The Lacanian Real in Solaris (Zizek / Lacan 7)

The following is part of a series in which I apply rudimentary concepts from Lacanian psychoanalysis to current events and film. My two principal texts are Lacan, an introductory text by Lionel Bailly, and Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture by philosopher Slavoj Zizek. I present these posts in order to deepen my imperfect understanding of the concepts as well as to venture some insights of my own.

In Slavoj Zizek’s In Defense of Lost Causes (2008), the philosopher briefly applies the concept of Otherness in Lacanian psychoanalytic theory to a scene in Andrei Tarkovsky’s classic science fiction film Solaris. I wanted to explore the connection in detail on my own, but when I did, I reached my own hypothesis: The planet Solaris represents the Lacanian Real.

Solaris was originally a novel by Stanislaw Lem first published in 1961. Tarkovsky’s film appeared in 1972, and director Steven Soderbergh released his own version in 2002. All these versions tell of a man named Kris who travels to a space station orbiting a planet named Solaris. Upon arrival, he finds one crew member dead and others coming unglued due to unwanted visitations by uncanny guests somehow connected to the planet.

 

The novel describes in detail the findings of the fictional field of study called Solaristics, the study of Solaris. All experiences with the planet for over 100 years have defied human explanation, from its orbit to its substance. In Tarkovsky’s film, it appears as a shifting viscous mass, while in Soderbergh’s it is an ethereal gas giant. In the novel, Solaris exhibits an unending variety of forms, which scientists have attempted to categorize with names like extensors, mimoids and asymmetriads. One theory is that the whole planet is an alien consciousness, but this too is uncertain. The book’s narrator states the situation bluntly:

“The sum total of known facts was strictly negative.”

Lem himself has stated that this was the intended focus of his novel:

“I only wanted to create a vision of a human encounter with something that certainly exists, in a mighty manner perhaps, but cannot be reduced to human concepts, ideas or images.”

That’s a fair description of the Real in Lacanaian psychoanalysis. Jacques Lacan’s concepts don’t have precise definitions so much as clouds of signifiers, but here are some of the signifiers in my notes for the Real: imperceptible, unsymbolized, ineffable, unimaginable, alien. The Real exists for us only as that which we cannot grasp. And yet, it is out of this unknown that we fashion what we do grasp. For this reason, Lionel Bailly states the following in his introductory text Lacan:

“The Real is the featureless clay from which reality is fashioned by the Symbolic; it is the chaos from which the world came into being.”

The planet Solaris is just such a clay. Shapeless, it can take any shape, and just as we each fashion our individual worlds from the Real, the scientists aboard the space station orbiting Solaris fashion bits of reality from the planet during their encounters with it: a child, a garden. In the final scene of Tarkovsky’s film, we see that Kris (or the planet through him) has recreated his home, complete with the surrounding woods, pond and his aging father.

So far, my hypothesis has held up fairly well, and it continues to do so in consideration of the closely related concept of Das Ding (the Thing), which signifies something lost. Like the Real to which it belongs, it is unsymbolizable and therefore cannot be repressed. Lost, it nonetheless sticks with you, nagging, hounding and refusing to go away. The object of desire becomes an object of anxiety, even of terror.

In Looking Awry, Zizek connects the Real to zombies:

“Apropos of this phenomenon, let us then ask a naïve and elementary question: why do the dead return? The answer offered by Lacan is the same as that found in popular culture: because they were not properly buried, i.e., because something went wrong . . . The ‘return of the living dead’ is, on the other hand, the reverse of the proper funeral rite. While the latter implies a certain reconciliation, an acceptance of loss, the return of the dead signifies that they cannot find their proper place in the text of tradition.”

This is true of the visitors in Solaris. The planet probes the mind of each person on the space station and sends a flesh-and-blood creation of someone it found there within the thoughts and memories--usually someone traumatic to the crew member. The crew members can eject their visitors into space or kill them, but another copy will simply show up. In Kris’s case, his long-dead wife Rheya (Hari in Tarkovsky’s version) suddenly appears in his room.

Like Das Ding, Rheya is lost and desired--and something was indeed very wrong with her death. She and Kris quarreled and he stormed out. Realizing he had left a research drug in the house, he rushed back only to find he was too late: Rheya had used the drug to commit suicide. In the years since, he has been unable to come to terms with her death--in Lacanian terms, he has yet to symbolize and integrate it into his psyche with any balance. And now, like a zombie, Rheya keeps coming back to remind him of the incident.

Tarkovsky’s Solaris is particularly rich in material for a Lacanian analysis. Soon after the first Rheya/Hari sent by Solaris appears, she passes a mirror and recognizes herself for the first time, exactly like the Mirror Stage of development. As anyone familiar with psychoanalysis knows, the early childhood drama shapes us for life, and Kris is obsessed with his mother and father. The drives eros and thanatos are also present, and when Solaris’s tinkering with the crew members becomes more than their minds can handle, they lose their grip and insanity threatens.

I would never presume to contradict Zizek when it comes to Lacan, but his thesis that the planet Solaris represents the Other does not exclude mine, for Lacanians also describe the Real as Other. As with much in Lacanian psychoanalysis, the concepts are complicated, never defined with crystalline clarity, and overlap. Focusing on the Real in Solaris simply seemed an easier point of attack for my own interpretation.

Lem’s original tale is classic hard science fiction with a philosophical bent, while the lush psychological exploration of Tarkovsky’s adaptation has made it a classic in its own right. If you’re interested, however, I recommend starting with Soderbergh’s version. As a sleek Hollywood project, it’s Solaris Lite, but it looks good and it’s accessible. No mastery of Lacanian psychoanalytic concepts necessary.

 

Previous posts in this series:
Identifying with Ferguson as Symptom
Watching Cinema Through the Eyes of the Past
Don’t Look Away from Mike Brown
Double Fantasy: Total Recall and The Woman in the Window
Sex…? Impossible!!
The Big Other and the Man Who Knew Too Much