As this cover of Lem’s Solaris and Borovik’s (The Hidden War) quoted analogy of the parallels between that story and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan attest to, these conflicts seem to revolve around complex issues of identification. The faceless figure on the book’s cover, stares into the conscious ocean on the surface of Solaris and sees the image of a human reflected back. It is as if the contact with Solaris gave this figure, this other, their subjectivity. Similarly, Borovik and Adam Curtis in the new film Bitter Lake, hint at the fact that for the Soviet Union, the war in Afghanistan was a last-ditch-effort of sorts, which inevitably resulted in their “exporting stagnation rather than revolution”. The Soviets went looking for identification, searching for a subjectivity that the dune sea of Afghanistan might reflect back, a much needed validation for a dwindling “Union”.
The whole experience backfires, however, and Solaris actually begins reflecting back “ghosts” that frighten and confuse the cosmonauts—the protagonist, Kris, even becomes dependent on his particular phantom. And then, suddenly, one day the phantom does not return. Kris is told that an encephalogram of his brain has been successfully introduced into Solaris, and it has begun to sprout “islands”.
As Curtis points out, the Soviets, and later, the U.S. and the rest of the West that invaded Afghanistan again, were likewise chasing “phantoms” produced by this desert-Solaris. In an illuminating segment of Bitter Lake, various subjects describe how coalition forces often acted with little to no material knowledge of the situation at hand. Allying themselves with oppressive authorities they assumed were anti-Taliban, and thus “friendlies”, the occupying Western soldiers would be met with violent opposition by peace-seeking Afghan people. The soldiers, in turn, assumed these folks were Taliban, and thus proceeded to massacre in many cases, the very people they were supposedly there to liberate.
The situation was and is an ouroborian quagmire of epic proportions, and leaders of the West have continuously failed to grasp the complexity of forces in this part of the world that they set in motion many, many years ago. Similarly to the film, the Afghanistans of our world, at times, have often responded to foreign “irradiation” by displaying a temporary image—a caricature of the West within their own borders, the reciprocated subjectivity that Imperialist countries long for. As Bitter Lake shows us, however, these mirror images have been smoke screens for the West, and in many cases, these foreign powers have failed to see how the Islamic world plays the West’s interests against themselves—we are ever fooled by the sand-swept mirage.
At the end of Solaris, Kris returns home, though everything now seems strange, affected by his time away and the experiences he has brought with him. As the image of his world disintegrates before his (and the viewer’s) eyes, the camera begins to “zoom out” and eventually reveals an incongruous little island amongst a wide, self-aware body of water—a lake, perhaps—bitter at the imposed outgrowth, this microcosmic humanoid tumor that recreated the haunted mind of the cosmonaut protagonist Kris. It is as an episode of the Twilight Zone, or the horrific result of a magician’s “prestige” act.
This is what we have done to Afghanistan.
In seeking to find, or inspire an imposed, symmetrical subjectivity onto colonized/occupied people, Imperial powers in the West and East will continue to encounter only a hostile simulacra. As world leaders begin to realize that the simplified narratives they have used to appease us throughout the globe (good vs evil, us and them, the war on terror, etc.) are not only misleading, but harmful, unproductive and yielding savage consequences—the time comes for people to build new narratives, as Curtis appeals at the end of the film, “and one that we can believe in”.
When we look into the surface of a new, vast consciousness, we must not think of it as a mirror, hoping to see ourselves reflected in it—we must yield to that consciousness its own subjectivity, recognizing it for ourselves and ensuring a reciprocal existential exchange. This is why I believe Curtis has devoted significant screen time throughout this newest essay film to the gaze of the “other”, the colonized object, not granted subjectivity. The film is strewn with the indifferent or indignant collective stare of a people and a region we have failed to really see. Of a people and a region we now garrote from afar, perfectly able to look at ourselves in the mirror the following morning.
