Two by Tarkovsky

I watched the sci-fi horror movie Annihilation on Netflix this past week for the second time; the first time was during the pandemic. I didn't remember some of the plot points, so it was good to see it again. A very good movie overall, with some interesting points to discuss. It was directed by Alex Garland of Ex Machina fame, another sci-fi (with some horror elements) movie that was excellent. In Annihilation, the 'Shimmer' is a land zone defined by continual mutation and which, once you enter, alters (mutates) a person inasmuch as the entry of said person alters the zone (its physical/biological/psychological/ emotional composition). All those that have previously entered the Shimmer have not returned and are presumed dead, with the exception of a man named Kane, who is married to Lena (played by an excellent Natalie Portman), a biologist and former soldier (like Kane). The reason for missions into the Shimmer is to find out what has happened at the lighthouse on the coast, where it is rumored that a meteorite has hit, bringing with it something extraterrestrial. The Shimmer seems to be mutating and expanding continuously with the expected repercussions (altered humanity and animal/bird life and death). Kane is completely disoriented upon his return and falls gravely ill within a few hours afterward. Lena joins a five-woman team of scientists who enter the Shimmer in order to find answers as to how to save Kane, what the Shimmer is as well as to what has happened to previous missions. Lena also wants to assuage her conscience of the guilt she has over an extramarital affair that Kane found out about, and which influenced his decision to join a military (suicide) mission to enter the Shimmer. I won't give away any more of the story, since it's absolutely worth seeing as much for the story as for the scares. The theme that runs throughout the film is that human life is characterized by a propensity for self-destruction (via our biology, psychology, personality and choices). When I was reading about the movie online, I found out that it was based on a book (book 1 of the Southern Reach trilogy) by Jeffrey VanderMeer, which I plan to read. But a major influence on Alex Garland's Annihilation was the 1979 Soviet sci-fi film Stalker by Andrei Tarkovsky, which Garland has acknowledged. 

I rented Stalker last night and watched it on GooglePlay. Like Annihilation, Stalker got under my skin. I thought the film, although long (2 hours and 42 minutes) was very good, but it's definitely not for everyone. It's a bleak film with a bleak message, no doubt influenced by Tarkovsky's personal resistance to the oppressive Soviet communist regime (dark, bleak, cold). The story is about a Stalker (a guide) who leads a Writer and a Professor into a zoned-off secure area where no one is permitted to enter, so they must sneak their way in. The Zone is an unpopulated nature preserve where there exists a house with a magical room that grants a person's most fervent wishes. As the Stalker explains to the two men, they must not wander off or disturb the Zone in any way, because it is dangerous to do so. The Zone senses the presence of the men, and as in Annihilation, few to no people return from the Zone. The Stalker's work is to guide unhappy people into the Zone and guide them out again; he earns money doing this, but he himself is not allowed to enter the wish room. The Stalker's life is not very happy; his wife berates him for leaving her and their crippled daughter for days/weeks at a time, they have very little money, and they live in a small flat that vibrates when the trains go by. As the film progresses, there is much discussion about the meaning of life, the meaning of art and science, the meaning of the wish room and the repercussions of having one's wishes granted. It is a philosophical film in that regard. I found it bleak because I felt for the Stalker, a good and simple man whose sole goal was in helping others to be happy and not worrying about himself. He believes in hope and the possibility of a better life for others, less for himself as he seems to have accepted his fate as a poor man. He does not want the Zone destroyed as it would destroy the meaning for his existence. He believes in the Zone and that the Zone has to be respected and preserved. He has faith that his work is helping others, but by the end of the film, that faith has been shaken. Again, I won't give away the story, as it is worth experiencing. What compounded the sadness for me was learning that Tarkovsky, his wife Larisa, and the man who played the Writer (Anatoly Solonitsyn) all died of the same type of lung cancer after the film was released--Solonitsyn in 1982, Tarkovsky in 1986, and his wife in 1998. It is thought that their cancers resulted from exposure to toxic chemicals from the chemical plant located upstream from the movie set--a deserted hydroelectric power plant in Estonia. 

Stalker was made in 1979; Tarkovsky's probably best-known film, Solaris, was made in 1972. The film Solaris from 2002, directed by Steven Soderbergh, is also one of my favorite films (A New Yorker in Oslo: “There are no answers, only choices” (paulamdeangelis.blogspot.com); A New Yorker in Oslo: The Martian Chronicles and Solaris (paulamdeangelis.blogspot.com). Both films are based on the book Solaris by the Polish writer Stanislaw Lem. Both deviate from Lem's book; apparently Lem was none too pleased with Tarkovsky's changes to his book and was even less pleased with Soderbergh's. I rented the 1972 film today on GooglePlay. Like Stalker, it's a long film, clocking in at 2 hours and 47 minutes, with long sequences here and there focused on one object, e.g., waving grass, a picture on a wall, a pitcher, a broken container. Both the length of the film and the extended sequences can test your patience, and I can't help but think that the film could have benefitted from trimming at some points. But I fall into the category of viewers who give directors the benefit of the doubt. Are they leading us somewhere? Are they revealing small clues as to what's coming? Like Stalker, Solaris has an atmosphere of foreboding that hangs over it; you know that something's coming and that it's not likely to be good. Tarkovsky is excellent at creating 'atmosphere'; it can be uncanny, bleak, grim, mystical--sometimes all of them in one. Both films deal with metaphysical questions--who we are, what makes us who we are, the importance of memories, the meaning of existence, the acquisition of sentience and the implications of that for the definition of humanity. Again, as I wrote in my blog post 'There are no answers, only choices', that remains the conclusion (for me) after seeing both of Tarkovsky's films. He was not interested in providing pat answers for us, he was interested in probing these questions. As such, his films are not for everyone, especially not for those looking for sci-fi movies with alien monsters and the resultant body count. In Solaris, the 'alien' is a sentient ocean, one that is trying to understand humanity as much as humans are trying to understand it. The Solaris Ocean provides humans onboard the spaceship, who are probing and studying it, with 'gifts' in the form of people they have known and loved but who are actually dead in reality. These entities, called 'guests' in Tarkovsky's film, can be viewed as manifestations of an individual's nagging conscience regarding the deaths of his or her loved ones. The sequence when the psychologist Kelvin first arrives on the spaceship is eerie enough; the spaceship is mostly deserted, and the two surviving crew members have chosen to remain in their rooms rather than greet him on his arrival. Over the course of the movie, we learn that some of the crew members (now dead) went insane because of these 'guests'. I'll have to go back and reread Lem's novel, but both Tarkovsky and Soderbergh came up with interesting endings for their respective movies, even if Lem didn't approve. They are the kinds of endings I love, as they lead to discussion about what happened and what the director was aiming at. I like doing postmortems on movies, but I know that not everyone does. I also like a good alien monster move, because I love movies, period. If the movie is made well, I enjoy it. Stalker and Solaris are both worth watching and discussing afterward. 

Day 6 Favorite novel FB challenge

Stanislaw Lem's book Solaris blew me away when I first read it. I remember thinking that the author could not have been of this world. He managed something so few other sci-fi writers manage; to write about another world as though he had been there to witness and experience it. It gives you a strange feeling when you read it; you understand in some uncanny way that the author had first-hand knowledge of this other planet. But how could he have? The story gets under your skin and doesn't leave you. I recommend the book, and also the 2002 film Solaris, directed by Steven Soderbergh, and starring George Clooney and Natascha McElhone. Like the book, the film also got under my skin. I've read the book twice and seen the film several times.

The Martian Chronicles and Solaris

I have been a fan of science fiction since I was a teenager, probably from the time I first read The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury. I also read Something Wicked This Way Comes, The Illustrated Man and Fahrenheit 451, and enjoyed them all. Bradbury is a thought-provoking and outstanding sci-fi writer (90 years old and still with us), and his books have a haunting quality about them. You don’t forget them easily. I don’t recall all of the stories in The Martian Chronicles in detail, just that there were certain parts that were quite scary in that what was suggested was considerably terrifying. You just knew that something terrible was going to happen to some of the earthlings who made it to Mars, and it did (the third expedition was liquidated by the Martians who posed as dead family members such that the deluded (and lonely) crew ended up just giving in to the delusions). The following passage from the chapter ‘April 2000: The Third Expedition’ is an example of the type of terror Bradbury could instill in his readers: “And wouldn’t it be horrible and terrifying to discover that all of this was part of some great clever plan by the Martians to divide and conquer us, and kill us? Sometime during the night, perhaps my brother here on this bed will change form, melt, shift and become another thing, a terrible thing, a Martian. It would be very simple for him to just turn over in bed and put a knife into my heart……..His hands were shaking under the covers. His body was cold. Suddenly it was not a theory. Suddenly he was very afraid……..Carefully he lifted the covers, rolled them back. He slipped from bed and was walking softly across the room when his brother’s voice said, ‘Where are you going?’…...’For a drink of water’. ‘But you’re not thirsty’. ‘Yes, yes, I am’. ‘No, you’re not’. Captain John Black broke and ran across the room. He screamed. He screamed twice. He never reached the door”.

This was all Bradbury wrote about the actual murder of Captain John Black and the massacres of the crew of the third expedition. You knew that murders were occurring in the rest of the Martian houses who had crew members staying with them because they were the ‘families’ of these crew members, but Bradbury didn’t have to elaborate at all about them, because it was left to our imaginations to figure out what was happening to them all. Superb sci-fi horror in a category all its own.

I was reminded of Bradbury recently because I just finished the sci-fi novel Solaris by Stanislaw Lem. It too deals with the theme of aliens who 'present' themselves to a space crew by taking on the forms of people familiar to them. In this case, the crew is living in a space station that orbits the planet Solaris. However, these aliens do not kill the crew members. The book was first published in 1961 (eleven years after The Martian Chronicles) but has a very modern feel to it, mostly because Lem’s writing is timeless and wonderful. Like Bradbury, he is a terrific storyteller. But Lem goes one step further—some of his descriptions of the ocean and the planet Solaris are pure poetry—beautiful and colorful and suggestive of eternity, melancholy, emptiness and loneliness. It is as though Lem tried to describe the eternal using a very crude language—English—and found that it was just not possible to completely convey all that he wanted to communicate. And when reading his descriptions of the planet, you know that he hit a linguistic wall of sorts. There have been at least two movies made based upon the book (I have written about the one I have seen—Solaris from 2002 directed by Steven Soderbergh—in an earlier post); neither of them as far as I understand attempted in any way to present the planet as  Lem described. Why, I don’t know. It would have been fascinating to have seen some CGI effects depicting the mimoids, symmetriads and asymmetriads. The book’s description of these Solaris creations is mesmerizing. A living planet/ocean, and a space station that was not able to communicate with this ocean in any way that made sense to the humans onboard. And yet, Solaris was able to probe their minds, ‘read’ each of them and provide them with ‘visitors’—alien creatures that resembled people in their past lives about which the scientists on board the space station harbored secret feelings of guilt. For the main character, Kris Kelvin, the alien creature who ‘visits’ him is his wife Rheya, who committed suicide early on in their marriage after he had walked out on her. In a rather complicated twist, the aliens themselves do not understand why they have been ‘sent’ to the crew members, who feel guilty both about wanting to be free of them and about wanting to be with them, at least in Kelvin’s case. Once Rheya understands what she is now and who she was to Kelvin in his past (real) life, she wants to free him via her destruction. It is not a happy book, rather a very thought-provoking one, not only because of the interactions between Kris and his visitor Rheya, but also because of the attempts to explain the nature of the ocean surrounding Solaris and the attempts to communicate with it. Lem seems to have wanted to insert his view of God at that time into the narrative as well. Kris asks the other crew member, Snow, whether he believes in God. Kris explains “It isn’t that simple. I don’t mean the traditional God of Earth religion……----do you happen to know if there was ever a belief in an imperfect god?……..I’m not thinking of a god whose imperfection arises out of the candor of his human creatures, but one whose imperfection represents his essential characteristic: a god limited in his omniscience and power, fallible, incapable of foreseeing the consequences of his acts, and creating things that lead to horror. He is a sick god, whose ambitions exceed his powers and who does not realize it at first……And he has created eternity, which was to have measured his power, and which measures his unending defeat……This god has no existence outside of matter. He would like to free himself from matter, but he cannot…….That is the only god I could imagine believing in, a god whose passion is not redemption, who saves nothing, fulfils no purpose---a god who simply is”.

It is an amazing and haunting book, in the same way as The Martian Chronicles, and well worth reading. I was sorry to finish it, because it left me wanting more. That is the mark of an excellent storyteller. 

“There are no answers, only choices”

I watched the sci-fi movie Solaris (from 2002) with George Clooney and Natascha McElhone for the third time the other night, and each time I watch the film I ‘discover’ something else about it that I didn’t remember from previous viewings. The film was directed by Steven Soderbergh and is a remake of the classic film (from 1972) of the same name directed by Andrey Tarkovskiy. I have not seen the 1972 film although it is on my ‘to watch’ list; nor have I read the novel by Polish author Stanisław Lem published in 1961. I’m guessing that the Tarkovskiy film would probably be as haunting a film as the Soderbergh film. Because that is the only word I can use to describe Soderbergh’s film—haunting. It gets under my skin in a way that no other sci-fi film/story can, with the possible exception of ‘I Am Legend’ (film(s) as well as the story by Richard Matheson). Everything about the film, the atmosphere, lighting, sets, music—combine to create a poignant and haunting film. In my view, the casting of Clooney and McElhone in the major roles as Chris Kelvin and Rheya (his wife) was a small stroke of genius. They are both wonderful to watch in their roles as partners in a sad marriage that ends with Rheya committing suicide.  McElhone manages to portray Rheya as an extremely interesting and attractive woman despite her psychological problems—beautiful, intelligent, classy, and sad. Rheya is a seeker, open to ideas of faith and belief in things one cannot see, and she is uncomfortable with aggressive, all-knowing people who bark out their opinions as though they were the only correct ones. But she is also a depressive personality, a woman who lives on the fringes of life and society, looking in and wanting to be a part of the life she sees around her, but knowing that she does not fit in. Chris is a psychologist and a pragmatist; he only believes in what he can see and know and dissect, and there are several points in the film where he almost gloatingly scoffs at Rheya’s faith in something other-worldly. He is right and she is not. You know by watching her eyes and body language in the film that his lack of faith and his pragmatism are helping to destroy her slowly, because she loves him but does not seem able to reach him. But he does not understand this nor does he intend to hurt her deliberately. Theirs is a marriage where you know that they love each other but their love is doomed to difficulties and problems from the start because they are such contrasting personalities. You know that the only way that things will change for them is through a tragic event. Chris just does not understand his wife, her vulnerability or her psychological problems, even though he is a psychologist and even though she has tried to be honest with him about them. She aborts their baby without telling Chris because she does not want to pass her depressive tendencies on to a child, and he explodes in anger at her when he finds this out and storms out of their apartment, whereupon she commits suicide thinking he has left her for good. After her death, Chris ends up out in space, a long way from earth, in orbit around the planet Solaris, after having been asked to investigate the crew on board who are acting strangely and reporting strange events onboard the ship. Solaris is a planet that seems to be able to read the minds/dreams of Chris and his colleagues on board the spaceship, and manages to ‘recreate’ the people they have lost to death back on earth, the ‘visitors’. Chris’ visitor is Rheya, and even though he knows that she is not really human, he becomes involved with her all over again and realizes that he wants to be with her for the rest of his life, with all of the implications surrounding that choice. He is warned by one of the team members named Dr. Gibarian to leave Solaris and to return to earth, because otherwise he will die there. Gibarian is also another of Chris’ ‘visitors’ who committed suicide shortly before Chris’ arrival; on earth he was his colleague and friend. When Gibarian ‘visits’ Chris, they have a conversation, where Chris asks him “What does Solaris want from us?” Gibarian replies: “Why do you think it has to want something? This is why you have to leave. If you keep thinking there's a solution, you'll die here.” Chris replies “I can't leave her. I'll figure it out”, whereupon Gibarian says to him “Do you understand what I'm trying to tell you? There are no answers, only choices”.  And Chris makes his ‘choice’, and it is a choice that moves him from guilt to forgiveness to peace—his own spiritual evolution that allows him to move beyond his pragmatism and to take a leap of faith into the unknown. It is only by taking that leap of faith that he can know happiness, but he does not know that before he takes it. But he takes the risk.

It was the sentence —“There are no answers, only choices” that caught my attention this time while I watched the film.  I thought--how true that is. But I never ‘heard’ or truly internalized these words before, not the way I did the other night. Maybe because I have come to that point in my own life, where I have realized that there are no answers to certain situations, to certain problems—there are really only choices, and it is the fear of making the ‘wrong’ choice that can keep us stuck in one place. I seem to continue to want specific answers to specific problems though, and perhaps they will never be forthcoming. So if I learn to accept that there are no answers, then I turn to the choices to be made and ask myself, which is the right choice? But perhaps there are also no right or wrong choices, even though we want so much to make what we think is the ‘right’ choice—in love, in life, in work.  Perhaps we need to take more ‘leaps of faith’ into the unknown—because really, even when we make what we think is the right choice, we can never really know for sure what we are doing and whether it was the best choice. It simply is a choice that we made, that then led to a life. This is what is scary—should we take the leap of faith into the unknown of a new life, a new job, or a new relationship? And could we have escaped sadness and problems if we had chosen differently? Perhaps. But since we also do not have control over the lives and choices of others who impact on our lives because they are part of our lives, we cannot predict what will happen to us. It’s not easy to accept this sometimes, which makes it difficult to take the leap of faith into the unknown.