Solaris

Continued light-headed, or perhaps woozy, all afternoon. Didn’t go to Catherine’s birthday dinner. Did go in for interview with prospective postgraduate – and I’m sorry if it sounds heartless, but what a waste of time that was. Well I suppose that in the larger sense, as I gave her advice about where she should consider studying, that it wasn’t wasted – for her.

Later: less weak, but a headache that won’t go away. Perhaps it is an overburdened liver; I obviously need to cut back on the supplements to find that out (unless I have the nerve, and it would take a great deal of that, to go into the clinic and demand a blood test on liver function).

And still later: an episode (‘Strain’) of Law & Order/Special Victims Unit on television, about AIDS, gay men, clubs, a new deadly strain, murders, drugs. The killer targeted PWAs who had infected his brother: and although he was convicted, I was a bit dismayed that no one seemed to feel very strongly that he was a madman. Of course it’s an ambivalent situation – but not that ambivalent, I think.

And, still with this headache, I finally switched over to the last ten minutes of the 2002 remake of Solaris; I had known it was on television, but since I have the DVD, it seemed silly to watch a broadcast. That was, of course, enough for me for the evening: although I understand some of the complaints about the film, I nevertheless think that the remake is extraordinarily beautiful – the colors, the slow, calm words, the eerie, half-unexplained plot, the shimmering music, the bruised, haunted look in Clooney’s eyes, the emotional resonance of the whole: the truth is, it is virtually my favorite movie.

Complaints? Of course: popular culture belongs to everybody, and everybody always has opinions, often negative ones. Film is collaborative, negotiated (like opera and musicals, and much theater); there is hardly a film that doesn’t at moments step down to a lowest common denominator, and slightly spoil its own taste. Most of the complaints are comparisons with Lem’s 1961 book, or Tarkovsky’s 1972 film; I’m not willing to fall for those – the book is too heavily, scientifically conceptual (though brilliant) and the music for the Tarkovsky is not as successful (I can’t hear the Bach out of context; it seems to me more like the quasi-parodic use of classical musics in Kubrick’s 2001).

Yes, towards the end, there are two mistakes: the hand held out to the phantom child is too overtly Sistine; and Rheya’s final speech is too long. But the whole is such a beautifully constructed poem: all the words of the book have been stripped out, and only the emotional core is left – all played out in a claustrophobically narrow range of images, and supported by an utterly beautiful film score by Cliff Martinez, which seems to use what must have been a vast amount of time studying Ligeti’s orchestral works from the 1960s. The music is, in fact, so beautifully made and so hypnotic that, this winter, I listened to it over and over….

Those final words: up until the extra sentences that slightly clutter the ending, they are entirely perfect. They are, in fact, answers to the griefs and nightmares of the past twenty-five years, at least for me. Kelvin has apparently somehow returned to his home; we see a repeat of the first scene where he is making dinner, cuts his finger, etc.; but this time it ends slightly differently – as he washes his finger, the cut vanishes. When he sees that, he knows things are no longer as they were: he turns to see his dead wife walk into the room, and he asks her, his eyes huge with love, grief, and a hint of fear – "Am I alive, or am I dead?" And Rheya, smiling up at him wutg love and comfort, gives the perfect answer, which I have found so strangely consoling: "We don’t have to think like that any more."

I identify almost too completely with the film. It’s heartless of me to say so, of course – not as my reaction to that student interview was heartless, but in a different way; because friends and family inevitably find it important that one not have a heart that seems utterly broken. That’s why I don’t share this film, or my other favorite Urbania (also about grief and the aftermath of loss) very often. But the truth is: those shots from the opening of Solaris, of Kelvin sitting on his bed looking out bleakly at the rain, are just too utterly real for me. And too familiar.

… My headache is – not gone, but – fading….