Solaris

The effects of the mystical wonder known as Solaris could be seen in a negative or positive light. Solaris allows people on the ship to be reunited with their deceased loved one for the duration that they are within Solaris’s range. By the same token, the copies of the deceased presented are not human and they are not actually the loved one. They are a portrayal of what the crewmember remembers them like. For example, Chris is visited by his deceased wife Rheya but he remembers her differently than she may actually have been. Everything from her face and voice to her present mental state reflects how he best remembers her. Because he remembers her in a seemingly depressed state, especially around the time she was pregnant, the Rheya he is visited by is always depressed. This connects to our discussions in class about how when we’re in love, we sort of see the other person not necessarily the way they are but they way that we picture them and want them to be (are you beautiful because I love you or do I love you because you are beautiful?). Solaris, I think, is kind of a reflective being. Crew members are exposed to a version of their loved one that may or may not be accurate because it’s built from memories. So the question becomes, does the crew member love their visitor as they loved the real person or are they seeing that person for the first time through fresh eyes after being separated for some time? Chris is haunted by the idea that he could have remembered her wrong. Also, because visitors are composed in appearance and mental states by memories, they cannot die without Dr. Gordon’s Higg’s Machine death ray gun thing simply because they are made up of memories and while they reflect the evolution of memories over time, those memories never die, so neither do visitors. The memories that visitors can recall cause them a great deal of confusion. It takes the copied Rheya a long time to realize that while she can recall the memories, she doesn’t remember actually living and experiencing them because she is not the real Rheya.

Solaris contains no answers, just choices. Your choices are to live out the rest of your life with your fake loved one in Solaris, use Dr. Gordon’s Higg’s Machine to destroy the visitor and leave, bring the visitor back to Earth, or find somewhere else to live together. There is no right answer in any case. Each has a downside. Some crew members, like Chris’s friend, choose to take their own lives. Others, like Dr. Gordon, choose to permanently abolish their visitor from the ship. And then there’s Chris who decided to stay in Solaris with fake Rheya and live out the rest of his life as though she was his real wife. We are led to assume that Chris is actually repeating his life there but he is now one of whatever Rheya is. We can tell this because there is a reoccurrence of a scene with him slicing vegetables in his kitchen. The first time, he slices his finger and runs it under water. This occurs right before he gets the video asking him to come to Solaris. This scene is repeated as the very last one in the movie and is virtually the same except for when he slices his finger and runs it under water, the blood and the cut rinse away, leaving his finger completely healed. This is a characteristic we saw in visitors which is why it is assumed he is now one of them. Chris and Rheya have their own theme with the line from the Dylan Thomas poem, “and death shall have no dominion” which is significant because in this story, it is very true. Chris and Rheya have found a way to be eternally together and while Rheya’s death did separate them for some time, Solaris reunited them and in death, the couple remains together in Solaris. For them, death had no effect and means virtually nothing.

There are 4 flashbacks from both Rheya and Chris that I thought were important. The first flashback occurs in Chris’s dream his first night on the ship. He remembers seeing Rheya for the first time on a train. She sits facing him, smiling, and holding a doorknob with a keyhole, she then gets off the train and smiles at him from outside. They never speak. It then continues at his friend’s party and she’s there again. They have a conversation without talking that leads to him taking her home. This is the very beginning of their relationship and the memory represents the perfection Chris sees in Rheya. The next memory occurs the following night and centers on how hard and for how long he tried to get Rheya to marry him. She keeps pushing the date back. Within this memory, there is a conversation in which she tells him about her childhood imaginary friend who lived under the wallpaper and eventually, she and her mom stopped talking and they only talked through the imaginary friend. Apart from her weird childhood, this memory is critical in exposing the beginning of Rheya’s internal turmoil that ultimately led to her suicide. The third memory is that Rheya’s when she discovers that she is pregnant. She seemed pretty upset about it. She then goes to a dinner party with Chris and his friends and they have a conversation about human existence. She leaves during the conversation and later tells Chris that she doesn’t like his friends, which upsets him. The fourth is another of Rheya’s memories in which they are fighting when he finds out that she has terminated her pregnancy without consulting him first and he leaves. When Rheya and Chris discuss the memory later, he tells her that he had later come back that night to apologize to her. All of these memories have two, disconnected parts but all depict key points in their relationship which their current relationship in Solaris is based and explains why Rheya is pretty depressed while on board the ship. Apart from the first memory, the others depict her in an unsteady state in which she’s fighting with herself.