How
to understand that strange floating freeway ride in Solaris? A dark parody of
Kubrick's 'Stargate' sequence in 2001. A glimpse of a kind of hell, the
'fallen' cosmonaut Berton's alienated view of life on Earth, and so a warning
or 'shadow narrative' for Kelvin: return home is impossible.
Just over half an
hour into Tarkovsky’s Solaris we are suddenly tracking, with that
familiar smooth disembodied unfolding perspective of the passenger, down the
urban ring-roads of Tokyo, though the city is not identified. In plot terms,
Henri Berton has quarreled with soon-to-depart Kris Kelvin and his father, and
is travelling away from the dacha. Though less than five minutes long,
the sequence seems overextended at first, referring to nothing else in the
film. In fact, it is oddly pivotal, serving several clear purposes.
As those who
enjoyed the 2012 BFI season will be aware, there had been a history of
occasional Soviet science fiction cinema since 1924. Famously, Tarkovsky,
though he proposed the project, had no interest in the genre. Details of “the
material structure of the future” and its “technological processes”, he
complained, express only an empty “exoticism” which substitutes for and
prevents the fiction being grounded in that human reality which is the only
subject for art. For Tarkovsky, surfaces, objects and places are what the
‘exterior’ art of cinema has to work with, to refer to deeper, more oblique,
uncertain, interior things. He could hardly agree to subsume this visual
language to a techno-fetishised spectacle.
Rather, he said, a
moon landing should be depicted incidentally, as one would film passengers
boarding a tram. It is a subtle but emphatic distinction. Because film, the
film-maker, must depict something. “We are striving to make
this imagined world as concrete as possible, especially in its purely external
manifestations. Reality shown in Solaris must be materially tangible,
almost graspable. We are achieving it through the textures of the decorations,
through cinematic style.”
And this is why the
ring-road sequence feels very specific. The core truth is the same: human
reality. But for just a few minutes Tarkovsky adopts an exactly opposite style,
(spectacle concrete, perhaps), expressing his remark that “Ordinary life
is full of the fantastic.” Here he is saying: ‘This may be just traffic, but
look, look again. How strange is our human existence, our structures and
movements, our civilization! What frantic mysterious madness, this night-time
city intersection, these endless intersecting series of rushing lights!’ This
is the entire dialectic progression of Solaris: that we step away from
life on Earth to look back with fresh ‘alien’ eyes.
Solaris was (and remains) fated, in the
Manichean geometry of the Cold War years, to be the ‘Soviet 2001’, the
‘anti-2001’; that is, defined by a film Tarkovsky quite openly
despised. So, more specifically, the night ride is also a sarcastic
‘cheap n’ cheerful’ parody of the fantastical nine-minute ‘Stargate’ sequence
in the earlier part of Kubrick’s third act, with all its receding slit-scan
corridors and heavily filtered aerial landscapes. Frontal cutaways make the
comparison quite clear: for a few moments Berton is a wrecked, all-too-human
version of Bowman, the ‘Star Child’. And the sequence’s intensifying musique
concrete, by Eduard Artemiev who scored the film, comments on the Ligeti
piece, ‘Atmospheres’, which powers the ‘Stargate’ ride.
At the end of
Kubrick’s ‘Stargate’ is, indeed, the Star Child. The Tokyo night ride likewise
involves a child: the monstrous proto-Visitor, four metres of moving colloidal
treacle, which the Ocean, evidently still to ‘get it quite right’, has somehow
extracted from Fechner. We have seen that Berton’s later insistence on the
reality of this manifestation, at his de-briefing many years prior to the
film’s action, has done him much harm. The night ride sequence begins with Berton
en route, revealing by videophone to Kelvin pere (and Kelvin, who
enters), that the child was a replica of Fechner’s actual son back on earth.
And we see a boy in the back seat behind Berton. Simply Berton’s own young son?
A memory of Fechner’s boy, relocated to his car? A Visitor, a ghost, a
flashback? The particular spatial arrangement of a car interior, the
conventions of filming this interior, are artfully employed to keep Berton’s
response to this child ambiguous to us.
Kelvin pere
sees the boy on screen, but does not comment or react, just as Kelvin will not
later, seeing Gibarian’s visitor on-screen. Why? One can ask many other
‘housekeeping’ questions of Solaris: About the fate of the ‘first’
Hari, marooned in space. About the multiple Hari’s, with Kelvin’s mother and
the dog, ‘summoned’ in Kelvin’s fever near the end of the film. About
Gibarian’s ‘orphaned’ young Visitor. Is this whom we glimpse (an ear over the
top of a hammock) in Snaut’s room?
The director is
hardly obliged to say. The questions are naïve, ultimately. Tarkovsky is
showing us the layering and ambiguity of presence and representation itself.
The ring-road
sequence moves between day and night, in and out of colour, suggesting an
interplay of reverie or memory with reality. But then the very next sequence,
where Kelvin burns his papers, turns out to be monochrome because it is the
rural twilight. Having initially resented having to film in colour, Tarkovsky
uses it playfully, ambiguously. Modes of consciousness are not colour-coded for
us.
In formal terms,
the Tokyo night ride concludes one of the film’s ‘shadow narratives’ or
‘alternative arcs’. In cinema, such an alternative serves to highlight the
actual story arc of the protagonist by pointing out the consequence of a ‘what
if’. A common variant is to show the fate of an equivalent character. A
longstanding and repugnant habit of mainstream Hollywood was to kill the
African-American friend or colleague of the protagonist to underline the peril
the white hero or heroine is in. (The murder of John Book’s black police
colleague, Elton Carter, back in big-city Philly, in Witness (1985) is
one among innumerable examples).
Three alternative
outcomes shadow Kris Kelvin’s path through Solaris. The first is
suicide. Kelvin becomes, in story-form terms (though not in the fiction)
Gibarian’s replacement, the third man on the Solaris station. And in these
terms, Gibarian is defined by his shame and suicide, something Kelvin rejects
(perhaps – how does one understand the very final scene?)
The second ‘what
if’ falls into that often revealing category, the idea expressed in draft and
not subsequently realised. Tarkovsky originally proposed that Kelvin returns
home to a wife, Maria, so that his Visitor, Hari, becomes no more than a means
of his redeeming himself. So this arc is simply a loop, a rupture and closure
of ‘normality’, satisfying but banal. Stanislav Lem, author of the source
novel, who complained in any case that Tarkovsky was simply remaking Crime
and Punishment (he has a point) dissuaded the director from reducing the
film to “nothing more than the melodrama of a family squabble.”
The third
possibility is suggested by Snaut, after Hari’s destruction. That Kevin simply
returns home. This ‘what if’ is embodied in Berton who did just that. So
clearly is Berton the shadow self to Kelvin that their conflict is in part a
kind of sibling rivalry. Kelvin pere makes this quite clear: “It
wouldn’t be that you’re jealous of him, that he will be the one to bury me, not
you?”
What if? Well, we
already know. Because we have seen Berton, humiliated, broken, oddly doll-like,
fragile, petulant, haunted (perhaps literally) and worn out, isolated,
apparently unable to share the burden of his experience by truly persuading
anyone. And it is Berton’s earlier return to Earth which provides the final
perspective on the Tokyo night ride. Elsewhere, Tarkovsky rejects ‘spectacle’
because “it is only through the perception of [real views] by the characters
in the film that it will become comprehensible to the viewer.” But Berton,
whose view it is, is no longer a human among humans, he is ‘the man who fell
(back) to Earth’, so his perception of life on Earth is utterly ‘alienated’. It
is one thing for us to refresh our sense of wonder at ourselves for a few
minutes. The matter is different for Berton. Berton is living it, as a kind of
hell.
Very far away but
surely recalling Berton, Kelvin realizes that he too can never really go home
again.
Guy Dugdale is a
freelance researcher and writer.
No comments :
Post a Comment