It is usually assumed that the film takes little except its title from the book but that is not true. Jon Ronson’s book is comprised of a series of interviews with soldiers of varying rank who claim to have been involved in some measure with the development of psychic spying for U.S. intelligence. We find in both the quirkier experiments in psychic spying conducted at Fort Bragg, like the existence of a goat lab and the development of a death touch, the “sparkly eyes” technique, and the use of the recruiting slogan “to be all you can be,” and both begin with a general trying to run through an office wall, albeit Straughan changes the name from Stubblebine to Hopwood.9 Name changes include the book’s Jim Cannon who becomes Bill Django, complete with revelatory experience in Vietnam and author of the First Earth Battalion Operations Manual. Other names are changed only slightly, so that a psychic who develops a knife-wielding technique is changed from Echanis to Eckmeyer. Elsewhere, Straughan appropriates exchanges almost wholesale, like the “Jedi Warrior” scene, originally spoken by an interviewee, former psychic spy Glenn Wheaton, but transposed into Lyn’s dialogue. Indeed, Clooney’s character is a composite of a number of interviewees in Ronson’s book: Guy Savelli (who runs a dance studio), martial arts instructor Pete Brusso (who demonstrates choke holds and how to interrupt thought patterns), Sergeant Lyn Buchanan, and Stubblebine, who describes being able to cloudburst while driving.10 There are differences too. The book makes specific mention of Uri Geller who claims that he was recruited to help U.S. intelligence, the Waco siege, and the training of the 9/11 terrorists. However, the substance of Straughan’s script is much closer to the book than has been noted, including all the Star Wars vocabulary and the talk of “Jedi warriors.”11
By the close, it is debatable whether we have learned any more about the characters than we knew at the beginning. Bob especially is a very flat narrative device, asking questions on behalf of the viewer so that another example of psychic spying can be explained. Bob asks Bill, “Do you believe in redemption?” but the narrative closes not on a rendition of the Earth Army’s hippy prayer but a frat house prank of putting LSD in the powdered eggs of the base. Out of context, shots of stoned soldiers giving each other flowers and driving tanks around are funny and it is tempting to think that a more liberal attitude to drugs and releasing some prisoners, heavily symbolized by the liberated goats, will somehow make everything all right, but the notion that this provides any kind of solution to the issues that the film only barely touches on is unconvincing. It is a film with effective moments, but Confessions was held together by a powerful schizoid performance by Sam Rockwell. Clooney’s part is not substantial enough to know how much sympathy he deserves. Perhaps it ultimately comes down to a more simple issue: we might believe that it is possible but unlikely that Barris killed 33 people but we lack empirical proof that Lyn could achieve something impossible according to the laws of physics as we know them.
The book ends on a downbeat note in which interviewees fail to return Ronson’s calls, but the film’s final scene seems out of synch with the ironic tone of the rest of the film. Bob is annoyed that his report has been airbrushed into a comedic piece on Barney’s theme tune. However, this is effectively what the whole film does with its potentially serious subject matter. What is presumably intended as a rallying call for more crusading journalism at the close actually has the opposite effect. McGregor’s self-aware declaration, “Now more than ever we need the Jedi,” would be more powerful if similar references had not been used throughout, implying the only hope is the intervention of a fictitious species. Bob ends the film as he began it, indulging in delusional wish fulfillment.
Conclusion
Bob Baer talks of the danger that the necessary identification with one’s enemy develops to such an extreme that “I was starting to think like the people I was after.”12 Lyn Cassady, Bob Barnes, and Harry Pfarrer all share an intense, emotional identification with a problem, at the expense of the bigger picture (in Baer’s case of the 1983 U.S. embassy bombing in Beirut), allowing viewers to identify with a fallible character but also feel possibly slightly superior to them, imagining perhaps that we might have remained more objective.
In Clooney’s movies of the last decade, antagonists are often part of a more complex worldview, which might involve shady business in the Middle East (Syriana) or legal bodies suppressing information about environmental issues (Michael Clayton), or remain largely undefined and possibly only in the imagination of the protagonist (Confessions). As in Burn after Reading, there is less focus on the job itself and more on individuals, particularly those frustrated with superiors who act from financial and political motives (an element traceable back to his character in ER). Even The Man from Uncle from which Clooney ultimately dropped out is an entirely logical project for his star persona, offering as it does a blend of the suave and stylish with more surreal cloak-and-dagger elements of espionage.
Chapter 8
Existential George
Solaris (Steven Soderbergh, 2002)
Snow:
I could tell you what’s happening but I don’t know if I’d really tell you what’s happening.
Solaris gave Clooney the chance to work again with Soderbergh in a genre that neither had yet tried, as well as representing the challenge of a remake of a classic text twice over (from Andrei Tarkovsky’s landmark science fiction film from 1972, itself an adaptation of Stanislaw Lem’s influential short novel from 1961).
The film opens with a close-up of rain running down a window, viewed from the inside. There is no music, no voice-over—few clues that this is indeed a science fiction narrative at all. Our first view of psychologist Chris Kelvin (George Clooney) is sitting on a bed, hunched forward, dressed in a gray undershirt and boxer shorts. His expression is blank, and along with the pathetic fallacy of the rain, the mood is somber. A ghostly female voice-over asks him directly what is wrong and whether he loves her anymore. The scene establishes the tone of the rest of the film: sedate pacing, a hero who appears thoughtful, and a refusal to offer audiences easily won spectacle. Equally importantly, it establishes the notion of a presence that is not physically possible, i.e., that life is an existential experience. Milena Canonero’s costume adds unobtrusive touches of futuristic style to his dress, so that he wears only different shades of black (on earth, a long Matrix-style leather coat; on Solaris, a slightly lighter shade of astronaut-like uniform), underlining his status as a figure in mourning.
A loud cacophony of undetermined sound, including a plane landing, takes us to the next scene, Kelvin striding through a crowd in a rain-soaked street. The extreme low angle allows Soderbergh to avoid providing too much detail of a futuristic society (like the later tight shots in the shopping scene) as well as evokes that seminal view of a bleak future urban society, where it seems to rain all the time and where nonliving creatures start to become aware of their own status, as in Ridley Scott’s 1982 Blade Runner. Rheya (Natascha McElhone) also mentions later that in Kelvin’s apartment, there are absolutely no pictures (a key part of the means of implanting memories in Scott’s film). There are echoes too of another Scott film, Alien (1979), in references to a faceless “company” and more so perhaps Aliens (1986), directed by James Cameron (one of the producers of Solaris), in the disappearance of a military unit sent to investigate a mysterious signal from a spacecraft and a single individual who is asked for help partly because they have unique skills for this situation but also partly as therapy for themselves.
The strongest link with either of Scott’s films is in the visual stylization, which reflects the emotional stasis of Kelvin at this point. It is a future that is cold and hard. The sound of Kelvin preparing his food echoes harshly around his flat, and the Alien-style tracking shots through the corridors of the Prometheus (the ship orbiting Solaris) are accompanied by an almost constant low hum of machinery. There are also evocations of 2001 (Stanley Kubrick, 1968) in the slow pacing, the elaborate docking sequence, lengthy shots of the Prometheus turning th
rough space, and the philosophical consequences of interacting with nonhuman species. The colorful control panel lights reflected on Kelvin’s visor as he looks out at Prometheus for the first time clearly evoke the “Stargate” sequence.
It is not until some way into the film that we actually see Kelvin address another character face-to-face. We see him on the phone leaving a message, then another phone conversation, but he is facing away from us and we hear only his minimal phrasing (nothing from his addressee). He speaks via an entry-phone screen to security personnel bringing the tape from Gibarian (Ulrich Tukur) asking for help, and pilots the ship alone, not even speaking to an on-board computer. Kelvin’s first close-up, looking up at the video screen, shows his face drawn and eyes welling up slightly, as if on the verge of tears. On earth, he seems to lead a half-life, floating among ghosts, possibly driven by his grief or perhaps this is the default setting of human existence. At a bereavement self-help group, he might equally be the therapist or one of the clients. The status of his later flashbacks is suspect as they are subjective, appear in dreams, and apparently under the catalytic influence of Solaris. Cold blue-gray hues dominate the scenes on the Prometheus, contrasting with a warmer brown-orange color palette for the past back on earth, but such a rigid juxtaposition is blurred by sound bleeding across cuts, like Rheya’s dialogue on voice-over and the steady hum of the spacecraft. Cliff Martinez’s score uses an oriental instrumentation to suggest a sense of wonder, such as when we see Prometheus for the first time, and subsequently to signal a haunting sense of unease, heard at moments where Solaris seems to be exerting its greatest influence.
Once on Prometheus, the narrative appears to shift toward murder mystery, with Kelvin following unexplained trails of blood, and Soderbergh uses slightly shaky camera movement from Kelvin’s point of view to emphasize the notion of a personalized subjective narrative. However, such movement, except for the brief chase of an unknown boy, soon gives way to characters sitting and talking. The swift shot of an unexplained blood print on the ceiling or the appearance of the boy do not motivate extended deductive reasoning because there is no explanation. The boy is supposedly Gibarian’s child but might equally reflect Kelvin’s own desire for a child, which was a key fault line in his relationship with Rheya.
Tzvetan Todorov’s concept of the Fantastic, originally conceived in relation to Russian folktales, is sometimes applied to film studies, and is useful here as we are faced with something we cannot explain.1 However, what Todorov terms a moment of “hesitation” cannot be extended indefinitely and gradually loses its ability to unsettle an audience as it seems that we will be denied a definitive category into which we might place our experience: it is neither scientifically explicable nor a religious vision. As Gibarian says, “There are no answers, only choices,” which makes the vast body of the film into an extended moment of Todorovian hesitation and dramatically weakens its ability to hold the attention of viewers over time. A mystery will hold our attention only if we think it can be solved. Talking about it does not help as language seems redundant. The only solution seems to be submission. On questioning the senior physicist, Gordon (Viola Davis) curtails extended debate on events “until it happens to you,” echoing the notion behind murder mysteries like George Sluizer’s The Vanishing (1988) that you can understand an unknown phenomenon fully only by submitting yourself to it (also part of the Alien franchise).
Sleep seems to be the portal to perceiving creatures, or so-called visitors, that are human in appearance but come from a world beyond our experience, a more philosophical version of the lethal threat posed by Wes Craven’s Freddy Krueger. However, at no point does any character articulate what this might mean about humanity, since the visitors are clearly reflections of the desires of the individuals they visit. In Kelvin’s first dream, Soderbergh makes the transition from objective reality to a dreamscape by progressively cutting closer on Kelvin’s sleeping head, intercut with shots of Solaris with electrical flashes like the synapses of a giant brain and subjective point-of-view shots from Kelvin. This happens without fictional markers indicating that we are entering a dream, like a wobbly screen, but the subsequent scenes with Rheya on a train make sense only as flashbacks to Kelvin’s first glimpse of her. This attempt to show on-screen the thoughts of a character is reminiscent of Laurence Olivier’s slow zoom into his own head, while delivering the “To be or not to be monologue” in Hamlet (1948). In the flashback, we tilt up from the subjective shot of Rheya holding what looks like a doorknob to a clear shot of her face. Such direct looks down the camera lens are used in several of the exchanges between Rheya and Kelvin, which intensifies the sense of a connection between them, excluding the world around them, although at the same time it complicates the consistency of viewpoint, since we also see through Rheya’s eyes here.
The romance of Kelvin and Rheya, conveyed via flashback, is conveyed primarily by extended shots of her at a party from his point of view, including a shot of her walking away, juxtaposed with Gibarian’s description of Solaris on the voice-over (“It’s almost as if it knows we’re observing it”), suggesting Rheya’s coquettish nature. The snatches of dialogue we hear via voice-over might come from his flashback, from Rheya present in the room with him now, or the sense of an almost telepathic relationship, from either past or present. Soderbergh appears to enjoy playing with the viewer’s sense of temporal disorientation. A conversation between Kelvin and Rheya in a later scene fades to black, a conventional marker for the end of a scene, but then fades into the same scene just a few seconds later like a very slow blink.
Rheya becoming increasingly paranoid that she cannot remember being present at her own memories is strongly reminiscent of Rachael (Sean Young) in Blade Runner as she gradually realizes that memory is key to what makes us fully human and that lacking this, she is a humanoid robot, a replicant in the language of the film, and Deckard’s cajoling that he is only joking feels very like Kelvin’s story here to Rheya that her increasing mental unease is just caused by fatigue. Rheya suggests that their continued existence is possible only if they both engage in a form of shared denial, “an unspoken understanding that I’m not really a human being.” At the end, Kelvin (now apparently a visitor too) does have a picture of Rheya on his fridge, by implication to help his memory as he is “haunted by the idea that I remembered her wrong.” Rheya suffers the existential nightmare of appearing to be immortal (her body restores itself after her suicide attempt) but knowing that she is not fully human either.
Solaris is more convincing as a philosophical provocation than a romantic narrative. The exploration of the concept of a second chance at love is compromised by Rheya’s ambiguous status. Viewers cannot invest much emotional weight in the potentially engaging notion of living one’s life over again and avoiding previous mistakes if the mechanism of this repetition is only delusional. Kelvin belittles Rheya’s belief in “a higher form of consciousness” and lectures her that “we’re a mathematical problem and that’s that.” Kelvin’s memory of finding Rheya’s body the first time, the crumpled poem held in her fist in in sharp focus, is intercut with his search for her on Prometheus. He finds her ready to submit herself to Gordon’s destructive beam, and as Kelvin looks at her face on a monitor, we hear her voice before her lips start to move in synch, suggesting a blend of a fantasy in his head with what appears before his eyes. However, when she looks at Solaris, we cut to a memory of her buying a pregnancy kit, and later during a dinner table discussion, we see Kelvin from her point of view with the sound cut, representing her wish fulfillment. That is, we are witnessing a supposed projection having flashbacks of her own.
A rare moment of tension in the film appears when we cut back to a close shot of Kelvin asleep, in the same position as before but now touched by a female hand to which he does not instantly respond, but upon waking, he leaps from the bed in fear. He cannot bring himself to look at her, keeping his eyes downcast, fearful that she is a ghost or perhaps more fearful that she is real. He
slaps himself hard and grabs a nearby piece of furniture before summoning the courage to look up, at which point the tears in his eyes convey a mixture of loss and fear in equal measure.
The visitors are reflections of how the characters remember them. Rheya had seemed suicidal to Kelvin, so that is how she reappears to him. However, in the intervening years since Tarkovsky’s film, the notion that our memories can be manipulated and we are living inside some form of construct has been given cinematic expression in a number of ways, from the Philip K. Dick-inspired Total Recall (Paul Verhoeven, 1990) to the computer game reality of eXistenZ (David Cronenberg, 1999) to Peter Weir’s media-controlled world in The Truman Show (1998) to the virtual world of The Matrix (the Wachowski brothers, 1999). Furthermore, the more precise concept of an alien entity reflecting back the desires of the humans with which it comes into contact has been expressed before in Sphere (Barry Levinson, 1998). The element of spectacle that some viewers might expect from a science fiction film is present only in shots of the ship orbiting around the planet and lengthy shots of Solaris itself. There are no action sequences, no explosions, no fights, and only a very small cast. Individual shot lengths are extended and often involve a character sitting or looking, i.e., not moving.
The ending, not in Lem’s story, of Kelvin somehow living on with Rheya, both translated into visitors (signaled by his finger now miraculously healing from a cut, in contrast to the opening), might have some logic from within the film as we do not know how such visitors exist or whether they can die. However, it feels like a consoling coda, a romantic cliché, contrived to reflect the Dylan Thomas poem that Kelvin quotes on their first meeting (“Death Shall Have No Dominion”) and added to palliate the bleak suggestion that all of our lives are only existential dreams. Perhaps too, this represents a limitation in Clooney’s on-screen persona: the idea that a character he plays can crash and die at the close of a narrative is too bleak for most audiences to accept. We have a scene with Kelvin lying on the floor of Prometheus as it falls into the surface of Solaris, and from his point of view, he sees a blurred object approaching, which comes into focus as the small boy from earlier, supposedly Gibarian’s son, and who, ET-like, puts out his hand. In close-up, the two hands meet, like a crude version of Michelangelo’s fresco “The Creation of Adam,” an image of the child that Kelvin was denied with Rheya.
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