Lost is a show that tends to wear its influences on its sleeve. It gives its shout-outs using character names (John Locke, CS Lewis, etc.), episode names (Through the Looking Glass, The Shape of Things to Come, etc.), books that are seen being read or on bookshelves (Valis, Our Mutual Friend, etc.), quotations (Ben quotes Of Mice and Men, the Star Wars "I've got a bad feeling about this...", etc.), thematic allusions (Desmond as both Odysseus and Billy Pilgrim, "zombie" Christian Shephard as the White Rabbit, etc.), and easter eggs (Jack trips over a Millennium Falcon, an actual red-shirt-wearing "red-shirt" is killed).
And Lost fans, being a generally well-educated lot, are usually quick to identify and disseminate them. What's more, I'm firmly convinced that if Lost fans read every book or author, and watched every movie or TV show referenced in our beloved drama, they would be better human beings for the experience. They might have to give up their day jobs and spend a decade or so to do it, but really...what price self-improvement, right? ;-)
But I digress...
The topic of the rather spry dead and imaginary people populating our Island and our living characters' lives has been much on people's minds lately, and more and more I found myself wondering why no one (or at least no one in Lost fandom I've been able to find) has mentioned Stanislaw Lem's brilliant novel (and Andrei Tarkovsky's critically-adored film), Solaris.
Let's have a look-see shall we? Solaris tells of a living planet (well, technically, a living "ocean" on a distant planet) which communicates with its human visitors by materially manifesting people from their pasts and forces them to confront their own limitations and foibles in the process. Sound familiar?
That the titular Solaris is an incomprehensibly alien sentience not necessarily advancing the best interests of its visitors as it attempts to communicate with them and understand them (while, in turn, the human scientists try to understand Solaris) also holds sounds a lot like Lost's Island.
As in Solaris, the Island's interactions with its human visitors and inhabitants cause insanity and death. Also, as in Solaris, the Island seems pretty indifferent to human suffering. It's been very willing to select the most traumatic possible "visitor" for those to whom it's manifested (Jack's father, Eko's brother, Ben's mother, Charlie for Hurley, Libby for Michael), has actively inflicted or allowed to occur various ailments (Ben's tumor, Jack's appendicitis, Locke's legs giving out at inopportune moments) and even "demanding sacrifice" (note that one of those inopportune moments for Locke's legs was what required Locke to send Boone to explore the Beechcraft, killing him).
None of which is to say that the Island is "evil" any more than Solaris was "evil"...they're both simply alien and have motivations incomprehensible to and arguably uncaring for humans. Or, to use Ben's colorful description from "Cabin Fever", they're (to human eyes) fickle bitches.
Another interesting aspect of the "revived" dead people in Solaris is that they were all imperfect copies, limited by the fact that they were constructed based on the memories of them held by the living characters rather than on the actual dead person. One could say something is similarly wrong with the Island manifestations we've seen speak, but who were never alive on the Island itself--namely Christian and Yemi, the latter of whom had a wrongness that Eko was able to detect upon interacting with him for a comparatively short time. The Island at least got a chance to get to know Charlie, Boone, and Libby before they died.
As usual, I would caution against taking too strong a "one-to-one" correlation. Lost is always, in the end, its own creature even if its genetic code contains DNA from a host of narrative ancestors. But I'll leave you with this thought: None of the other "mysterious islands" commonly considered antecedents for Lost's Island--Verne's The Mysterious Island, the island of Shakespeare's The Tempest (and the Forbidden Planet of film), Lemuria, Mu, Atlantis, and so on--were alive in and of themselves like Lost's Island and Solaris are.
PS: I'd also highly recommend everyone read more Lem. No less an authority on all things sci-fi than Theodore Sturgeon once called Lem the most widely read science-fiction writer in the world...and with very good reason! In particular, I found Memoirs Found in a Bathtub and The Futurological Congress to be utterly brain-fryingly good. Happy reading, everyone!
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In an additional Lost link, the George Clooney movie version of Solaris in 2002 featured Jeremy Davies as a weird twitchy guy who knew just a little bit more about what was happening than everyone else- a la Daniel Faraday.
Excellent, I think you've got something here that may serve as a sort of compass toward understanding the difficult nature of the islands' seemingly schizophrenic desires.
@robert
Not having seen the 2002 film, that's a really great catch as a Lost connection. For another one, though, the lead character of the novel and both movies who gets driven slowly mad by his proximity to Solaris is named Kelvin. ;-)
@JayDrizzle
Thanks very much. Like I said...I'm just surprised no one else pointed it out sooner!
I like that you pointed this out! Tarkovsky's film is one of my favorites, and I can't believe I never noticed the similarities between the Ocean and the Island and their abilities to manifest parts of your past. It is a great connection that would leave me feeling satisfied if they never decide to reveal every single secret about the island.
Finally someone else who recognizes Solaris as a Lost influence. I can't remember if I saw Solaris before I started watching Lost (I started with the second season), But I've always felt that Solaris held a lot of similarities with Lost, and myself have been surprised to find no one else had ever made that connection
I'm glad that you brought this up. It's one of those that was always on the tip of my tongue, but never was I able to spit it out. The connection is intriguing, but I think that it's coincidental. It's possible that they're only mining the same psychological territory; using visions of someone's past would seem to be a simple caveat for such mental analysis.
That being said, I need to read the book, as I hated the Tarkovsky movie. I didn't need 30 minutes of a car being driven around Moscow. On the other hand, I loved the Soderbergh version.
My movie tastes, like fate, is a fickle bitch.
The smoke monster reminds me of the vortex in the movie Mission To Mars where the vortex acts as a self defense mechanism against the astronauts who send the wrong message to the "face" on Mars. If you've seen the movie you probably know what I mean.
@james & cholm
Oho...nice to know I wasn't the only one going there!
@autochthonous
I suppose it may be a case of "parallel evolution"...but then again, when I think about the kind of people in the Lost writers' room, if none of them have seen Tarkovsky's Solaris or read Lem's novel, I'll eat my hat.
I'm much more inclined to believe that it's a case of not wanting to tip their hand with a reference that is perhaps too close an antecedent of their model of "dealing with dead people" and the Island as sentient entity.
That said, I'm very with you on Tarkovsky...man could leech the vitality out of anything. I mean, I get that it's a meditative work, but "meditative" doesn't mean "comatose". I've had friends call me a philistine based on my opinion of Tarkovsky after Solaris and Stalker, to say nothing of the entire oeuvre of Dario Argento (man wouldn't know narrative structure if it bit him in the ass...), yet somehow I can live with that assessment. ;-)
Lem, on the other hand, is dense, hard going but VERY much worth the effort in the books of his I've read. He reminds me a lot of Philip K. Dick, actually.
@i[heart]hanso
Have to admit that I haven't seen that one...
I love that movie Solaris! Highly recommended...
Great post.
It's hard to believe that no one has talked about this comparison before. It's been awhile since I've read the book, but the experiences of Kris Kelvin on the station orbiting Solaris, and the others on the station for that matter, seem very similar to the experiences of the people manning the Swan hatch. In both cases, the subjects are isolated in a small stations and are tormented by something they can't understand. Also, the purpose of the subjects being in the station is to study something they don't understand (in the case of the Swan, technically DHARMA is doing the studying but pretty close).
Also, I was thinking about the Symmetriads and the Asymmetriads that Solaris creates. To me these seem a lot like the black smoke. Both seem to be created or at least exist only within their own realm and both are random and unexplainable. The black smoke seems to have different "moods" which is pretty similar to the difference between the Symmetriads and the Asymmetriads.
What do these comparisons mean? ...Who knows. Thought they were interesting though.
Back during season 1, I was one of the few people taking what Locke was saying seriously, and noticed how the "island" was helping people deal with their issues and I thought about Solaris as a parallel.
I am not sure that the "island" is actually alive now though, I think that "the island" is actually Jacob... though I'm not sure who Jacob is. He's gathering Jack's family together it seems so I suspect he may be Aaron.
And wasnt the main character of solaris also named kelvin? I think you're on the right track thinking this book/film had some influence on lost for sure.
From the Wikipedia article on Solaris: "The novel begins with the arrival of the protagonist, Kris Kelvin, at a scientific research station hovering above the surface of Solaris". Hmmm, Kelvin at a research station. Sounds familiar.
Wow! When I first saw Jeremy Davies on Lost I thought "Cool, that guy was in Solaris." I can't believe I missed the other similarities! Thanks for the article.
Just wanted to say: Great post, Doc!!!
Peace
Awesome. So spot on, but so sadly overlooked. Wow, really well done. I read some Lem when I was in junior high, and had no idea what a rich thing I had; I definitely need to revisit him.
Funny. I e-mailed the site about this a few weeks ago. I highly recommend the book and the original film version.
I've read this site a while and haven't seen this come up...Not sure if this will post so I will make this brief becuase I couldn't get a password started for some reason. I have not read Solaris, but I think "Sphere" by Michael Chricton may also provie some of the answers to Lost...I read it years ago and it sounds similar to Solaris...the Chricton book also used a "numbers" theme over and over and if I rememeber correctly people were seeing manifestations brought on by the alien craft...dead relatives, squid or fish, and perhaps some other things were made by the sphere...if I remember correctly the spehere created things from the person's subconcious...the movie didn't really do the book justice...have fun.
Greg - - I guess I'm taking a chance that I won't get any credit for this, huh?
NuckinFuts.