Episode 337: First Contact? (Tarkovsky's "Solaris")

[00:00:00] Very Bad Wizards is a podcast with a philosopher, my dad, and psychologist Dave Pizarro, having an informal discussion about issues in science and ethics. Please note that the discussion contains bad words that I'm not allowed to say, and knowing my dad, some very inappropriate jokes. It's a young man's game, underwater welding, you can't do it for too long. It takes its toll.

[00:00:28] Welcome to Very Bad Wizards. I'm Tamler Sommers from the University of Houston. Dave, I'm back in Houston.

[00:01:19] Christopher Nolan's Odyssey has come out to huge box office and for the most part critical raves. How are you feeling about it? First of all, we miss you already. The guys is lesser without your presence. I have to go plant an oar. Yeah, that's right. I guess they know of the sea in Houston. I just go for East Texas, I think. They might not. I'm a little nervous.

[00:01:48] I mean, I'm thrilled that mostly it's great reviews, but knowing us, it's very possible that that's not predictive at all of how we're going to feel. Yeah. I mean, we're not the target audience who just did a bonus series where we went through book by book. Never mind me who teaches it every two years. I don't think how we feel about it will be a reflection of how any other people might feel, but I'm also nervous. When are you seeing it, by the way?

[00:02:16] I'm seeing it in a little less than a week, so on Monday night. Okay. I'm seeing it, I think, the night before. So neither of us have seen it yet. Have you read about it? I've tried to not read too much about it. I caught some like praise on Twitter, then I sort of got off of Twitter. But like people are talking about it. And like this is the other thing. It's like so many people are actually talking about it. So I was just talking to one of my colleagues who just saw it last night and she couldn't help but tell me her opinion. And I was like, I didn't want to hear her opinion.

[00:02:44] Yeah. What you're doing is what I do for virtually every movie that comes out. But this one, I have been reading things about it. And I also did something that's really the polar opposite of how I like to approach a movie where I looked at a variety article that said all the differences between the text and the movie.

[00:03:05] And I did that because I just don't want to be in the movie being like, oh my God, he left out the Achilles meeting in the fucking underworld. Are you kidding? That's such a like crucial thing. And I think I would be bad, both like it would be a bad experience for me, but also maybe people around me if I kept doing that, you know? I'm honestly kind of shocked that you did this, but I get it. I mean, you're emotionally invested in a way that not even I am since you've been teaching it for so long.

[00:03:35] So whatever takes you out less, whatever's less likely to take you out. And the funny thing is, I don't think it is the responsibility of a director to faithfully adapt a text. Like I think that's, I have a very clear like opinion about like cinema. We'll probably talk about this in the next segment when we talk about the movie Solaris, Tarkovsky's Solaris, that I don't think that there is an obligation on the part of the filmmaker to faithfully represent the book.

[00:04:01] Like, and yet, I don't know, like, I think I'm too, I'm acting, I'm already like ruined it for myself. I'm too neurotic about it. I should just go in and just enjoy the fucking IMAX, like awe-inspiring spectacle that I'm sure is going to be there. Like that's something I'm 100% sure of. I'm excited about the IMAX aspect, but I don't know if it said this in Variety. It might've like saved this, but I'll just tell you right now, he gave the Cyclops two eyes. Yeah. I don't know if that. No, but he doesn't do the nobody trick.

[00:04:30] He doesn't do, I caught that. You caught that too. But now you're spoiling our listeners. Okay, sorry, yes, that's right. I shouldn't drag my listeners down into my own private hell. Yeah, but last thing I was going to say quickly about whether he has to be faithful to the text. I feel like with the Odyssey, there is a bigger burden to be faithful because you can do as like a gajillion people have done versions of the Odyssey that you don't call the Odyssey and do whatever you want.

[00:04:59] But the minute you're touching the like pillar of the Western canon, you know. I don't even agree with that. Like I really don't think he has that obligation. I also think it's a fool's errand. Like it's not going to be seven hours. So, well, I was going to say something else I learned. But like there is one difference that I totally get even though I think it's a huge shame.

[00:05:21] But unless this is going to be like a, you know, a six hour, like three part series or something or like Twin Peaks of the Return with also an Odyssey kind of remake. You need to like make choices. The only thing that really bothers me is that he didn't cast an actual Greek man. You know? That's what it is. The Twitter discourse is really unbelievable. Or at least what my algorithm shows me.

[00:05:49] There was one that said Christopher Nolan had one job to depict a historically accurate Odyssey. He failed. Like it's so weird because like it doesn't even make sense. Like what would that be? Like Cersei, that's not how you really turn a person into a pig, you know? The historically accurate Odyssey would just be like some old man telling the story around a campfire. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. It'll be like you can't. Yeah. A blind man. A blind man. Yeah.

[00:06:19] If Homer was blind. Like really what all these things are saying, if you had the Annie Hall subtitles is it should be an all white Odyssey. As the Greeks, the pinnacle of the whites. Okay. Anyway, so today we are going to be talking. This is kind of part two of VBW Madness. The winner of that tournament, which had us talk about first Solaris the novel, which we talked about last episode.

[00:06:47] And I actually thought that was a pretty good episode having edited it. I know you never listen, but you should. No, I just know in my heart of hearts that it was good. Yeah. And then in the second segment today, we're going to talk about the movie, the Tarkovsky movie. And, yeah, I think like we said, we may talk about the Soderbergh for a bonus episode at some point soon. Because now I'm really kind of curious. Me too.

[00:07:11] And I think next episode, main episode, we're going to talk about the Odyssey more broadly, having both seen the film. So a lot of adaptation talk, you know, what does it mean to adapt something for the cinema? But first. We're going to hit all of your favorite buttons. We're going to talk about AI and your beliefs about AI. And we're going to do it via measurement of a true latent construct, which is where do you fall, Tamler, on AI?

[00:07:40] We're looking at a quiz called the AI Compass that asks you 15 questions about your opinion on AI. And it will categorize you into one of 30 archetypes. So I thought it would be fun for us to take the quiz just live right now. And, of course, we'll put a link to the quiz so everybody can take it. Have you looked at any of these questions already? I have. Yeah, I have. So you've taken the quiz? Yeah. But I'm going to take it anew and see if there's reliability.

[00:08:09] I'm going to do a Crombex Alpha on my own. Okay. Just some of the archetypes that you can be just looking at it now for the first time. On one end is the Luddite. It doesn't work the way they claim. It's making everything worse. And you'd like your internet back, please. Like I already know that like that's probably what it's going to be. And then the prophet is on the other end. AI is the most important thing that ever happened to our species. And it's going to be glorious.

[00:08:36] Well, the first part of that Bob Wright agrees with, not the second necessarily. You have tabs open about longevity research and you've mentally spent the UBI checks. You know what that is? No. Universal basic income. Yeah. So like, yeah, you know that soon we won't have to work as a species. And I'm sure that the thing they'll do is give everybody a generous UBI. Yeah. I thought it was like a bladder infection. All right. Let's start.

[00:09:04] Should I, how about I read the questions and. Sure. Yeah. Go ahead. Number one, are AI's conscious? Do we have responsibilities toward them? And there's always five options. The first is no, it's a next word predictor. This is embarrassing. Not now, but it might be possible someday. There's something going on in there, but it's not the same as human experience. They deserve moral consideration, roughly comparable to humans. And finally, they're the next stage of the evolution of intelligence on earth.

[00:09:30] So I definitely, I'm going to say the first one, but you know, I don't think it's just a next word predictor, but I do think it's embarrassing to ask this question. I'm with you on this. Not because I think it's a next word. Like it's really complex, but conscious is not where it's going. Or where it is right now. Or where it is. Or like, I personally don't think where it's going to go. I don't think so either. Number two, creative work. AI generated art, writing, and music. What's happening here?

[00:09:59] Option one, laundering other people's work through a statistics engine. Two, a cheap imitation that's flooding the internet with slop. Three, a useful drafting tool that still needs a human hand to matter. Four, a genius new creative medium like photography was. Five, the democratization of creativity itself. I don't even know exactly what that would mean. How could it be the democratization if like we're not doing it? But, so this is a tough one.

[00:10:26] Like when I write my long article on why the validity of the scale is in question. Like on the one hand, yes, it's laundering other people's work through a statistics engine. And it's definitely flooding the internet with slop. But it also might be a useful drafting tool for some people. Yeah. These aren't like well separated options. Yeah. So I think I'll go with the one in the middle. A cheap imitation that's flooding the internet with slop. Okay.

[00:10:54] I'm going to go with a useful drafting tool that still needs a human hand to matter. Okay. But with sympathies to the other options. Okay. Number three, what will AI do to employment? One, mostly generate busy work for consultants, net effect, noise. Two, automate some tasks, create others the usual churn. Three, displace millions of workers and concentrate wealth further. Four, free people from drudge work and create new kinds of jobs we can't predict yet. Five, end the need for most human labor. What comes after is the real question.

[00:11:24] So this one I have a clear answer for me. And it's the second. Automate some tasks, create others the usual churn. Yeah, me too. We shouldn't be agreeing so much, but it's pretty clear. Yeah. I know. It's bad for us. Number four, what's AI doing to our information environment? One, it's a glorified autocomplete making the internet worse. The epistemic disaster isn't AI being powerful. It's people believing it is. That sounds like an AI generated option.

[00:11:53] Two, generating confident sounding garbage at scale. It's an epistemic disaster. Three, making things worse on net. Deep fakes, SEO spam, hallucinated citations. Four, a mixed bag, better search and analysis, worse misinformation. Wash. Five, on balance helpful. It's easier than ever to research, back check and learn. Six, a revolution in knowledge access. Everyone now has a research assistant. This is a tough one.

[00:12:17] I think one of the things that is perhaps useful is, you know, the way you can like use it to kind of follow up questions on searches. I think like making things worse on net might be right just in terms of like how people who haven't generated their own intellectual habits and lives already. So like for a lot of young people, but for people who have done that and who know like

[00:12:44] to take this stuff with a grain of salt, what to confirm, what to follow up on, I think it might be very useful. So maybe I would even say mixed bag wash. But I don't, I don't think it's a wash when you take into account like what it's going to do to our youth. Yeah. So which one are you going to go with? Maybe I'll go making things worse, but I'm tempted to do a mixed bag. Well, do making things worse because I go, I'll go a mixed bag because I think it's actually hard to know.

[00:13:13] It definitely does make research and analyses better and easier, I think, but definitely worse misinformation. But yeah, I'm also not a hundred percent making things worse on net might be right. Okay. Five. What do you make of the company's building AI? One, a bubble built on vibes, VC money and GPU hoarding. It'll pop. Two, over-promising, underfunding safety and moving too fast. Typical tech. Three, a real industry building real products. Some hype, some substance.

[00:13:42] Four, building something genuinely important, even if the business models are still shaking it out. Five, the most consequential industry since semiconductors. It's either number one, a bubble built on vibes, VC money and GPU ordering. It'll pop. I do think that, but you know, I'm not an expert in the financial future of this. So it's either one or two. What do you do? You know, my gut was over-promising, underfunding safety, but I actually think it's a real industry building real products.

[00:14:11] I think it's a lot of hype, but I think there's some substance. So I'll say three. All right. I'm going with one. All right. Six, could AI pose an existential threat to humanity? One, no, this is sci-fi panic by people who watch too much Terminator. Two, honestly, it's fine. It's a tool. The anxiety is way more dangerous than the technology. Three, not from technology itself, but from how people misuse it. Surveillance, weapons, control. Four, a small but non-zero chance worth taking seriously without panicking.

[00:14:40] Five, a serious risk that's being recklessly ignored by the people building it. Six, the most dangerous technology humanity has ever created. So like by existential threat to humanity, I take it that means this will make humanity go extinct. Yes. So then I'm definitely taking one. No, sci-fi panic. Yeah. I'll take two. Honestly, it's fine. It's a tool. Anxiety is way... I don't know if the anxiety is more dangerous than the technology, but I think neither. So dismissive we are.

[00:15:10] Four, this is seven. How much do you actually use AI in your own life? One, I avoid it on principle. Two, I've tried it. It's fine. I don't think about it much. Three, I use it regularly for specific tasks. It's a decent tool. Four, it's become a daily part of how I work and think. Five, I can't imagine going back to work without it. Yeah. Like this is the one that scares me, like how I would answer this in a year. But for right now, I'm clearly on. I've tried it. It's fine. I don't think about it much. Yeah. And I'm at... I use it regularly for specific tasks. It's a decent tool.

[00:15:40] Definitely not a daily tool for me, unless you count the undesired Google results that come. Yes. That's a daily encroachment. Yeah. No, I hate all that shit. It's so bad because sometimes like those, for some reason, those Google search results are like worse than just like using chat GPT or something. And if you know what you're looking for, you can see sometimes that it's just wrong right away. Yeah. Which should make you wonder about sometimes... Exactly. It's the... Don't know. You aren't qualified. Gelman amnesia. That's whatever. AI in healthcare.

[00:16:09] This is question eight. AI in healthcare. What's the real story? What's the real story? What's the deal? What's the deal with AI? One, hype. The hard parts of medicine aren't pattern matching. Two, some useful narrow applications, but nowhere near the sales pitch. Three, already saving lives and diagnostics. The best is ahead. Four, we'll transform medicine as profoundly as antibiotics did. I honestly don't know this at all, but I'm going to say the second one, but this isn't really based on much.

[00:16:39] And, you know, given how I think just normal diagnostics in medicine can be really, really bad, especially now, I think like if you're comparing it to that, it might be useful. I don't know. So I'm going to say two. Yeah. And I'll say three, already saving lives and diagnostics. Again, I don't know. Like I would be lying if I said I had expertise, but it does seem as if that's an application that's made some progress, like better at reading scans just because you can feed it so much

[00:17:09] information about scans that have been read. That's maybe optimistic, but yeah. Number nine, training data and consent. AI models are trained on data scraped from the internet, much of it without permission. One, it's straightforward theft and should be illegal. Two, it's ethically questionable and the creators deserve compensation. Three, complicated. It's how all learning works, but the scale changes things. Four, fair use. You can't own facts and patterns. Five, a non-issue.

[00:17:38] Human artists learn from everything they see too. This is a tough one that I don't know if we've talked about very much. No. You know, I think, you know, Vince Gilligan had a famous little clip where he called it the world's most expensive plagiarism machine. And there is a lot of stuff like, I mean, I know I'm currently in a class action lawsuit, which I'm sure will yield zero or it'll yield like something where I would have to fill out 12 forms to get $4.

[00:18:08] I think it's Anthropic taking books without permission and putting them in. I don't know even the details. I was just told, hey, you might as well try it. You could get a couple thousand dollars. So apparently they took all of my books and put them in. And I don't know. That's like, you know, even people have to buy the book technically to be able to read it or, you know, take it out of the library, which means so the fact that they're doing that is at the very least ethically questionable. So I think I'll do that one. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:18:37] Google famously sort of just scanned all the books that it could and said, we'll worry about it later. I didn't know that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I'm mixed on this too. I'll say complicated. It's how all learning works, but the scale changes things. But I don't think it's because that's how all learning works that it's complicated. I just think that somewhere in the middle, like feasibly, like it's- So why not two? The one I did. Because I don't know that creators deserve compensation. I mean, I guess that just depends on whether they make a lot of money from any one creator.

[00:19:05] I don't have the intuition that people need to get paid if AI ingested it. Wait till they start doing like AI versions of your beats. You know, that's a good example because beats are sampling so much anyway. And I'm not going to pay those fucking artists. Yeah. But I don't make money from them for that reason. Well, for many reasons. But yeah. Yeah. And you kind of do. And I kind of do. That's true. All right. I'll put two.

[00:19:35] Actually, it is ethically questionable. Ten. Students are using AI to write their essays and do their homework. One. It's a plagiarism machine that produces C minus work. Schools are panicking over a souped up thesaurus. See, this is where it's like combining two answers that are just double barreling. It's not producing C minus work. It's producing like B work. B plus. Yeah. And schools are allowed to panic over even that. Two. It's destroying the entire point of education. Three. A real problem that schools need to address, but not the end of learning.

[00:20:05] Four. The assignments need to change, not the students. Five. This is what a calculator was to math class. Adapt or get left behind. Six. The best thing that happened to education. Personalized tutoring for everyone. I like to adapt or get left behind. Like, oh yeah. If you didn't adapt to the calculator, you were fucked. Fucking abacus Dave is what they call to me. It's destroying the entire point of education. Very clear cut for me. Yeah. I'll say a real problem that schools need to address, but not the end of learning. Because I'm optimistic about our children. Eleven.

[00:20:35] How should government handle AI? Regulate the companies wasting resources on it, not the technology. It's not powerful enough to need its own framework. That was one. Two. Ban or heavily restrict it until we understand what we're dealing with. Three. Regulate it like pharmaceuticals. Prove it safe before you ship it. Four. Sensible guardrails, but don't strangle innovation. Five. Five. Mostly stay out of the way. The technology is moving too fast for legislation. Six. Let it rip. Regulation is just protectionism for incumbents. I don't even know what they mean by that.

[00:21:05] So, I think regulate it like pharmaceuticals maybe, but I don't even know what we're talking about here. You know? Like, this is a tough one for me. I don't want to say sensible guardrails, but don't strangle innovation because, I don't know, it's one of those two. Which one do you think? I'm going to go sensible guardrails, not because I'm worried about it strangling innovation, but because I think sensible guardrails are pretty much the only thing we can do. All right. I'll do the other one.

[00:21:33] Regulate it like pharmaceuticals. But then, in exchange for that, deregulate certain pharmaceuticals. Let us get Vicodin again, you know? We're not going to win that one. I think I'm ready. I think I can handle it. Fucking patronizing ass governments. 12. Will we build artificial general intelligence, a system that can do anything a human can do intellectually? One. No, we don't even understand human intelligence. This is decades away, if ever. Two.

[00:22:03] Maybe someday, but current approaches won't get us there. Three. We're closer than most people think, and it could happen within a decade. Four. It's essentially already here. We just keep moving the goalposts. One. For me, no, we don't even understand human intelligence. This is decades away, if ever. I'm two. Maybe someday, but current approaches won't. Get us there. All right. 13. Who's actually benefiting from AI right now? One. NVIDIA, cloud providers, and grifters. That's about it. Two. Big tech mostly. The democratization talk is marketing. Three. A mix.

[00:22:33] Tech companies for sure, but regular people are getting real use from it too. Four. Anyone willing to learn how to use it. The tools are right there, Tamler. Five. Everyone increasingly. It's the most accessible, powerful technology ever built. I mean, people are getting real use from it. There's no question about that, even if it's just like cooking a big dinner. For guests coming over. And I guess I'll do that, a mix. Yeah. I guess I'll do that. Yeah. That's my gut too. I'm just going to, for the sake of being interesting, do anyone willing to learn how to use it? That's not what you believe.

[00:23:02] No, it's not. The tools are right there. So do, just pick what you believe. I'll do a mix. Yeah. That's what I would have picked. 14. It's 2031. What happened with AI? One. The bubble popped AI is still around, but the hype looks embarrassing in hindsight. Two. Incremental progress. Useful tools. No revolution. Remember when people said this about blockchain? Three. Steady. Real integration into work and daily life. Less dramatic than predicted, but meaningful. Four. Major societal shifts underway. Job markets, education, and creative industries fundamentally changed. Five.

[00:23:32] We're living in a different world. AI reshaped everything faster than anyone expected. I mean, I do think there will be a bubble. Like, I believe that. I'm not sure what basis I have for believing that, but I think this is going to be a bubble that pops and it could be like the financial crisis. Yeah. And maybe the, I guess I'll do that one because AI is still around, even though I do think it can be maybe a useful tool, but I'll do that one. I think that's closest to what I believe. I think steady real integration into work and daily life, less dramatic than predicted, but meaningful.

[00:24:00] I think it'll become just part of everything. But I think it's like, it sucks like right now. It's being like, I think if you work in a job where they're trying to bring AI into like a corporate workplace, like from talking to people, I think that ends up being much harder than if you just didn't do it at all. Maybe. I just, I think that, that what will happen is the things that it doesn't work well for will slowly sort of fall off. And the things that it does work well for will just be integrated in like a almost seamless

[00:24:30] way. So like already, you know, people who record zoom meetings get like note taking like AI, that's like super helpful. Like that's the kind of shit I think it will just integrate itself into. But there's this whole consultant class that is trying to create all these workshops that you have to attend. Like it's just going to be a huge pain in the ass. Well, my friend who works at a hospital, the thing that he drove him crazy was this woman

[00:24:56] coming in, making him do this like six hour like workshop and saying, AI is not going to take your jobs. People who know how to use AI are going to take your job. Like, I don't know how he didn't just burn down the entire place at that point, you know, that would have just driven me out of my fucking mind. Oh my God. Okay. Last question. AI data centers use enormous amounts of electricity and water. How much does this matter? One, we're burning staggering amounts of energy and water to run a technology

[00:25:25] that mostly generates spam. This is genuinely unconscionable. Two, the environmental cost would be easier to stomach if we were getting something worthwhile out of it. We're not. And that makes the waste indefensible. Three, it's worth keeping an eye on. But AI data centers use less electricity than streaming videos in 4K and nobody's launching a moral crusade against Netflix. Four, the environmental footprint is real and should be taken seriously. But the potential benefits in medicine science productivity operate on a completely different scale. And five, the environmental argument is wildly exaggerated by people who already

[00:25:55] are opposed to AI and went looking for the most sympathetic reason to say so. You know, like I feel like I believe all of these to some extent, you know, like it's, this is a very poorly phrased question because we are burning, I think, a ton of energy and water. I don't think we're just generating spam, although it is generating a lot of spam. You know, I've heard those things about streaming and video in 4K. And, you know, as someone who enjoys doing that, I wouldn't want to stop that.

[00:26:24] So if that's true, but like it doesn't tell you which of these things is true. So I guess I'll do the middle. It's worth keeping an eye on if they're right that data centers use less electricity than streaming video in 4K. That also could be for now because there aren't that many data centers, but soon there will be. Yeah, it sucks because I think the environmental effects were wildly exaggerated by people who are opposed to AI. Yeah. You know, so there's all this like overestimation of how damaging it is.

[00:26:51] And there's people who have reported that an almond farm uses way more than a data center. Like just growing almonds is like a huge like water waster. But I also think that it's the 4K video. Like we should be up in arms about all of this stuff if we're going to be up in arms about it. And so I'm going to say it's worth keeping an eye on. There's a real thing. And this is a big thing in Texas right now of communities not wanting data centers anywhere around them. And so I assume there's a reason for that. Yeah.

[00:27:21] I don't think it's just hype that these communities in rural Texas, they're not predisposed to bitch about the environment. Like I think there's something like that it does that's damaging to the local environment. But I don't know. But at least in this case, it's not because of like woke people. They're ugly. They're big. Maybe they're noisy. Maybe there's environmental impact that we're not capturing. Don't say that about rural Texans.

[00:27:47] And I think that this is the one place where the regulation from the government should really step in. That's easier at least to regulate than whatever the technology is. All right. Clicking to see my results. Do you have yours? I do. All right. You want to read yours first? Sure. You are. And the title of my archetype is free subscription tier. Patron Saint Kara Swisher of the Wall Street Journal. It works. You use it. And the jury's still out on the big questions.

[00:28:17] You're not dismissive. And you're not converted. You're empirical. You'll happily use the free version for what it's good at. But you're absolutely not paying $20 a month for this. There are limits. Except for that I am. That is right. An unfortunate way to try to present what I think is probably like your view overall. But I like for all of the people who are about to email me to say I'm entirely dismissive about the wonders of this technology. No. This website told me I'm not dismissive. Yes. Okay. The website did not tell me that.

[00:28:47] Although I am not on the furthest archetype. I don't remember what this was. But I am the shrug. I think this captures what I was like six months ago. The shrug. You know. Now I'm very worried about what it's doing in education. And you know. But here's what it says about the shrug. It also says my patron saint is Matt Levine. Do you know who that is? No. I think it's just doing that because I'm Jewish. It knows. Yeah. So here's what it says.

[00:29:14] AI is a thing that exists and you regard it with detached amusement like everything else. It's overhyped, sure, but so is most stuff. That's fair enough. You'll use it when it's useful. Ignore it when it isn't. And you'll find the discourse more interesting than the technology. That's definitely not true. You are unbothered. Yeah. I think, like I said, this would have been more accurate a bit ago. Oh, the shrug to the 10th. That's only the 10th from the end of the spectrum.

[00:29:44] I know. You could have been the Luddite, the digital hermit, the retired engineer, the conscientious objector, the journalist. Yeah. I feel bad about that. I should be more like that. And mine is just one higher. Free subscription tier is number 11. Oh, I need to get more Luddite, clearly. But, you know, like... You're going to work on that. I'm going to work on that. All right. That's where we stand on AI, whether we agree or not.

[00:30:14] Whether we knew it or not. Because we've scientifically demonstrated that this is where we are. And, yeah. Anything more to add about it? No. But I think that, obviously, the movie we're about to discuss is all about AI. I'll make sure and bring it up over and over again. And soon you won't need a Tarkovsky. That's true. Because, you know, AI will be able to just give you a Tarkovsky-like movie. Yeah. We'll be right back to talk about Tarkovsky's Solaris, which I'm very excited to do because there's a lot to talk about.

[00:31:54] Welcome back to Very Bad Wizards. I'm going to start with support this time because with all the excitement about The Odyssey, I see that Emily Wilson's translation is number seven on the bestseller list. So whatever we end up thinking of the movie, it's doing a lot of good. And anyone who is interested in reading The Odyssey and having some people to read along with, you should go to our Patreon page. And for just $5 a month, you can get access to all of our bonus episodes,

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[00:33:43] And what would really help us out a lot is if you gave us a five-star review on Spotify or Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to Very Bad Wizards. That helps other people find the show. All right. Thank you so much. We really love hearing from you. Let's get back to the episode. All right. Let's get to our main topic. This is Andrei Tarkovsky's 1972 film Solaris,

[00:34:12] based on the Stanisław Lem book that we talked about last episode. I was surprised to see that Lem is listed as one of the writers also. And I do think he worked on the screenplay and stayed in contact in spite of the conflicts that they had about it in spite of how Lem would shit on it basically for the rest of his life. Yeah, it's crazy. Like on the one hand, I kind of respected if he was like, all right, well, like, I think they started off

[00:34:41] thinking it was going to be more collaborative. Yeah. I mean, I think that's what he must have thought. Yeah. But Tarkovsky is working under the theory like the auteur kind of has to have the final say because I'm not a novelist. I'm a film director and I'm making a film. Yeah. And I think I saw a quote that I thought captured nicely the friction where Tarkovsky said he thought that Lem just was viewing him as an illustrator of his book. Yeah.

[00:35:11] Right. Yeah. That he just thought he was going to take the book and do the best he could to put the book on film, but that the primary thing was to be faithful to the book like an illustrator. And of course, that's not what someone like Tarkovsky of anyone is going to be interested in doing. Because for Tarkovsky, the number one thing I think is cinema and the tools that you have, that you have to be faithful to that above all else.

[00:35:38] But what do you think, since we're on this topic, what do you think are the main thematic differences? And we can talk about some of the narrative differences. The biggest one for me is that thematically and possibly by necessity, there is just less focus on what the alien is. And that theme that Lem apparently came back to multiple times about like the strangeness, the otherness, the impossibility of ever knowing the other.

[00:36:07] And the book spends so much time on that and the limits of scientific discovery and the limits of science itself that I guess just would not have been possible in this medium. Like at least it would have been difficult to focus on that. And I remember the first time I did this, watched the movie and read the book thinking, wow, one of them really is about humans and one of them is really about the aliens. And I think that's the vibe that I get. What about you? Yeah, same.

[00:36:35] I think Lem is interested in Solaris itself. He says at multiple points, like, I called it Solaris, like, because like the focus is about Solaris. And I think all the epistemological problems we face trying to understand it, I think that was, as you said, a very big part of the book. Like Tarkovsky really just kind of gestures at it at one point, but that's not the focus of his movie at all.

[00:37:03] I think you could make a movie that explored that question. I just don't think that's the movie Tarkovsky. I don't think he's the right person for that movie. And certainly I don't think what he wanted to do. Um, there was an interview with Lem on the Criterion disc that I have and watched it on where he basically says like Solaris itself was kind of an annoyance to Tarkovsky. Like he wanted to do crime and punishment on a space station.

[00:37:32] And it was just like Solaris to him was like a pretext to explore all these things about the human problem and human loss and human isolation. And I think it's funny that Tarkovsky gives what I take to be kind of Lem's perspective in the Sartoris character to some degree, you know, like Sartoris will say something like this is just second rate Dostoevsky or he'll say at one point, don't turn a scientific problem

[00:38:01] into a common love story. So I think like, it's funny that I think Tarkovsky is kind of giving that view some air, even if, you know, he's making the movie that he wants to make. I think some of that conflict is played out in the stuff with Sartorius or Sartorius. I think it's Sartorius. Yeah, Sartorius. So that's, I think, broadly right. I think narratively, I think the movie is pretty faithful in the middle and completely different

[00:38:31] in the beginning because they don't even go out to space until the 43rd minute. It's 43 minutes and something where he's finally in the rocket ship. And of course, the end, which I'm sure we'll have a lot to talk about. It's not the same as the end at all. And here's maybe the biggest difference between them. I think Lem is right that Tarkovsky finds Solaris to be an annoyance or an obstacle, you know,

[00:38:55] opening on the pond that's in his family home, the Dacha or Daka or whatever they call these Russian family homes, that you see the reflection of that in the pond. The pond looks already kind of mysterious and beautiful and kind of awe-inspiring. And I think like one of the main themes of the movie is that the earth is just as mysterious.

[00:39:24] It's just as strange. It's full of reflections and magic. It's all kind of here if we notice and attend to it. But we run away. We try to explore beyond the boundaries of earth, not because earth doesn't have all this stuff to offer, but we're just afraid to kind of reckon with who we really are and what we've done.

[00:39:48] And one of the, I think, the messages once you get to the space station is you can't run away from that anyway. Like not even in space. It'll come back, if anything, harder, more intensely because Solaris, like in the book, acts also as a kind of mirror to the person. And that driving scene, one of the things I love about that, and I know it's a controversial scene, but it's shot, as you told me, in Tokyo, which I thought when I was looking at that look seems like Tokyo.

[00:40:16] It's just so space-like. Like as he's going through there, the sounds and everything, it's like that same feeling that you get in a rocket ship going out to space. You can get in the car if you just pay attention to everything that's going on. And I've had this experience, like, and it's usually coming out of a movie in the movie theater and then driving home on the highway. It's like I'm doing it for the first time. Like it's just so cool. And the sounds especially.

[00:40:42] And I think the sound in this movie is designed in those opening scenes to be otherworldly, even though it's so clearly on Earth.

[00:41:25] So I think like so much of what this movie is saying is it's here. We don't need to go out to the cosmos. Like what we have is here. We need to turn inward and we need to connect not with aliens, but just with our fellow human beings. I mean, there is a part, I guess, in the third act that where Snout at his birthday party pretty much says that we're not actually interested in exploring new worlds. We just want to extend the borders of Earth. Yeah.

[00:41:52] And that I think is like the thesis that you're describing. Yeah. I like everything you said. I am like not sure what I think about what he's saying about Earth. I definitely think what you said makes sense. But I got a little bit more of an ambivalence about it. I could also read that freeway scene in that, you know, big Japanese concrete and light modern landscape as a criticism of what we're doing to the Earth.

[00:42:21] Because it's in such stark contrast to the nature scenes in his dad's house out in the country. And so it feels like we're trying to turn the Earth into something that it's not. And the imagery of his mother on that farm, like I kept thinking Mother Earth was something that he was trying to tell us that like Earth is the roots of all humanity. It is the source, the wellspring of life.

[00:42:45] You know, he carries the dirt with him all the way to Solaris and it's like he's yearning to be in contact with that. But at the same time, he's not, which I'm not quite sure what's going on. And so I wasn't sure whether he was saying like, OK, not only are we misguided into thinking that we need to explore new worlds, we're actually changing what we really need and what we want from our own planet into something that we think we need and want, which is these like big freeways and modernity.

[00:43:15] Yeah, no, I think that's there. I definitely think there's also a kind of critique in the driving scene of like everything gets progressively more alienating and louder and cacophonous. And it is kind of like we're taking this Earth and we're fucking it up. And even his family home, you can see it's by a highway. So it's almost like a little mini Solaris itself.

[00:43:39] Like he has this family home that's like probably going to be encroached on soon by the highway there. So I think that is something, you know, I do think Tarkovsky wants us to return to nature, return to the mother. Although the mother is not painted as a necessarily super sympathetic character. No, that's why I think there's some weird ambivalence there because he also chooses not to return to Earth. Right. Not to return to the people he's supposedly connecting with by staying on Solaris. He's like creating a new version of them to connect with.

[00:44:08] But I guess I see that as a failure of his character that he does that. Not as he is correctly or even defensibly trying to just keep what he wants of Earth. But I don't know. What do you think? I mean, I think so, too. Like I was at the end of this not sure what he really thought of Chris's way of dealing.

[00:44:30] So I think what is clear is that he has presented the Raskolnikov, like the crime and punishment guilt of conscience that's weighing on Chris as well as the other ones. And these are the sources of the guests, you know, people they feel guilty about. On the one hand, it seems as if Chris is working through the trauma or the guilt that he's experienced because of the suicide of his ex-wife, Hari.

[00:44:57] And he is less ashamed of her than the others are of their guests who they never find out. Like he treats her as like a real thing. He doesn't experiment on her. You know, she even says at one point he's the only decent one. You know, he's treated me. He's loved me. One way of reading that is Tarkovsky thinks, yeah, he's actually worked through some of these psychological problems. On the other hand, he seems like extra clingy toward her the more time goes on.

[00:45:26] And he wants her not the original Hari. Like it's like a replacement. And that he chooses the replacement home and father and life on Solaris instead of dealing with whatever he had to deal with at home. Seems like that's not healthy. That's a pretty unhealthy way. Yeah. It's like a person who's gone temporarily insane, choosing to stay with their hallucinations instead of like returning to the real world. Imperfect as it is.

[00:45:56] So that speech that Snout makes, I wrote it down, so let me read that. He says, we have no interest in conquering any cosmos. We want to extend the earth to the borders of the cosmos. We don't know what to do with other worlds. We don't need other worlds. We need a mirror. We struggle for contact, but we'll never find it. We're in the foolish human predicament of striving for a goal that he fears that he has no need for. Man needs man. Gay, but whatever. It's a little gay.

[00:46:25] But that's the thing that I think he's running away from is that he didn't properly make connections. It seems like not with his father because his father has a lot of ambivalence about him. And it seems like he's a little bit on the outside of the community. And we don't know who the aunt is or the kids, but he has clearly nothing to do with that.

[00:46:47] And he burns his mementos from childhood before he leaves, which at first I was like, is it because this is a journey from which he can never return? Sort of like this is a long space journey and you're committed to being there for the rest of your life. But it doesn't seem that way. It seems as if returning would be an option. And what he's doing is just eliminating the connections that he has, save for a couple of things that he takes with him. Yeah. Like, I think it's clear that you can come back because Burton came back.

[00:47:17] He's older. Right. Obviously. Yes, that's right. And I think, is it implied that the father was also there at some point? I think it is because he seems to have known Burton in a professional context. Yeah. So, yeah, it's like he has these people here. He has Burton who has been in contact with the ocean. He has his father who also has been involved and he just doesn't really talk to any of them about it. No. There's a moment where his father is like, hey, can we talk alone? We don't get that much time.

[00:47:45] And he's like, yeah, I don't know if you've ever seen this in people. There are people who it seems like they want so much more of a connection to their father that they have this childhood eagerness in just the way that they even talk about it. And it's clear that he wanted to be more connected with his father, but his father was probably distant and he doesn't get that. And so it seems as if he's a person who has failed at connections with people.

[00:48:10] And that's another reading that I had, which is like, it seems as if this is a man who has realized that his connection to other humans has never yielded anything satisfactory for either him or the other person. And there is a way in which he's turning inward, but he's getting something out of the Chris version of Hari. The one that's in his mind, the father that's in his mind, the house that's in his mind, the mother that's in his mind.

[00:48:38] Yeah. It's just that that's solipsistic and it's cheating. You know, like I don't think he's moralizing necessarily, but I think there is a general sense that you can't cheat when it comes to human connection. Yeah. And this relates to some of the AI stuff I think that we have. It can simulate connection, but it can't actually be connection. Although even some of the stuff that Hari says might suggest otherwise. I don't know. I know. It's hard to know.

[00:49:05] You know, the more optimistic reading, which I don't think is the one Tarkovsky is really offering, but he puts it out there. I think it's one that Lem would have offered is that he is the first real shot at truly connecting with the alien because he is so bad at connecting with other humans. Here is somebody who has been willing to open up emotionally to the creature that is the ocean.

[00:49:32] And maybe what he's doing is not just running away from humanities and maybe not entirely solipsistic, but rather approaching the alien in a way that I think as Sartorius at one point says, or I don't remember if it's Snout or Sartorius that says like, hey, you might have been the first to make an emotional connection to the ocean. Yeah. And in fact, I watched certain scenes again this morning in preparation, in addition to watching the whole thing.

[00:49:58] It does seem like something big will happen on the ship between him and Hari, and you'll cut to those cool shots of the ocean. And it seems like there's activity building in the ocean. Like it's kind of learning something about, and it seems to, although we don't see the, what is it called? The encephalogram. Encephalogram, the snufflock, I guess. We don't see him do it, and it's like, it's a little confusing,

[00:50:23] but it does seem like maybe that worked in terms of getting rid of all the guests and making it so that they don't come back. Like, so I don't know. Maybe that's, yeah, I think that is an optimistic read. It just, so much of the movie is about like the deep regret and shame that he has for not having connected with anyone successfully. And I actually maybe got the slightly different read of the stuff with him and his father.

[00:50:49] To me, it seems like it's more him that's distant than the father. But maybe that wasn't true in their childhood. I don't know. Maybe now that the dad is retired, he wants to do like a cat in the cradle thing. Yeah. You know, there is an interesting parallel when his father is talking to Burton, is that the guy's name? About the house. And he says that it's exactly like the one that was my dad's or my grandfather's. Yes. That he rebuilt as a replica.

[00:51:18] It's just like, oh, he's doing the earth version of what Chris ends up doing out there. Exactly. And that's why it's so close to that highway, you know, like, and yeah. Well, this relates to what I think is a huge theme in the movie, which is the idea of copies and reflections. And everything is like a copy of a copy of a copy. So that DACA, right, is a copy of the original great grandfather's house.

[00:51:45] And then the DACA we see at the end of the movie is another copy of that. And there's a little bit of degrading of copies sort of raining inside. Exactly right. It's raining inside. The further you get, it's like a Xerox copy, the more it's going to be faded or inaccurate in all sorts of different ways. And there's so many shots of mirrors. And I think the idea of art as a form of a copy, you know, like art trying to express something real. But it can't do that.

[00:52:14] It has to do it via art. And then there's that Bruegel painting, Hunter's painting, where it seems like that conveys something. It kind of merges with the DACA and stuff that he experienced on Earth. And she seems to understand that. Harry seems to understand that. So, like, I think that idea just runs through it.

[00:52:35] But it's a very platonic idea is there are these, the real, which for Tarkovsky, I think probably has to do with love and some sort of like spiritual connection that you can have with the Earth and with other people. And then you have these successively more distant copies. And, you know, at the end, like what he's doing is basically looking at shadows on the wall of Plato's cave or, you know, something even beyond that. I don't know. He's looking at an AI version.

[00:53:04] A video of shadows on the wall. Yeah. Yet I still can't help but feel that there's some ambivalence there because one of the things that seems right is that Harry's getting moved by the art in a way that, like, maybe what the guests had never experienced before, the ocean hadn't experienced before. And the power of art to evoke, even as a copy, seems like something Tarkovsky is going to be sympathetic toward, right? So, like, this is what he is doing.

[00:53:34] He is presenting artwork to evoke emotion. And the evocation of that emotion is just as sincere an emotion as it would be with whatever, quote unquote, the real thing would be.

[00:53:50] And it seems, again, I like, it's weird that I'm reading optimism into it, but it seems as if toward the end, the love that he's feeling for Harry and perhaps for the father and the landscape that the ocean has created is going to do something profound to the ocean or to him or to the relationship between him and the ocean because it can do that. Yeah, no, I mean, I completely agree with that. And so I don't mean to say that just because something is a copy, it's bad.

[00:54:18] I think, you know, when it comes to what I think Tarkovsky might imagine to be real, it might be unarticulable. Inarticulable? Inarticulable. I just can't say the last part. It's literally inarticulable. It's literally. It's literally. And so art is sometimes either the best way for us to represent it or even more optimistically, it's a pointer.

[00:54:42] It's a way for us to access the real thing which can't be represented in such straightforward or clear-cut ways. So I agree with that. And I also agree that when she's looking at the painting, she is getting more from it than I think any of the humans on Earth. Yeah, for sure. She doesn't have that kind of world-weary cynicism about it like they have about Don Quixote. Yeah.

[00:55:08] So it's almost like she has a more innocent appreciation of it because she hasn't been damaged by Earth. She hasn't been emotionally crippled. And, you know, I think she says something to that effect at some point, you know, like I feel more deeply than you do. And I think they're kind of dead inside all those people. And yet she's sympathetic. She's like, no, you're all human just in different ways. It really is interesting.

[00:55:34] Like I, so I watched almost two times this time around and I found myself even after the second time more confused about what's going on with Hari than I was at first. Because I'm like, wait, is she having a real insight here? Is the, you know, or by extension, is the ocean having a real insight? And I'm kind of thinking that in the book, it's all about humans trying to understand what's going on with the ocean with Solaris.

[00:56:01] And I think that what might be happening is Tarkovsky representing Solaris getting true understanding of humans. Because that's what Tarkovsky is interested in. What is humanity? Yes, exactly. And I think that's the clear difference between Lem and Tarkovsky is that ultimately they're interested in different things in this book. I'm not saying Lem doesn't care about humans or humanities or even that the novel doesn't pay attention to that. Because clearly he does because of the, you know, he created Hari.

[00:56:29] That's why it's so wonderful to see two takes on, like, obviously Tarkovsky saw something in the book that inspired him. And, you know, like, even that Lem might not have realized he was putting in there. So I think, like, to get back to what you started off saying at the beginning of this episode, there is no being faithful to the book in a better way or worse way. I think Tarkovsky probably was faithful to the book in a way that Lem just didn't realize. Yes, exactly.

[00:56:58] That book does have these questions about Hari and the extent to which she might be a less damaged version of a human being. You know, I always seem to say this. When you're a hammer, everything is beginner's mind. But she has a little beginner's mind, a kind of innocence that ultimately leads her to do something that we consider a very human, almost ideal trait, which is sacrifice. Right. Yeah.

[00:57:26] And that's just something that none of those other people are capable of. They just want to destroy, radiate, you know. Yeah. Okay. Before we dive into the details, do you want to talk about this in contrast to 2001 A Space Odyssey? That's certainly the way that this has been presented as Tarkovsky's response to Kubrick. And yeah, we're certainly in conversation with each other. I mean, we both love both movies. But do you have any thoughts on that contrast?

[00:57:54] Is this being overplayed and we should just accept both masterpieces on their own terms? You know, I found it, like without doing a whole lot of reading about what Tarkovsky was thinking, just getting the gist of his complaints, I could see the very intentional parallels with changes. So 2001 is really clean. It's really neat. It's really like futuristic in the like antiseptic sense.

[00:58:24] And Tarkovsky builds a space station that is just as futuristic, but it's dirty. It's in disrepair. It's like tarnished in a way that's very like Blade Runner-y. Blade Runner gets all the credit for creating a future that was dirty. Yeah. But this is definitely a dirty future. And then infusing the station with like human artifacts, like art and the like decor and everything that is just giving it his,

[00:58:53] I think it seems like he's thinking your sci-fi doesn't have to be stripped of its humanity. Yeah. I think that's right. Even though it's dirty, it's also warmer. There's something warm about the shift. It's lived in. It's lived in. Yeah. There's, you know, it's a contrast. And the color, sometimes it becomes almost intentionally kind of blue and clinical with his bed having the plastic on it.

[00:59:17] And then other times they're just in a drawing room with candles, having like a cigarette and dressed in suits. Like, so it's sort of all over the place. And a lot of times the color choices emphasize this difference. And I don't know, like I haven't gone through this and analyzed every time it goes from color to black and white or that kind of sepia or to a kind of bluish color. It goes in sometimes with no clear rhyme or reason narratively. It doesn't seem like. Right.

[00:59:45] Other than the fact that even though it's not, I don't think it's explicitly ever mentioned in the film. Solaris in the book has two suns, one of which is blue and the other one is orange. And so the nighttime is the blue light. And yeah. Yeah. But so it seems as if he might have taken that as a cue for lighting, but that ends up giving, yeah, one is very cold. Yeah. And also sometimes it's just black and white or sometimes it's like seppy.

[01:00:13] And I'd like to see that because it seems like sometimes it just turns blue for no reason. Like it's not like a lot of time has passed. So we've gone from day to night. And, you know, there's a weird thing when they're at the beginning looking at the old tape, the black and white tape of Burton giving testimony. And then in that they play a video to show to the committee. And that video is in color. Oh, man. You're right. I didn't even. Like what the fuck is going on there? Like it shouldn't, that shouldn't be possible because the whole thing is in black and white.

[01:00:43] And sometimes it's unclear because of the, so like take the driving scene. I think sometimes that goes into black and white too, but it's not so obvious. Because it's like concrete and night and lights. And so the difference between that in color and that in black and white isn't until you see a person. And when you cut from that and you cut to him at the pond side burning all his stuff, that's in black and white. Yeah. I don't even know how that relates to Kubrick.

[01:01:09] But Kubrick is way too precise to be doing stuff like that unless there's a really good reason thematically. And I just think, yeah, Solaris is a little looser in how it presents everything. It's more languorous. Yeah. It's not even really a sci-fi movie. I mean, I know that that's like kind of a useless discussion to have because it is what it is. But it's very clearly just using the setting as a way to tell this very human story.

[01:01:37] Let me run this by you. This popped into my head that the difference between them that you can see in this movie is that Tarkovsky thinks human beings are redeemable, even if they aren't redeemed. And Kubrick just doesn't think we are.

[01:01:54] And so in that way, you know, Kubrick has a much more cynical view of humanity, even though he might have a more grandly optimistic view, depending on how you interpret the end of 2001 as some kind of possible next level of transcendence. But even if that's the case, it wouldn't be the humans who did that. Like the humans will blow up the earth the first chance that they have.

[01:02:22] You would need this contact with some greater force to get us to transcend in that way. Where I think Tarkovsky thinks even though we're fucking it up, it's possible for just human beings as human beings to transcend in some way. Interesting. So my first thoughts were, yeah, like does Kubrick even care about redemption?

[01:02:45] But yeah, it's certainly an optimism about the human's ability to reach for whatever the stars and find something that might in the end improve us. But it definitely takes the contact with the other. Yeah. Yeah. The monolith. Yeah, exactly. It was the monolith that gave us even our first steps of evolution. And my other thought was, does Tarkovsky, does he believe in redemption? Or is he just okay with the human condition as it is?

[01:03:13] Which might just be different ways of saying what you're saying. But like it seems as if he's comfortable with the messiness that is humanity and wants to deal with it rather than find the answer elsewhere. But as you were saying that, it did remind me of a thought I had. About these two movies that I don't know if it says something because one of these is definitely from the book Solaris. But they both have huge babies. Yeah. One baby is cosmic and transcendent.

[01:03:39] The other one is a freakish half representation of what humans might think humans are or whatever. What Solaris might look like. And what Solaris is interpreting. But when it doesn't know very much at this point. Right. Or it's just reading the guilt of whatever the father, Techner or whatever his name was. Yeah. That we learn. And both in the book and in Tarkovsky's movie, it's deeply like nauseating. It's so nauseating. They find it just repulsive. So that's the kind of copy that. Yeah. Yeah.

[01:04:08] That is something that occurred to me as well. Because I think what also makes them both awe-inspiring if one in a totally negative way is the sheer size of them. Yeah. And that's certainly true of the Kubrick baby as well. Otherwise, it's just a baby. Right. I think that's interesting. I don't know what to make of it. I do, though, think that Tarkovsky is very, very interested in the human condition in a way. That Kubrick is also, it's just such a different approach.

[01:04:36] I mean, you look at Eyes Wide Shut. There's a lot about guilt in there and about, you know, it's just sort of a very different way. I just think he's ultimately so much more cynical. Like, it's very hard to find characters in his movies who are sympathetic or they're yearning for something greater than themselves. And he finds a way to work with what I think is an ultimately pretty bleak worldview about human beings and human nature.

[01:05:05] And I think Tarkovsky, you know, on the one hand, I'm very tempted to say that he, because I do think he's more interested in human beings and I think he's more optimistic about our potential. But, you know, with both here and in Stalker, and I think also in Mirror, if I remember right, the underlying story is a tragedy and there's a kind of a failure. But at least they're trying. They're always trying in a Tarkovsky movie and they're almost never trying in a Kubrick movie.

[01:05:33] Yeah. No, I think that's right. Yeah. What do you think of the whole opening? I mean, I think it's so beautiful. For sure. It felt like an ode to nature and to Earth and all of its beauty and complexity. And it comes back to be important by the end. And I don't know, it just feels like humanity is grounded to this planet. You know, I don't know how to describe it. That's just what it evokes in me.

[01:06:01] But his taking the dirt with him in that canister, when you look at all he has room for, he barely has room for anything. And one of the things that he feels the need to take is the dirt in the canister with a little seed in it that ends up sprouting in the space station. I think it's kind of confusing what happens in all of it. So Burton and his father are together while he's standing by the pond. And then this all leads up to where they watch a video of the hearing.

[01:06:30] It's like they're almost going to talk. Like he says, the father says, we need to talk afterwards. And the son says, all right, I'm glad to hear you say that. I don't know why this guy has to be here. And then like he has a conversation with Burton, but they don't fully connect. And then there's this aunt or what we think is the aunt. Yeah. Who's just kind of hovering around along with these two kids, I guess Burton's kid and a girl that there's no explanation for.

[01:06:58] And he just disappears like halfway through that opening. So I don't know. It was like their characters from another movie almost. Yeah. There's a horse in the garage at one point that freaks out the kid. So I guess the kid is more from the city, but why is the horse in the garage next to a car? I don't know. Again, all I can rely on is the emotions that it gives me. And you were right to point out that like if you blink, you'll kind of miss how close it is to the road. Yeah.

[01:07:27] To like the concrete. And there is something in the juxtaposition of the horse and the car that's like, all right, we're already building this earth into something that it's not. Yeah. I think that's exactly right. I think I read somewhere that Tarkovsky has a very straightforward symbol for a horse that it just means life for him. It means life. And so, yeah, you're encroaching on life and nature by having it in a garage. And yeah, we're already trying to like merge things that shouldn't be merged.

[01:07:56] The one thing that I also found on my second watching this time was the like explicit kind of four elements are referred to often. The earth, wind, water, fire. You know, there's lots of obviously lots of water imagery. And then there is the bonfire video, the fire that he uses to burn his own stuff, the fire from the launching of the rocket that burns him, the candles. Yeah.

[01:08:23] Then there's the sound of the winds rustling the leaves that they try to replicate on the station. That was one of those things where I was like, you know, a director who got notes from the studio would not leave in so much of this for the worst. Because just that moment where he's like, hey, we learned this trick. You can make the fucking HVAC system sound like leaves rustling. Yeah. By cutting it like you're looking. Yeah. Strips, little strips of paper. Yeah. And then talk about copies, right?

[01:08:48] That's such a far down the Plato scale of like reality. You just have paper and an HVAC system and yet they still want to do it because. They're longing for it. They're longing for it. They're longing for that connection. Yeah. Yeah. And I think that's probably how Tarkovsky himself feels like as the earth is disappearing, he wants to at least make something that evokes nature and life. Yeah.

[01:09:12] There's also I think we're getting a real sense that time is not linear in this movies. There's one really cool moment where the aunt is watching the recording of the hearing of Burton's hearing and Burton says something and then she goes, what do you mean? Uh-huh. Old Burton is standing just, you know, beside her. So she's both talking to young Burton who is like, what do you mean? So it's already like we're not sure.

[01:09:41] Already we're just getting a little disoriented in terms of the time and place. This also seems like a kind of mirror of 2001. There's a couple of things about 2001 that seem like this, like the long shots and the patience, the playing with time in that way. You know, in the end there's the kind of VBW's favorite word, liminality, like the liminal hotel room that he's in as he's aging in 2001.

[01:10:07] And then there's the fever dream that he's having in the plastic encircled room in this. Yeah. But it's all like, yeah, fucking with time, sense of time. Yeah. And showing also that it's going to be a very subjective movie. We're going to be in people's perspectives. And, you know, I think when he, after the driving scene, do you have anything to say about the driving scene beyond what we've said already?

[01:10:30] There's just the one thing that I think you and I had talked about offline, which is the fact that it's five minutes is it's testing the audience. And so people have said that Tarkovsky would do shit like this just so that the people who are easily bored would walk out of the theater. Yeah. You can be hypnotized by it. Like I was hypnotized by it. And then I watched it again. That was one of the scenes I watched.

[01:10:53] The changes in sound and color and shadows and like, and, you know, I know that quote that you're talking about that he does it so that people who aren't really committed will walk out of the movie. But it does come fairly, you know, it comes about 30 minutes in. So placement wise, it's more like the train scene in Stalker, not the opening scene, but the train scene where it just kind of lulls you in and it marks a transition to, you know, the next part.

[01:11:23] Of the movie. It's ushering you in like a ferryman to this next world that you're going to be spending time in. Yeah. In that way, it's like kind of the 2001 going through the portal scene. The Stargate. The Stargate. The Stargate. Toward the end. Toward the end where it's like long and it's transition-y.

[01:11:44] Or it could be like, you know, placement wise, I think it's more like the stewardess, that long shot of the stewardess, you know, doing all these mundane tasks going into. Yeah, exactly. And, you know, again, like that ushers you into a new phase of the movie. There's a lot of ways in which this is riffing on Kubrick. You know, there's that scene where the ball comes bouncing through on the station. Yeah. I was thinking is in The Shining.

[01:12:12] Did he do that as a little reference to Tarkovsky? Either a fuck you or a hey. Like, let's talk. Yeah. Game respects game. Yeah. So maybe that was his way, Kubrick's way of trying to connect. That's. Yeah. You know, the other weird thing about the highway scene, though, that I wanted to ask you about is you could have this with Kelvin, right?

[01:12:39] Like he presumably has to go to the city to launch in an aircraft. Why have it be Burton and his son or what we presume to be his son and not Kelvin? I don't know. It's so true. It's weird that Burton is the one in there. I mean, is this showing Burton's increasing? I mean, Burton almost leaves the kid there. He's like very not connected. Yeah. I think he's feeling real, just not cool with Earth anymore.

[01:13:09] Yeah. So maybe it's his psychological disconnect. Oh, yeah. And maybe like Kelvin's father, maybe with him, you know, this is giving you a window as to what Kelvin's childhood was like, where he would be driving places with his dad, not really knowing what's going on. But still, you know, there's that nice moment where he puts his head on the dad's shoulder. The dad doesn't seem to fully appreciate it. But I don't know. I don't have any answer. I think yours is as good as any I can think of. Yeah. Okay.

[01:13:39] Okay. So we're 43 minutes in and he's taking off. So what I was going to say about this idea that we're playing with perspectives and time and place and what's real and what's not. He says, I'm losing stability. Come in to the station. Now, the station, it's clear that they're not expecting him and they didn't do anything to like help him land because they don't seem to know that he was coming. And then he shoots it in a way where you really get a close up of his head and it's a little transparent.

[01:14:05] And, you know, I don't read the movie like this, but I think it's opening the door to readings that a lot of what happens now is just going on in his head. And maybe it's just a death dream as his spaceship explodes. I don't love that reading, but it is weird how that's presented, you know? Yeah. Yeah. And also he thinks he's like about to take off and they're like, oh, you're already flying.

[01:14:34] You know, like later in the movie, there's going to be a lot of stuff that goes on in his head unambiguously. Totally. It's actually not clear to me, even like the last fever dream, how much he manifested that the ocean, because he's asleep for so long, how much was physically manifested by the ocean? Because like that jug of water at the end that's actually there in the room when he wakes up, like I think that must have been created by the... By the ocean. Yeah. Yeah. Interesting.

[01:15:02] And we haven't talked like that much about the, you know, the effects. Like I think that it's gorgeous what he does to make the planet surface, the water swirling, you know, which was like a chemical bath basically that it created. Yeah. The landing, the seeing of the station floating right above the water. It was one of those rare moments where I was like, this is what the book was describing, you know?

[01:15:25] Like where you're not like, oh, kind of bummed at how it took away your imagery from reading it, but rather I'm like, yeah, it was floating above the water just like that. You captured it. Totally. And I also loved the like, I don't know what to call the aesthetic, but whatever mid-century Soviet space like decay is like rusty cosmonaut aesthetic. Yeah. But also a kind of handmade quality too.

[01:15:51] So it feels like there's a lot of care in it, even if it's not pristine. So I read that somebody gave them an old mainframe computer that he could use to dress the set. I think that's what he's walking through when he first gets there and it's like, it's just like on fire. It's like sparking. Yeah. Right. You know, whereas like when this happens in 2001, like he is unplugging things, but everything works and it's just humming perfectly.

[01:16:20] I think like also the sounds are so cool. Oh, so good. Yeah. Yeah. What's crazy is that the actor is not the person you hear. Did you read that at all? No. Like the main guy, Chris, was a Lithuanian actor and his voice is entirely replaced by a Soviet actor. Really? Yeah. So it's like My Fair Lady with like, it's not our Audrey Hepburn singing, but like. But like the whole thing. Yeah. Because it's all ADR anyway. Like it's all dialogue replacement. You can tell like the, like the old spaghetti Westerns.

[01:16:50] It's just people in the booth re-recording their lines. But apparently for this actor, since he was Lithuanian and Russian wasn't his first language, for all of his Russian movies, they just had another person do his voice. I didn't know that. I do. I think he's good. That actor, I think is very expressive. He is good. And he's so funny. He looks like what people in their 40s looked like back then. Yeah. But in a good way. Like, I don't know, like in a kind of tough. Yeah, exactly. Like he's a 47 year old Eastern European man was not going to look like Brad Pitt.

[01:17:19] He was going to have a hairy chest and some, you know. I read somewhere, actually, now that you say that, that Vladimir Putin saw like an early movie of his where he played a spy. And that's what made him want to join the KGB. That's what he said. That's so funny. Yeah. Yeah. I guess you can kind of see it maybe. I thought Snout was cast perfectly. So good. And kind of like what I thought of Snout.

[01:17:46] Like maybe a touch more sympathetic in the movie than the book, but really captured the spirit of how I understood that character. Totally. It just takes a little longer in the book to get that sympathy. But this guy gets it pretty quickly. Yeah. Sartorius, not at all sympathetic. Not at all. I was wondering if he represents Kubrick in Tarkovsky's mind. I don't know. I don't know. But you were saying that he might represent Lem? I was saying that he's given lines that represent Lem.

[01:18:13] I don't think that he as a character is supposed to. But I don't know. In any case, he's just like a rotten guy through and through. I think it's very funny that we actually get a glimpse of his guest. And that scene is one of the few, I think, clearly comic scenes where he's trying to talk to Kelvin about the suicide and what to do afterwards. And he's just holding the door really like behind him.

[01:18:41] And then all of a sudden, at one point, a midget in pajamas just bursts out, runs through the hallway. He grabs him and shoves him back in and is like, you know what? Can we do this another little later? And that's like all that we don't know a single other thing about that guest. Right. We call them little people. But yeah. In the book, you think it's kid, right? But I guess it's under described in the book.

[01:19:08] But yeah, that they chose to go that route is like a moment of just fucking bizarreness. But also kind of deliberately comic in that he's holding the door closed like that, even though that becomes something like more horror like when it's Hari. But at this point, it really is like a slapstick kind of comedy. Yeah. But then you realize he's probably what he's doing is just fucking doing shitty experiments on all of his guests. Yeah.

[01:19:36] And why would he have a little person as his guest? Who knows? But oh, this is what I wanted to ask you. So one of the things that we see early on is when he gets to the station, Jiberian left him a video note. And one of the first guests we see is just a girl, a little girl and like a teddy, like in a negligee kind of like nightgown thing. And then we see her more clearly in the video note from Jiberian. Yeah.

[01:20:05] And she's bringing him some milk. And that just was creepy to me because I'm like, wait, so what is he feeling guilty about here? Was he like fucking like did he rape and murder a little girl? Like what did he do? Yeah, I don't think we know. It is clearly the reason why he's taking his own life. Whatever it is, it's something like it could be as innocent as that's his daughter that he didn't spend enough time with.

[01:20:32] But it does seem like it might be a little darker than that. And he does say that it has to do with conscience. Yeah, exactly right then. And that he's never going to, you know, he apparently was the first person to start getting guests that hadn't happened to the other ones yet. And he was terrified of letting them see like who the guest was. Right. Everyone else is ashamed of their guests. And they even say to Kelvin, like you're lucky you have someone from your past, not someone from your imagination. So that's the other thing.

[01:21:02] Like maybe he was having fantasies about having sex with children. We have no idea and it's I don't even think we have hints. Right, right. And we never see, by the way, snouts. No. Right. We just see there's a hammock and there's like a clearly a person in snouts. Yeah. Yeah. I think that the movie presents this part of the book faithfully. Like when he first gets there, I remember having the same feeling from the book. Like this, everyone seems to have their own fucked up thing.

[01:21:31] Like the one person he knows has killed himself. And every time he goes to try to see one of the other people on the space station, they seem to not want him to come in the room and to like talk to him later. You know, like and just the confusion of that turning into transitioning into the foreboding of what's in store for him. I think all of that is presented like kind of in the same. I got it. Got the same feel for the movie as the book. Yeah. Yeah.

[01:21:58] As with his first response to like launching Hari version one or version two, whatever we call her, into space. Like I thought that was nicely done. And then Snout realizes right away what he's done and is almost giving him shit for like not having tried other methods first. He's like, oh, you went straight to the rocket? Like you didn't try potions and powders and other methods of execution.

[01:22:22] But I think in the book he says that almost compliment or like, oh, you're like you're a humanist or something. Like you're not trying to like either do painful experiments or kill them violently or something. Right. And then the thing where she breaks down the door is horrifying because it's bloody and she clearly feels pain. Right. I take it. Yeah. Because he asked her explicitly later. Did you feel pain? And she's like, yeah, I felt pain.

[01:22:47] And this is in the context of Sartorius being just explicitly like this is more ethical than doing experiments on bunnies and earth. And he's like, did you? Yeah. They're just a machine. Yeah. Well, we don't know. Right. Maybe he's right. Yeah. There might be like a real appendages of Solaris. But yeah, she's like, yeah, I feel pain. And it just looks so terrible. Same with when she poisons herself. Oh, when she drinks the liquid oxygen. Yeah. Oh, man, that is a eerie, eerie scene.

[01:23:17] And it's so well done, too. I don't know how they did it. But she, you know, he goes and finds her. She's completely frozen. She's like a bloodied mouth. Like she ended up drinking liquid oxygen and freezing herself. And then she like melts and comes back. Yeah. And I think Snout even says, God, this is like this. I'll never get used to this. To these resurrections. Yeah. These resurrections. Right. And there it's almost like she looks between like some combination of a zombie and a vampire,

[01:23:46] you know, like when she's out right after the portion. So this movie definitely leans into horror, I think, at certain times. Also like exploitative horror in the sense that you get to see her like boobs when she's dead. Yeah. But only when she's dead. Only when she's dead. Yeah. Yeah. That actress was 21. And apparently like Tarkovsky ended up with her. Oh, really? Yeah. He fell in love with her during the shooting of the movie. And did they, is that his wife or not? I don't know.

[01:24:14] I don't know if they ended up getting married or not. Because I know his, he had a wife on Stalker and that's, and they both got cancer and died together. Oh, fuck. That's right. I think the camera on the spacecraft is also just so cool. Just, it's just kind of floating around. Yeah. Actually in ways that remind me more of like The Shining than 2001 where things seem a little bit more rigid.

[01:24:39] But here it's just constantly kind of doing these slow pans across the room and, you know, it's patient and just beautiful. Beautiful. Yeah. What it reminds me of too is like, even though it's very much 2001 in that it's a space like station that's circular, it's a little confusing the layout. Yeah. And like, it reminds me a little of the overlook when he's like running, when he's like doing his little big wheel riding around.

[01:25:06] And there's a point at which now, I don't even know if we know why, where he like comes out of his room running and like, you see the camera, like follow him all the way around until he gets back to like where you, you, the camera started. Yeah. There's a lot of impossible shots like that. And I think, yeah, you're right. And you know, it also has like the hedge maze and the copy of the hedge maze in The Shining. So there's a lot of connections you might make between The Shining and this movie too.

[01:25:34] And then there are some parts that remind me a lot of 2001, just how like slow the spacecraft will move or, or how things will rotate really slowly. It's funny because in 2001, it is just two guys and hell, right? Yeah. And in this, it is whatever the three guys and the guests, but they're supposed to have been 85 people on that space station. And this is the shell of the station at this point. That's right.

[01:25:59] Like, because everybody has left because they've given up on solaristics. But in 2001, weren't a bunch of people supposed to wake up and then just how kills them all? Oh yeah. So there are a lot of people in like, so even their abandonment, it's for a different reason, but they're both on ships that I think are supposed to be, uh, hold a lot more people. Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, it's like the book. I don't totally get what's driving Snout and Sartorius.

[01:26:29] Sartorius seems to be just the most unsympathetic portrayal of a man of science. Exactly. I was about to say that he is the empirical method that is the, like the slash and burn kind of like, let's dissect everything. Let's doesn't matter if we destroy it. Let's irradiate it, you know? And there's a scene where he says like, I don't care about Geberian. I care about man. And, uh, Calvin says, was he not a man? You know?

[01:26:57] So it's like this idea of caring about man as an abstract concept as opposed to caring about particular human beings, you know? And this is, I think Calvin might've been closer to that before he had this encounter with Harry. Yeah. Because Burton has to tell him at first in their discussion where he's like, look, they're planning on irradiating it. Right. Like, I guess we didn't say, but in the book conversation we did, like the reason that

[01:27:23] Chris is going to Solaris is he needs to do a report to see whether or not they should even continue this space operation. Depending on what he says, they're going to cancel it and get it out of orbit or not. And I don't know what Burton is trying to convince him of. I think to not do that, right? To, he says at one point, like knowledge is only worthwhile if it's moral and we shouldn't start destroying things we don't understand yet. Right. And I think Calvin has very little sympathy to the point where he just makes Burton get

[01:27:53] mad and leave and take his kid. I love it when Burton says, well, then don't make science immoral. If you want morality out of science, don't make science immoral. Right. Burton has been convinced that there's something, he's a humanist is a funny way of saying it, but he's convinced that there is something interesting and spiritual going on that's been missed. Yeah. And he wanted to tell him that and like, wasn't able to, because yeah, like in the book, human beings have a real problem connecting. And even the most basic way is just having a conversation.

[01:28:21] Another thing that I think Tarkovsky honors, you know, it's like, he doesn't have, end up having it with his father. He only can have it with Hari, who is ultimately just a projection of himself. I love when Burton is leaving in a huff and he talks shit about Chris and his father's like, dude, we've known each other for 20 years, but I'm not going to let you say that about my son. And he goes, look, 20 years, we were bound to stop being friends at some point. He just like walks off. I like to imagine that's how our friendship will end.

[01:28:51] Yeah. It's just like, yeah. I mean, like, obviously it has a shelf life, but I think this is as good a chance, a good point as I need to end it. Do we want to talk about Harry at all? And like, cause I think you could do a reading of this movie that focused more on her and like her evolution and what it means to be her. She has that kind of Blade Runner quality of becoming something that does deserve moral consideration.

[01:29:19] Kelvin comes to that, but also it's very interesting to imagine, although we can only speculate like what's going on inside of her, you know? I know. And this is where, you know, jokes aside, like the AI question does come, come in kind of where she's realizing one of the first things that happens is she sees the picture of herself and then looks at herself in the mirror with the mirror theme that you were talking about earlier and is distressed that she doesn't recognize herself.

[01:29:47] You know, later on distressed that when she closes her eyes, she doesn't remember what she looks like. Yeah. And by the way, something he says about his mother when he closes his eyes or he's like, yeah, I forget what you, your face looks like, mom. Oh, really? I didn't say that. Yeah. At the end, it's kind of creepy, which is another thing. I don't understand what's going on with the mom. I really don't. I don't either. And she kind of looks like Harry. Yeah. To the point where if you're kind of racist, like you might just like confuse them. Yeah.

[01:30:13] If you're really the only existing kind of racist against white people, then you might. But yeah. So I think that's interesting. She also seems to progress like the first version of herself didn't know how to undo her dress with the scissors. And then the next version does know how to do that. Dude, it's creepy because in the book, for some reason, one of the scenes I found the most like the eeriest was that the incarnation of Harry, like fully formed is wearing a dress

[01:30:41] for which there are no buttons or zippers in the back. So it's like his imagination just hadn't thought of that. Dresses need that. And so he needs to like rip it off. So you see that in this movie where she has like what looks like laces that would open up the dress, but they actually don't open up anything. And he has to like get a scissors and like cut them open. You destroy rather than try to understand. Totally. But the next incarnation has like internalized this. And when she's ready to take her dress off, it's not that his memory now created something

[01:31:11] that remembers there's a zipper. It's that she has remembered that like the way to take off the dress and take the scissors to it. Because that's still all he knows. But then she seems to kind of autonomously, or I guess this is open to question, but she seems to start developing in ways that aren't necessarily connected to his projection of her in that moment. But I don't know if that's true, actually. I don't even know if I've thought about that. I think that's right.

[01:31:40] I think that at least that's what is trying to be communicated. And when Sartorius says in front of her to Kelvin, you have a wonderful specimen. I think that that's probably true in multiple ways. I think that Kelvin's apparition is the most mature of the apparitions that they've seen so far. And in this sense, like he has managed an emotional connection with Solaris that none of the other ones have.

[01:32:06] She's not just an apparition of his like, you know, guilt or whatever. She is an apparition that has enough built into her that she can truly grow. And I think there is something, the emotional center to their relationship with each other that like I haven't like caught well, like I don't know. But there is something so interesting about her being unable to leave his side at first. And then as she gains independence, him not being able to leave her side.

[01:32:35] And he runs back to her. He's like in a panic. He keeps running back to her. And she's like pulled away. Yeah. Which I think is a male nightmare that you're like the woman you're with won't need you one day. Right. I think there's an interesting question about her sleeping. Right. And at one point she says, I don't know how to sleep. It's not sleep. She says it's somehow around me. It's as if it weren't just inside of me, but much further away.

[01:33:04] And then Calvin says, well, that's probably still sleep. So I think at a certain point when you start to imitate something so much, that is the thing, you know, like maybe she is sleeping, although that's undercut by the fact that they think she's sleeping at one point and she isn't, which leads her to ultimately, I think, do the sacrifice. Right. I like that, that image that it's not just inside of me, but much further away. Yeah. Yeah.

[01:33:29] And there does seem to be something about, maybe this is just like an easy take or a surface take, but it feels like it is his love that's feeding her into becoming a full person. And she even says it, but she's like very mature about this. She's like, maybe it's not me he loves. Maybe he's just protecting himself, but nonetheless, he loves me. And like, you know, there are many reasons for love.

[01:33:55] And like, if he loves me because he's protecting himself, that's just a reason that he has for loving. It really is love. And maybe this is a very Tarkovsky thing. I think that love can actually like do something transformative, both to the person who is loving, but also to be loved. And the fact that it's making her become more human-like is, I think, very in line with the Tarkovsky message. But I see this in the book too. And it's very clear in the book that he's starting to love not Harry as Harry, but

[01:34:25] Harry, this Harry. This incarnation. He's like learned to love throughout this. Yeah. And so she is, as other people are doing the journey away from being human, she is doing the journey to being human. One of the things about Harry that I forgot to mention is, do you remember like one of the first things he sees is that she has the thing on her arm, like the prick mark where she injected herself. It's already there. It's like he couldn't imagine a zipper, but he very clearly has the suicide.

[01:34:53] We learn that the mom didn't like her. And so like she has some sort of vague memories that he must, he knows that she knows things. And so there is this real weird dynamic between the mom and Harry. And it gets like kind of Freudian to me at some point in a way that I'm sure Lem was not happy with where it's like, even when he's talking to his mom in his, whatever that is, a memory or a dream, the fever dream. He's like becomes a little kid, you know?

[01:35:23] Yeah. And then seems to become a little kid around her, like almost treating her like she's his mother, putting his head in her lap like that. Now, how all this relates to the last third of the movie where reality kind of starts to break down until it ultimately lands in a place that's entirely unreal or at least unreal and what you initially think it might be like, I'm not sure. But like starting at the birthday party meeting into the weightlessness, which is beautiful

[01:35:53] and so cool. Such a cool scene. All practically done, you know, just with wire work and seamless and looks so beautiful. And, you know, but then like, yeah, it seems like a lot of shots are framed like they're paintings. They look like 17th century Dutch or Belgian paintings. And sometimes they're exactly in poses of paintings. And, you know, there's that another shot. I don't know how he did of panning to all these different versions of Hari.

[01:36:21] And then with his mother mixed in at one point, like I haven't fully reckoned with how to understand this last third before you get into the final scene. Yeah. It's like, is this a painting? Is this real? Like the way it's being shot now, it does seem like reality is collapsing a bit. Yeah. That last bit turns more surreal than anything else in the movie, even though there have been surreal moments.

[01:36:46] And I really do, again, get a mirrored 2001 where like I'm confused at the end about what's happening. Yeah. And everything seems happening. And there seems to be a real communication of some deep emotional truths about Chris, about his relationship with his family and his relationship with Hari. And I'm not sure. And this kind of brings me back around to the beginning where I was like, I'm not sure what's

[01:37:10] being said about how he's dealing with his past, his emotions, his relationships with people. Because clearly that's central. That's at the very forefront of what's happening now. Now, and yet he decides that the way that he's going to deal with it is to stick around on Solaris. How did you feel about everything there? It feels because at first, I don't think you think it's necessarily, oh, he's gone back. He's going to reunite with his dad.

[01:37:39] They're going to make up for lost time and play catch, get out the old mitt and glove. Like it's definitely, you don't think it's going to be that. But when you find out what it really is, which is just an island on Solaris, it feels like a disappointment, like an ultimate failure. Maybe something tragic where he now has the desire to connect, but maybe it's too late and maybe this is the best he can do. Or like, you know, I could see a more optimistic reading.

[01:38:09] He has connected with the alien. We've made contact. Which is kind of how we were talking, or at least I was talking about the end of the book, where he's like, now, you know, we don't know what happens once he gets to the planet at the end of the book. But it's felt kind of optimistic to me that he was like, let's explore this uncharted territory. Let's like connect with it. But yeah, I'm confused because it could be, both ways seem totally reasonable to me. When you pan out and you realize that it is just this little feature of the vast ocean

[01:38:38] of alienness, you could be like, boom, like that's the like fucking hard truth about what he's decided to retreat into his own mind. Or like, this is the one shot that humanity has had to make contact with this. And he's taken that step. But he's doing it via like working out his own shit, you know, with his father, with Hari. And so that's what's...

[01:39:03] But it could be that the ocean is doing anthropology, you know, the ocean is needing the real subjective sense of what it is to be a human being with emotions. And this is the first time anyone's given it anything like that. Yeah. It hasn't just reacted with horror and loathing and wanting to destroy the thing. Right, right. And I don't think that this would be Tarkovsky's main... Like, I think Tarkovsky is telling us something more about connecting with humans and staying

[01:39:30] like connecting with the earth and the elements that are there and not a fabrication, not a copy in this sense, kind of doing what like the way that Sartorius describes it as being a replica and a copy and a matrix. Yeah. But he's also respecting what Lem might have been saying in the book at the same time. Like, he's not... I don't know. Yeah, I don't know. Because if on the optimistic reading of the movie, the ocean is also making overtures to Kelvin, maybe showing Kelvin what he wants to see.

[01:39:59] Whereas the ocean is like a impenetrable, opaque void in the book. So much more inscrutable, the ocean at the end. Like it just... Yeah. Like we talked about last episode, a big part of, I think, the point. So, yeah, I don't know. I feel like it's a kind of tragic ending, but I totally could see myself in a different viewing reading it the other way. Yeah.

[01:40:24] I was trying to sit with what I'm feeling at that last bit where he approaches his old, you know, home and he looks inside and it's his father. And it is, on the one hand, like one of the most horrifying moments in the whole movie to me is when you realize that it's raining inside. Yeah. And that this is just a fucked up weird replica that's broken. Something's off. Something's really off.

[01:40:52] I don't know why it's so powerful to me that like it's raining inside is just like it's misunderstood. If the ocean has misunderstood like that badly, then there is just horror to come. Yeah. You know? Yeah. And it mirrors the opening of the movie where it's raining outside on Kelvin and he just stays outside. Yeah. Yeah. He just stands in it. So maybe he's like, oh, humans like to stand in the rain. And so he shows his father in the house. Yeah.

[01:41:22] So in that sense, it would be there's still a lot of work to do. Solaris. Before you can say. Yeah, exactly. Study us a little bit more. I wanted to ask you about the dogs. Yes. What are the dogs here? So the dog in the opening is very cute and plays with the kids. And then in one of the flashbacks, you see what I take to be that dog as a puppy because it's like the little puppy version of that breed.

[01:41:49] And I thought I love that dog more than I've ever loved anything. That seemed like just the cutest little puppy. Is that when his mom is holding it? Yeah. When his mom's holding it. Yeah, exactly. We don't know, by the way, we don't know what happened to his mom at all. No, we don't. You see a picture of her in the opening scene. You wonder if the father has a lot of guilt about that. We really don't know. It's just like dangled there. The stuff about his mother and not liking Hari. But that's it. Yeah.

[01:42:18] So the dogs like in the painting and stuff like that, is the dogs representing anything? Like all that's good and holy. I don't know. I mean, it does seem like it's usually positive. Yeah. But yeah, I couldn't get past just loving the dog and wanting to spend the rest of my life with that dog on an island. Yeah. So there is the last thing, I guess, that goes to the interpretation, like maybe the optimistic

[01:42:44] interpretation is the thing that he says at the end when he tells Snout, like, yeah, I'm going to go down into the ocean. He says, do I have the right to turn down even an imagined possibility of contact with this ocean, which my race has been trying to understand for decades? Should I remain here among the things and objects we both touched? Like he's saying, like, what's the right thing to do here? And it does seem as if it could be that Tarkovsky is just giving lip service to the way that the

[01:43:10] book was written because I couldn't help but think that he's just escaping his true problems. Yeah. I mean, I think it is an escape, whereas I don't think it's an escape in the book necessarily. It doesn't seem like he can really go back. We don't have the thing with his father, as far as I remember, like nothing like that. So there's nothing really for him to go back to, whereas here there is, I think. He has a little girl running around his family home.

[01:43:37] So that's, I guess, another reason why I do think Tarkovsky is, I lean towards this not reflecting the potential optimism of the book. But like I said, I could teeter the other way. Yeah. Which is great. It's a great feature of this. I do think that his, the fact that he inserted the first third of the movie as a story about a man on earth is meaningful. Yes. And I understand Lem's frustration. It must be hard.

[01:44:05] I think it's his most famous book, maybe one that he's most proud of. And, you know, but that's what happens when you allow someone to do a movie. I got to remember that next on Sunday night. That's right. Yeah. Homer. Yeah. So when someone makes a movie about us and this podcast, we just have to let the, you know, the masters do their work and not grumble or interfere. That's right.

[01:44:35] All right. Great book. Great movie. It's a privilege to talk about. A privilege. And I feel like there's so much that we missed talking about. This is very fruitful. Yeah, I agree. Like, I feel like we left stuff on the table. Maybe we'll get back to some of that stuff if we talk about the Soderbergh version. Yeah. All right. Join us next time on Very Bad Wizards. I'm waiting.

[01:45:42] Just a very bad wizard.