We’re circling back to where we began. A month ago, I started a series on Hot Air about the Anti-Communist Film Festival, which is being planned for the fall of 2026. I think the festival could have a huge cultural impact, inoculating young people against communism while letting people get together and have a big party and watch some cool movies.
The response has been enthusiastic. I’ve heard from foundations, journalists, and even people in Hollywood who want to get involved. We have a GoFundMe and a GiveSendGo for donations. A publisher is interested in compiling my articles on the topic into a small book to be given to donors and available for purchase. A theater location in Washington, D.C. has been scouted and the owners and managers are on board.
The first piece I wrote about the festival for Hot Air introduced the movies I want to screen (the list has since expanded) and talked about George Clooney. Clooney was in the news for his Broadway production of Good Night and Good Luck. Clooney is still congratulating the corrupt media on covering up communist infiltration into the United States in the 1950s. Yes, Senator Joe McCarthy made mistakes, but liberals have been using him as a piñata for more than seventy years. You’d think that they could at least admit that Alger Hiss was guilty.
Still, I would like to invite George Clooney to the Anti-Communist Film Festival based on what I consider one of his best movies. I speak of Solaris, a 2002 science fiction vehicle, directed by Steven Soderbergh. Solaris tanked upon release, but I saw it a few years ago at the American Film Institute series on Stanislaw Lem. Lem (1921-2006) was a great Polish science fiction writer. His 1961 novel Solaris, on which the film is based, is considered his masterpiece. There is also a 1972 Soviet version of Solaris directed by Andrei Tarkovsky, which won a Special Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival. Poland named 2001 the year of Stanislaw Lem.
Both Stanislaw Lem and Andrei Tarkovsky were artists who irritated the Soviets, who tried to censor both men. As a Polish author who lived under communism, Lem saw what happens when societies try to play God. As science fiction scholar Carl Tighe noted in an essay about Lem: “Virtually all of Lem’s novels can be read as parables about what happens to societies and people when channels of communication are blocked, about the difficulty of making a revolutionary society or fundamentally changing human nature by social or political engineering on the slender basis of the knowledge of humanity at our disposal. As such, his novels are profoundly humanistic, a coded criticism of the kind of society that developed under Stalin.” Tarkovsky got so tired of communist harassment that he came to America.
In Solaris, which takes place in the future, a psychologist named Kris Kelvin (Clooney) is called to a space station that has been orbiting a planet called Solaris. The entire planet is a gigantic and sentient ocean of a mysterious plasma substance. Weird things have been happening on the space station. Each of the two remaining astronauts on board (a third has committed suicide) talks about their “visitor.” They are being visited by a person in their life who they thought was dead. The person is fully formed, with a body, intelligence, and the ability to communicate. They seem alive.
In Kelvin’s case, the visitor is Rheya (Natascha McElhone), his wife who committed suicide several years ago. Rheya had been suffering from depression, then had an abortion, and she tried to hide from her husband. This sets Kelvin off as he rips through their house, lost in despair that the baby “that could have brought some life to this place” has been killed. It’s a powerful scene, not the kind of thing you usually see from Hollywood, never mind a liberal Democrat like Clooney.
Now Rheya, or a copy of her, is back and standing in front of Kelvin. It is an opportunity for a second chance. However, Kelvin soon discovers that Rheya is not a free-thinking creature of God, a soul, but the manufactured being of an alien consciousness. She is based entirely on Kelvin’s memories of her. This means the good memories as well as the bad. As Kelvin not only remembers Rheya as beautiful and intelligent but depressed and suicidal, her replacement also becomes depressed and suicidal.
Solaris offers a dramatic warning about the danger of trying to play God. Going back to the original Frankenstein novel, written by Mary Shelley and published in 1818, some of the best horror, science fiction, and fantasy works have preached the same message: we are not God, and when we act like it, refusing to accept natural life (Rheya’s pregnancy) and death, bad things happen. It’s a theme that can be found in everything from Star Trek to Solaris.
In Solaris, a poem that Kelvin admires in “And Death Shall Have No Dominion” by Dylan Thomas. As the title suggests, it is about the end of mortality:
And death shall have no dominion.
Dead men naked they shall be one
With the man in the wind and the west moon;
When their bones are picked clean and the clean bones gone,
They shall have stars at elbow and foot;
Though they go mad they shall be sane,
Though they sink through the sea they shall rise again;
Though lovers be lost love shall not;
And death shall have no dominion.
Of course, human beings and an alien consciousness cannot offer final reconciliation for our failures, brokenness, and sins. Only God can. Despite lukewarm reviews and terrible box office, I always liked Clooney’s science fiction movie. I’ll ask him about it when he comes to the Anti-Communist Film Festival, which we’re hoping to have next fall.
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