Reflections on Tarkovsky's Stalker

(Please watch the movie yourself before reading about my opinions, or anyone else’s for that matter. If you need an apéritif, take Tarkovsky’s own words: “I am often asked what does this Zone stand for. There is only one possible answer: the Zone doesn’t exist. Stalker himself invented the Zone. He created it, so that he would be able to bring there some very unhappy persons and impose on them the idea of hope.”)

The Zone is nothing other than nature – ours and in itself. That’s my take on Stalker, a wonderfully abstract 1979 film that enables multiple interpretations. Each scene is madly precise, and filmmaking lore makes Andrei Tarkovsky’s achievement seem even greater (and more ruthless). The titular stalker is a man who can lead others to the brink of self-reflection but does not allow himself. In his stubborn refusal, together with the writer and professor, to enter the Room – the domain of deepest desire – we see the religiosity Tarkovsky wanted to convey. But if not for the unseen hand of soviet correction,[^1] Tarkovsky might have dwelled too much on The Idiot and The Death of Ivan Ilyich and made something else entirely. That would have been a shame, because what we have instead is as impersonal an artistic depiction of humanity as I have ever seen.[^2]

I usually dislike pat takes, but Geoff Dyer’s description of the opening credits scene is pat in the word’s positive sense (while I prefer Nick Schager’s take overall):

An empty bar, possibly not even open, with a single table, no bigger than a small round table, but higher, the sort you then lean against – there are no stools – while you stand and drink. If floorboards could speak these look like they could tell a tale or two, though the tales would turn out to be one and the same, ending with the same old lament (after a few drinks people think they can walk all over me) not just in terms of what happens here, but in bars the world over. We are, in other words, already in a realm of universal truth.
(Zona: A Book About a Film About a Journey to a Room, 2012)

Trying to make sense of Stalker is like trying to compose a subjective, universal theory of human nature. The actors – Kaidanovsky, Solonitsyn, Grinko, and Freindlich – projected their own, as did the brothers Strugatsky, who wrote the source material, and of course, so did Tarkovsky. Some theories are truthier than others, however, and the interpretation I propose is inescapable.

One view is that the Zone represents the stalker’s self-aware illusions, as Tarkovsky said. Another view, the one I hold, is that the Zone is nature incarnate. The two views are inseparable. A distinction could be drawn between one man’s nature and human nature, but it would just as soon disappear. Similarly, we could live in a natural world devoid of anything holy, but we would not live for long.

Why, except for the opportunity to stage a daring escape from the USSR, would the screenwriters and director depict the trio of stalker, writer, and professor being shot at while entering the Zone? Allegorical quashing of the personal is a would-be dissident’s thing, surely. In that case, monitoring and informing on one another are what kill. But the Zone is devoid of intelligence operatives. And while the writer and professor betray their promises to the stalker, to respect him, they do not betray him to the guards. The barbed wire around the Zone is just another barricade erected to prevent natural reactions to suffering, and it might as well be in America.

The film’s most allegorical scene flows up a shallow river, amid which the stalker sleeps on an ait, before coming to his outstretched, Michelangelesque hand. This particular scene was shot in sepia tones – the visual code used in the film to signify that the stalker is back in modern existence, although he is simultaneously dreaming inside the Zone. Trawling up the river, we see all kinds of creations: a submerged Orthodox icon, for example, as well as machines and syringes. But the image that caught my eye was a bowl submerged inside the river with fish inside it, shown as soon as the monologue fades. Is the fishbowl a sanctuary or a prison? To my mind, that is the crux.

Tarkovsky had this to say in Sculpting in Time (1987):

This, too, is what Stalker is about: the hero goes through moments of despair when his faith is shaken; but every time he comes to a renewed sense of his vocation to serve people who have lost their hopes and illusions.

The way he moves in the Zone clarifies things: the stalker leads from behind. The others try going their separate paths, but they reunite. No movement is unilinear, and only natural man[^3] can determine where they are going – by sortilege, it seems to the intelligentsia. Finally, the three of them just sit together at the Room’s entrance, the professor fiddling with a gadget and testing the water by throwing stones, the writer beside the hero pensively gazing at their reflection, and the stalker perhaps content for their company. He rues the intellectuals’ nihilism in the end, but still, they came to him for inspiration (and as his voluminous book collection later shows, he to them).

But wait, you might ask, how could the Zone be about nature (ours and Earth’s) when it was said to have been created by a meteorite, or not a meteorite exactly? Speculation on the matter has featured atomic bombs and Chernobyl disasters, in addition to the alien visitation described in the Strugatskys’ novel. In any event, we often give life to that which takes it away. We also forbid some objects, because we know it is in our nature to abuse them. Sometimes the forbidding itself is an arbitrary abuse of power. The more prudent questions, in my opinion, are how could authorities forbid certain expressions of our nature, and when should we accept them?

Let Tarkovsky’s words from Sculpting in Time conclude things:

People have often asked me what The Zone is, and what it symbolizes… The Zone doesn’t symbolise anything, any more than anything else does in my films: the zone is a zone, it’s life.

In exile, facing his own mortality, he wrote:

In the end, everything can be reduced to the one simple element which is all a person can count upon in his existence: the capacity to love.

That too is only natural.


[1] Do not discount fate, either: A literal earthquake prevented filming in Tajikistan and necessitated a move to Estonia, while a corrupted film reel supposedly forced the director to re-film the present version from scratch.

[2] In case you do not find the film sufficiently impersonal, read into the lore: Tarkovsky may have killed himself, his wife Larisa, and the writer (actor Anatoly Solonitsyn) by filming three separate takes, all the while surrounded by chemicals from hydroelectric and manufacturing plants near Tallinn. They each died in middle age of lung cancer.

[3] Forgive me for pointing out that the writer says he imagined the stalker like “Leather Stocking, or Chingachgook, or Big Snake” – referring to James Fenimore Cooper’s Mohican character inventions. Dante’s Virgil is nowhere in sight.