alt.media by Uri Dowbenko: 'Solaris'

ALT.MEDIA

by Uri Dowbenko

‘Solaris:’ Life Is a Trance and Then You A. Die, B. Live, C. Trance Out All Over Again

Written and directed by Stephen Soderbergh, ‘Solaris’ is the perfect movie for a Catatonic Planet.

Slow and languid in its pacing, ‘Solaris’ is like Kubrick’s metaphysical space opera ‘2001’ on ‘Ludes (or maybe Valium or Prozac, but definitely something pharmaceutical) mirroring the United Trance States of America, while the Bush Cabal continues to produce and direct its own Consensus Reality Version of the American Nightmare.

Like the movie’s anguished futuristic psychiatrist Kelvin (George Clooney), America remains asleep, or is it just a waking dream, adrift in the Sea of Maya, also known as the Grand Illusion.

When the Clooney character goes to sleep, the connections between his life in the subconscious and his waking reality, dreams and memories reflect the seemingly random patterns and chaos of 21st Century Life.

Of course, the Clooney character believes that "the whole idea of God was dreamed up by man." So, suffering without respite, he has to relive his losses and regrets, like Sisyphus pushing the rock of his petrified emotions up the hill, over and over again.

There’s even a joke about it. “Nihilistic shrink?” a partygoer asks the Clooney character. “Is there a school?” That’s about as witty and ironic as it gets.

Soderbergh’s theme is the Persistence of Memory, whether real or false, and the distortions of the reality that constitute the experiences of life.

“Solaris” is part of the “What Is Reality?” sub-genre of sci-fi. In other words, what is the interplay of perceptions created by the human mind and the collision of memories as the mind creates its own world? “I was haunted by the idea that I remembered her wrong,” says the Clooney character as he tries to hold on to the memories of his wife Rheya (Natascha McElhone). He re-imagines her and the traumatic memories and fantasies connected with her. When she suddenly and mysteriously appears on the spaceship once again, he becomes embroiled in his own unresolved fears and emotional turmoil.

Using extensive flashbacks, Soderbergh shows their first meeting, their life together and her eventual death, distorted by his own subjective perceptions. The Dylan Thomas poem, "And Death Shall Have No Dominion," becomes literal as the characters find themselves in a space and time in which they recognize each other, but also understand that something is radically out of whack. Even though he understands his wife has died, the Clooney character still cherishes her and becomes possessive of her presence even as she realizes herself that, as she puts it, “I'm not the person I remember.” ‘Solaris’ can be tagged as “Weird Scenes Inside the Spaceship,” an analogue for those who drift through life and wonder about the Meaning of It All.

In fact, the symptoms that one of the spaceship’s survivors recounts are the symptoms of life on Planet Earth today - depression, hypertension, shock, fatigue, and denial.

In the movie, Solaris is the sentient planet/ being which exerts such a strange influence on the inhabitants of the spaceship, that it must be Hollywood’s version of God, omniscient and omnipotent, but also strangely malevolent and randomly cruel in its treatment of humans and manipulation of their psychodramas. That’s about as close to “religion” as they want to get.

(And speaking of religion, the tourist brochure promoting the Two [Fallen] Towers of the World Trade Center actually had this brazen headline, as if written by the Copywriters of Babylon - “This is as close as some of us are going to get to heaven.”

In other words, the Fallen Ones, the Nephilim of Zechariah Sitchin’s lore, understand quite well why they were cast out of the etheric realms to the earthly plane. After all, they even sent Enoch, a mere mortal, to plead their case before the “throne of heaven.”)

Deliberately or not, Soderbergh has captured the emotional level of a comatose society, or as Al Martin puts it so eloquently in his column, “The Bush Cabal End Game,” (http://www.almartinraw.com), “We have become a nation floating in a sea of Jack Daniels, punctuated by bobbing capsules of Prozac, adrift on rafts in a catatonic sea.”

At the end of ‘Solaris,’ the last lines of dialogue reveal a clue about their state of being. He asks the former wife, “Are we alive or dead?” And she answers, “We don’t have to think like that anymore.”

And what does this mean? They are actually neither alive nor dead, but in what has been described as “devachan,” a state of consciousness after death, in which the soul is able to fulfill its unfulfilled desires and live according to the mind’s own direction.

This state of being is described in a book called “A Dweller on Two Planets,” by Frederick S. Oliver, which recounts the life (and afterlife) of Phylos the Tibetan, an inhabitant of Atlantis 50,000 years ago. Yes, it might be considered too outré’ for some, but this book delivers an excellent understanding of the laws of karma and reincarnation and how causes set in motion can create effects in another life.

About his own passage into so-called death, the author of “A Dweller on Two Planets” writes, “All about me were those I loved. As time seemed to lapse, I became conscious of the presence of one and another of my friends. They were with me each as I had conceived. They were my concepts for they were subjective, not objective. They were my ideals, not real people and they formed my world. It occurred not to me that they were not real.”

Describing the state of subjective consciousness which became the main problem of the Clooney character in ‘Solaris,’ the author writes, “As the soul is different from every other soul, so also is the world different to every person. Now it is the record of the soul made on imperishable mental substance, which constitutes much of the life after the grave. The record merges into a reality, and all seems equally real, just as real as when the combined senses first perceived it in verity. This after-life is a reconstituted and inverted earth life, subjective now.

Describing devachan or after life existence in what has been called the astral plane, the author continues. “Now the state after the grave and his or her knowledge, aspirations and trusts of life is the condition of the harvest, where no one acts, but where the rewards of action in the preceding life are paid. It is the land of Lethe, where is no pain, sorrow, sickness, or agony for these earthly conditions begun on earth and they perforce must be finished on earth.”

And so it is that we perform on the Stage of Life, where karma is balanced and choices are made, where life is affirmed, or death is embraced. The consequences of our feelings, thoughts and actions we see reflected in our lives. This then is the Consensus Reality of Life on Planet Earth.

Soderbergh’s “Solaris” is a remake-update of the unwatchable 1972 Russian movie of the same name, directed by Andrei Tarkovsky and based on the novel by the Polish writer Stanislaw Lem.

In this version, Soderbergh (thankfully) got rid of the Soviet angst and the ponderous pseudo-tragedy pace of the terminally depressed Russian mindset.

Soderbergh has, of course, directed masterworks like “Traffic” and “Erin Brockovich,” but the trance-inducing plot line of ‘Solaris’ keeps it in the “not for everybody” category.

The cinematography (Soderbergh’s own work under his “Peter Andrews” pseudonym) is exquisite. The jewel-like visuals are like fine art still photos, depicting the alienation of humans, adrift in a spaceship, which could itself be a metaphor for earth itself. The production design of Solaris with its purple and blue electro-magnetic storm clouds, teeming with an otherworldly energy is contrasted with the sterile erector set-like spacecraft, a mechanical thing devoid of life.

Soderbergh’s ‘Solaris’ takes all the favorite Russian tragedy themes and transforms them into their American counterparts -- self-deception, selfishness, and hubris. After all, the Clooney character, a psychiatrist no less, just can’t get over himself.

Meanwhile the United Trance States of America and its Imperial Storm Troopers are goose-stepping into the future. It is the Roman Empire come again, and the world shakes and trembles in an awesome fear and loathing.

Instead of fulfilling its destiny and liberating the world from suffering, the USA makes more karma with its perverse and nasty ways. The insanity defense won’t work this time. Being ignorant of the (cosmic) law is no excuse either. And you know that blaming the Bush Crime Family is about as lame as you can get. If you live life in a trance, remember you made the choice.

Or as a character in Solaris says, “There are no answers, only choices.”

Copyright © 2002 Uri Dowbenko. All Rights Reserved.

Uri Dowbenko is the author of "Bushwhacked: Inside Stories of True Conspiracy," now available at Barnes & Noble. His forthcoming book, “Occult Politics: Watching Movies with Eyes Wide Open” is scheduled for publication in 2003. He is a frequent contributor to:
Conspiracy Digest (www.conspiracydigest.com),
Steamshovel Press (www.steamshovelpress.com) and
Conspiracy Planet (www.conspiracyplanet.com).

He can be reached at u.dowbenko@lycos.com

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