The Philosophy of Steven Soderbergh

16. Solaris, Cinema, and Simulacra

281 SOLARIS, CINEMA, AND SIMULACRA Michael Valdez Moses Cinema also approaches an absolute correspondence with itself and this is not contradictory: it is the very definition of the hyperreal . . . Cinema plagiarizes itself, recopies itself, remakes its classics, retroactivates its original myths, remakes the silent film more perfectly than the original . . . the cinema is fascinated by itself as a lost object as much as it (and we) are fascinated by the real as a lost referent. —Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation Soderbergh, the Remake, and the Dream Factory Though not a graduate of one of America’s leading film schools, Steven Soderbergh is as much a student of the history of cinema as any of his celebrated peers who learned their craft at university.1 One of the key figures behind the 1990s “independent” film movement, Soderbergh has distinguished himself by a self-conscious style of filmmaking that conspicuously imitates and reworks earlier cinematic forms and genres and by an unusually selfreflexive body of works, beginning with his 1989 feature-length debut, sex, lies, and videotape. In a filmmaking career that currently spans two decades, Soderbergh has directed three remakes of earlier films: The Underneath (1995), an adaptation of Robert Siodmak’s 1949 film noir classic, Criss Cross; Ocean’s Eleven (2001), a stylish updating of Lewis Milestone’s 1960 Rat Pack vehicle of the same name; and Solaris (2002), a carefully meditated revision of Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1972 science fiction masterpiece.2 Given that contemporary directors are generally eager to talk about the influence of earlier filmmakers on their work (discussions of cinematic influence have become a standard feature of interviews with and DVD commentaries by directors), it might not seem all that remarkable that So- 282 Michael Valdez Moses derbergh’s films routinely reference the work of his cinematic predecessors. Soderbergh nonetheless stands out among his peers for his conspicuous interest in remaking the films of those predecessors and for his abiding interest in how film and video mediate both his professional relationship to the idiom and history of cinema and, more generally, the complex networks of our contemporary social and personal relationships. His films conspicuously and reflexively represent the ways in which the media, and especially cinema, constitute the experiential fabric of our postmodern existence. His startling portrayal of how ordinary lives are decisively altered by the presence of visual media provided the thematic and dramatic center of slv, and as director, screenwriter, cinematographer, editor, and producer, Soderbergh has continued to explore the peculiarly hypermediated character of contemporary life in his subsequent projects, perhaps most brilliantly in his 2002 science fiction remake, Solaris. Though by no means a commercial success upon its initial release, Solaris marks one of Soderbergh’s most aesthetically successful attempts at fusing cinematic form and content.3 In his remake of Tarkovsky’s classic (itself a visual re-presentation of Stanisław Lem’s 1961 novel), Soderbergh found a conceit that concretely figures the hyperreality of our contemporary postmodern existence: the sentient planet. Superficially a story about crew members aboard a space station orbiting Solaris who discover that the planet communicates with them by materializing “facsimiles” of those about whom they dream, Solaris may be understood as a film about the omnipresent influence and power of cinema itself. The key to unlocking the mystery of Soderbergh’s film is the recognition that the planet Solaris (which effectively controls the orbiting space station, Prometheus) is a dream factory; it functions in precisely the ways that theoreticians of film have suggested that cinema in general, and Hollywood in particular, do. Solaris captures, mediates, and reproduces the dreams of those who come within its gravitational field, and in so doing, it transforms or remakes the dreamers in its own image. The formal brilliance of Soderbergh’s film depends upon its relentless conflation of the mimetic and diegetic levels of its narrative; that is, the film collapses the distinction between the characters in the film and the actors who play them, between the world that is represented in the film and the film itself as a self-reflexive representation. The resolution of the story, the climactic scene in which the protagonist, Chris Kelvin (George Clooney), and the facsimile of his long-dead wife, Rheya (Natascha McElhone ), are reunited in a hyperreal world created by the implosion of Solaris, Solaris, Cinema, and Simulacra 283 immerses the audience in a moment of pure cinema, one that collapses not...