 |
Clooney battles the lip-
eating creatures of Solaris. |
This is the third in a series of blog posts about Stanisław Lem's science fiction novel
Solaris and related films. In the
first blog post of this series, I complained about the non-linear narration provided by Lem to readers of
Solaris. Below, I provide my linearized synopsis of the story. In the
second blog post of this series, I expressed my surprise at the ending of the 1972 movie that was based on Lem's novel. Here in this final blog post of the series, I comment on the 2002 film version of
Solaris.
"The Book is the Alien"
 |
| George as Chris |
In the novel, readers learn that Solaristics, the study of the mysterious planet Solaris, has fallen into disarray. In its golden era, Solaristics was a booming field of scientific investigation and teams with thousands of researchers actively worked to study the living ocean of planet Solaris. Solaris was a tough nut to crack.
Born after the boom years of Solaristics, Kris (Kris in
1961, Chris in 2002) Kelvin did research under the guidance of Dr. Gibarian. The two scientists (from different disciplines) collaborated after Gibarian learned of Kelvin's doctoral thesis which described similarities between
human brain electrical activity and patterns of activity in the living ocean of Solaris.
 |
| Gibarian is dead. |
At the beginning of the novel, Kelvin travels for 16 months across the interstellar depths to Solaris. Only three scientists remain at the research station: Gibarian, Snow and Sartorious. Arriving at the station, Kelvin discovers that Gibarian is dead, having been the first resident of the station to receive a "visitor", an artificial life form produced by the alien ocean and "gifted" to Gibarian. With time, all the residents of the station receive their own such "gift", including Kelvin.
 |
-Berton 1972-
surgically removed
from the 2002
version of Solaris |
Before he died, Gibarian left clues for Kelvin that lead him to read some old records concerning the experience of an earlier Solarist, Andre Berton. Berton saw what appeared to be an artificial humanoid figure on the surface of the ocean, apparently an early attempt by the Solarians to create an artificial human. Inexplicably, Berton's report was dismissed by most of his peers as an hallucination. However, there was evidence that this first artificial human was in fact a replica of the child of another Solarist who had fallen into the living ocean. Berton reported that the replica child was strangely large.
Size Matters
 |
Soderbergh mutates Lem's large woman
into a small boy who pops up around the
station whenever he is needed
to advance confuse the plot. |
Shortly after Gibarian's death and the arrival of Kelvin at the research station, Kelvin sees Gibarian's "visitor", an unusually large human-like artificial woman, an artificial life form who prefers to remain with Gibarian's dead body inside a freezer, but "her" body does not freeze. Baffled by what he has experienced in his first few hours at the station, Kelvin seriously conciders the idea that his brain has been attacked by "
emanations from the ocean", causing him to hallucinate.
"
the romance all but overpowers the sci-fi premise" (
comment on the 2002 film)
Self vs Non-Self
 |
| Chris and Rheya (2002) |
Kelvin tries to determine if his brain is still functioning normally and is under his own control; satisfied that he is still sane, he falls asleep. During his first night at the research station, Kelvin receives his own "
gift", an artificial copy of his wife, Rheya, a young woman who died ten years previously. Kelvin uses a "neutron microscope" to examine a sample of Rheya's blood which has cells and molecules, but those structures are composed of collections of neutrinos. The artificial humanoids are essentially immortal, having the ability to spontaneously repair structural damage to their artificial bodies.
 |
"Rheya, I have the results.
You are definitely pregnant!"
Dr. Sartorious was surgically removed
from the 2002 Solaris film.
He should be there as a member of the
station's staff, a clinic doctor who does
Rheya's pregnancy testing. |
Even a sample of Rheya's blood in a test tube, when destroyed by acid, spontaneously regenerates itself! By the end of Lem's novel, Kelvin and Snow send a report to Earth describing the now-confirmed ability of the alien ocean to construct artificial humanoid life forms (
Phi-Creatures). The Rheya character in the novel (who lives for several weeks on the station with Kelvin) is an artificial construct with a human-like mind that contains memories of Rheya taken from Kelvin's mind.
Readers of Lem's novel
Solaris never see the visitors that Dr. Snow and Dr. Sartorious receive as "gifts" from the Solarians. However, Dr. Kelvin hears the footsteps of the visitor who is with Sartorious and imagines that his "guest" is small, like a human child or a dwarf. When the artificial Rheya first joins Kelvin at the station, she has a strange compulsion to always be near him. In one part of the book, Snow sits talking to Kelvin while he has his hand inside a cabinet, as if holding someone's hand, someone hidden inside the cabinet.
I suspect that the artificial humans that Sartorious -and possibly Snow- received as their "visitors" were unusually small artificial humans, at the other size extreme from the artificial humanoid seen by Berton and the one "gifted" to Gibarian. It took practice before the Solarians could make nearly perfect replicas of humans.
Robots
There is also the possibility that one or both of the "guests" for Dr. Snow and/or Sartorious was the replica of a robot. It could make some sense that the cybernetician (Dr. Snow) might be thinking obsessively about one of the station's robots. When Kelvin first meets Snow, he literally has blood on his hands. I prefer to think that Snow found Gibarian's dead body and while moving the body to the freezer, he had to deal with the giant 'woman' who was Gibarian's "guest". Most likey 'she' was the source of the blood on Snow's hands.
 |
| Snow's bot |
Soderbergh's choice to depict one of the scientists at the Solaris research station as a woman raises the question: since Lem depicted the science of Solaristics as the exclusive domain of male scientists, then were those men simply forced to live for years without women while they worked at the Solaris research station? Lem did, occasionally, write about '
female' robots and even robots that could kill humans (see
this), and I can't stop myself from imagining that Dr. Snow might have availed himself of the companionship of a 'female' robot. If the Solarians began duplicating the station's robots, then Snow may have been forced to put all of the robots into storage.
Perfection
Kelvin, recipient of the final artificial humanoid, seems to have received a nearly perfect physical copy of his dead wife. I believe that the Solarians were gradually learning how to make better and better artificial humans. Sartorious works relentlessly to find a way to rid himself of his less-than-perfect "visitor", eventually devising a dis-integrator that can disrupt the artificial neutrino structures of the "guests". The artificial Rheya is so perfect that Kelvin falls in love with her.
 |
| finders keepers |
However, after the artificial Rheya is destroyed by Sartorious, Kelvin reacts strangely. As if suddenly freed from his infatuation with the artificial Rheya, he suggests that the entire ocean of Solaris must be destroyed.
"
The journalists pounced on my thesis, and in some newspapers my name was coupled with grotesque headlines- 'The Despairing Jelly', 'The Planet in Orgasm'." -Kris Kelvin
I believe that Kelvin had been in some sort of telepathic linkage to the Solarians, possibly with the Solarians studying his reactions to the artificial copy of his wife. When Kelvin first realizes that he has been used by the aliens, he resents how he was manipulated by the Solarians.
It also seems possible that the Solarians were working to telepathically guide Kelvin, Snow and Sartorious towards "beaming" the recorded mind pattern of Kelvin's waking consciousness into the ocean. There are hints in the story that the Solarians can most efficiently access human thoughts while a person is asleep, but they may be baffled by human waking consciousness and human language. Soderbergh's film version of the story implies quite strongly that Chris develops a kind of telepathic communications link to Solaris.
 |
| brain structure (image source) |
By the
late 1950s, powerful microscopes were being used to reveal the structure of synapses in brain tissue. I wonder if Lem had seen electronmicroscopy images of brain tissue. Are the
mimoids described by Lem as sprouting from the surface of Solaris his imagined equivalent of the complex microscopic structures within our own brains?
At the end of his novel, Lem describes a visit by Kelvin to an old mimoid and we finally get to "see" the playful interaction of the alien ocean with Kelvin as he touched the ocean.
After Kelvin's mind pattern is sent into the ocean and the
anti-Phi-Creature dis-integrator beam has at least temporarily cleared the research station of "visitors", Kelvin decides to stay at the research station, waiting to see if the Solarians will begin another round of their experiments, possibly re-uniting Kelvin with an even more perfect version of his wife. In the the 2002
Solaris film, there is no such ending; instead, Chris is told by Solaris not to return to Earth and Chris is placed into a kind of virtual reality existence with Rheya.
Ocean #3
 |
2002: a third depiction of
the Solaris ocean |
Might the 2002
Solaris film be a better science fiction movie than
the 1972 version? Apparently some fans of
Solaris
(and
even Lem) were upset that the 2002 film put its focus on the relationship between
Chris Kelvin and his wife, Rheya. I was disappointed that the huge budget for this movie did not include some CGI
mimoids and symmetriads.
I don't mind science fiction stories that
concern themselves with romantic relationships. I'm not offended by the
idea of a
Solaris movie about using an alien-produced artificial woman as a way to get a "second chance" in a failed relationship. I interpret Lem's novel as suggesting that the Solarians selected Kelvin because of his special pattern of brain activity, a pattern that may have contributed to his marital difficulties with Rheya. When Kelvin reaches Solaris, he enters into a kind of psychotherapy at the "hands" of the Solarians (well, at least at the hands of Rheya).
"
It's so refreshing to read a sci-fi script which isn't aimed at 12-year-olds!" (source)
In an online
script (dated October 4, 2001), Steven Soderbergh makes a connection between Kelvin's lack of felicity with words and the fact that he was chosen to make contact with the Solarians. In the film, Gibarian invites Kelvin to Solaris, knowing that Kelvin will get a chance to "see his dead wife". Is it the Solarians, looking into Gibarian's mind, who select Kelvin as their tool for making Contact?
 |
Wait... where am I?
Rheya and Chris (2002) Earth/Solaris |
I like the idea that Kelvin may have had an unusual mind that made him particularly well suited for telepathic contact with the Solarians. Human language provides a way for human individuals to share information and guide how they interact socially. Lacking the human concept of "individuals", the telepathically-linked Solarians might struggle to understand human language and prefer to work within the domain of non-linguistic human thought. Kelvin's unusual brain might be particularly well-suited for study by the Solarians while they try to understand the humans who have arrived on Solaris.
 |
| a Solarian |
That 2001
Solaris script adopted the same ending that was put into
the 1972 movie. That ending is a logical projection of the ending that Lem gave to his novel, a kind of ending that probably suits many movie-goers. However, I would prefer an "ending" that is a new beginning. Rather than trap Kelvin in some kind of virtual reality simulation where his wish to be with fake-Rheya is fulfilled, I would prefer to see Kelvin interacting with an artificial Solarian: a communications device that has humanoid appearance, but which allows for verbal dialog between the Solarians and we humans.
 |
| Kelvin vs Rheya. Who is the puppet? |
Soderbergh's imagined backstory for Kelvin and Rheya strikes me as being entirely foreign to Lem's novel, like a tumor grafted onto the story. Similarly, as a film project,
Solaris (2002) seems like a tumor grafted onto Soderbergh's film-making career. Apparently Soderbergh "
really loved" the 1972 film version of
Solaris, but he had his own interpretation of Lem's book. I suppose Lem's
Solaris is destined to be viewed differently by every reader of the story simply because of all the ambiguity that Lem wrote into it.
 |
Solaris Cloonaris |
Disintegration
I get the feeling that Soderbergh has little interest in science fiction and he was not trying to make a film "about" the planet Solaris, rather, he seemingly just wanted to play with the Kelvin-Rheya relationship. Not that there's anything wrong with that. In Lem's
Solaris, he describes failed attempts by Solarists to remove samples of the Solaris ocean from that world and take them back to Earth for study... the samples simply disintegrated. Can we really expect anything more from an attempt to extract the Kelvin-Rheya relationship from
Solaris and explore it in a Soderbergh film?
The Better Date Flick ?
 |
| George going topless (and also bottomless) |
The
Solaris nipples of the new millennium belong to George Clooney. 😞 I feel sorry for anyone who saw a trailer for this film and tried to treat it as a "date flick" not only because of the choice of whose nipples to feature on the big screen. More importantly, Soderbergh crafted more of a horror story than a love story.
Snow Job
I love the idea that we only see an artificial copy of Dr. Snow in the 2002 film version of
Solaris.
When Snow first walks on stage in Lem's novel, he acts like he is
really messed up and not hitting on all his cognitive cylinders.
However, by the end of the novel
Solaris, Snow has regained his equilibrium; he is no longer haunted by his "guest" and he is a rational scientist once more.
Is the alien entity in
Solaris a conscious, thinking being or just some mindless automaton? Lem leaves that as an open question. Do the Solarians use telepathy? In his novel, I believe that Lem provided evidence to support the idea that the aliens of Solaris used a form of telepathy to communicate with the scientists on the research station. For some reason, the aliens could not make use of human language, but they could seemingly transmit ideas into the subconscious mind and dreams of Kelvin.
 |
Kelvin has past experience using neutron micro nanoscopy
and he is the first person to look at a tissue sample
(some of Rheya's blood) from a Phi-Creature.
Based on what he observes by nanoscopy, he concludes
that the Phi-Creature are made of neutrinos, not atoms. |
After a few days on the station, in the chapter called "The Monsters", suddenly Kelvin knows things about Dr. Sartorius that he should not know. In particular, he believes that Sartorius is going down an erroneous path in creating the device that will disintegrate the "gifts". Kelvin also knows that he would not be able to convince Sartorius that he is using a mistaken theory of neutrino physics, so he recruits Dr. Snow to try to change the mind of Sartorius. I must conclude that the Solarians are telepathically providing Kelvin with information about the inner thoughts of Sartorius.
 |
| The Neutrino Physics of Solaris |
Kelvin is a psychologist, so how does he suddenly know physics as well as does Sartorius, a man who has had training in that discipline? In the novel, Lem has made clear that the Solarians know a vast amount about physics. I must conclude that the Solarians have telepathically provided Kelvin with his understanding of neutrino physics. Why? So as to divert Sartorius from creating a too powerful version of the neutrino field dis-integrator and interfering with the experiments being performed by the Solarians? So that Sartorius will instead work on a method for beaming Kelvin's thought pattern (that of his waking consciousness) into the ocean? Sadly, Lem made no effort to be clear about any of this in the story, so Soderbergh is free to ignore these particular questions. 😞
How do the "guests" arrive inside the research station? Teleportation? Again, Lem could not be bothered to say. 😞
 |
| meeting of minds |
True to the novel, Soderbergh's film version of
Solaris
has a scene with discussion of God. However, that scene comes earlier in the film (it is in the last chapter of the book).
Soderbergh moved the whole issue of god up and adds in enough ambuguity so that some viewers have imagined the "organic ocean" as a
higher-dimensional entity that can be thought of as a god. However, I
feel that both Lem's original
Solaris and Soderbergh's film are
about people, not gods. At the end of the novel, Kelvin is waiting for
more interaction with "gifts" from the Solaris ocean. At the end of
Soderbergh's film, Kelvin takes the opportunity to further his
"relationship" with the sentient ocean; he does not run away and return
to Earth, he dives in. This is the true spirit of science fiction:
pursuit of the unknown, searching for information and human
understanding of our world.
 |
| seductive ocean |
Soderbergh claims to have been impressed by the feeling of "
psychological claustrophobia"
when he read Lem's novel. I agree that Lem created a sense of
"isolation" for characters like Kelvin, which may have been due to Lem
throwing Kelvin into contact with an artificial life form that does not
really understand anything about human social behavior. Kelvin was able
to withstand the disruptive effects of that contact with the alien ocean
and even sit down and work out a theory for how to neutralize
neutrinos: this might be the ultimate therapy for an autistic child: the living ocean of Solaris.
 |
Rheya and Chris collaborate
to make a baby; Solaris version 4.0
in the Ekcolir Reality |
An important issue is: do the "guests" evolve? Is the
ocean learning from its experiments? The truly romantic interpretation
is that Kelvin is summoned from Earth, the one person who can take the
true measure of Solaris. Kelvin's scale extends far enough 'down' to allow measurement of
the nature of this autistic ocean. And Kelvin gets his reward: a chance
to start over again with Rheya. For we humans, if you want to study
the molecular neurobiology of memory in a research lab, then the mouse running in its maze must get a reward at the end of the
experiment, even if it is only a sip of sugar water.
Soderbergh
put a child on screen as one of the alien-created human replicas. Maybe the
"guest" who can best adapt and learn is one in the form of a human
child. It would have been fun to allow Kelvin and the artificial Rheya to produce a baby that would grow into the tool for efficient communication between the Solarians and the humans.
Weird Science
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| Clooneris - the wonders of marketing |
Neutrinos were discovered in 1956. Lem started
writing Solaris in 1958. The
Phi-Creatures (copied humans) are made of
neutrinos and Lem's neutron microscope inexplicably uses magnets. I blame writers such as
Isaac Asimov
(positronics) and Lem (
neutrinos) for my own use of
hierions and sedrons
as imaginary particles. I can make my imaginary particles of Future Science do whatever the plot calls for without worrying that I am violating the physical properties of an actual particle that is already known to physicists.
Soderbergh took the opportunity to write
mysterious
Higgs anti-bosons and The Incredible Growing Planet into his version of the story.
"
Solaris started taking on mass exponentially." -artificial Snow in
Solaris, 2002
It is important
that science fiction stories be updated in this way, making them new and
approachable for each generation. Soderbergh's silly science is no worse than Lem's original imaginary science.
 |
ice house
silly but pretty |
I'm willing to accept the weird science that Lem wrote into Solaris, but in a 1972 review of the novel (download the 30th issue of the fanzine
Speculation here), Tony Sudbery forcefully criticized several elements of the "future science" in Lem's story, particularly his idea that you could make an artificial humanoid out of neutrinos. Sudbery made the point that building things out of neutrinos by using magnetic fields to hold the neutrinos in place (as claimed by Lem) is "a trick roughly equivalent to building a house out of bricks consisting of water held together by safety pins." Sudbery's complaints ultimately boil down to the fact that Lem was not a scientist and so some readers of science fiction are going to be disappointed by Lem's fake (imaginary) science and illogical story elements. However, film makers such as Soderbergh and most movie goers are not likely to be concerned about such deficiencies. We can still ask, was Soderbergh's film true to Lem's original science fiction story? I believe that it was, but I'd call it a kind of "Lem Lite". Lem mentioned robots and then never developed that thread in
Solaris... Soderbergh mentions the "AI system" at the Solaris research station and then does nothing interesting with it. 😥
"...
cybernetics lies at the heart of all Lem's work and thought." -Michael Kandel
Lem had an early interest in robots and artificial life, but his aborted medical career and work in a maternity ward also influenced his story telling. Some elements of the story that we see in
Solaris were also found in Lem's 1946 story "
The Man From Mars". In that story (Lem's first published Sci Fi), there is unsuccessful "first contact" with a telepathic alien that seems to be some strange type of artificial life form.
Mechaneurystyka
Before there was a
Solaris movie, there was a 1963 film “Ikarie XB-1” which has the robot (see the image to the right on this page) that I had hoped to see in a
Solaris film. Also in Lem's story about travel to Alpha Centauri, we get to deal with pregnancy in space. This film was based on Lem's 1955 novel
The Megellanic Cloud. In his story, a couple hundred Earthlings set off to Alpha Centauri and eventually make "first contact" with aliens who live in that star system.
Artificial Life
Why Kelvin?
Lord Kelvin was one of the last
"scientific" opponents of the idea that the human species slowly evolved
over the course of billions of years. By applying physical science concepts and making simplistic assumptions,
he estimated that the Earth was only about 40 million years old. Lem
seemed to suggest that the alien life form of planet Solaris had arisen
by some sort of spontaneous generation. "
It
is therefore not just a humanoid robot or an electronic brain but also a
hypothetical gaseous–magnetic system, with which we can have a chat,
that belongs to a class of systems endowed with consciousness…" (
source).
Lem (or anyone else) makes a major error by assuming that consciousness
can exist in a liquid or a gas -or a non-material soul- without firm 3D material
structures. Consciousness must be embodied in complex physical systems where stable structures hold memories.
How did
Solaris come to exist? There are useful insights in the essay ("
The Open-Ended Parables of Stanislaw Lem and 'Solaris'") by
Darko Suvin that was published as an Afterword in the early English language editions of the book. In that essay, Suvin mentions other works of science fiction that had previously been published by Lem, including short stories that were compiled as
The Book of Robots.
Suvin tells us that Lem had read some of the work of Isaac Asimov, but it is not clear how strongly Lem was influenced by Asimov's stories about positronic robots.
Reading
Solaris, I could not understand 1) why there is a chapter in
Solaris called "
The Monsters" or 2) why the robots at the research station had to be inactivated or 3) why Dr. Snow is described as being a "
cybernetician". It is easy for me to imagine that
Solaris started out as a story about the robotic helpers at a space station and what happens when they are "duplicated" by an alien force.
"
Lem’s works are parables speaking about ourselves through startling situations in other worlds." -
Darko Suvin
A Parable
In 1964, Lem's short story "
Two Monsters" was included in an English-language collection of stories. In this short parable, a
Metallic Monster appears on a planet (seemingly arising spontaneously from the ancient magnetic wreckage of a destroyed city). The Great Cybernator, the Dynamicizer and the Physicker all attempt to deal with the
Monster by constructing "electroknights" (see the image to the right), one of which (named 'Antimatt', the one made by the Physicker) is made of a special form of matter that can slip between the atoms of ordinary matter. The electroknights made by the Cybernator and the Dynamicizer are helpless against the
Monster. The Antimatt can destroy the
Monster, but then a duplicate
Monster is quickly created to replace it. To make a long story short, it is revealed that everyone we have met in the story so far is an artificial life form, descended from robots that were made long ago by humans. The humans have now found these descendants of runaway robots and proceed to destroy them (the first step towards that goal was creating the "
Metallic Monster").
It is fun to imagine that maybe there was an original (and now lost) story about how the Solarians duplicated robots inside the Solaris research station. We can imagine that the duplicated robots had only partial memories (programming) which led to chaos. Maybe the human staff had to defend themselves by means of an anti-
Phi-Creature shield made by Sartorius? If such an aborted story existed, it might have been a Sci Fi tale with Lem's version of
Forbidden Planet's robot and protective force-shields. In a 1971 review of
Solaris by
Peter Miller, he compares
Solaris to
Forbidden Planet in terms of the problems that can arise by turning memories into "living" forms.
 |
Monster from the id (Forbidden Planet)
The Monster can't get through the
anti-neutrino electrical shield. |
Maybe the planet Solaris was a metal-poor world where the biologically-evolved residents never developed space travel. With time, they developed advanced nanotechnology and transformed themselves and the entire planet into one all-absorbing artificial life form. For humans, the distinction between self and "non-self" is fundamental. We use our big brains to predict each-others behavior. We have a sophisticated body surface barrier and a complex immune system for defense against non-self organisms, but the solipsistic Solaris ocean is quite different.
 |
| successful alien contact (video) |
Contact
The self-suficient life form of Solaris can entertain itself while it waits quietly through the long eons for creatures like we humans to visit their world. Still, I prefer to think that with time, meaningful contact and communication would be possible between the Solarians and we humans. In the end, is Kelvin together with his beloved Rheya or with the mysterious Solarian(s)? Soderbergh allows us to decide for ourselves, but when making First Contact, what would we want an alien being to know about we humans?
 |
Retro-SIHA 2002
The Search for Interesting Aliens |
This is a Test
Maybe it is a good First Contact if the Solarians can come to see that a man like Kelvin would do anything, take any wild chance that came his way to correct his error, to recover the love of his life. 👍👍
 |
| Trapped on Solaris |
Oh, the horror. However, that (above) is only the "glass is half full" view of Soderbergh's
Solaris. The other perspective is that by the end of the film, our two lovers are trapped in a Hi Tek hell. Soderbergh showed quite clearly that the copy of Rheya is incomplete and flawed and cannot function as a stable human being. The pessimists (realists) in the audience have been given good reason to believe that within a day or two, Rheya will again sink into a melancholy state, recognizing that she is trapped for eternity in a fake life with a fake and poorly remembered half-mind, a simulated and defective mind that is a persistent generator of self-doubts and woe.
Retro-SIHA: 2009,
Knowing
Related Reading: the 2018 film
Annihilation
"
Super-Neutron", short story by Isaac Asimov
See Also:
The Portable Star, short story by Isaac Asimov
Next:
return to 1939
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