Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker:1

a movie review

by

John C Woodcock

(2016)

(John may be contacted at: jwoodcock@lighthousedownunder.com)

1With appreciation to Kirill Zimin for the translation of the movie script. Found at
http://tarkovskyzone.proboards.com/thread/87
From the outset, you will need to bracket your prejudices with the word “stalker”
appearing as the title. Stalker has nothing to do with predatory or obsessional behaviors,
i.e. stalking victims, like the movie Fatal Attraction, for example. The name here refers to
smugglers, taken from the book this movie is based on. In fact, to “get inside” this movie
at all you will have to bracket most of your expectations about what a movie is supposed
to do and be about. Stalker is considered one of the top 50 movies for all time (British
Film Institute) and these accolades are probably due in large part to Tarkovsky’s mastery
of the cinematic medium.
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,
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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. Why did I 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.

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.

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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

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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!

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