There’s Something About Hari: Deciphering the Emotional Core of Solaris

There are several repeated visual motifs once we arrive on the space station orbiting Solaris: circles, mirrors, and works of art (which I will touch upon later). The main hallway of the station loops around on itself, and is lined with circular mirrors that warp perspective. The lobby outside Sartorius’s office has circular windows of various sizes which reflect shadows onto the ground nearby. Conversations, particularly those involving Hari, are shot partially through mirrors, and often involve blocking and choreography that has the actors pacing circuitously around the space they inhabit. These repeated devices are emblematic of the themes of Solaris, specifically what Hari’s existence means and how their relationship effects Kris. Hari herself is a reflection — Snaut describes her as “the materialization of your conception of her”, whereas Sartorius refers to her as a “copy” and a “matrix” (which is contradictory: a copy would be something produced out of a matrix, which in this context means “the mold in which something is shaped”). As posited by Snaut, the Hari that exists in the space station is a creation of Solaris’s Ocean, one of many extracted from the minds of the people stationed in its orbit. Despite the evidence that this Hari is a completely new creation, Kris maintains that she is his wife and by the end of the film tells her that “Now you — and not her — are the real Hari” in reference to the Hari that died on Earth ten years ago. This push and pull between thinking of Hari as a device — Sartorius calls her a “mechanical reproduction” — and a human being  —Hari argues back “I am becoming a human being. I can feel just as deeply as you” — is the question at the heart of this film. This extends from the debate about Hari’s personhood to Kris’s acceptance of her as both a copy and a truly satisfying replacement for the late Hari on Earth.

To begin with, let’s examine Hari as an individual. Although she is born from Kris’s subconscious memories of his late wife, she appears to have autonomy of her own and is aware of the fact that she is not “the original”. In the same scene that she reveals to Kris that she knows about original-Hari’s suicide (“I’m not Hari. Hari is dead. She poisoned herself. I'm somebody else”) she continues to talk about original-Hari in the first person (“Did you ever think of me?”) and then switches back to third (“And her, the other one, what happened to her?”). Hari’s mere recognition of Kris, despite having a shaky grasp on original-Hari’s memories shows us that she is not a creature made entirely independent — that is to say, she isn’t a blank slate with the face of Kris’s dead wife. But she hasn’t gained all of the original’s knowledge or memories and relies on Kris to fill her in. So Hari as we see her exists in two states at once: she is different and she is the same. And while she might have been forged out of Kris’s subconscious memories, she defines her personhood by being able to exist outside of him; at the dinner party, part of her argument that she is becoming human is that she “can already get by without [Kris]”. Her consciousness and self-awareness becomes irrefutable, and her lack of perceived “humanity” is purely semantic. The longer Kris stays on the space station with her, Snaut warns, “the more human she'll become.” This statement also has a double meaning — not only does Hari gain independence by way of being able to exist outside of a five foot radius of Kris, but she also becomes more human and real to Kris.

Kris’s perception of Hari, while not necessarily the deciding factor of her personhood, is central to Solaris. Initially, he is frightened by her appearance — he is visibly tense, sweaty — and ultimately blasts her into space. It isn’t until Snaut makes it clear to him that a version of Hari will continue to return…

Kris: Will she come back?

Snaut: She will… and she won't.

Kris: Hari the Second.

Snaut: There may be an endless number of them.

… that Kris decides to accept the new version of Hari when she materializes in his room for a second time the following night. The notion of an endless supply of Hari’s reflects the visual motif of circles — she will continue to materialize, die, and be reborn in a cycle lest they find a way to stop it. Even in her various deaths and attempts at suicide, we see the repetition of Hari’s life on Earth where she poisoned herself after Kris left her. In the space station, Kris pushes her away in the most extreme way by shooting her out into space; she suffers a traumatic seizure when he leaves her for the library; she drinks liquid nitrogen out of despair that she may not truly be real; and finally she manages to truly kill herself via Sartorius’s “annihilator”. The cycle ends but Kris ends up in the same position he started, mourning the loss of Hari by suicide. Of course, Hari’s death was her choice in the end; Kris had decided to stay on the space station, eschewing his life on Earth in order to spend the rest of his life with this new Hari. He made up his mind that to him, even if Hari was a copy, it didn’t matter. He still loved her.

I think it’s easy to see this turn of events on paper and see it as Kris being duped into a life that is perhaps too good to be true, and that Hari’s suicide/sacrifice makes the point that a copy could never stand up to the real thing. Indeed, there are a lot of stories, especially about time travel, where the idea of getting to re-live an idealized life or have a second chance with someone you loved is eventually shown to be not “as real” as the original. Solaris, in practice, does a lot to test that idea. Despite being a facsimile of Kris’s original wife, Hari, as I illustrated above, was truly self-conscious and was a person in her own right. In fact, part of what made her “human” was her ability to exist without Kris. The question becomes less “is Kris being seduced by an idealized version of his wife” and more “if this idealized version of Kris’s wife has consciousness, is it moral to leave her behind?” The answer is not so straightforward, for Kris or the audience.

It’s a long-standing rumor perpetuated by film historians that Andrei Tarkovsky was not a fan of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey — in Phillip Lopate’s essay from Criterion, he claims that Tarkovsky found it “cold and sterile”. This focus on emotion and antipathy towards detachment is a major focus of Solaris. Before Kris is confronted with the Ocean’s offering of Hari, former astronaut Berton describes him scathingly as “an accountant, not a scientist” when Kris refuses to respond to his emotional pleas not to bombard the planet with radiation. Kris responds that “I don't have the right to make decisions based on impulses of the heart. I'm not a poet.” The dichotomy between art and science, emotion and detachment, is something that by the end of the film is proven to be moot. This is described by Snaut during his birthday party:

“Science? Nonsense. In this situation, mediocrity and genius are equally useless. We have no interest in conquering any cosmos. We want to extend the Earth to the borders of the cosmos. We don't know what to do with other worlds. We don't need other worlds. We need a mirror. We struggle for contact, but we'll never find it. We're in the foolish human predicament of striving for a goal that he fears, that he has no need for. Man needs man.”

What Snaut is trying to explain is the contradiction of space travel — it is seen as a purely scientific act, a search for knowledge. But what motivates man to seek that knowledge? Snaut believes that man searches for this to find a mirror, or, themselves. The use of mirrors as a framing device in the film reinforces this idea. In this way, the scientific exploration of the cosmos is not unlike the creation of art — the third visual motif in this film. Plastered on the walls throughout the Solaris station are paintings (conceivably copies of paintings). The most heavily featured painting is Hunters in the Snow by Pieter Brueghel the Elder, which is shown in extreme close-up during the scene where Hari sits, “lost in thought,” after the dinner party. The painting itself is reflected in home videos that Kris had shown Hari previously of his childhood in wintertime. Hunters in the Snow is one of the most famous examples of genre painting, which is defined as “pictorial representations, which may be in various media, having as subject matter scenes or events from everyday life.” In a sense, it is a copy, just like Hari — a representation of reality or a real thing. But Hunters in the Snow has just as much, if not more, emotional value to humanity despite it being a an amalgam of paints situated just so on a canvas. Kris tells Snaut as he gazes upon Solaris, “see, I love you. But love is a feeling we can experience but never explain,” and as much as he is talking about his personal experience, this can apply to humanity’s appreciation of the arts. There is not a logical reason for art to exist, but it does and human’s assign worth to it. Kris’s love for Hari reflects this idea. Snaut tells Kris that it’s meaningless that he’s made an emotional connection with Hari, but Kris doesn’t see Hari as being less than the Hari he lost on Earth. She is a representation of what used to be his reality, and he has decided that that is just as valuable to him.

So where in all of this romantic, artistic, emotional analysis does the science of science fiction fit in? Well that’s entirely the point. In Solaris, science is incapable of helping comprehend the cosmos. Kris arrives at the station ready to carry out a “concrete goal” in as unbiased a manner as possible, but that alone is not enough to get him through the experience. When he asks for an explanation, Snaut responds: 

“In my opinion, we have lost our sense of the cosmic. The ancients understood it perfectly. They never would have asked why or what for.”

This answer, paired with the speech cited on page 4, give us the answer: some things are not meant to be explained, some things are beyond a reasonable or logical answer. It is Tarkovsky’s view that space travel, for all the science it requires, is a pursuit that is not scientific at all. It speaks to the nature of mankind to search for meaning.