Watching Solaris (1972) and Marjorie Prime (2017) recently really brought home to me how resigned, defeated, and dystopian our collective imaginations have become when we think about future technologies.

Marjorie Prime is a well-acted, emotionally affecting piece of work. But its vision of digital memory, embodied in the AI-informed holograms of Walter (Jon Hamm), Marjorie (Lois Smith), and Tess (Geena Davis), seems to contain within it knowledge of our own cultural defeat.

They learn (brilliantly) to mimic aspects of personal character based on what they're told about the dead people their holographic forms project. But their human counterparts can use them only to construct backward-looking, nostalgic, and ultimately destructive self-identities.

We see this in the banal fragments of memory their evolving stories encode: flashes of Cameron Diaz on a 14" CRT screen in a motel room; an impotent longing for the late '90s and early '00s, impossibly distant from the film's own temporal setting in the 2050-70s.

A future beach house filled with large format, case-bound books (all unopened); Jon's vintage 1970s Merc sedan (by then almost as old as his dead mother in law). Obsessively curated pieces of a dead past. All we see of the world outside is that it rains a lot.

Those younger characters who live outside the depressive, ultimately self-destructive fug that surrounds Jon and Tess seem sympathetic, but don't seem to exist in the same cultural horizon of understanding. They are there to "help" in the most functional definition of that word.

The holograms (less obviously our "data doubles" than in Black Mirror) serve to play up the limitations and hopelessness of this kind "replay culture." They are reminders of a past that can never really be re-enacted.

Compare this with the encounter (on the orbiting space station) between psychologist Kris and the alien "neutrino double" of his dead wife Hari in Solaris.

Unlike the holograms in Marjorie Prime, which become more blandly competent the "better" they are, the more "human" Hari becomes, the more she collapses into existential panic and despair.

Those emotions cause her to do shocking violence to her own (beautiful) body, but that violence is a product of her embodied nature. Unlike the insubstantial holograms, Hari is "flesh and blood." The relationship between her and Kris is erotic and deeply felt as well as horrific.

And the encounter in Solaris between human and impossibly advanced alien technology (no matter how deeply painful it is for both parties) is ultimately sublime. Tarkovsky imbues the meeting of minds and bodies (the revivification of memory) with a dark, ineffable wonder.

The meeting of alien and human intelligences in Solaris (each deeply curious about the other) makes us wonder how much any of us truly know those who are most significant to us in our lives.

The comparative hopelessness in Marjorie Prime recalls something @PYeerk has written about: the way in which Black Mirror et al. "precode" future technologies as dystopian and our resistance to them as hopeless.