In the Zone

[7] The ?my wife looks like Natascha McElhone? footnote, which goes on for a good thousand words, is one of several spots in Zona where Dyer could have done with a less enabling editor?but then again, maybe not. I did like when he invoked the weird frisson of seeing a loved person?s face seemingly doubled on-screen: ?After a while this became so striking I whispered to my wife: She looks incredibly like you. ?I know,? my wife whispered back.? And I wouldn?t want to cut out the passage in which he reflects on how the resemblance between his wife and that of the on-screen hero, played in the Soderbergh version by George Clooney, increased Dyer?s sense of identification with the hero?s dilemma. (In Solaris, to summarize a confoundingly difficult movie very briefly, a man in a remote space station is visited by what may be either the ghost or some sort of alien-engineered replicant of his dead wife.) But perhaps I could have done without the subsequent reassurance that multiple independent observers have confirmed the McElhone resemblance, or the information that, when Dyer and his wife happened to get a real-life look at the actress years later, the occasion was at ?a lavish fund-raiser for the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London.? Still, the whole rambling McElhone anecdote arguably pays off, as Dyer ends on the sharp, wistful observation that, eight years after Solaris? release, neither his wife nor Natascha McElhone look like the Natascha McElhone of the movie: ?Only the film preserves that memory of how alike they were, more alike than the two films of the same book.? It?s easy to imagine Dyer?s beleaguered editor throwing up her hands and saying, Oh hell, just leave it all in. What purpose would it serve to rein in Geoff Dyer? Isn?t his spacey free-associative prolixity one of his writerly superpowers, the very tool that allows him to hack his way through (or at least get profitably lost in) the perceptual jungle of forbidding movies like Solaris or Stalker? (Return.)

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