we talk ever more past each other. As we no longer need to stop and really communicate we become ever more isolated. Alone. Adrift in the cosmos, a pretty blue sphere plagued by endless war, no longer in the large scale of armies, but on a personal level. A man plants a bomb in bus, a train, a park, a building; or he straps it on himself so he won´t have to live with it. Who is he fighting? Does he even know himself?

A man lays down in tower with a sniper-rifle, to shoot whoever walks by, why? Why not.

War in this time is personal war, the war waged by the individual against whoever randomly walks by. Note how I avoid the use of the word innocent, for whom is innocent? For if we fight not with weapons, do we not fight with feelings? Do we not deliver devastating blows, for what purpose? Are we not all injured, and do we not all hide this weakness? Is it weakness?

I feel like crying.

b