Slavoj Žižek

SOLARIS 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?NR=1&v=DNq-_unoG7c&feature=endscreen 

“The innermost of
your inner space”
—Slavoj Žižek
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SOLARIS is the story of Chis Kelvin, a psychologist who is sent by a rocket to a spaceship circulating around Solaris a newly discovered planet. 

This planet has the magic ability to deeply realize your deepest traumas, dreams, fears, desires. 
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The hero of the film finds one morning his deceased wife who committed suicide years ago. 

Kelvin realizes not so much his desire as his guilt feelings. He blames himself all over again.
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When Kelvin is confronted with the spectral clone of his deceased wife, although he appears to be deeply sympathetic, spiritually reflective, etc.—his basic problem is how to get rid of her.

She’s simply a clone of his imagination—seemingly resurrecting herself from any death or denouement to come back and haunt him. 
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This is what’s driven all the other scientists in the spaceship circling SOLARIS crazy because it’s so irrational. Like being haunted by a disguised Monster of the Id straight outta FORBIDDEN PLANET.

Slavoj Žižek puts his usual spin on the film, the original Andrei Tarkovsky Russian version. Although James Cameron & Steven Soderbergh’s new version of the Stanislaw Lem sci-fi classic has its moments too—thanks to the fine acting of George Clooney.
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Slavoj Žižek interprets the Solaris alien as a paradigm for Western subjugation of womanhood as something alien and even evil in the same sense as he sees Darth Vader as the Christian archetypal Evil One in the STAR WAR series. 

He even suggests the possibility of redoing the STAR WAR series from the point of view that the Emperor is the good guy and the Jedi knights are nothing more than a bunch of fucked-up retro Fallen Angels trying to stir up trouble for the EMPIRE.
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But Stanislaw Lem, the author of SOLARIS, is known to have pooh-poohed both film versions—by dismissing the possibility that the UNKNOWN can ever be conceptualized or known by mere human beings. 
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Simply because the UNKNOWN is the UNKNOWN—and we have no way of knowing who or what the OTHER is since perhaps EARTH is actually SOLARIS. And the whole purpose of being here—is to familiarize us with something which our limited monkey brains can’t possibly understand yet.

Something totally Exo-Political—that has created and cloned us and perhaps even genetically retro-engineered us into who we are. Just like Kelvin’s wife in the spaceship suddenly appears—circling this new strange world SOLARIS.
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SOLARIS = EARTH which could possibly mean that we are actually the clones of something—something very advanced and perhaps even bored with being eternal angels of the unfathomable galactic deep?

Desiring perhaps to GO HOMEWARD ANGEL—as the author Thomas Wolfe wrote about way back when. To experience the pain & heartache & possible annihilation of—something we were and something we’re yet to be again.