Film Fatale: Solaris, World on a Wire, and the Allure of Vintage Science Fiction
Words: Charlotte Amy Landrum
Make it stand out
I actively disliked the sci-fi genre for the longest time. The cold structures, grandiose spacecrafts, and narratives often requiring an intimate knowledge of a wealth of lore bored me. It also intimidated me, as someone who loves to shout about the things they enjoy, all it would take is one slip up of an alien beings’ complex middle name and the nearest Funko Pop hoarder guy would give me a “Well, Actually!” And there is nothing I hate more than a man’s “Well, Actually” tripping me up whilst I’m being earnest.
As a 21st-century girl, I want 21st-century stories of layabouts, the streets of New York, busted cars, and a landscape that is not too different to the one outside my window. I discussed this specifically in last month's column - where I gushed over the personal comforts of Pet Semetary (1989) - I want to somehow directly relate to what I’m watching. And whilst that is a standard practice, it is also quite small-minded and possibly narcissistic. A large part of my hatred of sci-fi spouted because I made no attempt to see how these stories of other worlds compared to my own and how impactful the genre is for the history of film and culture. I was blinded by Star Wars fanatics and my own assumptions. A simple shift of perspective, and suddenly I have been cooped up in my room trying to find another dystopian whirlpool to watch.
Despite the long-term hate, I have had a pretty pink 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) poster in my room for the last few years. The film was an exception. Directed by Stanley Kubrick, my teenage self was much more keen towards this piece of sci-fi after A Clockwork Orange (1971) and Eyes Wide Shut (1999) rocked my film-Tumblr-fueled world. I found the making of 2001 incredibly exciting. Sets that they created manually rather than superimposed: The spacecraft that could actually rotate, the final scene of psychedelic colours created with a “Slit Scan” machine from visual effects artist Douglas Trumbull (who was only 25 at the time, and that made me feel like a failure as soon as I found this out, so sorry if you feel the same), and even the floating pen scene being a simple trick of sticking a pen to a piece of moving glass - something that would be generated with soulless CGI today.
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Then enters 2001’s narrative: What will happen when AI can mimic human intelligence? How can we cope with the speed of these technological advancements? What is on the other side of the solar system, the universe… the astral plane? As a teen who was in a chokehold by Albert Camus, these existential themes - as well as the stylish 60s interiors - rinsed away any preemptive suspicion for 2001. Yet I still refused to delve any deeper into science fiction’s lure due to a need to maintain a cool, French New Wave image for myself, which no one cared about other than myself.
“Close enough to our current world with dystopian political structures and technological advancements, but far away enough that we can lay in bed as we watch, clinging on to the off chance that it couldn’t actually happen.”
Shock horror, my presumptive teenage self was proven wrong once again when sitting down (next to a boy) when I was around 18 to watch Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris (1972), and then, more recently, to Dune (2024), World on a Wire (1973) and On the Silver Globe (1988) (and only one of these next to a boy!). Similar to what I loved about 2001, these films hold the quality of questioning our own existence and experiment with form; finding an alternative avenue to talk about the current world and the dire problems within it. These movies feel like a warning.
Tarkovsky’s Solaris focuses on the human experience, taking the psychologist Kelvin (Donatas Banionis) into space and enhancing the cinematic avenues to explore memory, love, and isolation. As Dr. Snaut, one of the two surviving crewmen of the space station that has been overtaken by strange happenings, says: “We don’t want to conquer space at all. We want to expand the Earth endlessly. We don’t want other worlds, we want a mirror.” A reflection is what these sci-fi films become. Close enough to our current world with dystopian political structures and technological advancements, but far away enough that we can lay in bed as we watch, clinging on to the off chance that it couldn’t actually happen.
The 1970s had a knack for conjuring up paranoia fueled future worlds, and not just in America. German director Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s World on a Wire (1973) is a gorgeous emergence of 70s glamour and sci-fi narrative. The limited series, or film if you have 3 hours to binge watch it all at once, focuses on the terrifying idea that you are unknowingly in a simulation. Created before The Matrix (1999) and before that Reddit post about the lamp, the 27 year old Fassbinder adapted the 1964 book Simulacron-3, and showed us just how stunning sci-fi can be. Fassbinder took the glamour of New German Cinema and implemented just enough white space, circular patterns and distorted reflections to evoke a future that never was. These paranoid futures are not just tired to American screens, but had spread across the globe.
Paranoia and conspiracy is a human tradition. It is hard to imagine the world without it, but whilst it remains within the constant flux of hot and cold wars spanning continents, different decades have differing flavours of not trusting your neighbours. The western suburbanites of the 1970s had a close eye on their growing collection of suspiciously smart kitchen appliances. In the early 1980s, ‘computerphobia’ was introduced into the lexicon as a way to describe those frightened of the fast-paced technological advancements. More recently, even after beginning to comfortably live side by side with the computer, the fear of the Y2k bug plummeting the world into destruction created a mass hysteria. No notable films have been made surrounding this, probably due to embarrassment, but the fear birthed in the films mentioned still resonate even 40 years after.
When I was a kid, I remember asking my mum what the 1970s were like after seeing some groovy looking disco scenes on TV. She said it was awful, that no one had any money, no one had any nice things, people seemed to have an evil streak and dressed really bad. This all sounds familiar. The 2020s and the 1970s are constantly compared due to parallels of inflation, war, and protest. In turn, you might spot some mullets and flares in your local pub.
It makes sense then that the craze of Denis Villeneuve’s Dune is not just due to their leads Timothée Chalamet and Zendaya looking perfect, but how the film evokes the feelings of these unique 1970s science fiction films. The environments are taken seriously with grand architecture, the costumes are birthed from historical research, and the narrative is a tale of a harsh environment and harsher dictators. Although less stereotypically futuristic with its desert landscape in place of a chrome spaceship, the sentiment remains.
Whilst there are other sectors of sci-fi that can be enjoyed through joy and fun such as the Jean Paul Gaultier fashioned The Fifth Element (1997), it is the heightened paranoia and how technology and humanity interact that makes me press play on the next grainy science fiction film on my watchlist.
