Professor and Stalker peer above the sandy hillocks like they’re on a soundstage for a sci-fi remake of
Sands of Iwo Jima.
(Mention of a soundstage makes me realize something that I’ve been reluctant not only to admit but even—after all these viewings—to notice: that some of these interior sequences in the Zone look a bit too much like they were filmed in a film studio, as opposed to looking like they were scouted out, discovered, chanced upon. They look designed and manufactured, which is to say they look
over
designed.) Writer has suffered some kind of collapse. He’s lying in a puddle of water: he’s adapted so thoroughly to the idea of never getting dry that he’s practically amphibious. Behind him is a round metallic container or drum. He gets up, walks towards it, peers inside, walks back, picks up a rock—possibly the same rock thrown by Stalker, even though, strictly speaking, that’s impossible (if it makes sense to talk of the impossible in a realm in which anything is possible) and drops it into this shallow drum. Maybe it
is
the same stone, the stone that makes no sound when it lands, because there is no splash or clang at all, nothing—and then, after ten or twelve seconds, there is an echoey, clanging splash suggesting that the drop is about the height of the Empire
State Building at least. It’s only now that something seen earlier makes sense: the splashing moon right at the beginning of Part 2, with the poetry intoned over it. That, presumably, was a view from above of the stone striking the surface of the mercury-water at the bottom of this tube or drum or whatever it is. Given the depth, it’s quite ballsy of Writer to perch on the rim of this drum—a drum that is in fact a mile-deep shaft—as if on the edge of a paddling pool made from Meccano.
Writer is by now a wholehearted believer. Dropping the stone—a Professorly experiment of sorts—has proved to him that there are no facts here. It’s all someone’s idiotic invention—but whose? Well, Tarkovsky’s, if one subscribes to the
auteur
theory of cinema, I suppose. Not that Writer is interested in answers to this rhetorical question. He’s basically having a good old snivel and, like most writers given half the chance, the snivelling soon takes the form of whining about critics, about how his work has not been properly understood, snivel snivel. What the hell kind of writer is he if he hates writing? A true writer, as defined by Thomas Mann: someone who finds writing more difficult than other people. Not that this is any consolation. Quite the contrary. Writing is the opposite of consolation, it’s torment, like squeezing out
haemorrhoids, he reckons—a comparison that actually has its uplifting side too. In François Ozon’s film
Swimming Pool,
Charlotte Rampling says that literary prizes are like haemorrhoids: sooner or later every asshole gets one. In
Rerberg and Tarkovsky: The Reverse Side of ‘Stalker’,
this speech by Writer is taken as a vicarious monologue by Tarkovsky. Writer wanted to change ‘them’ but it’s actually he who’s been changed by ‘them’, has been gobbled up by ‘them’. Tarkovsky’s vision is uniquely, uncompromisingly his own—or so it seems to us. For his part, Tarkovsky believed that his ‘entire life has consisted of compromises’. By now the camera has moseyed right up to Writer—this is his soliloquy, his Hamlet moment, his close-up. Or put it another way, whenever you want to pour your heart out Tarkovsky’s camera is always there, moving subtly closer, ready to lend an ear and an eye. Writer’s really distraught. The Zone is working its drippy magic as, sitting on the edge of the infinite drop, he peers into the depths of his own being, talking directly at us, encouraging a reciprocal response from this member of the audience.
So what kind of writer am I, reduced to writing a
summary
of a film ? Especially since there are few things I hate more than when someone, in an attempt to persuade me
to see a film, starts
summarizing
it, explaining the plot, thereby destroying any chance of my ever going to see it. In my defence I would say that
Stalker
is a film that can be summarized in about two sentences. So if summary means reducing to a synopsis, then this is the opposite of a summary; it’s an amplification and expansion. This still begs the question of whether the composition of such a summary is a reasonable way to spend one’s days. What is the purpose of such an exercise? The exercise is, of course, its own purpose, an end in itself. Whether it will amount to anything—whether it will add up to a worthwhile commentary, and whether this commentary might also become a work of art in its own right—is still unclear. The point is that, as a direct result of embarking on this summary, I am not in the despond in which Writer finds himself. I’m not perched on the edge of a tubular abyss in a soaking wet overcoat; I’m sitting at my desk in a nice warm cardigan. I’m getting on with something, making progress, moving towards a Room of my own. Certain kinds of writers, certain types of novelists, are reluctant to engage in anything that distracts them from their own work. Commentary, for them, is a distraction, of secondary or no importance. But there are other writers—and
I don’t mean straight-down-the-line critics—for whom commentary is absolutely central to their own creative project, who insist that at some level commentary can turn out to be every bit as original as the primary work of the novelist. Besides, if mankind was put on earth to create works of art, then other people were put on earth to comment on those works, to say what they think of them. Not to judge objectively or critically assess these works but to articulate their feelings about them with as much precision as possible, without seeking to disguise the vagaries of their nature, their lapses of taste and the contingency of their own experiences, even if those feelings are of confusion, uncertainty or—in this case— undiminished wonder.
Writer has finished talking his talk and begins walking the walk towards the other two, through the sandy hummocks of the sand room. The camera angles slowly down to where he was standing, to where his feet were, to reveal something of significance that he left behind: a clue. We wait and look. But there’s nothing. Just the sand, slightly disturbed but unconcerned.
Stalker is happy again. Deep down, Writer must be a really good man, if he made it through the meat grinder.
The meat grinder is a horrible place. Porcupine sent his brother to die there. His brother was a talented creature, a poet who wrote lines that Stalker proceeds to recite as if his life depends on it. Here’s another quirk or feature of the Zone: it never happens that all three men are happy at once. Writer is really pissed now. He reckons Stalker cheated when they drew lots, is convinced that Stalker has chosen Professor as his favourite. Diddums! It’s all getting a little fraught and fractious but here comes that black dog again, no longer looking like a messenger from the unconscious, just looking like a nice black doggy, padding through the puddles and all the bric-a-brac bobbing about in them as Writer harangues Stalker, telling him what a cheating little shit he is. They’re in a room, backlit by a window with a view of the greenish world outside, tightly framed by an open doorway. The phone starts ringing. Writer keeps ranting, then picks it up furiously—No, this is not the clinic—before ranting on again. Then, abruptly, in another of those comic moments for which Tarkovsky is absolutely unrecognized, they look at the phone as the emperor of Brazil, Dom Pedro II, did when he first encountered the new invention: ‘My God, it talks!’ It’s as if the whole film is a mysteriously extended version of one of those Orange Film Board-sponsored
‘Don’t let a phone ruin your movie’ shorts.
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This moment of unexpected comedy, as Robin Bird points out, has its origin in a documented quirk of history: soldiers scrambling through the destruction of Stalingrad would occasionally come across odd vestiges of civilization, ‘such as ringing telephones.’ Proceeding on the principle that if it talks it works, Professor ignores Stalker’s warning— Don’t touch!—picks it up (it looks a bit like one of those dynamite plungers in westerns) and dials. It’s a rotary dial so this sequence has added fascination as gestural archaeology. In evolutionary terms the index finger enjoyed a long period of dominance in the era of the rotary phone but this action is now close to extinct. The index finger is entering a phase of quietude and disuse while the thumb enjoys a renaissance in the age of texting and mobiles. Professor gets through right away—and not to an automated answering system (which would have made the rotary dial a little problematic) but to an actual Russianspeaking human being. He’s made a personal call, possibly long-distance, another reminder of the past, when phone calls were prohibitively expensive and one grabbed
every chance to make a call on someone else’s dime. He has a coded conversation that does not make sense but is full of mutual threat, counterthreat and foreboding. I’m in the old building, he says, Bunker Four. (This is another accidental detail reinforcing—as always happens with stray coincidences in the realm of conspiracy theory—the idea of the film as prophecy of nuclear doom: it was reactor number four that went into gradual meltdown at Chernobyl.) Clearly Professor is intending to do
something,
though what that something might be—in the words of the Buffalo Springfield song—ain’t exactly clear. The voice at the other end of the line—Russian, sinister-sounding—says that whatever it is he’s plotting is revenge for the fact that he slept with Professor’s wife twenty years ago. (Twenty years? That does seem a long time to have harboured a cuckold’s grudge.) Voicing our unspoken questions, Writer asks Professor what he’s planning. Imagine what it’s like when everyone comes here, Professor explains. All the tin-pot dictators and would-be führers, people who come not for money but to change the world.
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A good point, this. For many years
now I have felt that I would like to be a dictator, the ruler of a regime that conforms in every detail to my ideas of how I think life should be lived and ordered. The world is full of people like me: idle Stalins and back-bedroom Lenins who are prevented from seizing and wielding power only by a chronic lack of drive, determination and ambition (desire backed by a willingness to achieve that which is desired). If we had access to the Room…I don’t bring people like that, says Stalker. They’re all standing in
a
room that for all we know might actually be
the
Room, in which case the Room would be a major disappointment, indistinguishable, in fact, from just about any other room. (Every bit as important as Tarkovsky’s capacity for doubt is his
literalness;
how fantastic—I mean how
un
fantastic—to call their destination, this Holiest of Grails, the Room.) We’re looking at them through the doorway still, the doorway without a door. Writer is fiddling with some string or twine and he’s not impressed by Professor’s little speech. No one cares enough about anything except their own trivial preoccupations. Revenge on your boss, something like that he can understand—strangely he doesn’t
mention bigger sales or good reviews—but anything larger? No one who comes here is interested in that kind of stuff. A false distinction, surely. Dictators and ruthless autocrats start out with the idea of settling a few scores, want to advance to the next rung of the ladder so they can get even with whoever it was that snubbed them once, long ago, or for sleeping with their wife or some dimly remembered but unforgettable offence, if not the precise individual then the class or race of whom he is representative, and from there it’s a very small leap to deciding that the whole lot of them must be exterminated, followed by any other class or group that looks like it might be capable of extermination or of revenging itself on you or your descendants, and before anyone knows quite how it happened all of Scotland bleeds and we have the Gulag system that stalks Tarkovsky’s film like Banquo’s ghost. Stalker says it’s not possible to believe in happiness at the expense of someone else, which seems a little naive, especially to Writer, since the knowledge that someone might be a little unhappier than oneself—might have suffered worse reviews and even poorer sales—has been one of mankind’s sources of solace, if not since the dawn of time, then certainly since the advent of literary journalism.
Writer pulls a switch and the lightbulb above his head, the bulb that looks like it’s not good for anything except
not
working, surges into a light so bright that they all flinch from its glare. It’s overexerted itself, though. After a few seconds, just like the light back home, when it was turned on by Stalker’s missus, it goes out with a ping. The Zone might be fundamentally different from the world back there but defective wiring would seem to be a problem from which there is no escape. Buried beneath other, more overt layers of allegorical suggestiveness, could this be the very heart of the film ? If their deepest wish, even if only negatively demonstrated, is for a decent power supply, then perhaps this constitutes a coded critique of the failure of communism as famously promised by Lenin: Soviet power plus electrification of the whole country.
TIME TO GET GOING.
They step through the doorless doorway, the
way.
Writer, indulging in a last bit of baiting, tells Stalker he won’t forgive him. As he does so we see what it is that he’s been weaving together: a crown of thorns, no less. He puts it on and, credit where it’s due, it fits him like a glove—but it’s not a glove, of course, it’s
a crown of thorns. Ring any bells? Something biblical going on there? An allusion to Bob Dylan’s ‘Shelter from the Storm’? Writer as Christ? I dunno. Everything just is. Or isn’t. But may be. So we’ll have to leave it at that. Writer is wearing a crown of thorns of his own making but attempting to say exactly what this symbolizes or means is like making a rod for your own back. Quite an achievement, this, to have someone wearing a crown of thorns and to leave us the option of not buying into a theological or symbolic reading of something that seems to exist solely—it keeps you neither warm nor dry—in the realm of the symbolic. Tarkovsky’s hostility to symbolic readings of his films extended to questions about the meaning of the Zone itself: ‘I’m reduced to a state of fury and despair by such questions. The Zone doesn’t symbolize anything, any more than anything else does in my films: the zone is the zone, it’s life, and as he makes his way across it a man may break down or he may come through.’ Ah, so the Zone
is
more than just a zone—it is, as Tarkovsky himself conceded, ‘a test.’
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