Continued light-headed, or perhaps woozy, all afternoon. Didn't go to Catherine's birthday dinner. Did go in for interview with prospective postgraduate – and I'm sorry if it sounds heartless, but what a waste of time that was. Well I suppose that in the larger sense, as I gave her advice about where she should consider studying, that it wasn't wasted – for her.
Later: less weak, but a headache that won't go away. Perhaps it is an overburdened liver; I obviously need to cut back on the supplements to find that out (unless I have the nerve, and it would take a great deal of that, to go into the clinic and demand a blood test on liver function).
And still later: an episode ('Strain') of Law & Order/Special Victims Unit on television, about AIDS, gay men, clubs, a new deadly strain, murders, drugs. The killer targeted PWAs who had infected his brother: and although he was convicted, I was a bit dismayed that no one seemed to feel very strongly that he was a madman. Of course it's an ambivalent situation – but not that ambivalent, I think.
And, still with this headache, I finally switched over to the last ten minutes of the 2002 remake of Solaris; I had known it was on television, but since I have the DVD, it seemed silly to watch a broadcast. That was, of course, enough for me for the evening: although I understand some of the complaints about the film, I nevertheless think that the remake is extraordinarily beautiful – the colors, the slow, calm words, the eerie, half-unexplained plot, the shimmering music, the bruised, haunted look in Clooney's eyes, the emotional resonance of the whole: the truth is, it is virtually my favorite movie.
Complaints? Of course: popular culture belongs to everybody, and everybody always has opinions, often negative ones. Film is collaborative, negotiated (like opera and musicals, and much theater); there is hardly a film that doesn't at moments step down to a lowest common denominator, and slightly spoil its own taste. Most of the complaints are comparisons with Lem's 1961 book, or Tarkovsky's 1972 film; I'm not willing to fall for those – the book is too heavily, scientifically conceptual (though brilliant) and the music for the Tarkovsky is not as successful (I can't hear the Bach out of context; it seems to me more like the quasi-parodic use of classical musics in Kubrick's 2001).
Yes, towards the end, there are two mistakes: the hand held out to the phantom child is too overtly Sistine; and Rheya's final speech is too long. But the whole is such a beautifully constructed poem: all the words of the book have been stripped out, and only the emotional core is left – all played out in a claustrophobically narrow range of images, and supported by an utterly beautiful film score by Cliff Martinez, which seems to use what must have been a vast amount of time studying Ligeti's orchestral works from the 1960s. The music is, in fact, so beautifully made and so hypnotic that, this winter, I listened to it over and over....
Those final words: up until the extra sentences that slightly clutter the ending, they are entirely perfect. They are, in fact, answers to the griefs and nightmares of the past twenty-five years, at least for me. Kelvin has apparently somehow returned to his home; we see a repeat of the first scene where he is making dinner, cuts his finger, etc.; but this time it ends slightly differently – as he washes his finger, the cut vanishes. When he sees that, he knows things are no longer as they were: he turns to see his dead wife walk into the room, and he asks her, his eyes huge with love, grief, and a hint of fear – "Am I alive, or am I dead?" And Rheya, smiling up at him wutg love and comfort, gives the perfect answer, which I have found so strangely consoling: "We don't have to think like that any more."
I identify almost too completely with the film. It's heartless of me to say so, of course – not as my reaction to that student interview was heartless, but in a different way; because friends and family inevitably find it important that one not have a heart that seems utterly broken. That's why I don't share this film, or my other favorite Urbania (also about grief and the aftermath of loss) very often. But the truth is: those shots from the opening of Solaris, of Kelvin sitting on his bed looking out bleakly at the rain, are just too utterly real for me. And too familiar.
... My headache is – not gone, but – fading....
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