Andrei Tarkovsky's Incomprehensible Planet-Sized Brain

Speaking of science fiction... 

Andrei Tarkovsky is one of my favorite artists in any medium, and his films are rare examples of how popular art can explore spiritual questions with complexity, humanity, and humility.  His third film, Solaris, is the story of a widower named Kris Kelvin who travels to a space station to study what appears to be a sentient ocean. Tarkovsky and his admirers often view it as something of a failure compared to the rest of his work. I disagree with this opinion, but I understand it.  Unlike Tarkovky’s other films, Solaris is firmly rooted in a specific genre, and I might concede that it is slightly weighed down by melodrama from time to time. One could also argue that it is open-ended when it shouldn't be, and it isn't open-ended when it should be (the ending, for example.)

Supposedly, this movie was (in part) a response to Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. That movie diminished humanity, depicting us as insects. In it, everything we've done and built is insignificant. From apes using bones as tools to men on a spaceship there has been no meaningful progress. We are stuck in a holding pattern until an archetypal person (David Bowman) comes into contact with a mysterious Monolith. Staunchly atheist, Kubrick made a movie about waiting around for divine intervention.  I love Kubrick's movie, but its view of humanity is pretty low.

2001 needed a response, and Tarkovsky, whose glacial-pacing and meticulous visuals are superficially similar to Kubrick’s, was the perfect man to match Kubrick's classic in terms of quality and aesthetic achievement. For material, Tarkovsky used a novel by Stanislaw Lem and I get the impression that the two men saw the story differently because of their divergent worldviews. Lem was interested in What's Out There, and what would happen when humanity encountered something beyond our understanding. Tarkovsky doesn't seem as interested in Sentient Space Oceans except for their capacity to affect human lives and relationships.

This is typical of the pragmatic slant Tarkovsky seems to have on religion: God doesn't matter - the subjective experience of belief is what matters. This slant can also be seen in Tarkovsky’s masterpiece Stalker, a story about a man who works as a covert guide (a “stalker”) through a forbidden place called the Zone that is rumored to be dangerous and powerful. Maybe the Zone is real and maybe not, and maybe it is what the Stalker thinks it is and maybe not, but the film is far more interested in what that belief DOES to the Stalker and his family.

Like Stalker, Solaris dispenses with any overarching metanarratives or Absolute Truths in order to focus on the subjective, personal experiences of one person. Kris Kelvin matters. He isn't a generic stand-in for "humanity". This makes him an ideal stand-in for humanity.

A good friend of mine found the “power of love” theme in the film trite and disappointing. I posed this question to him: Which relationship in your life actually matters more? Your relationship with your wife, or your relationship with a literally-existing Godlike being?

Interpersonal relationships matter more, in Tarkovsky's view, than our relationship to what Physicist Prophets can bring us. In the film, a man named Snaut says "We don't need other worlds, we need a mirror". In other words, we need the world we've already got, and all the confused, messy people who inhabit it. 

The ocean on Solaris can never really be understood by Kris and Snaut, unlike the Monolith in 2001, which follows an easily-understood pattern, operating mechanically. Kubrick's god is smooth and tidy and objective, orderly and east to grasp.  It is a consummate professional, dull, systemic and rigd.  it is exactly what many atheists think theists believe in.  Tarkovsky's god, on the other hand, is a confused mess of feelings and inconsistent actions. When they beam Kris' thoughts to the surface of the ocean, they actually change the way it interacts with them - like a new covenant. Tarkovsky takes a (forgive the clunky phrase) Postmodern-Humanist-Christian view of things, where the experience is unstable and unpredictable, while Kubrick spins a good old-fashioned Enlightenment yarn about science.

Soalris is a flawlessly executed film and all that, but I love it mainly because it reflects where my own thinking has been lately.

Gun to your head: Would you rather encounter the 2001 Monolith, or the Solaris Ocean-Brain?

Robots and Aliens and Existential Questions

Released this month, Ridley Scott’s Prometheus is a return to the iconic motifs that comprise the two sci-fi films that bolstered his career early on. I admire the film for attempting to engage with big questions, but it chokes on its own hubris at times while at others it appears to give up its ambitions altogether, settling for something perfectly mundane. It’s disappointing, not because it’s a bad movie (it’s not) but because it’s an average movie that should have been terrific. I agree with the consensus that the film is a narrative mess saved by striking visuals and terrific acting from the two or three actors who are given something substantial to work with. Watching it, you get a sense that a much longer movie was slashed to appease the short attention-span contemporary audiences are trained to have.  The horror is oddly neutered, the plotting and pacing are clumsy. 

Technically a prequel to Alien (set in the same universe, utilizing the backstory of the nefarious Weyland Corporation and the “Space Jockey” corpse seen in Alien) but thematically closer to Blade Runner (questions of creation, responsibility and existence) this film feels like a return to the well, or a belated victory-lap/expansion similar to David Lynch’s Inland Empire, which takes the structures and themes dealt with so perfectly in the Lost Highway / Mulholland Drive duo and stretches them out into a rambling cinematic improvisation. Unnecessary, but interesting. Prometheus stretches too much to connect to Alien: A perfectly satisfying ending is ruined by a tacked-on epilogue showing the origin of that film’s creature. It’s a terrible scene that has little to do with the rest of Prometheus.

You could argue that the symbolism in both Alien and Blade Runner is heavy-handed, but I’m a fan of Ingmar Bergman so I obviously have no problem with heavy-handed symbolism. I actually find both of those films to be totally effective in their use of symbolism and open-ended exploration of open-ended themes. 

There’s a scene in Alien where Ian Holm’s character attempts to kill a woman by shoving a rolled-up pornographic magazine down her throat. Soon after, he is beheaded, and white liquid spurts out of his mangled body (he is an android). Take this into account alongside H.R. Geiger’s iconic creature design (a big part of Geiger’s M.O. is to make everything evoke bio-mechanical genitals,) and the terror-of-sex theme smashes out pretty loudly.

Blade Runner climaxes with a human-like artificial life-form asking his creator (who calls him “the prodigal son”) for more life. When he is denied, he says, exhausted and frustrated “I wasn’t more life, father” (or “fucker” in the sub par theatrical cut), kisses his creator, and then kills him by applying pressure to the man’s eyes. Soon after, the prodigal son is cradling a dove in the rain on a rooftop, a nail pushed through his hand, as he quietly dies, lamenting that the extraordinary things he has seen and done will vanish.

The symbolism in those films is not very subtle, but it is not overbearing either, and here's why:  If those big themes aren’t your bag, you can always enjoy Alien as a well-crafted monster movie (probably the best monster movie ever made, in fact), and you can always enjoy Blade Runner as a futuristic film noir about a bounty hunter pursuing a band of outlaws. Both of these films are terrific on ether level.

Prometheus doesn’t allow us to enjoy it on multiple levels.  The religious/reproductive themes occur literally within the reality of the film.  The characters are aware of what their experiences imply, and they discuss them openly and literally.  For example:  A temple-like place that appears to be an alien weapons factory (installed by the race of aliens who ignited the start of all life on earth) is discovered to have been built “two-thousand years ago”.  Based on the timeline of the film, that would mean our creators began making these bio-weapons in what we call the first century.  The implication is muddled, but obviously Christian.  Did we anger “The Engineers” (as the character Elizabeth Shaw names them) by killing Christ? By allowing Christianity to flourish?  (I’m aware that not everything that happened in that century had to do with Christianity, but given the film’s explicit Christian motifs, I have to assume…) 
                                     

I’m excited to see Hollywood tackle big, unanswerable questions, and I’m excited whenever science fiction is used to do what it does so uniquely well (that is, when it is used to contemplate, ask questions and explore ideas not easily explored by other genres.)  Unfortunately, this film’s fundamentalist/materialist insistence on literally locating all of its ideas in the physical realm inhabited b the characters makes it less like Persona and more like Ancient Aliens. 

I'm not interested in Lisa Brown's vagaina (or Jase Bolger's penis)

News from my home state of Michigan...

For speaking out against new abortion legislation, (or perhaps for the manner in which they spoke out,) two State Representatives were banned from speaking on the last day of this latest session of the House of Representatives.

Rep. Barb Byrum suggested that the legislation be amended to require men to prove that their lives are in danger before receiving a vasectomy.  I'm not a fan of joke legislation, but I can accept that it is an effective way to impact public opinion.  I'm not sure I can accept the equivalency of abortion and vasectomy, but I respect Byrum's point, however imperfectly made. 

Rep. Lisa Brown's comment?  "I'm flattered you're all so interested in my vagina. But no means no."  There has been a strong reaction to the idea that Brown is being punished for using the word "vagina" but I think she is being punished for using sarcasm (which is as unprofessional as it is un-clever).  I doubt anyone is bothered by her (probably intentional) evocation of rape and sexual assault with the words "no means no".  They should be.  Comparing this legislation to rape is intellectually dishonest, and throwing around rape humorously, even if it is pointed humour employed in a serious situation, is tasteless.

That being said, Brown's comments are hardly the most offensive thing said in a legislative session, and Byrum's are even milder.  This is an obvious case of one political party censuring and silencing another.  I wish I could say that this kind of thing is shocking.  It isn't. 

What is so interesting to me about this incident is how it highlights the impossibility of approaching the abortion issue in an intellectually honest way.  I sympathize with these two lawmakers for that reason. 

I've written at length about abortion before, but I'm more twisted up now.  Please excuse the following burst of cognitive dissonance, I just have to get it out of my system:  I wish there was a way to frame this issue that didn't involve simplistic narratives depicting a two-sided war between backwoods Biblical-fundamentalists/True-Believers and enlightened/myopic cosmo-feminists.  Coercing a woman to do something isn't very Christian, and squelching the act of childbirth isn't very feminist.  No, both of those statements are absurd.  Maybe.  We can't and shouldn't legislate based on Biblical values if we wish to remain consistent with the principles of this government's secularist founders.  I suppose that also means we can't legislate based on feminist values, because those founders were also, for the most part, staunchly patriarchal.  I don't really mean that, obviously.  I believe in keeping the US government totally secular, and I certainly want to defend the reproductive rights of women, but aren't there other, less painful methods?  Isn't our willingness to accept abortion a symptom of the same values that fuel our militarism?  The idea that I have more of a right to exist than you do is the most destructive idea in the history of ideas.  Abortion must be allowed in order to keep our laws consistent with the values of our culture.  On the other hand, fuck those values.  Human life, even though I can't define exactly where it begins, should be cherished, not trivialized and devalued like it is in our selfish, irresponsible, late-capitalist cesspool of callous violence and myopic ideological crusades.  Women should be allowed to get abortions.  No one should get an abortion.  Except in cases like ectopic pregnancies, maybe incest, maybe rape.  Rape is the most evil act imaginable because it attempts to reduce a person to a disposable hunk of flesh that can be thrown away.  Abortion is rape.  No, that is a false equivalency, like abortion = vasectomy.  The government has no right to decide what people do with their bodies.  Abortion is good for society. Abortion is a violent act.  Our society's survival requires certain acts of violence. Is it worth it? What are we preserving?

That didn't feel good.  In fact, it felt terrible, just like it feels terrible every time I think about this issue.