Solaris

A rare occurrence where I wish I had not read the source material prior to watching the adaptation.

I started reading Solaris by Stanislaw Lem in early 2025. I heard about this writer because I had read The Southern Reach Trilogy by Jeff VanderMeer and I was looking for similar books. A lot of people mentioned Solaris but often mentioned that it was a departure from Lem’s other works. So I read The Futurological Congress (the third book in a trilogy… why did I do that) in order to prepare myself for this writer’s style. I hated it. But because Solaris was supposed to be different, I decided to give it a chance.

I actually dug through my old notes and found a review I wrote in April 3, 2025:

Solaris by Stanislaw Lem

A novel about a man named Kelvin who goes to the planet Solaris. There he inexplicably meets his dead wife.

Loved this book. It was pretty hard to get through a lot of the technical descriptions of the ship and even some of the academic texts in this world of the planet Solaris. But since we’re in the mind of a scientist, it makes sense.

I felt for them, Kelvin and Rheya, both of them living together in amorous familiarity despite being on a station millions of miles away from Earth on a planet with two suns.

So fascinating all the explanations for what Rheya and the other two phantoms created by the planet were made of. The science of the mimoids was cool. As I read, I kept wanting to spend more time exploring the planet.

A lot of the dialogues (what felt like monologues sometimes) were like sooooo trueee. Really touching ending scene.

Though I had hangups about how boring and a slog some of the technical exposition was, I mostly enjoyed the book, especially toward the end. The experience of reading it was challenging, but ultimately rewarding.

That was not the case with my experience of watching Solaris by Andrei Tarkovsky. When I realized this book had multiple movie adaptations, what first came to mind was, how in the hell were they going to show how complex, overwhelmingly abstract and, just like, grand the movements of the Ocean were?

Here’s what I will say: the moments on earth, the flowing plants in the water, the nature, and even the almost painstaking, lingering shots of traffic were beautiful. I like those choices made by Tarkovsky (other than Solaris, I only watched The Mirror and I liked the same kinds of scenes there as well). I also liked some of the limited shots we get of Solaris itself. (How did they show those waves? Soap and water? Computer graphics?)

As I was watching it, naturally, I couldn’t help but compare it to the book. It begins with a scene that where our hero Kelvin is given far more information about Solaris prior to his journey there. In the book, these details about what a pilot observed about a fallen cosmonaut and his baby comes more than halfway through.

I mean, the spectacle of how the plot unfolds was cool, fine. It’s a movie. The actress who plays Hari (Rheya in the book), Natalya Bondarchuk was gorgeous. I thought she did a great job. I liked that Kelvin was sweating pretty much the whole time, and I appreciated this for two reasons, 1) I like when men on screen in stressful situations are sweaty and 2) this is not something that easily comes up first person narration of the character who is experiencing the ongoing anxiety of this traumatic event.

Also there were a ton of scenes with Kelvin’s family that was nearly absent in the book. And that scene with Kelvin’s mother, I’m like, bro, these directors and their mothers. Enough! I’m actually quite fond of what Lem said about this: “And what was absolutely terrible was that Tarkovsky introduced Kelvin’s parents and even some aunt into the movie. But most of all, his mother. […] The mother is Russia, the Motherland, Earth. That just enraged me.”

I think it’s really funny that Tarkovsky was so excited to adapt this novel and met Lem at some hotel in Moscow to discuss, and they both basically argued for, like, weeks and parted ways being absolutely annoyed at one another. Like, that is funny!!!

An aside about the ‘other’ in fiction

I think ultimately, ultimately, what I have been seeking for the past two years, after having watched Annihilation by Alex Garland that one random night at The IFC, after which I came home spooked as fuck, kind of scared, but also excited, was an answer to a question I had, a question I had a long time ago, when I was a kid, when I was first learning about the universe and how big it was, and how we defined life, living things, and how we sought life elsewhere in the vast universe. Which was, how could we possibly know?

The way I saw it, us defining what constitutes living things was farcical because, bro, we are the living things. For example, one of the characteristics of living things is that they respond to external stimulus. This is certainly true for us. But can we really apply this to life that has no business looking or evolving anything like ours on Earth? Solaris responds to blasts of radiation from the station. It responds to a cosmonaut drowning in it by creating the largest baby ever in the image of the cosmonaut’s son. Okay, sure it’s alive. But we lose so much by attributing a meaning behind those reactions. I think about this the same way I think about animals and insects. Cats are not being sassy for swiping at you, mosquitos are not evil for wanting to eat your blood and live. In the movie, Solaris supposedly creates these phantoms based off the individuals’ sins. That’s poppycock!!! I get that we are in the mind of an unreliable narrator with a subjective point of view. I get that the purpose of the movie, books, TV, the purpose of art is to tell a story and compel some emotional movement in the beholder. But positioning the intentions of a sentient ocean by saying it scans your subconscious and produces a simulacrum of your deepest sins to torture you feels so… flat and unimaginative. Maybe the visceral and kind of unnerving acting by Bondarchuk emphasized this for me in the movie, how painful this existence was for her. But in the book, there were so many more mundane, sometimes sweet moments of just, honestly, kind of hanging out.

There’s a quote by Dr. Snow (Snaut) that hit the nail on the head:

“It’s almost as if you’re purposely refusing to understand,” he groaned. “I’ve been talking about Solaris the whole time, solely about Solaris. If the truth is hard to swallow, it’s not my fault. Anyhow, after what you’ve already been through, you ought to be able to hear me out! We take off into the cosmos, ready for anything: for solitude, for hardship, for exhaustion, death. Modesty forbids us to say so, but there are times when we think pretty well of ourselves. And yet, if we examine it more closely, our enthusiasm turns out to be all sham. We don’t want to conquer the cosmos, we simply want to extend the boundaries of Earth to the frontiers of the cosmos. For us, such and such a planet is as arid as the Sahara, another as frozen as the North Pole, yet another as lush as the Amazon basin. We are humanitarian and chivalrous; we don’t want to enslave other races, we simply want to bequeath them our values and take over their heritage in exchange. We think of ourselves as the Knights of the Holy Contact. This is another lie. We are only seeking Man. We have no need of other worlds. We need mirrors. We don’t know what to do with other worlds. A single world, our own, suffices us; but we can’t accept it for what it is. We are searching for an ideal image of our own world: we go in quest of a planet, of a civilization superior to our own but developed on the basis of a prototype of our primeval past. At the same time, there is something inside us which we don’t like to face up to, from which we try to protect ourselves, but which nevertheless remains, since we don’t leave Earth in a state of primal innocence. We arrive here as we are in reality, and when the page is turned and that reality is revealed to us – that part of our reality which we would prefer to pass over in silence – then we don’t like it any more.”

Can you really divorce the technology, tooling, scientific frameworks of study used to explore from Earthly baggage to really, really understand something completely different?

I take the same issue with the core conflicts in There Is No Antimemetics Division by qntm and Pluribus. Again, I KNOW IT IS A STORY. A human story, to tell us, the human who is watching or reading the respective work. But I thought it was so boring to have these unknown memetic agents and phenomena be reduced to an ally, a pet basically (Sunshine) or antagonist (U-3125). I felt like Pluribus did a better job of exploring the hivemind virus because it was granted the luxury of 9 one hour long episodes. They’re not trying to be evil, it’s simply their biological imperative. They do eat people but not out of malicious intent, but because it’s practical. But then the show makes this case for humanity by saying, “Just pick a fucking apple instead of eating dead humans.” I still struggle to see the hivemind as antagonistic, mostly because we don’t know that much about it so far.

I feel a little crazy for saying I don’t want a story where the other is antagonistic. (But then, I think often of Arrival and how, if I hadn’t watched it immediately after watching The Shape of Water, maybe I would have been slightly less horny and able to appreciate it better for the premise it presented. Maybe I will rewatch it, but more likely, I’ll watch The Shape of Water again.)

Anyway

I’m starting to grasp at straws here but I really want to express what I mean. At some point, I think, the medium to explore the unknowable cannot be a film, literature, a story, or academic research, but maybe a blood curdling scream, or a dream that is entirely tactile. But to the extent that we do want to have a shared experience, I think the movie was fine.

I left the theatre feeling spooked mostly because of that haunting final scene and the accompanying music, but primarily frustrated because of everything else. In the movie, after Hari is killed for good, Kelvin stays on Solaris on one of its islands with a perfect replica of his house back home, with a version of his father and dog. He drops to his knees and embraces his father as the camera pans out providing an isolated ariel view of this literal island he is on, on a planet so far away from Earth.

Once again, Lem’s criticism of this just makes me laugh:

My Kelvin decides to stay on the planet without any hope whatsoever while Tarkovsky created an image where some kind of an island appears, and on that island a hut. And when I hear about the hut and the island I’m beside myself with irritation… This is just some emotional sauce into which Tarkovsky has submerged his heroes, not to mention that he has completely amputated the scientific landscape and in its place introduced so much of the weirdness I cannot stand.

Now I want to actually include some of the final passages from the book. Kelvin, again after Rheya’s final death, takes a helicopter out and steps onto one of these impossibly undulating structures called mimoids:

With the flitter a few paces behind me, I sat on the rough, fissured beach. A heavy black wave broke over the edge of the bank and spread out, not black, but a dirty green. The ebbing wave left viscous streamlets behind, which flowed back quivering towards the ocean. I went closer, and when the next wave came I held out my hand.

…

[T]he wave hesitated, recoiled, then enveloped my hand without touching it, so that a thin covering of ‘air’ separated my glove inside a cavity which had been fluid a moment previously, and now had a fleshy consistency. I raised my hand slowly, and the wave, or rather an outcrop of the wave, rose at the same time, enfolding my hand in a translucent cyst with greenish reflections. I stood up, so as to raise my hand still higher, and the gelatinous substance stretched like a rope, but did not break. The main body of the wave remained motionless on the shore, surrounding my feet without touching them, like some strange beast patiently waiting for the experiment to finish. A flower had grown out of the ocean, and its calyx was moulded to my fingers. I stepped back. The stem trembled, stirred uncertainly and fell back into the wave, which gathered it and receded.

…

In all their movements, taken together or singly, each of these branches reaching out of the ocean seemed to display a kind of cautious but not feral alertness, a curiosity avid for quick apprehension of a new, unexpected form, and regretful at having to retreat, unable to exceed the limits set by a mysterious law. The contrast was inexpressible between that lively curiosity and the shimmering immensity of the ocean that stretched away out of sight … I had never felt its gigantic presence so strongly, or its powerful changeless silence, or the secret forces that gave the waves their regular rise and fall. I sat unseeing, and sank into a universe of inertia, glided down an irresistible slope and identified myself with the dumb, fluid colossus; it was as if I had forgiven it everything without the slightest effort of word or thought.

…

That liquid giant had been the death of hundreds of men. The entire human race had tried in vain to establish even the most tenuous link with it, and it bore my weight without noticing me any more than it would notice a speck of dust. I did not believe that it could respond to the tragedy of two human beings. Yet its activities did have a purpose… True, I was not absolutely certain, but leaving would mean giving up a chance, perhaps an infinitesimal one, perhaps only imaginary… Must I go on living here then, among the objects we both had touched, in the air she had breathed? In the name of what? In the hope of her return? I hoped for nothing. And yet I lived in expectation. Since she had gone, that was all that remained. I did not know what achievements, what mockery, even what tortures still awaited me. I knew nothing, and I persisted in the faith that the time of cruel miracles was not past.

Even now reading that final passage makes me really emotional! The interaction between Kelvin and the wave, the acknowledgement, that’s what I love to see. The resignation that there is no sense in trying to know this being. The painful letting go of any hope of reviving of any of his comfortable life on the station with Rheya. Yet, still there is something, he doesn’t know what, but it’s enough for him to determine it is worth it to stay. To me, this is beautiful.

(Now, I will have to figure out what order to read/watch Roadside Picnic/The Stalker. God.)