“Strangely Familiar”: Tolkien’s Notion of Fantasy, Creation, and the Anthropocentric in Tarkovsky’s Solaris

J. R. R. Tolkien’s notion of fantasy is intriguing and invites conversation with other art forms and theologies of art. For Tolkien, fantasy is the art of using one’s imagination to create a “secondary world”—or “sub-creation”—that has “‘the inner consistency of reality’” and that compels “secondary belief.” Fantasy has a uniquely generative power and stems from humans’ will and “right” to create as beings created in the image of God. Fantasy, for Tolkien, hence ought to be a strictly literary enterprise, as it is unable without much difficulty and contrivance to be adequately captured by visual and aural arts like stage drama. However, and as I aim to show, film is a visual and aural medium that can both challenge and expand on Tolkien’s contentions. Specifically, Tolkien’s claim that drama is “anthropocentric,” something that fantasy “need not be,” may be engaged, refracted, and re-envisioned by film. In the present analysis, I will use Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris (1972) as a lens for showing how film achieves this. I will argue that, from both a formal and thematic standpoint, Solaris effectively renders the human—or anthropocentric—as an inherently and theologically fantastical phenomenon.