Karl Steel Solaris

Karl makes some very good point about Solaris on Twitter.

My wife wonders whether it's really Kris or a planet simulacrum at end. Could be that the ocean doesn't want to give Kris up & so recreates him in his longing. If end-Kris is real in sense that neutrino-Hari is, then we shift from psychological readings of Kris's end and towards the ocean's desires. The inhuman, the split Big O, what have you in an oop sense, the universe's desires, altered by its contact w/ us, but also itself, going on w/out us.” (Twitter forces one to abbreviate, which can be good.)

My pennyworth was my favorite Lacan quotation: “What constitutes pretense is that, in the end, you don't know whether it's pretense or not.” The disturbing ambiguity of the end is precisely that way. We are inside the ocean-being's fantasies. As the camera pans back, we see a little world of human meaning in a gigantic ocean of non-humanness, as the synthesizer dissonance absorbs Bach into its wider sonic spectrum. Love it.


Here's my essay “Ecologocentrism,” which is my contribution to Solaris studies.