I suspect that what I have to say about the greatness of the movie will not belong to the tenor of the general favorable criticisms of the movie. That is to say, my perspective on the movie does not focus on Tarkovsky’s undoubted artistic mastery. I am seeking simply to say what the movie itself says to us, about itself, in its own terms: the sparse script, the camera work, the colors, the actors, all weave seamlessly together to say something to us, something essential that needs to be heard and I will try to say it. This means that I will not be offering any external interpretation of the movie’s more enigmatic elements. I will stay within the “text” of the movie, as it were, and let it speak through its images, script, action, scenes, etc., to us.
For a moment, remove the script, which is sparse enough as it is; remove the sound and lighting effects which are used with the delicacy and precision of a Japanese tea ceremony master, and what do you see for over two hours? It’s astonishing to realize that all you see is this: three middle-aged men stumbling around rather aimlessly in the bush land of a gigantic disused rubbish dump (the detritus of a bombed out or abandoned city) during which time nothing much happens! Literally! At the end of the movie even the central character bemoans the fact that the journey was a failure, that nothing has changed after all his efforts to take his companions “somewhere”. There are no murders, no fireworks, no breath-taking action scenes, no strange appearances of alien figures, and no buildup to a climax or resolution. I suppose we could make a tentative comparison to the style and mood of “Waiting for Godot.” I thought also of a certain kind of modern “men’s group,” where men go together into “the wilderness” in order to “find their authentic selves,” the “wild man within,” or to rediscover the living quality of nature or animal spirits, etc. At the heart of many such forays into nature is a desire to find “otherness” in some form or another, some light of intelligence other than the bright light of the ego that so dominates our ordinary perceptions today. Instead, many such well-intentioned journeys into the “interior” end up with lasting memories of male- bonding to be sure, but little else, in terms of the stated intention of encountering a “living other” whose light may eclipse that of the ego and truly initiate the human being into a new reality. In other words, although there may be some thrills and spills that are well worth remembering and recounting over a beer, often nothing else much happens in terms of relativizing the light of the ego in deference to a greater light or intelligence that wants to “speak”.
Stalker can easily be seen this way, i.e. as a portrayal of three tired, disillusioned, middle-aged men, looking for meaning in an age of nihilism—a scientist, a writer, and a self-styled “group facilitator”—who manage to convince themselves that they are on a journey to encounter an “alien” presence called the “Zone,” somewhere on the forbidden outskirts of the burned out, destroyed husk of a city, in order to find its center, simply called the “Room” where all desires will be satisfied. Stalker even persuades the other two men to pay him for his services. And so they embark on this quixotic journey (imagine Stalker as Don Quixote and his companions as Sancho) together for two hours of my time, a day of theirs, during which nothing much happens!
Why then, was I so gripped by this movie, from start to finish, hanging on every line of speech, every gesture, every mood that came and went? Why was I not disappointed for a second, during the many moments of high tension and expectation of disaster, followed by … nothing much at all. Stalker expects some imminent and dangerous response from the alien Room whenever they make a supposed (according to Stalker’s judgment only, by the way) wrong move, even though Writer or Scientist cannot see anything untoward about to happen, at any point on their quest. The expected devastating response never happens, not even once. The tension builds and then simply releases into … ordinariness. No alien presence at all! No punishment! Just a bush here, a mist there, a building, a tunnel—all perfectly ordinary and explainable. I did not feel let down or even betrayed when Stalker, at the end, weeps with his sense of failure to guide his companions into Fulfillment:
“They do not believe in anything. The … organ with which they believe has atrophied! … nobody believes. Not only those two. Nobody! Whom should I lead in there? Oh, God … And the most terrifying thing is … that nobody needs it anymore. And nobody needs that Room. And all my efforts are worthless!”
This movie is structured masterfully, from start to finish, by ambiguity. And it is an ambiguity that can be “resolved” only by destroying the very essence of the movie’s intent to build ambiguity and hold it in tension through the entirety of the drama. Only then, i.e. holding this ambiguity without resolution, can something true appear—to us, the audience—through the errancy of our three protagonists. The ambiguity is written into the script this way: Stalker is a humble psychopomp.2 His wife knows he is blessed as “God’s Fool.” He knows the Way. Like Moses he can show the way to others but cannot himself enter the Promised Land where all desires are satisfied. He describes his role in a passionate outburst when the scientist reveals his clandestine purpose to destroy the Room with a bomb:
“Yes, you’re right, I’m a louse, I haven’t done anything in this world and I cannot do anything … And neither could I give anything to my wife! And I do not have any friends and I cannot have, but you cannot take what’s mine from me! Everything is already taken from me, there, on the other side of the barbed wire. All I have is here. Can you understand! Here! In the Zone! My happiness, my freedom, my dignity – everything’s here! For I lead the same [people] as me in here, unhappy ones, suffering. They… They have no other hope left! And I – I am able to! Can you understand – I am able to help them! Nobody else can help them, but I, louse (shouts), I, louse, am able to! I am ready to shed tears of happiness that I am able to help them. That’s all! And I want nothing else.”
Psychopomp or delusional psychotic? Let’s continue. What is the Way that Stalker knows? Keep in mind that the mood of the entire movie is one of end of days, apocalyptic, a civilization disintegrated, nihilism near its nadir. In one scene, for example, Stalker falls asleep with his companions and we hear the voice of his wife reciting what seem to be lines from Revelation, “And there an immense earthquake took place, and the Sun became dark as sack cloth, and the Moon was like covered with blood … And the stars of the heaven fell to the ground as if a fig-tree, shaken by a great wind, let its unripe figs fall down. And the sky hid itself, rolled up as a scroll; and various hills and isles moved from their places (laughs)…” The Way, then, is into the heart of hopelessness.
Stalker leads his skeptical (and gullible?) companions deeper into the “wasteland” through an eschatological landscape dominated by the presence of water in a variety of forms (mist, rain, wastewater, pools, streams, puddles, mud, wells, etc.) He uses a variety of methods that can only be called mantic practices: He insists that they must follow a path of indirection; that the Zone is maze-like, shifting all the time, and filled with traps; that it demands respect or else it punishes. He uses his intuition to find the right path by an oracular method of hurling a metal nut tied to a ribbon ahead of them, revealing the right way. He sees signs that no one else notices. Natural events such as a wind rising, or a mist, become warnings about mistakes but, and here is the other side of the ambiguity, in spite of Stalker’s dedication and conviction, nothing ever happens. At one point he cries out in alarm that Writer has taken a wrong turn and now is lost to humanity, declaring at one point, “I never choose, myself, I’m always afraid. You cannot imagine how terrifying it is to make a mistake… But somebody has to go first!” Writer, however, turns up quite unharmed a few minutes later. All Stalker’s actions are based on his conviction that the Zone is founded on an alien presence. Is Stalker on to something that no-one else notices, i.e. a true psychopomp, or is he psychotic, catching others up in his delusional system? There is simply nothing in the movie to confirm or disconfirm his perceptions of the present or future (e.g. go this way or die).
The Room is the center of the Zone and they finally arrive, according to Stalker anyway. Within an abandoned, gutted building is a doorway (threshold, according to Stalker) to a waterlogged room with a big puddle covering the floor, with its share of litter and garbage. The puddle appears as mirror-like until light rain disturbs the surface. The complete ordinariness of the scene is amazingly highlighted by an old telephone which suddenly rings. Scientist, seeing that it is working, uses the phone to call his colleagues back in the city telling them that he has the bomb and is going to use it, against their wishes, to destroy the Zone. He is doing this to prevent other people from being drawn to the Zone under false pretenses. He is completely rational about the Zone and its non-meaning. Everything we now see seems to support his and Writer’s skepticism. But now he begins to have doubts:
“We assembled it … with friends, with my ex … colleagues. This place, as we can see, cannot make anybody happy. (punches in the numbers; assembling is over). If it falls into the wrong hands … Actually, I do not know now. Then we realized … that one shouldn’t destroy the Zone. If it is … If it even is a miracle – it is a part of nature, and it means it is a kind of hope, so to speak. They hid this bomb … And I found it. The old building, fourth bunker. It seems there must be a rule … one should never perform irreversible actions. I do understand, I’m not a maniac (sighs), but while this ulcer here is open for every scum … I will neither be able to sleep or to rest. On the other hand, maybe the innermost will not let it happen. Ah?”
Writer is more susceptible to Stalker’s persuasions but he too now has a crisis of doubt asking, “… ah… How do you know, that this miracle really exists? [To Scientist] Who told you, that dreams really come true here? Did you see anybody, who would have been made happy here? Ah, maybe Porcupine (Stalker’s mentor)? And actually, who told you about the Zone, about Porcupine, about this Room?” Scientist answers, “He did,” meaning Stalker, and Writer concludes, “then I do not understand anything at all. What is the meaning to come here?”
Once the two men pass through their crisis of doubt, they notice how very quiet the Room is. Is it merely quiet or have they broken through to a realm of stillness, or Silence, the realm where all desires are satisfied? Is a greater light at last penetrating and eclipsing the light of their ordinary consciousness? Or is the mystery available only to Stalker, once again, leaving his companions in their benighted ignorance? More ambiguity! They sit at the threshold and Scientist, being a scientist, cannot resist casually throwing stones into the Room and its puddle, maybe to see what happens. Nothing happens beyond ripples.
Near the beginning of the movie, Stalker warns his companions that no one ever returns the same way they came and indeed, at the end, we are not shown how they return. The scene simply opens up at the same bar where they all first met. Nothing much has changed, it seems. Stalker believes the trip was a complete failure. Yet … in an extraordinary final scene, at Stalker’s home, his daughter, thought to be a mutant cripple by others, begins to quietly exercise her mental power of telekinesis, moving glasses on a table, simply by looking at them.
Something now indeed is happening! What are we to make of this scene in the light of the entire movie’s structure of ambiguity, where Stalker can equally be seen as a psychopomp and a delusional psychotic? Right from the beginning we are struck with the mood of nihilism and its anxieties of an epochal “loss of meaning.” We also hear from Stalker that, in the end, “everything has its own meaning.” The movie seems to be suggesting that to make a decision about meaning (three men stumbling around in a meaningless rubbish dump, or two initiates being led to a meaningful revelation by a psychopomp) is the wrong way. The Way may be to hold and sustain the ambiguity without trying to resolve it by a decision. Stalker offers us a “procedure” if you like, for holding this ambiguity:
“When a man is born, he is weak and supple, when he dies he is strong and callous. When a tree grows, it is tender and gentle, and when it is dry and hard, it dies. Hardness and strength are companions of death; suppleness and weakness express the freshness of living. That is why what has hardened, will not win.”
We can hold this ambiguity of private, subjective meaning (Stalker) vs. public general meaninglessness (Writer and Scientist), by becoming pliable, fluidic, rather than rigid and hard in our convictions or categories of thought. Stalker’s admonition is resonant with the plethora of fluidic imagery in the movie: mists, wind, mud, and water in all the variations that I mentioned above. If we can remain thus fluidic in our attitude, then something, a “child,” may be born out of that condition of ambiguity, something quite unexpected that, without even trying, has already surpassed what for us is an impassable barrier between spirit and matter, mind and body, literal and figurative, inner and outer interpretations, prosaic and poetic realities, etc.—all hardened categories of thought easily overcome by a child.
Call it telekinesis if you like, but don’t get too literal about it!
1 With appreciation to Kirill Zimin for the translation of the movie script. Found at http://tarkovskyzone.proboards.com/thread/87
2 Psychopomp: one who grants safe passage for souls to the after life, Hermes is a psychopomp, as are dogs and cuckoos, both of which appear throughout the movie.