Existential Zones, Pt. 1 — Solaris (1972)

Alexander Ullom’s feature debut, It Ends, has been billed as a horror movie, but it’s more of an existential exercise wrapped inside a genre premise. That same description could be applied to Solaris, though Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1972 science-fiction classic takes nearly twice as long to ponder the nature of life in a situation where death has no meaning anymore. So this week we’re discussing whether Solaris’ deliberate pace and opaque symbolism work toward or against its emotional core, its relative accessibility compared to Tarkovsky’s other work, and what about the film invites its reputation as the “anti-2001.” Then in Feedback, a listener brings an alternative reading to our recent discussion of War of the Worlds as a response to 9/11.

Please share your thoughts about Solaris, It Ends, or anything else in the world of film, by sending an email or voice memo to [e-mail], or leaving a short voicemail at [phone].

This episode is presented by Regal Unlimited, the all-you-can-watch movie subscription pass that pays for itself in just two visits. Use code NEXTPIC26 for 15% off.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
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(00:20):
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(00:42):
her public persona, and where to start with her movies.
To subscribe to our Patreon, please visit patreon.com slash nextpictureshow.
That's patreon.com slash nextpictureshow. It's very difficult to keep the
line between the past and the present.

Speaker 2 (00:57):
Do you believe that someone out of the past can
enter and take possession of a living being?

Speaker 3 (01:04):
We may be through with the past, but the past
is not through with us!

Speaker 1 (01:12):
Welcome to The Next Picture Show, a Movie of the
Week podcast devoted to a classic film and how it's
shaped our thoughts on a recent release.

Speaker 2 (01:18):
I'm Tasha Robinson, here with Scott Tobias and Keith Phipps.

Speaker 1 (01:22):
Our absent co-host Genevieve Kosky was planning on joining us
this week, but all jokes aside, her internet got knocked
out in a recent spate of summer storms, and we're
all ready for a break from this Midwest summer weather.
This week, we're looking at two existential movies that metaphorically
address some of life's biggest questions, although they don't necessarily
have equally big answers. but we'll do our best to
answer the questions that the movies ask but don't definitively

(01:44):
pin down. For instance, this is very important, given 50 hawks,
10,000 rats, five gorillas, and one man with a gun,
which two would you choose to protect you and which
two would you choose to hunt you?

Speaker 3 (01:56):
Was it 10,000 rats?

Speaker 2 (01:58):
It was 10,000 rats. Let me be really clear about
this up front. There's no way I'm having the rats
attack me. I have to have the rats on my side.
I am absolutely terrified of rats. So that's, that for sure.
Rats are, rats are on my side. Maybe going to
do the Hawks as well. So, so we're going to,
I'm going to leave the, the, the people coming after

(02:19):
me are going to be the grillers and the, and
the guy with the gun.

Speaker 3 (02:22):
So I'd forgotten it was 10,000 rats, which kind of
changes things. So I think, Yeah, I've got to have
the rats defending me. And I'm thinking the rats would
easily overwhelm the gorillas because 10,000 is a lot of rats.
And as in the movie, it ends, which is where
this is from. We do not know what kind of

(02:43):
gun the one man has or what his skill level is.
But if it's a shotgun, I'd say the one man. Tasha,
do you have an answer to this?

Speaker 1 (02:52):
I think that you're both right and that the movie
completely underrates. It gets a little bogged down in the
discussion of the stopping power of hawks and what kind
of man with a gun it is. And nobody really
gives the 10,000 rats their due. Under no circumstances would
I want to be attacked by 10,000 rats, even with
all three of the others defending me. I think all

(03:13):
of us would go down almost instantly. Given the flight
superiority of hawks dive bombing things, I'm going with the
hawks and the rats as protectors and the gorillas and man.
I hope that the things haunting me don't get a
head start. A lot depends on positioning, which is also
not discussed in this weighty philosophical conundrum. But I do

(03:37):
think regardless of anything else, having 10,000 rats protecting you
rather than attacking you is just definitively the right answer.
Maybe that's why the movie glosses over that is because
it's just so obvious.

Speaker 2 (03:49):
I would say, too, if you have the rats on
your side, there is a high likelihood that they will
also be capable of making you, you know, three Michelin
star level cuisine. Somewhere.

Speaker 1 (04:02):
Is this like monkeys and typewriters and the works of Shakespeare?

Speaker 2 (04:06):
Well, I'm just saying Ratatouille. We just did this.

Speaker 1 (04:09):
You're basically implying that if you've got 10,000 rats, one
of them has got to be a Michelin star chef.

Speaker 2 (04:13):
Sure, and the other ones can be Marshall to do
other jobs.

Speaker 3 (04:17):
In the kitchen.

Speaker 1 (04:17):
Well, I will tell you, when it comes to which
of these I would rather have sitting on my head
under my hat, I would definitely go for any number
of the rats over any of the gorillas or the
man with a gun. I feel like we've cracked this one.
I feel like we're good. I also feel like the
other movie in our pairing does a really crap job
of addressing this very important philosophical question. But we should

(04:39):
get into that. Scott, can you tell us about the
movies we've paired for these episodes?

Speaker 2 (04:44):
Sure. Alexander Ullam's feature debut, It Ends, has been billed
to some degree as a horror movie. But it's more
of an existential experience that critics have widely compared to
Jean-Paul Sartre's No Exit, a play that 28-year-old Ullam had
never heard of until the reviews started rolling in. It
Ends starts with four young friends getting into a Jeep

(05:05):
planning to get food together. Instead, they find themselves on
an endless road they can't escape. Their varying responses and
debates about what's happened, what it means, and what they
should do next all reminded us of the slow burn
clashes in an inescapable situation in Andrei Tarkovsky's Solaris. This
1972 existential classic follows a psychologist sent to space to

(05:27):
assess a failing research station. He finds the place in disarray,
with the remaining scientists there acting erratic and secretive. Then
his dead wife appears, and he begins to understand what
the other men there have been experiencing.

Speaker 1 (05:40):
So in this episode, we'll talk about Solaris and what
a heavily symbolic movie is trying to say about life
in a situation where death has no meaning anymore. Then,
in the companion episode, we'll look at a more modern
approach to the question of whether we can see life
more clearly when most of the quotidian things that define
it fall away. Stay with us.

Speaker 2 (05:57):
I'm Kelvin, a psychologist.

Speaker 1 (06:02):
As far as I can see, you didn't wait for me.

Speaker 2 (06:05):
He understands that everything will depend on his first.

Speaker 3 (06:07):
Message from the station.

Speaker 2 (06:10):
If you see something unusual, neither me nor Arturius, try
to hold yourself back.

Speaker 1 (06:18):
Who came?

Speaker 3 (06:18):
She died ten years ago. What you saw was the
materialization of your idea of her.

Speaker 2 (06:30):
Chris loves me. He wants me alive. You're not a
woman or a man.

Speaker 1 (06:32):
You're just a repetition of her. In a 1970 Russian-language
interview with film journalist Noam Abramov, filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky said
something which has been taken out of context extensively over

(06:53):
the years regarding Stanley Kubrick's 2001 A Space Odyssey. That
film came out in 1968, and Abramov brought it up
as an example of the kind of science fiction film
Tarkovsky had just been complaining about, a movie that fixated
on the close detail of what life in space might
look like. Tarkovsky complained, 2001 A Space Odyssey is phony
on many points, even for specialists. For a true work

(07:15):
of art, the fake must be eliminated, unquote. When Tarkovsky's
third film, Solaris, came out in 1972, that quote was
used to market the movie as an anti-2001, an answer
to and repudiation of Kubrick's filmmaking. It's still frequently called
the anti-2001 in essays today. But looking at Tarkovsky's quote
in context of the rest of the interview, it becomes

(07:36):
very clear that he was not making the film as
an answer to Kubrick at all. He wanted to adapt
the source material, a 1961 novel by Polish science fiction
author Stanislaw Lem, as a continuation of the themes Tarkovsky
had explored in his first two movies, Ivan's Childhood in
1962 and Andrei Rublev in 1966. Here he is laying
out the connection. Quote, I wanted to explain why I

(07:59):
decided to adapt Lem's novel Solaris. Whether or not my
first two films are good or bad, they are, in
the final analysis, both about the same thing. They are
about the extreme manifestation of loyalty to a moral debt,
the struggle for it, and faith in it, even to
the extent of a personality crisis. They are about an
individual armed with conviction, an individual with a sense of

(08:19):
personal destiny, for whom catastrophe is an unbroken human soul.
Tarkovsky goes on to say that his previous two movies
were similarly about protagonists enduring in the face of trauma
and facing moral transformation as a result. He says he
doesn't particularly care about the science fiction setting or trappings
of the story, He's only interested in, quote, the moral
leap of a human being in relation to new discoveries

(08:42):
and scientific knowledge, unquote. And he talks at length about
how his personal connection to this idea, his interest in
it as a theme, is the passion he feels for
this film, the kind of passion that makes a filmmaker's
work connect with audiences. What he's criticizing in Kubrick's work
is a comparatively smaller thing, a focus on detail in
a setting where those details are necessarily fictional. so they

(09:03):
can't feel comfortable, lived in, and true. Whether any of
the settings in Solaris feel comfortable, lived in, and true, though,
is a matter of debate. Rather than a repudiation of 2001,
Solaris feels like a companion piece that's similar in several
broad regards. Both movies feature lengthy prologues before the space
travel part of the story, sterile and forbidding sets to
suggest what the future might look like, long dialogue-free scenes

(09:26):
of the characters in their environments, cosmic puzzles, and endings
that invite extensive analysis and discussion. Both are deliberately paced,
to a point some people would describe as slow cinema,
and both involve deeply emotional experiences that the protagonists face
with grim, stoic calm rather than explosive displays of emotion.
Donatus Banyanis stars as Chris Kelvin, a psychologist who seems

(09:49):
sunk deep within himself, giving little away to others. It's suggested, though,
that he's sunk in a deep depression, still contending with
his wife's suicide ten years previously, after they are Kellen
is ordered into space to analyze the crew of an
installation on the planet Solaris, a water world where the
endless sea appears to be a single thinking organism that

(10:09):
reacts to the humans studying it from their space station.
A scientist who lived there long ago was recalled after
reporting an anomaly that's been dismissed as a hallucination. a
13-foot-tall child swimming in the ocean, a dead ringer for
the orphan child of one of the other researchers. The
station's complement of researchers has dwindled to three, and the
government is debating shutting it down, pending Kelvin's analysis. He

(10:33):
arrives to find the space station in disarray, with collapsed equipment,
detritus everywhere, and one of the researchers dead, having left
Kelvin a recorded message and then killing himself. The remaining
two scientists, Snout and Sartorius, give him elliptical answers to
what's going on, or turn him away. Eventually, though, he
encounters another inhabitant of the station, Hari, played by Natalia Bondarchuk,

(10:56):
seemingly a reincarnation of Kelvin's wife. Kelvin panics, shoves this
apparition into a rocket, and blasts it into space, but
Hari promptly returns. This figure appears to believe it is
his wife, and before long, Kelvin is accepting her presence
and her identity, more than she accepts herself, as it
turns out. The science fiction thread stretching throughout Solaris is

(11:17):
easy enough for fans of the genre to parse. There's
an alien presence at work here, trying to interface with
these troubled, guilty humans who bring their traumas to its world.
In the process, it becomes increasingly self-aware and arguably traumatized
and troubled itself. Whether it's trying to communicate with them,
or reflexively imitate them, or even to punish them for
their moral lapses is unclear. But one thing is obvious.

(11:41):
It is very alien to their ways of thinking. Tracking Solaris'
human component is more difficult. Snout and Sartorius have clearly
been through the ringer and come out changed, but the
film devotes almost no time to what their experiences have
been or the complexes that have shaped them. Spouting philosophy
and mocking Kelvin's responses to Hari, they hover over Kelvin

(12:02):
like an angel and demon on his shoulder, though which
role they take shifts from scene to scene and moment
to moment. whether they're indulging him, encouraging him, insulting him,
or dismissing him. Kelvin himself is clearly enduring a trial
that changes him. But for every scene where he breaks
down or expresses what he's feeling, there are three where
he stares blankly at undulating fronds in a river, or

(12:23):
at a telescreen, or at the ceiling. Tarkovsky packs the
movie with moments that feel richly symbolic. A medium shot
of Kelvin facing the camera that match fades to one
of him facing away. A long, slow zoom into his
ear as the men discuss the human condition. A lengthy
sequence of the old Solaris veteran driving away from Kelvin's
country home through a bleak futuristic landscape. An indoor hot

(12:45):
rainstorm that leaves steam rising from the back of a
man who appears not to notice the water at all.
And then there's a long study of several Peiter Bruegel
paintings with a close-up camera focus that suggests we're traveling
into the worlds they portray. What are we to make
of these lovingly crafted but often disjointed seeming images? A
Tarkovsky quote from that same interview might shed some light
on what he's getting at here. Describing Stanislaw Lem's 1959

(13:09):
novel Eden, Tarkovsky says, quote, In Eden, Lem tells about
an expedition to a planet where the members of the
expedition encounter a reality, the developmental laws of which they
cannot comprehend. These laws slip away from understanding, like thoughts
just forgotten. The air is filled with guesses and analogies,
seen by the naked eye, but they can't be caught.

(13:30):
It's a very specific, unnerving, and frustrating condition, and Lem
does a brilliant job of expressing this condition. He describes
in detail everything that the expedition encounters, but more than
the detail, he describes what it is that the people
see while not understanding what it means. Watching Solaris is
much like that. Each sequence could be unpacked at length
and sieved for symbolic and instructive meaning, much as people

(13:52):
have done over and over with Stanley Kubrick's movies. But
it might be more instructive to look to the actual
content of that Tarkovsky quote about what he didn't like
about 2001 A Space Odyssey, the focus on the fake
and fictional in imagining the future. If Tarkovsky primarily wanted
people to see the emotion, the challenge, the will to overcome,
and the moral dilemma at the heart of Solaris, his

(14:13):
focus on the organic feels more like it's meant for
mood than for decoding. His streams of water and sudden downpours,
the anomalous appearance of that family dog in space, a
sudden 30-second burst of zero gravity, that steaming indoor rainstorm,
and Kelvin's emotional response, they all seem like a call
to real, physical, recognizably human things. rather than false imagining

(14:35):
about space travel. It's an odd approach to making a
science fiction movie, certainly. Deriding any detail about your own
story setting is antithetical to truth, and dismissing the genre
itself is unimportant to your movie. But then, even though
Solaris runs close to three hours long and makes time
for long studies of water weeds and falling rain, there
are huge deliberate gaps all over the story, alighting over

(14:57):
the things Lem and Tarkovsky weren't interested in exploring. That
makes studying what does wind up on the screen... What
they did find important, a lot more telling, and as
Tarkovsky would put it, a lot more personal. So to
kick off, I kind of started my research on Solaris

(15:20):
by reading the Criterion essay on the film by film
scholar Philip Lopate. And I was astonished to see him
calling it Andrew Tartofsky's most accessible film since I've seen Stalker,
which seemed a lot more accessible than this movie to me.
I'm curious where you rate this one on accessibility and
how much Tartofsky you've seen.

Speaker 2 (15:40):
I think I've seen maybe one more Tartofsky film than Keith,
but we overlap quite a bit. To me, it's almost
objectively true. that his first film, Ivan's Childhood, is his
most successful. You would actually not necessarily recognize it as
a Tarkovsky film if you saw it. It's a little more,
the story, I mean, it's exceptional. It's a great movie,

(16:02):
but it's really just about a boy's experience with war
and struggle, and it's extremely locked into that perspective. It's
quite simple and riveting in that respect. It is not
nearly the sort of philosophical experience, you know, the meditative
experience that his later films would be. But I'd kind
of put this one on a level really with stalker
in terms of, you know, difficulty really, I, I, I'd

(16:26):
say it's the sacrifice, which is another one. Uh, if his,
I've seen, remember, I remember that one as being a
pretty tough, I'd say that's a tougher one. What do
you think?

Speaker 3 (16:35):
That's the first one I started with, with Tarkovsky and I,
and it took me a while to come back. I
have not seen Ivan's childhood yet. That's, that's one of
the ones I have not seen. I also have not
seen mirror, which was coming up on our site and sound, uh,
survey over at the reveal, uh, Oh, boy. Andrei Rublev,
in terms of storytelling, at least, it's pretty straightforward. And
style certainly stretches that out. We're getting to the place here.

Speaker 2 (16:57):
But I don't know.

Speaker 3 (16:57):
I think this is not his most accessible, but I
think it's accessible. I'd say probably more accessible than Stalker.

Speaker 2 (17:05):
I don't know.

Speaker 3 (17:05):
They're probably on the same level. They're challengers. He's a
challenging filmmaker. That's part of why he's worth talking about.

Speaker 1 (17:13):
I just find that interesting because I felt Stalker was
very accessible compared to this movie. And we can certainly
dig into the parts of it that I found inaccessible.
But he lays out a fairly clear connection between his work,
at least at the time. And I see it as
extending to Stalker as well in terms of both the driven,

(17:36):
enduring protagonist he's describing and in terms of both this
and Stalker as I know comparing this heavily to the
only other Tartofsky movie I've seen is kind of the
boss baby. This is giving me boss baby vibes, guys.

Speaker 2 (17:50):
Exactly.

Speaker 1 (17:51):
But the fact that both of them are kind of
expressly about the fantasy of getting the thing you want
and then the moral dilemma of what to do with
it as a result. the existential problem of whether we
should get the things that we long for or not
and what that does to us as human beings. I
do see them as different kind of approaches to similar ideas.

(18:16):
So I am curious whether you see either of those ideas,
the one he identifies or the one I identify, as
stretching through any of his other movies.

Speaker 3 (18:25):
I mean, I think the strongest connection with Stalker is
this idea that you can take these science fiction concepts
and And kind of strip the whole, you know, speculative
fiction science elements out of it and make them purely
about the underlying themes that you normally get in, well,
you get in good science fiction. And to me, I'm
sure we're going to get into the 2001 comparison you

(18:47):
talk about in the keynote, Tasha, but I think he's
really kind of interested in science fiction insofar as it
provides a gateway to the themes that he wants to
talk about less than the genre itself. He's making subtext
text in some ways.

Speaker 2 (19:01):
I mean, first of all, just to quickly go back
to the accessibility question, I think I'd be remiss if
I did not say that Dan Coyce's notorious cultural vegetables
essay that caused such a firestorm on Twitter back in
the day that that was built around Solaris. So Dead
Coist did not find Solaris to be all that accessible.

(19:21):
Just going to throw that out there. I think you're
absolutely right, though, Tasha, this premise of yours about Stalker
and Solaris may have been the only two films of
his you've seen, but they are, I think, they feel
like companion pieces to me and they feel like very
similar experiences. You also, in both films, have this abstract
sense sort of realm that is being contemplated. In stalker

(19:43):
it's the zone and here it's it's solaris but specifically
this ocean or this this that is keeps shifting and
seems to be delivering uh guests to the space station
i mean all of that it all they all feel
connected i mean i think the difference ends up being
that with the zone you have these travelers these tourists

(20:05):
who are seeking something, or have heard of the power
that this place has, they can achieve this, their desire,
I guess, going to the zone. And here, it's almost
foisted upon them, or at least foisted upon our hero
in Solaris, his wife kind of coming back to him.

(20:25):
And certainly in both cases, very much a cursed monkey's
paw thing happening with getting what you wish for.

Speaker 1 (20:34):
Well, when it comes to accessibility, I would like you
guys to check my math a little bit on analyzing
the symbolism here. Obviously, with a 166 minute movie, that
is largely symbolic images. We honestly, I feel like we
could spend five hours analyzing this movie. And I did,
you know, do some internet searching on some of the

(20:55):
individual images that most baffled me just to see, you know,
and of course, a lot has been written about some
of these shots and what they mean. This is a
very unpackable movie. But for me, I mean, I certainly
don't think that as on the whole, he's thinking, even
having said what he said about Stanislaw Lemm, that for
the most part, when he's putting these images on screen,

(21:18):
he's thinking of them as, you know, opaque and not
understandable images. So I guess I'm wondering whether any of
these things that I mentioned specifically as seemingly opaque were
things where you were like, oh, of course, you know,
when he zooms into this man's ear and we're looking

(21:39):
at his ear hair, That is clearly an image talking
about the vulnerability and perhaps ridiculousness of human bodies or
whatever it is. How much do you feel the symbolism
of this movie is clear, present, and obvious as you're
experiencing it?

Speaker 3 (21:57):
I don't get the air. I'll just say that. I
don't understand. I mean, it's hypnotic and I don't dislike
it in any way, but I don't understand what's going
on there. But Bruegel, I mean, Bruegel's paintings are all so,
you know, if you want to have a contrast between
what life is like on Earth or what, you know,

(22:18):
just sort of the busyness of existing on Earth and
among other people in a community with lots of activity
and nature. I mean, everything in Bruegel's paintings there are
an antithesis to what's going on. on the space station.
In some ways, it's like everything they've lost. That's one
way to read it anyway.

Speaker 2 (22:39):
I struggle to unpack a lot of this symbolism in
this movie, but I think, I guess, maybe this speaks
to what we're talking about. Maybe it doesn't, but what
kind of stood out for me on this time was
how much the film has given over to time on
Earth before we even get to the space station. It's
a good 45 minutes before Chris is finally on the

(23:01):
space station. And I think the kinds of images we
see during that stretch, the way they kind of rhyme
or contrast with things that we see later, I think
are really compelling. I mean, I think, I think specifically
of these, of, uh, those shots of the water, of the, uh,
just these, these sort of, what is it, seaweed or
something drifting and drifting in the water. And, and then,

(23:23):
and then you get these incredible shots of, of traffic
that he, he sort of lingers on. And that's kind
of interesting, but, but, but, uh, but specifically with the
nature image imagery, I thought like, The device of the
sort of homemade wind rustling effect that they had sort
of attached to sort of give them some kind of

(23:45):
connection to the life they left behind was so interesting
and poignant. And it kind of connected back visually to
this organic, more beautiful footage that we see as the
film opens.

Speaker 1 (24:00):
For me, at least, a lot of the water imagery
in the movie kind of comes back to the ocean
of Solaris, the ocean that is... Kind of both the
landscape of this entire planet and the, you know, the
intelligence that is causing the phenomena that we see. And,
you know, symbolically, there's just there's a lot of ideas

(24:21):
there in terms of the ocean, you know, evolutionarily being
the source of life of, you know, evoking images of
the womb, of evoking life. Lopate suggests that when Kelvin
is watching the underwater plants wave back and forth, he's
contemplating the hair of a drowned woman, effectively. There's just

(24:42):
a lot of symbolism associated with water. And when we
go from these underwater plants to... The pouring rain, which
Kelvin just sort of stands in and the water seeping
into the teacup and diluting the tea. We go from
all of that to like this swirling mass of water
on this alien planet. And then eventually back to the rain.

(25:05):
But the rain has become something strange and alien in
a setting where, you know, islands have risen up from
the sea and the sea is no longer one thing.
So I feel like the water imagery in specific is
telling a story here. But I don't know what to
make of the traffic imagery, which we spend a fair

(25:26):
bit away from Kelvin's home and his perspective to follow
this other astronaut like driving around in this sort of futuristic,
brutalist looking city that kind of reminded me of Goddard's
Alphaville in a way. What do you make of all
of the traffic sequences?

Speaker 3 (25:44):
It's Tokyo, actually, where they filmed that. Oh, is it? Really?
I could have sworn that was like a 15-minute sequence

(26:05):
the first time I watched it. So when it started
this time, I'm like, I'm going to time this to see,
you know, how deep in the double digits this scene gets.
It's four minutes, but it just has that like sort
of hypnotic quality where time kind of drifts away, doesn't it?
What it means, I don't know. I really don't. I
don't know either, but I think it's so good. It's
more bustling humanity of the kind that our hero is

(26:28):
about to leave behind, you know, possibly forever. But, you know,
it's a stark contrast to everything that he's about to encounter.
But other than that, I really don't know what to
say about it.

Speaker 1 (26:38):
Oh, that is fascinating. I don't think I would have
thought double digits, but I would have put the over-under
around maybe eight.

Speaker 3 (26:45):
And it's fascinating.

Speaker 1 (26:47):
I think both that we both felt that and that you,
you know, you used the scientific method in this film
about science and also science's irrationality and uselessness. Thank you, Keith.
That was very helpful.

Speaker 2 (27:00):
Doesn't doing that also make you contemplate your relationship to
time and this film's relationship to time as well, Keith? Sure. Absolutely.

Speaker 3 (27:09):
Sure does.

Speaker 2 (27:10):
I often do. How does it pass? Does it become
tricky and amorphous and blurry and sequences that are actually
four minutes long or feel like they're 20?

Speaker 3 (27:21):
I mean, you're kind of joking, but it kind of does.
I mean, the pace of this film, the fact that
there is no single pace to it, it's kind of
slow and slower. It's the shot rhythms of this. You know,
it does have like sort of disorienting effect. It's just
not moving at the speed you expect movies to move at.
And it kind of lurches between speeds within its own

(27:41):
running time.

Speaker 2 (27:42):
Slow and slower is the Farrelly brothers' least popular film.

Speaker 1 (27:48):
I mean, any movie that stretches past the two and
a half hour mark makes me contemplate my relationship with time.
Almost any. There are certainly movies like The Odyssey where
I just I don't feel the time passing. Robert Altman's Shortcuts,
I believe, is nosing around four hours. And that movie
goes by like a blink as far as I'm concerned.

(28:09):
There are movies that don't prompt me to either check
my watch or contemplate the infinite, my relationship to it.
But this movie, yeah, a little bit of contemplating the
infinite and or the clock on my phone. There is
slow cinema that I love that I find hypnotic and compelling.
And this one, honestly, was not that for me. It's
funny because Stalker is paced very similarly, but I found

(28:34):
the images there a lot more compelling. And I fell
into that movie just full bore in a way I
couldn't with this one, though I am pretty curious how
it would play on a rewatch.

Speaker 3 (28:45):
I really love this one, actually. And in part because
of the contrast we've been talking about, because I do
find that the nature imagery of the beginning, which will
return in a really strange way at the And it's
such a stark contrast to that derelict station. I mean,
I think, you know, I'm always kind of a sucker
for like cutting edge technology that's fallen into disrepair and

(29:07):
this station is so Seems so haunted even before you
encounter any of the quote-unquote guests aboard it. But I
find as minimally expressive as Donatans Benianus' performances here, I
find it quite moving. And when he does show expressions,
it's kind of like the movie itself. It's like, you know,
when something does happen, when there is like sort of

(29:29):
a shift, it's all the more jarring for the sort
of placidity around it.

Speaker 1 (29:34):
Well, you're anticipating a question I have about Kelvin as
a character, but before we get into that... I want
to get to a question that Scott anticipated about, again,
time in this movie and the fact that it takes
us 45 minutes to get into space. I haven't read
Stanislaw Lem's novel, but I did read a summary of it.
And apparently it starts with the space launch. Whereas here

(29:55):
we spend a full 45 minutes with Kelvin on Earth
and with his family and his life and his contemplating
of the infinite and or the water, hanging out with
a dog or not hanging out with the dog. The
briefing that he gets, watching the guy who gave the
briefing drive away for four minutes, apparently. What do you

(30:17):
get most from this 45 minute intro about what matters
in this movie?

Speaker 2 (30:23):
You know, to hear you describe it, it actually reminds
me a little bit about the difference between James Cameron's
original cut of Aliens and what he ended up releasing theatrically, right?
Because that movie shows you a little bit of what
happened on the life among the colonists, right? Before Ripley

(30:43):
and the team arrive. And in the theatrical cut, which
is the superior version in my view, you don't get
anything until you actually... turn up and see what has happened.
And I think that's an effective narrative strategy. I also think,
you know, to go back to what Tarkovsky might have
been thinking, you know, I think it kind of sets

(31:05):
the audience up for a different kind of experience that,
you know, you're going to have a more contemplative experience
when it is structured this way. And when you have
so much emphasis placed on this character and how he's
feeling and the world in which he is occupying before
he gets to the space station, all that stuff, he's

(31:25):
given 45 minutes over to that before you get to space.
So that kind of sets you up for what type
of film this is going to be, I think. And
then once you establish that, you then get the shock
of him arriving and really sort of drinking in the
level of disarray and chaos that has sort of swallowed
up this entire mission.

Speaker 3 (31:46):
I have read the novel. It's been a long time.
It certainly is not a slow-paced novel, as I remember it.
It's very dense with ideas. But oddly enough, though, I
feel like the opening section is the most straightforwardly science fiction-y,
as the film gets, because we get the whole history

(32:08):
with Burton, the former cosmonaut, astronaut, and his experiences, and
the footage of him testifying to about them before a
very skeptical audience. And I find that is actually, I think,
a really interesting way to get this exposition out there,
the background you need to understand what Solaris is and

(32:28):
what's been going on there, but also kind of a
Chilean dramatization of the bureaucracy and the refusal of established
science to accept things outside their understanding of how the
world works. To basically ruin this guy's life. I mean,
I like the scenes quite a bit. And then we

(32:51):
get four minutes of him driving away.

Speaker 1 (32:52):
I feel like apart from the things we learn about
kind of Kelvin's past and psychology and what his life
on Earth looks like, one of the biggest things I
got out of that intro was something that isn't foregrounded.
which is just the gap between how the cosmonaut who's
testifying looks on the screen versus how he now looks

(33:15):
in real life, tells us that a lot of time
has passed. Either that or he's prematurely aging from his experience.
But when I realized, it took me a little while
to realize it was the same person. And when I did,
I kind of went, oh, a lot more time has
happened since that phenomenon That phenomena is not what's prompting

(33:35):
them to send Kelvin. This is a thing in the
past that has come up, been debunked, been buried, been ignored,
and is now resurfacing because they're trying to explain what
it means that other cosmonauts are experiencing similarly hallucinatory phenomena.
So that was kind of my big takeaway. But the

(33:57):
other thing is maybe just spending enough time with Kelvin
to get to understand him better. And that's something we're
definitely going to need as we transition into the part
of the story centered on Kelvin's experience on the space station.
So we should get into that. But before that, let's
take a little break. The Next Picture Show is presented

(34:21):
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(34:44):
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(35:05):
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(36:10):
receive your discount. That code is N-E-X-T-P-I-C-26. So, yeah, Kellen
is a character. What do you make of him? Is,
you know, given Tartofsky's statements about the importance of his
stories being about the dogged character who perseveres no matter

(36:33):
what's going on and makes big moral choices. Do you
see Kelvin like that? Do you see him as making
a huge moral choice here? Do you like him at all?
And if you don't, does it matter to the story?
Who is this man?

Speaker 3 (36:47):
Tash, I feel like before that, we should... what is
the audio equivalent of an ominous title card that says
part two? As we return from the break, we really
do need that.

Speaker 2 (36:56):
That's an interesting point to stop and then take it
up again. I thought, I like when this movie shifts
into part one and part two, though I'm kind of
curious as to why that was necessary.

Speaker 3 (37:08):
Yeah. Do I like him? I find him affecting. I mean,
it's not an easy character to like. But I think
he also has kind of an everyman quality about him.
Here's one point of clarification, and I might be wrong
about this, but do we not learn that he's a
psychologist until he gets to the station? I remember being

(37:30):
kind of like, oh, he's a psychologist when he's introduced
as such.

Speaker 1 (37:34):
I thought that was in the briefing up front, but honestly.

Speaker 3 (37:38):
It very well may be. I may have just kind
of glided past that.

Speaker 1 (37:41):
I mean, at this point, I've read so many analytical
takes and essays and interviews, I don't know where I
got any particular bit of information. So I cannot pin
that down for you, I'm afraid.

Speaker 3 (37:51):
Well, I guess the broader point it's going to make
is why a psychologist? Why is this character a psychologist?
And why would they send a psychologist to deal with
the issue of the station being as it now stands.

Speaker 2 (38:05):
I mean, I think maybe they're thinking this is a
mental health problem or something. Not an issue of there
being some supernatural phenomenon that they're having to deal with,
but a problem of just being isolated and needing some
kind of help or intervention from him. And I think
that he seems to approach this assignment with that in

(38:27):
mind of just, of being a little, coming to the
table a little bit with a little bit of skepticism,
even though he's seen pretty persuasive footage that there might,
might be something going on here. But of course that
his skepticism is immediately erased when his ex returns to him.
Then he's on the crazy train with the other two.
I'm just going to think of her as his ex-wife.

Speaker 1 (38:50):
That's, that's dark.

Speaker 2 (38:51):
Wife? No, ex-wife is a little dark. Okay, fine. His
deceased wife. It's just wordy.

Speaker 3 (39:00):
You could just say wife, I think, actually. She's not alive.

Speaker 2 (39:05):
The idea is she's not alive, though. I just want
to make that clear.

Speaker 3 (39:07):
Right. I think maybe attached to the point I was
trying to make is do we want to think of
this guest as his wife or as an entity in
the form of his wife?

Speaker 1 (39:17):
No, I was just thinking that I don't normally hear
people refer to somebody as, you know, an ex-spouse because
they've died as opposed to because you've gotten divorced.

Speaker 2 (39:27):
Yeah, that's how I is. Although I don't... late wife.

Speaker 3 (39:31):
But you could have made the point I was trying,
I just suggested, because I think it's a pretty good one.

Speaker 1 (39:34):
I mean, a lot of interesting points have been made there.
I think the one that I kind of seized on, though,
was As far as the question of why Kelvin is here,
I don't necessarily think that he's there to provide support
of any kind, like mental health help for anybody. To me,

(39:54):
it just sort of seems like, you know, one man
sees something that does not fit within your understanding of
the world. You dismiss it as a hallucination and recall
him from the ship. When everybody does... then you're dealing
with some kind of phenomenon. But rather than sending more
people there to study the phenomenon and possibly fall victim
to it, they decide to send somebody to analyze, like,

(40:18):
are these people having a mental health breakdown or is
there something else going on? And they don't really analyze
the fact that they're only sending one person, which could
kind of come down to, we've already given up on
this installation and If I remember the numbers correctly, it
staffs 30 and there are only three left, which turns

(40:38):
out there are only two left.

Speaker 3 (40:39):
I think there were 85 at one point. I think
at one point there were 85. Oh, yeah.

Speaker 1 (40:43):
So even bigger than I thought. I did not write
that point down, unfortunately. So, I mean, to me, it
sort of smacks of like, we don't want to throw
more resources at this, but we will, you know, make
a kind of like small budget. inexpensive, uh, relatively effort
to check out what's going on. Could you just go

(41:04):
find out whether these people are lunatics, um, or, you know,
whether you also experience, uh, like hallucinatory measures and, uh,
and see four meter tall boys, uh, swimming around in
the ocean. So that, that was certainly my take on
the psychologist thing. I didn't realize until I saw the
credits that our two scientists here have specific disciplines. If

(41:27):
I recall, one of them is a pilot and the
other one is an astrobiologist. Snout and Sartorius to me
kind of blurred together a bit in a way that
I suspect repeat watches would clarify. Obviously, they have kind
of different responses to him at the beginning. They both
want him to go away, but it kind of seems

(41:48):
like for different reasons. But at the point where they're
having a grand philosophical debate where the conversation is just
about whether people need people and whether there's any point
in colonizing other worlds, whether humanity has a future, whether
science is meaningful, just all of these kind of like
big topics that come up that feel very Russian to me,

(42:12):
even though the author is Polish. The specific kinds of
Is anything meaningful and does humanity have a place in
the stars at all? Questions feel very Russian to me.
And these two men kind of blur together. And I'm
curious if that was your perspective or if having seen
this movie multiple times, you see them as very distinctive individuals.

Speaker 3 (42:34):
I mean, I think– I believe it's Snout that has
more of a mad scientist quality. No, Sartorius, who has
kind of a mad scientist quality to him. But beyond that,
we don't really get beneath the surface of either of
those characters all that much, do we? And we really
don't get a sense of who their guests are, apart

(42:56):
from some kind of chilling peaks here and there.

Speaker 1 (43:00):
Yeah, that sequence where one of them is concealing somebody
in his room... And they escape. And I did not
get a very clear view of that. My impression was
that it was a little person rather than a child.

Speaker 3 (43:13):
It's a little person, yeah.

Speaker 1 (43:16):
But it's never addressed. And the fact that Kelvin himself
doesn't immediately say, who is that? There's not supposed to
be anybody else on this space station. What's going on?
The fact that he doesn't address it seemingly ever is
deeply baffling to me.

Speaker 2 (43:32):
Does he see it?

Speaker 3 (43:33):
Yeah, I think so.

Speaker 2 (43:34):
I was very surprised by myself to never really return
to it.

Speaker 3 (43:40):
Once he arrives, I feel like he almost immediately sinks
into the, forget it, man, it's Solaris kind of mentality.
Weird things are going to happen.

Speaker 2 (43:52):
Yeah, that's pretty damn weird, though. I mean, it's early, too.
It's when he's still a little bit skeptical and nothing
has happened to him yet. That's interesting. But I think
we had kind of started that question of just what
we think of him, our lead character, and whether we
connect with him in some way. And I think this
is a movie that's often talked about as being a

(44:14):
film about grief, and I think it does sort of
resonate in that way, even though this is not a
character that you warm up to that easily. But I
think the situation itself, the way it asserts itself, though,
is affecting. This woman who keeps being manifested and goes

(44:35):
away and then comes back, and the ways in which
she is... you know, versions of this character are sort
of jettisoned, all have, you know, I think their own
individual meaning and their own individual weight. I mean, the
whole sequence where he's, the first manifestation that he puts
in the rocket and it tries to set out into
space is just an incredible sequence. Very bad, very poor

(44:58):
safety work on that sequence. whole operation.

Speaker 3 (45:02):
But it's also, it's kind of like one of the
few moments that's kind of funny, too. It's an interesting scene.

Speaker 1 (45:10):
It's also just wild that the space station has a
full-sized rocket sitting around that they can afford to dispense.
Weird detail. This past weekend, participated in a Battlestar Galactica
LARP tied to the recent remake. And I just think
about how that series is about every time somebody causes

(45:33):
trouble or there's a political shift, we shove them out
the airlock. And shoving somebody out the airlock is very,
very cheap. Expending an entire rocket on blasting them to
wherever he sends Hari 2.0 is, or Hari 1.0 is
kind of incredible. And the fact that he's new to

(45:53):
the station and yet he still knows where to go
for the Disposable rocket ships that you poke your alien
intruders into. Just absolutely wild. Very visual. You know, very,
very compelling visually, particularly when he can't escape in time
and gets caught on fire by the blast of the rocket.

(46:14):
This is all really wild detail. But I did find
myself wondering, wasn't there an easier way?

Speaker 2 (46:20):
There's kind of a vacuum effect with space, from my understanding.

Speaker 3 (46:25):
And when later, when one of the others tells him
that she's still out there, you can go retrieve her
if you want to.

Speaker 1 (46:31):
Like in space, there's just another one of his wife
out there. Which is, again, wild. Because when the second
one kills herself by drinking liquid oxygen, which is horrific.
She just revives, which does that mean the one that
he blasted into space is also just eternally alive? Is
she going to run out of oxygen and.

Speaker 3 (46:53):
Be out there? I think she's still out there.

Speaker 1 (46:55):
There's a lot about the situation we don't know. And
we probably shouldn't focus on the details because we're kind
of not meant to know. This is a movie about,
you know, the emotional impact of this reunion and and
what it does to this man of science who ends
up kind of falling back on love and faith in
a way.

Speaker 2 (47:14):
I think the film kind of endorses this idea that
is asserted that, that she isn't real. Like there's something
that she's, you know, made of what neutrinos or something.
There's not she, you know, that it's, that she's a
manifestation of rather than something that we should really, someone
who should, we should really think about. as a person

(47:35):
in terms of our, you know, whatever moral response to her, uh,
might be, uh, it's really just about him, him and
his feelings and him having to grapple with her return and,
and what that, you know, means to him, you know,
as somebody who is, who has grieved, you know, his, uh,
His ex-wife, his late wife.

Speaker 1 (47:58):
So I feel more of a connection with her, I think,
than with him. And part of that is just that
the character is allowed to be a lot more emotive,
you know, a lot more about what's going through her head.
And her particular journey is so painful and tragic, even
though she's questionably real, even though she's a manifestation of

(48:19):
something unknown and possibly unknowable. What we see on screen
is a woman struggling with humanity, with her own reality,
with her purpose in life in a very visceral way
and taking really precipitous action that turns out to be
very painful physically and emotionally. I connect to that a

(48:39):
lot more easily than I connect to what is, in
Kelvin's case, mostly stoicism and i connect to him most
in the moments where he he breaks down and shows
what he's.

Speaker 3 (48:50):
Feeling it's a really touching performance you know i i
find if you weren't at least a little bit um
moved by that you i'm not sure the film would
work as as sort of as alien as this manifestation
is is uh you know is revealed to be i'm
sorry i got a little distracted because i was looking
up natalia bunderchuk who is still alive and uh directed

(49:13):
as as a career as a director including as recently
as 2015, but including a film called Bambi's Childhood, which
appears to be an adaptation of Bambi with human actors
playing the roles of animals, including her. Well, anyway, if
it's a rabbit hole, we can go down, or I
guess a deer den, we can go down. A thumper hole?

Speaker 2 (49:34):
This sounds like a reveal piece happening in the near future.

Speaker 1 (49:38):
Yeah. So it interests me that we, to me, Hari's
first suicide ends up kind of being the emotional climax
of the film. We see her come back from it
in a physically agonizing, emotionally traumatic way. And it seems
to be the turning point of Kelvin's feelings for her

(50:00):
as well. So much happens around that suicide. But when
she kills herself the second time, this time permanently, It
all happens on screen, and it's just something he has
to contend with, having not been there for it, and
left not even with a body to connect to the
way he does with his old friend who also killed

(50:22):
himself on the space station, and with her death the
first time. Why do you think the filmmakers decided to
handle her permanent death that way?

Speaker 3 (50:31):
I don't know how it lines up with the novel itself,
but I think this kind of probably... connects most closely
to what Lem has said he's trying to do with
the novel, which was explore the impossibility of communicating with
alien life, of any possibility of humans making any kind
of connection with alien life. So I think whatever they

(50:56):
did have, it's obviously... not working out for Solaris at
this point and she is withdrawn would be my reading
of that. And, you know, it's not an upbeat development.
How did you two read it?

Speaker 1 (51:12):
Well, yeah, given the unknowability of the alien, here's the thing.
I came away with an impression maybe that I understood
the alien intelligence a little better than I understood some
of these people. Stout and Sartorius's response to the situation was,
is frankly kind of baffling to me. And it's because
we have so few pieces of their individual puzzles. We

(51:34):
don't know exactly what caused their companion, Kellen's former friend,
to kill himself. We're told that the manifestations possibly have
something to do with guilt. But there's a lot that
we don't know here. But what I see kind of
as the overall picture, as I said in the keynote,
is an alien intelligence trying to reach out and make

(51:56):
contact while not necessarily understanding what humanity is, what humans are,
or what these particular people want, and then kind of
getting burned in the process. I can't imagine anything we
could do to aliens crueler than mapping a human being's
brain experience onto them. That's just, it's savage. Everything, all

(52:21):
of the tortures being done to aliens in Spielberg's Disclosure Day,
pale in comparison to making a giant alien ocean be human,
but it seems like it does respond by offering them
kind of a refuge in a way. What do you
see as the big picture here? Like, do you, do
you feel like you understand in the end what this

(52:43):
ocean intelligence is or what it's trying to do? I,
I don't, I'm surprised. I, I, I guess I don't
really tend to think of it the way that you
do it.

Speaker 2 (52:53):
And maybe as, as a, as the separate end, I
feel it, I think of it so much in relation
to these characters and their psyches and their experiences in
being something that kind of absorbs and reflects all of
those feelings rather than as something that exists separate from them.

(53:17):
So it's kind of hard for me to think of
it in the way that you're thinking of it here.
It reminded me actually a little bit, the movie reminded
me a little bit of a film I think it
surely influences, which is Melancholia, the Lars von Trier movie,
and how the characters, how a situation imposes itself on
these characters and transforms them in a way, or at

(53:39):
least reveals to us how they're thinking changes in relation
to this immense planet that is suddenly heading towards Earth.
It feels like that kind of a relationship to me
more than Solaris itself being reflective of an alien intelligence

(54:01):
or us having to grapple with an alien intelligence.

Speaker 3 (54:04):
Are you telling me that Melancholia, a film that uses
some of the same Bruegel paintings, might have been influenced
by Solaris? But I mean, no, I do think, I mean,
the novel is explicitly an intelligence, and I think there's
enough here to make that conclusion And no, I don't know.
I feel like that impossibility is, you know, neither the

(54:27):
humans nor the ocean come away with an understanding of
each other. But that said, I find, I don't know
what it is exactly, but I find the reveal that
the ocean has started to develop islands is a really
kind of, I don't know, I find it a really

(54:48):
kind of affecting thing. Line and of course the subsequent,
you know, we when we see one manifested at the
at the end I don't know whether to see this
like progress between human and ocean relations or Human Solaris
relations or kind of a perversion of what each is
supposed to be I guess I know I'm jumping in

(55:09):
the gun and on your discussion topics here Tasha But
I guess it's whether or not you see his settling
into that house. That's not quite his house or where
it rains inside instead of outside, and it's just a
small isolated patch in the middle of a giant ocean.
Whether you see that as somewhat encouraging or kind of

(55:30):
horrific or unreadable, I guess, depends on how you see
that revelation of the islands.

Speaker 1 (55:39):
I mean, for me, at least the answer is in
Kelvin's response. That could be, you know, if he if
he wandered around like looking horrified and trapped, we would
be in kind of a classic Twilight Zone ending where
it turns out. And, you know, the big twist is blank.
It was never earth all along, Charlton Heston.

Speaker 2 (55:57):
He broke his glasses.

Speaker 1 (55:58):
Yeah. So, but instead he falls on his knees and
as he did once before with the manifestation of his
wife and presses his head into the midsection of the
manifestation of, I believe it's his father.

Speaker 3 (56:14):
It's his father.

Speaker 1 (56:15):
Honestly, it was a little hard for me to tell
sometimes the difference between his lanky, aging, recessive hair, deeply
socketed eyes father and the astronaut, the older cosmonaut, who
had a lot of the same characteristics. But yeah, it
certainly seemed to be his father. And seeking emotional solace

(56:37):
in him the way he had previously in her, to me...
means he's making some kind of connection. He's expressing something
deeply felt. And for me, at least, for that character,
it feels like a step forward. But I could very
easily see somebody making an argument for this is perverting

(56:57):
what humanity is. We're running long and we should move
on to other things. I will just say, I'm sure
some people were curious what we made of the Steven
Soderbergh version of Solaris. We are going to talk about
that a bit in the second half of this conversation.
But I guess to close out, Keith, you said, you know,
of course, we're going to talk more about the 2001

(57:17):
comparison before we're done. I didn't even have that in
my questions. It kind of seems to be like something
created a little bit more by marketers and an interviewer
than anything else.

Speaker 3 (57:29):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (57:30):
But when it comes down to.

Speaker 3 (57:31):
You might have covered it pretty well already, Tasha, but.

Speaker 1 (57:34):
Well, no, I'm very curious for your thoughts, especially when
we're talking about the ending. You know, kind of 2001,
a famously opaque ending that has been parsed out in
terms of the symbolism and what's happening. And of course, 2001,
the book having gotten many sequels kind of unpacking that imagery.

(57:58):
I'm curious what you make of the comparison between them
or if you think there is a comparison to be made.

Speaker 2 (58:03):
I mean, I think.

Speaker 3 (58:04):
I don't want to be reductive, but I think, you know,
2001 is a story going from the dawn of man,
as they call it, to the next stage of human existence.
And I feel like if anything, in Solaris, it's a
matter of no matter how far you travel, you carry
baggage with you. I mean, you know, the fact that

(58:27):
he goes to the far reaches of the galaxy and
what's waiting for him there is the wife whose death
has haunted him. I mean, in some ways, it's a
much grander expression of a moment I really like in
the Damien Chazelle movie, First Man, where, I mean, spoiler
for what happens, you know, Armstrong lands on the moon,
but he also deposits this memento of his daughter he's lost.

(58:52):
And it's like, and I found it so moving that
the idea is that you could accomplish something that nothing,
that no one has ever accomplished before, you know, one
small step for man, you know, something that no one
has ever done, but You're still carrying the burdens of
your life with you. And I think this is kind
of that writ large in some ways.

Speaker 1 (59:10):
Boy, that I cannot ask for a better segue because
I'm absolutely going to bring all that back up with
you in part two. And we compare this movie to
it ends because I think that there's a very strong
parallel there. Let's take a moment and think about that
and get into feedback. Now it's time for feedback, but first,

(59:34):
let's dive into what's happening elsewhere in the extended film-spotting
cinematic universe. As usual, there's a lot going on. As
we record this, Matt Singer and Jordan Hoffman at FilmSpottingSVU
just delved into Hulu's Anthony Mackie epic, Desert Warrior, directed
by Rupert Wyatt, and they're asking what and who exactly
it's targeting. On the movie racket, Michael Phillips and Robert

(59:54):
Daniels discuss the old Samuel Goldwyn movie-making adage, if you
want to send a message, try Western Union. And at
the Film Spotting Mothership podcast, Adam and Josh just wrapped
up their two-part list of top five movie needle drops,
a list that would make my brain immediately seize up
if I had to contribute because there are so many
possibilities and because I've never been the most music-oriented cinephile.

(01:00:16):
But having not listened to those episodes yet, I can
say I do have a nominee, the use of Lou
Reed's Perfect Day in Train Spotting. When I think about it,
maybe my entire top five is from Trainspotting. Do either
of you have immediate contenders for best needle drop in
a movie?

Speaker 2 (01:00:34):
Oh, my God. There's just so many.

Speaker 3 (01:00:38):
Before we do that, can I just say that Matt
and Jordan are just, it's a public service what they're doing.
Because I didn't know that Rupert Wyatt had a new
movie with Anthony Mackie. I mean, you could go, you
could just blissfully, you could, I don't know, work talking
about movies for a living and not know the same
existence were it not for them. Scott, I saw that

(01:01:01):
you have something you want to say about the needle drama.
I've got one too.

Speaker 2 (01:01:04):
Yeah, I mean, it's any given day on this, but
I'd probably have to go with Jumpin' Jack Flash and
Mean Streets, which is just a galvanizing cinematic moment when
Robert De Niro's Johnny Boy character comes into a bar
with a woman under each arm. And you get this

(01:01:27):
look from Harvey Keitel, who's his friend, but also has
to deal with his instability and behavior, which puts him
in peril. And it's dynamite. It's just one of those
great pop moments that Scorsese would repeat many times in
his career. So that one comes immediately to mind.

Speaker 3 (01:01:48):
There's so many, but I'll tell you the one that
comes first to mind for me, which is Chungking Express,
which shifts from one story to the next halfway through.
It feels like you're reaching the conclusion of the first
cop story First got played by Takeshi Kishiro. And you're

(01:02:09):
getting a bump into Fei Wong's character, who will be
one of the central characters in the next part. And
California Dreamin' kicks in, a song you'll hear again and
again and again in the second part. But it's like, oh,
it's like the car has shifted gears and turned in
another direction and now we're going over here now. And
just because that's what, just because that's what one car

(01:02:30):
wants to do with this movie and the rules do
not apply and anything can happen. And I love it
so much. I get sort of anticipatory chills knowing that
it's coming whenever I watch that movie. I love it
so much.

Speaker 1 (01:02:43):
Well, you can find out what Adam and Josh picked,
you can listen to the other Film Spotting Family podcasts,
and you can catch up on the latest Next Picture
Show episodes at filmspotting.net. Now it's time for feedback, where
we address responses. We've gotten to recent episodes. Keith, could
you read this one that we recently got about our
pairing of The End of Oak Street with Steven Spielberg's
War of the Worlds?

Speaker 3 (01:03:02):
Sure. Jordan writes, I'm listening to your recent episode about
War of the Worlds and how it's a representation of 9-11.
While I don't doubt that you're right that it was
intended that way, now that I hear you say it,
when I saw it in the theater, we were in
the middle of bombing Iraq, and I took the movie
as completely the opposite. To my eyes at the time,
it was a representation of what it was like for
human beings in another country, like the Iraqis, to be

(01:03:23):
crushed by a super powerful force like us. I shouldn't
leave out the Afghans, but that war was a little different. Like,
maybe you can see the reality of this if we
show it happening to Americans? Iraq was very foremost in
American minds when the movie came out, so I couldn't
help seeing the movie this way. To me, it was
highly powerful for that reason. All I can say is, wow,

(01:03:44):
because until today, I literally never thought of the movie
as a terrorist versus us. I absolutely thought of it
as super military like ours versus helpless civilians. It resembles
that and not 9-11, but I'm probably wrong, at least
as far as what the filmmakers intended. I also have
very strong feelings about people who are thousands of miles away,
as I am sure Spielberg was. Tell me what a
thing they only experienced on screens as if it happened

(01:04:05):
to them. I'll leave it at that.

Speaker 1 (01:04:07):
Hmm.

Speaker 3 (01:04:08):
This letter, I, first of all, I mean, there's so
much 9-11 imagery that has to be inspired by, but
at the same time, like when I read this, like,
You know what? I think Joshua might be on to
something here because it really does work as that as well.
And it becomes kind of a really different movie if
you start thinking of that as sort of the controlling metaphor.
Rather than 9-11, wow, it's giving me something to think about.

Speaker 1 (01:04:29):
I mean, my immediate reaction to this letter was that
Joshua is just more empathetic than most people because 9-11
kind of set off a wave of... America first, only
America's pain matters. Anybody we hurt in feeling better about
what happens to us, it's their own fault for being
in the way. The attacks on Iraq particularly come to

(01:04:52):
mind in that. So seeing this, you know, not as
a reflection of kind of 9-11 induced American psychosis, but
as like an empathetic response to how it affected other
people in the world. I think is a very generous
response and a very kind of telling response about who

(01:05:14):
Joshua is. But it's hard for me to see that
in American filmmaking of the time period in particular. I
did go on just a tiny little hunt in the
time I had to see what Spielberg had said, specifically
looking for 9-11 in Iraq. And the interviews that I found,
I think he was maybe being careful about addressing that question.

(01:05:37):
as filmmakers so often do, is like a tiny little sidebar. Boy,
it is frustrating to me when you get a, for instance,
Alex Garland doing a Civil War or equivalent movie that's
just very obviously political and addressing the politics of the moment.
And the filmmaker knows full well they can't talk about
it because if they come out and say, like, no,
this is about unpopular issue and trying to make people

(01:06:01):
like see the other side of it, they will immediately
turn a bunch of people off and the people that
most need to see the film might not see it. So, yeah,
I mean, it's certainly possible that this is what was
going through Spielberg's head, but I have not found any
incidences of him talking about it.

Speaker 3 (01:06:16):
But, you know, intentional fallacy doesn't really matter what was intended.
It's what's there on the screen.

Speaker 1 (01:06:21):
Ah, death of the author. I mean, certainly what's going
on around you at a given time and where you
came from makes a big difference in the kind of
art you make. And, you know, how you interpret it
is how you interpret it.

Speaker 2 (01:06:36):
But.

Speaker 1 (01:06:37):
Joshua, I think, is talking here more about the intent
and how the movie was meant to be read and
not just how he read it, which is a very
different thing. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:06:45):
I mean, I think, I mean, it's been, this is
all making, I was not on that episode and so
did not get a chance to rewatch The War of
the Worlds with you. And now I'm intensely curious to
see how it would play. But I think in terms
of Spielberg's politics, I mean, he is willing to go
out on a limb. I think Munich is quite a
bit more provocative than I think even it was given

(01:07:06):
credit for at the time. And as a fascinating one to, to,
to visit, uh, to, to kind of parse out its politics,
which I think were quite daring. Um, uh, and, uh, so, uh,
so I don't, I don't doubt that, uh, Joshua's, uh, reading, uh, could,
could be, could align with, uh, Spielberg's.

Speaker 1 (01:07:22):
Oh, one way or the other. Thanks for running in
and thanks for making us think. That's it for this
episode of The Next Picture Show. In our next episode,
we'll talk about a much shorter, fleeter existential crisis movie,
Alexander Ulm's feature debut, It Ends, which has four people
in their early 20s encountering a different kind of anomaly
that seems a lot less personal and even less escapable.

(01:07:44):
Look for that episode next Tuesday on your podcatcher of choice.
For ad-free versions of the podcast and extra content, find
us on Patreon at patreon.com slash nextpictureshow. You can find
us at nextpictureshow.net and on Blue Sky at The Next
Picture Show if you want to keep track of when
new episodes drop. Until next time, remember that the preservation
of simple human truths requires the mysteries of happiness, death,

(01:08:06):
and love. To think about it is to know one's
day of death. Wait, what are we doing watching these
movies that openly think about these things? Oh, crap!

Speaker 3 (01:08:24):
That was a good movie.

Speaker 1 (01:08:25):
Yeah, seen here before once.