Into the Zone: Andrei Tarkovsky's Stalker

 

A couple years I watched the Andrei Tarkovsky adaptation of Solaris for the first time. Andrei Tarkovsky (not to be confused with Genndy Tartakovsky) directed one other science fiction film, Stalker (1979).

[Note that this blog post spoils a thirty-nine-year-old movie that you will probably never watch.]

I haven't see anything else by Tarkovsky, but there are some interesting parallels between Solaris and Stalker. While in Solaris, human beings go into space and encounter some kind of alien life which can reshape reality, in Stalker, some kind of alien presence lands in Russia (we're told they thought it was a meteorite). The area around it is cleared out and fenced off, known as "the Zone," and in the heart of the Zone is "the Room," where you can go to achieve happiness. The main character is the unnamed "stalker," a person skilled at navigating the Zone, and the film chronicles one his trips into the Zone, leading an unnamed professor and an unnamed writer to the Room.

The main question of Solaris is whether humanity is really searching for the unknown, or whether humanity is just searching for itself. ("We don't know what to do with other worlds. We don't need other worlds. We need a mirror. We struggle for contact, but we'll never find it. We're in the foolish human predicament of striving for a goal that he fears, that he has no need for. Man needs man.") These ideas play out in Stalker in different combinations. The unknown has come to us, but we have cordoned it off. The writer and the professor don't want to know what the Room is; they want what it can do for them. (Or so we think at first; the professor turns out to have a hidden agenda.)

Like Solaris, there are long stretches of the film where it's not always clear why something is happening. But like Solaris, it can also be riveting at times. Once the characters make it into the Zone, it's a tour-de-force of tension, because you are utterly convinced that anything can happen in a strange shifting landscape even though the landscape never actually shifts and nothing actually harms the main characters. Or even really threatens to that much. The movie looks like it was filmed in some kind of dilapidated industrial site (Wikipedia tells me it was a deserted hydroelectric plant), but when you watch it, Tarkovsky convinces you that it's an alien landscape. When the characters push their way through the tall grass, Tarkovsky convinces you that reality is crumbling. But there's no on-screen special effects, no camera trickery, just tension. I don't know enough about film to tell you how he does it, but he does it, and it works.

Most of the time. There is a bit where the writer is sent down a tunnel, and later he's like, 'Holy crap, I can't believe you guys made me do that!' But me, I'm just like, 'All you did was go down a tunnel.'

At the end, the characters draw near the Room, and truths are revealed. The professor is there to blow it all up (he worries what politicians will do if they get their wishes and use them to create utopia), while the writer casts doubts on whether or not the Room is real, if the stalker isn't living out some kind of fantasy himself by watching people go through this, yet never realizing the Room does nothing-- because those the stalker escorts back out of the Zone rarely seem happier.

As was said in Solaris, "We're in the foolish human predicament of striving for a goal that he fears, that he has no need for. Man needs man." No one in the party has need of the Room; the stalker needs to go back to and reconnect with his family.

So, all right, okay? When watching Solaris, I felt like I learned something; when watching Stalker, I felt like I missed something. Two hours and forty minutes is a long time to watch to be told, 'The real magic was at home all along!' That there was never anything to the Room or possibly even to the Zone fizzles out the entire thing. Even though the movie doesn't commit to this idea-- it's definitely left ambiguous-- it still doesn't satisfy. There is no big idea, and the stalker brings home a dog he finds in the Zone. It kind of works emotionally (the part of the movie set after the leave the Zone is like coming down from an adrenaline rush), but it doesn't satisfy thematically.

The end hints are something more, though. The scenes set in the Zone are in color, while scenes outside of it are in this bright sepia tone. When the stalker dreams in the Zone, his dreams are in sepia, but some of the scenes in the end are in color, despite being set outside the Zone, mostly those revolving around the stalker's daughter, "Monkey." Is it because family was the true happiness all along? Or is it because Monkey is something else, something new: the very last scene indicates she has some kind of telekinetic powers.

But why? Wikipedia tells me that in the novel Roadside Picnic, upon which Stalker is based, "It is widely rumored that incursions into the Zone by stalkers carry high risk of mutations in their children, even though no radiation or other mutagens had been detected in the area." This information was not communicated in the film so far as I noticed, though, so it's an epilogue that sits oddly, with an unclear relationship (in terms of both theme and plot) with with preceded it.

There's definitely some interesting stuff happening in Stalker, and some great filmmaking. But watching it after Solaris, I can't help but feel that anything Tarkovsky did well here, he already did better in the earlier film.

I like to take my own screenshots when possible, but for this essay I cheated and just used ones I found on Google Images, since I'd already returned the disc to Netflix.