hope
by Douglas Messerli
Arkadi Strugastky, Boris Strugatsky and Andrei Tarkovsky (screenplay, based
on a novel by the Strugastkys), Andrei Tarkovsky (director) Stalker / 1979
In a
small, crumbling village just outside of the protected and prohibited
"Zone," lives the Stalker (Aleksandr Kaidanovsky), his wife (Alisa
Frejndikh), and their mute and crippled daughter, nicknamed Monkey. The
outpost, filmed in sepia, gives the whole (at least in the new print I saw at
the Los Angeles County Museum of Art) a slightly sickly yellow tone. We know
immediately that this town is deadly to its inhabitants. Three nuclear silos
appear in the distance, the streets are littered with debris and filth, even
the Stalker's house is perspiring with moisture. When the trains pass, the
entire house rattles, moving a drinking-glass and other objects in its wake.
This is a world on the verge of collapse.
Beyond it lies an even more "dead and deadly" region, the
"Zone," site of a large meteorite or nuclear disaster, or....well, no
one knows. The authorities know only that its inhabitants died and when
soldiers and others tried to enter, they never returned. Finally, it became
apparent that the only way to keep people from doing harm to themselves was to
fence it in, to prohibit entry. Policeman cruise the streets of the Stalker's
small village, shooting anyone who may even appear to be trying to enter the
"Zone."
In
the Soviet period in which Tarkovsky made this film the implications of what the
"Zone" represents were even broader. As Slavoj Žižek noted in The Pervert's Guide to Cinema:
"For a citizen of the defunct Soviet Union, the notion of a forbidden Zone gives rise to (at least) five associations: Zone is (1) Gulag, i.e. a separated prison territory; (2) a territory poisoned or otherwise rendered uninhabitable by some technological (biochemical, nuclear....) catastrophe, like Chernobyl; (3) the secluded domain in which the nomenklatura lives; (4) foreign territory to which access is prohibited
(like the enclosed West Berlin in the midst of the GDR); (5) a territory where a meteorite struck (like Tunguska in Siberia)."
In short, Tarkovsky's "Zone" is any or
all of these; it does not stand for one thing, and the essential fact is its
prohibition, like so much else in Soviet life.
Following in the footsteps of a figure nicknamed Porcupine, the Stalker
has learned some of the secrets of this forbidden place, and now, for a sum of
money, is willing to take people in an out of this prohibited space, facing
possible death from the surrounding military (the Stalker has already spent
long periods in jail) and, most of all, the shifting "death traps" of
the "Zone" itself.
Yet
some people are willing to take their chances; a writer and professor, each
named after their profession, having heard that within the "Zone"
lies a room which, after one enters, fulfills a person's innermost desires, await
the Stalker's arrival. Unlike the hopeless, hapless heap of ruble outside of
the prohibited space, the "Zone," despite its treacherous potential,
offers people the ineffable concept of hope.
In
that sense, the "Zone" is the shadow of the "real" world
which the Stalker, the Writer, and the Professor inhabit, a kind of dream
landscape where, despite the evidence of disaster and the potential nightmares
of any dream, imagination reigns, and human potential is a possibility. Yet, as
the Stalker warns his partners in crime, not everyone will survive, those who
are the most wretched, who have the least ego and are most flexible, have the
greatest chance of surviving, but even they are sometimes destroyed by the
dangers that lay in wait. It is almost as if the "Zone" were itself a
being, tricking those who dare to enter it into their own death.
After surviving the gunfire of the guards, the three escape via a
railway handcar into a world that suddenly (as in The Wizard of Oz) shifts into color. Yet here no human beings
exist, not even little ones. The plants have overrun the destroyed power lines
and the battle tanks of the military, but their flowers have no scent. It is
beautiful and, as the Stalker joyously proclaims, "absolutely
silent," but it is a place without mankind, a world, in short, of death.
Almost immediately we realize that the two individuals who the Stalker
is guiding seemingly have little of what it takes to survive. The Writer is a
worn-out genius, an alcoholic believing only in logic and longing for the
"magic" of the Middle Ages. His mantra is that everything is a
triangle: A1=B1=C1. Despite the Stalker's stated restrictions, he brings with
him a bottle of liquor and, as we later discover, a hand gun. The Professor is
equally smug, insistently cynical of the human race and of any possible
salvation in the hands of his own scientific kind.
Slowly they make their way toward the "room," seemingly just a
few yards from where they stand; but both are frustrated with the Stalker's
insistence that they cannot attempt a direct assault, but must make their way
around things in order to survive, turning this way and that, moving every few
feet toward a cloth tied up with metal nuts, retrieving it, and throwing it
out, in another direction, before setting forth again.
The
rules imposed upon this absurd journey indeed often seem to be right out of
Samuel Beckett's writings, and the two "tourists," arguing as they
go, often appear to be playing out a variant version of Waiting for Godot or Mercier
and Camier. So inconsistent seem the Stalker's rules that the Writer
finally determines that he will disobey and move straight ahead, but when he
attempts the maneuver, the house itself warns him to stay away, and he
retreats, insisting that he was called back by his colleagues, they insisting
that he spoke to himself in a transformed voice.
At
one point, when the Professor disappears (against the rules he has returned for
his forgotten rucksack), the remaining two proceed through a rainy drainpipe,
only to find him safely on the other side. It is as if space itself circles
back. So exhausted are the three, they fall into a grumbling sleep, the two
outsiders fighting like a long-married couple until they are collapse in a
coma-like sleep, heaped each upon each, a stray dog hunkering down beside them.
Besides the simple beauty (and marked ugliness) of the landscape,* what
helps the viewer to accept these somewhat academic dialogic encounters is the
humor of it all, the Kafka-like ridiculousness of their positions, particularly
given their improbable situation. What we gradually come to comprehend,
moreover, is that despite their oppositional stances toward life, they now have
to obey the rules of a different world, and can make no progress without them.
Their final long voyage through a dark and filthy tunnel, although
dramatically eerie, hardly matters. We know that despite their bluff, these are
both wretched men, unhappy even in their great successes. They will survive the
trip, but will they survive the "gift" of the room, the realization
of their "deepest, innermost" wishes?
As
they reach the entry to the room, the Stalker once more explains what is about
to happen before encouraging them to enter, reiterating that, having learned
from the example of Porcupine —a stalker who entered in order save his brother,
but instead became fabulously wealthy, and, soon after, committed suicide—that
stalkers are not permitted to set foot in this sacred space.
The
Writer gets cold feet, realizing that the trap of the promised magic is that
the innermost wish of any individual may not be what he consciously desires. It
may be a destructive force, a petty wish that counteracts any human good within
that being. No, he proclaims, he will not enter.
The
Professor has already understood that such a force might be used by the truly
evil men in the society to take over governments, to kill thousands, etc., and
he has brought a bomb with him to destroy the spot.
Yet his fervor, his plea for the salvation of this sacred place gradually wins them over. The Writer apologizes as the Professor disassembles the bomb, the camera focusing with intensity for several moments on the three men gathered at the future's gate, the floor of room inexplicably flooding.
Returning home, exhausted, the Stalker and his "passengers"
gather once more at the local bar before his wife comes to fetch him. At home,
he reports that he realizes he can never take another person into his beloved
"Zone," that he must give up the one thing he was able to offer
others because there is no longer anyone who believes strongly enough. When his
wife proposes that he take her to the
room so that may achieve her secret desires, the Stalker admits he cannot dare
that. Even he, it appears, does not have enough faith.
Has
the "Zone" been his own fantasy, as the Writer and Professor have
hinted, being the one thing in his string of life-failures that he has had to
give, been able to create? We can never know.
His
wife's monologue about both their sufferings and love which have allowed
happiness and hope to coexist, however, seems to point to their survival,
perhaps even to their prevailing over the difficulties they face. The rugged
dreamer will ultimately accept the ordinariness of his life.
In
the distance we hear the rumble of the train. Their deaf and crippled daughter
sits alone at the table. First a glass, then a bottle, and finally a second
glass slides across the table, the last falling to the floor. The train comes
nearer, and with it, embedded deep within the rumble of the railway, a muted
musical accompaniment from Beethoven's "Ode to Joy," which disappears
as quickly as the engine passes. We now must ask ourselves, was it the train
that moved the glass in the very first scene and now, these three objects, or
was it an extraordinary telekinetic gift with which the child is possessed?
There is no answer when it comes to such a question, only hope.
*Most of these scenes were filmed near Tallinn,
Estonia, in an area around a small river with a half-functioning hydroelectric
station. As sound-editor Victor Sharun has written:
"Up the river was a chemical plant and it poured out poisonous liquids downstream. There was even this shot in Stalker: snow falling in the summer and white foam floating down the river. In fact it was some horrible poison. Many women in our crew got allergic reactions on their faces. Tarkovsky died from cancer of the right bronchial tube. And Tolya Solonitsyn too. That it was all connected to the location shooting for Stalker became clear to me when Larisa Tarkovskaya died from the same illness in Paris."
Los Angeles, January 24, 2010
Reprinted from Green Integer Blog
(January 2010).
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