The Cinema of Steven Soderbergh by Andrew deWaard

Author:Andrew deWaard
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: PER004030, Performing Arts/Film & Video/History & Criticism, PER004010, Performing Arts/Film & Video/Direction & Production
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2013-05-06T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER FIVE

Returning to the Scene of the Crime: Solaris and the Psychoanalytic Detective

Earth. Even the word sounded strange to me now… unfamiliar. How long had I been gone? How long had I been back? Did it matter? I tried to find the rhythm of the world where I used to live. I followed the current. I was silent, attentive, I made a conscious effort to smile, nod, stand, and perform the millions of gestures that constitute life on Earth. I studied these gestures until they became reflexes again. But I was haunted by the idea that I remembered her wrong, and somehow I was wrong about everything.

Chris Kelvin, Solaris

Having considered how The Limey absorbs and aestheticises the operations of history and memory within its formal and narrative structure, and how the process of ‘remembering correctly’ functions within Soderbergh’s conception of schizophrenia and nostalgia, we can continue our exploration of the role of the detective in Soderbergh’s oeuvre. Solaris takes the process of memory details and negotiation of personal histories one step further, not only immersing the spectator in the character’s memories, but allowing the characters to actually interact directly with these recollections, as a result of the planet Solaris’s psychological effects on the inhabitants of the orbiting space station. In effect, both the protagonist and the viewer are required to return to the scene of the psychoanalytic crime.

Soderbergh’s Solaris differs from Tarkovsky’s film (1972) as well as the original science fiction novel by Stanislaw Lem (1961), on account of its mostly psychological narrative and its expression of three separate but interrelated traumas. The first of these is on the level of character, as the protagonist Kelvin must come to terms with his wife’s suicide by delving deeply into his own complicity with this traumatic act, a narrative arc emphasised by formal and stylistic embellishments. The second is Soderbergh’s artistic trauma as he copes with the fact of his ‘belatedness’ and his personal engagement with a larger canon of film history, particularly as he seeks to ‘remake’ one of the classics of art cinema, while folding in the influence of another, Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). The third is a negotiation of a much larger, societal trauma, a result of the production of Solaris and a release in the wake of the events of 9/11, one of the first films dealing with loss and reconciliation in the uncertain years following the attack on the world Trade Center. Thus, the mournful tones, gloomy palette, and various narratives of loss in Solaris are woven together into a complex tapestry of trauma, one that both the detective and the viewer are charged with unravelling.

Temporal and Psychological Trauma

The protagonist of Solaris is a psychologist, which foregrounds the narrative’s concern with the unconscious and prompts the viewer and critic to a psychoanalytic reading of the film. The patient who is subjected to an intense traumatic event, as formulated by Freud and others, bears damage to their psyche and is doomed to repeat the repressed symptoms that erupt unexpectedly in everyday life.

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