Post by ledjarde on Apr 9, 2007 12:43:52 GMT -5
About 2 years ago, I did this essay on the symbolism in Stalker as part of the European Cinema section of my Moving Image degree. I just thought some of you might like to read it. Please feel free to raise points, discuss, etc.
- Chris
Souls At Zero
Christian and Visual Symbolism in Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker
In terms of cinema, the world of science-fiction invariably conjures up a series of particular, iconic images we have come to associate with the genre: alien landscapes with impossible terrain and tangerine skies; dystopian cities drenched in the permanent rain of a future world; colossal star ships cruising through the ink-black silence of deep space. The sight of three balding Russian men, huddled together in a deserted, flooded room, deep in existential debate, doesn’t seem to be one of them. But this is certainly no ordinary science-fiction movie. We are in the organic, poetic, speculative territory of Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker (1979).
Based on Arkady and Boris Sturgatsky’s novel, Roadside Picnic, Stalker concerns the allegorical journey of three men, Stalker (Alexander Kaidanovsky), Writer (Anatoly Solonitsin) and Scientist (Nikolai Grinko) across a forbidden, industrial landscape (The Zone) towards a location (The Room), said to possess the supernatural ability to grant innermost wishes. Cordoned off and guarded by the state, The Zone is rumoured to be the result of a meteorite strike, which caused a massive, radiation-induced change in the physics and metaphysics of the landscape, although the book attributes the effect to an alien landing.
The backgrounds of the three men appear to have been chosen carefully in order to represent different, opposing fractions of man’s faculty to contemplate. Writer represents the arts, the ability of man to transcend the actuality of his existence. Scientist symbolises man’s need to explore and explain, to rationalise everything in terms of facts and figures. Their guide, Stalker, is an unskilled worker, a non-intellectual who relies on his faith to assess the world. He represents man’s need for a higher understanding, or possibly the way man turns to religion when he has little else to hold his life together.
Having been assigned titles rather than actual names, the trio are representations of sections of society rather than characters. This arrangement ensures their journey through The Zone is replete with philosophical debate and existential conjecture. As their individual character arcs develop, the three men become, by turns, comrades, opponents, foils and disputants. Above all else, their discussions assess their individual need to travel to The Room, and it is within the mechanics of these discussions that the film’s underlying themes are explored, and one theme in particular: that of faith.
A graduate of the Moscow State Film School in 1960, Tarkovsky was a devout member of the Russian Orthodox Church until his death in 1986. He viewed his work as, “…about one thing: the extreme manifestation of faith,” 1 a philosophy apparent in all his work, none more so than Stalker. "Certainly in today's world, which leans so heavily towards the material and the technological, the Church shows no sign of being able to readdress the balance with a call to a spiritual awakening." 2
Clearly, Tarkovsky’s paramount concern was that the state communism of his Marxist homeland was, by extension, a form of extreme spiritual repression. The Soviet government under which Tarkovsky lived was fundamentally atheist. Indeed, prior to Perestroika, it was mandatory for university students to complete a course in ’scientific atheism’, and in excess of fifty thousand priests were either executed or sent to labour camps during the first twenty years of communism.
Turning his back on the thirty-year-old, state-approved, Socialist Realist film movement, which sought to represent the Marxist regime as a unified socialist utopia, Tarkovsky’s response was to invest his films with an intensely personal vision of spirituality and faith. Perhaps inevitably, the Soviet authorities were keen to censor what they viewed as a subversion of the communist agenda. As a consequence, Tarkovsky often struggled against the entire Soviet film system to receive script approval, financing and distribution. In spite of gaining international accolade and awards, his films were not only censored in his homeland, but their releases were delayed, sometimes for years, and also withheld from festivals.
Mosfilm, the biggest and most powerful Soviet film studio, had previously granted Tarkovsky the large budget he required for his epic Andrei Roublev (1966). But when Soviet authorities demanded cuts on the grounds of violence and nudity, and generally found the film too dark, Mosfilm, possibly bowing to state pressure, refused such lavish budgets in the future. 3 The state censors began to insist upon reviewing an advance copy of all scripts prior to filming. By way of response, Tarkovsky altered his work significantly during the filming and editing stages. Stalker was no exception.
Its original script appeared to attack western capitalism, and the United States in particular. But when the completed film was revealed to be a study on the need to place faith above materialism in the search for personal satiety, the Soviet authorities were furious. As symbolised by the characters in Stalker, Tarkovsky saw the Soviet Union as scientific, artistic and literary, but ultimately without faith. Stalker was consequently the last film Tarkovsky would make in the Soviet Union, and he went into exile a few years later.
The depiction of a totalitarian state’s attempts to repress the spiritual needs of the individual, delineated on screen by the military’s cordoning off of The Zone, is perhaps where the roots of Tarkovsky’s exile were sewn. The Room at the centre of The Zone is a clear metaphor for God and freedom, and the barbed wire and armed guards on the edge of The Zone is the state’s way of preventing the common man from reaching it. The Room is where innermost desires are made manifest, where prayers are answered. As faith and belief were the antithesis of Marxist theory, Stalker stated Tarkovsky’s belief that the state was smothering the human need for spirituality.
The question of faith seems to permeate every aspect of Stalker. Each of the three protagonists undergoes a crisis of faith at some point during their journey through The Zone. Writer has no faith in himself as an artist. ”…what hell of a writer am I, if I hate writing?” he asks, “…a painful, shameful occupation…nobody needs me.” Clearly, his very profession dictates he should be faithless, as outlined in: “A man writes because he’s tormented, because he doubts…he has no faith.” Neither has Writer any faith in hard facts, as highlighted in his attack on Scientist’s need to measure and extenuate. “So you decide to pack a knapsack full manometers and other nuts…and put all these miracles to an algebra test.”
In turn, Scientist has no faith in The Room to bring happiness to the world, and believes its powers will eventually be used to corrupt. He lacks faith in mankind as a whole, and harbours a purely rational, cynical view of the needs of individuals. Perhaps he is bound to this form of belief by his experience of witnessing every advance in technology ultimately employed in the pursuit of power and greed, and fears the powers of The Room will be used to similar ends. “But if this thing gets into the wrong hands…” he warns the others. Scientist is Tarkovsky’s personification of the state; unconcerned with spiritual cultivation, merely intent upon a state-run, proletarian system in which the individual contributes labour in return for ignorance of the divine.
Stalker’s lack of faith lies with himself and his place in the world. He feels his only worth is to act as a guide to those without hope who wish to visit The Zone. When near The Room, he confesses, “my happiness, my freedom, my self-respect, it’s all here.” The Zone is his salvation. Stalker is the personification of someone who has forsaken the state system, and can only find wellbeing in the face of God. He states the only people The Zone will allow near The Room are those without hope. I feel Tarkovsky’s statement here is that when worn down by the system, when stripped of all hope by the systematic oppression of the state, people will eventually turn to God. But Stalker fears the state may be too strong, and that if communism completely eradicates the need for God, he will be stripped of the only occupation of which he feels worthy. “And nobody believes,” he complains. “Who am I going to take there?”
The Zone appears to induce a sense of self-loathing and introspection in those who travel within it, eroding all trace of egotism and selfishness so it can clearly see the innermost wishes of those who near The Room.
Perhaps an image placed ominously at the start of their excursion into The Zone should have made the three men further heed the significance of their journey. As they stand at the border of the cryptic, green landscape ahead of them, the area is marked by ruined, leaning telegraph poles, poignantly and unmistakably shaped like crosses. The ultimate sign of personal, physical and spiritual sacrifice, the crosses foreshadow the journey ahead. Indeed, the entire sojourn can be seen as a life-altering journey through the conscience of the three men. The more they explore and discover the landscape, the more they explore and examine their own brittle psyches.
Here perhaps lies the great irony of Stalker, in that after their long, tiring trek through The Zone, the three men become hesitant as they stand at the threshold of The Room. Perhaps suddenly fearful of what it holds for them, Stalker, Writer and Scientist never enter The Room, but appear content to arrive at some form of nihilistic impasse, and instead sit huddled in the dirt to witness a glorious rainfall from an indoor ceiling. Writer and Scientist have proved themselves men without faith, and so now, at the very moment when The Room can grant them their deepest desires, their humility prevents them from risking being proved wrong. “In short, they can’t, at bottom, summon up the life-and-death sincerity which converts desire into fruition.” 4 Instead of lifting the veil to see the face of God, they would rather remain in darkness; faithless and ignorant, but at least never having witnessed the means to believe otherwise. Tarkovsky’s point here is that perhaps there are no answers to be found in faith, no concrete resolutions or revelations in the search for God, only fulfilment in the search itself.
Stalker himself isn’t burdened like Writer and Scientist, isn’t bound by the constraints which keep faith uncomfortably at arm’s length for them. He has no academic qualifications, no great intellectual grounding in the arts. He is a simple man, a weak man; his soul hasn’t been hardened by the certainty of science and knowledge. “When a man is just born, he is weak and flexible,” he says. “When he dies, he is hard and insensitive…hardness and strength are death’s companions. Pliancy and weakness are expressions of the freshness of being. Because what has hardened will never win.” Stalker feels that belief is power, and that instead of being hardened to its influence, the ability to be open and welcoming to faith and belief means only his prayers can be answered. We feel he is the only one of the trio with sufficient faith to step inside The Room, articulated by one simple sentence of his: “You have to believe.”
But perhaps the biggest act of faith results from the film’s complete lack of dramatic irony. Stalker claims The Zone is a dangerous territory, subject to constant change, and navigating it is extremely hazardous. But apart from the sudden disappearance of a bird in one of the latter scenes, we never witness any outward confirmation of its supernatural capabilities. As an audience, we are spared any advance views of The Room that will signal their journey’s end. We only have Stalker’s word that it even exists. As a consequence, we remain as ignorant as Writer and Scientist to their destination, as blind as they on their journey of discovery. The Zone we see is a series of lush fields, decaying buildings and rusted industrial debris. The Zone in which we are required to believe is a conscious, living landscape; attentive and aware. It is a leap of faith made easier through Tarkovsky’s meticulous use of camera movement, sound, script and production design, allowing us to sense beyond the landscape we see and hear, to the one we suspect.
Tarkovsky’s combination of monochrome and colour also serves to highlight certain narrative conceits within the film. The early scenes set outside The Zone are depicted in sombre black and white; dark, oppressive and devoid of beauty, a world to escape from. But when the three men arrive on the edge of The Zone, the landscape’s sudden rendering in colour hints at the hope and possibilities ahead of them. And at the film’s climax, when the men have returned to the outside world, black and white is used again, emphasising they have returned empty-handed into hopelessness. This dichotomy between the light and dark of the world signifies the twin extremes of salvation and ignorance.
The trip through The Zone is one where Tarkovsky hints that the natural world created by God is indiscriminate, and will eventually overcome any intrusions by the materialistic world. The landscape of The Zone is littered with the remains of a militaristic and technological past. Early in their journey, the men encounter a group of abandoned tanks, overgrown with grass and moss; a military outpost smothered by the progress of nature. Every building they pass through or inhabit is decayed beyond repair, every field they navigate their way across is strewn with machinery half-hidden in the grass. Possessions are rendered useless and obsolete in The Zone, highlighted by the many slow camera movements across the surface of flooded interiors and streams. Coins, hypodermic needles, religious icons, guns, a calendar, machinery components and ceramics are seen submerged in the water, rusting into obscurity; symbolic of all things beginning and ending in water. In keeping with Tarkovsky’s world view, these objects represent materialism, rendered useless outside the context of everyday circulation, and ultimately discarded in the search for God.
Water acts as an important, recurring theme throughout the entire film, symbolic of thirst, baptism and purity. Barely a scene goes by without its presence. As part of their journey, the men encounter waterfalls, rivers, streams, flooded interiors and tunnels, pools, indoor rain and dripping roofs. They each walk chest-deep through water without any sign of needing to dry themselves, a purification as they near the threshold of The Room.
The many images of items submerged in water also hint at the dangers of pollution, and many critics have drawn a stark parallel between The Zone and the threat of nuclear contamination. Stalker was made seven years or so before the 1986 nuclear disaster at Chernobyl, though rumours of a smaller disaster in the 1960’s, covered up the state, sparked debate about the origin and warnings of Tarkovsky’s The Zone. Indeed, a zone similar to that in Stalker has long been established around the former nuclear facility in Chernobyl. Its radiation-polluted atmosphere, altering the physics of the environment, mirrors that in Stalker.
A chilling premonition of disaster is narrated over one of the sequences showing the polluted water; a Biblical prophecy from Revelation 8:7-11. It prophesises in verse the falling of a great star from the sky, Wormwood, causing catastrophe on a global scale. A third of the earth will be burned, the seas will turn to blood, a third of creatures will die, and poisoned water will kill a great many people. The literal Russian translation of the word Wormwood is Chernobyl.
The very fact that The Zone is a vast, environmental disaster is seen in Stalker’s daughter, Monkey, unable to walk because of her father’s repeated exposure to The Zone’s polluted environment. Throughout the journey, we suspect Stalker’s innermost wish is to cure Monkey. At the end of the film, it seems he has succeeded. We see a close-up of Monkey’s face, apparently walking with her parents. But as the camera pulls away, Monkey is revealed to be sitting on her father’s shoulders, as crippled as ever. We recall how we never actually saw Stalker enter The Room. Indeed, we remember him saying to Writer at its threshold how guides should never enter The Zone or The Room with an ulterior motive. This is reinforced by the tale of Porcupine, a guide who had accidentally caused his brother’s death. Porcupine had entered The Room in the hope of being granted his wish that his brother return back to life. But on his return home, he found a far deeper wish had been granted, resulting in great wealth. With his remorse too great to bear, Porcupine hanged himself. Stalker has clearly learned the morality of this tale. He could have entered The Room to pray for Monkey’s cure, but was ultimately fearful it might recognise a deeper desire within him.
Monkey is, however, the only person seen in colour in the world outside The Zone, suggesting she is the signal for a future generation of hope. This proposal is stressed by the film’s enigmatic closing scene, in which Monkey apparently uses telekinesis to make three glasses slide untouched across a tabletop. Tarkovsky suggests here that, as Monkey appears to have been gifted this ability through her father’s contamination, The Zone has the capacity to evolve mankind, to elevate his senses into the realm of the supernatural. In the presence of miracles, does this bring him closer to God? Or, with miracles manifest and thus the need for faith curtailed, maybe he doesn’t need Him after all.
- Chris
Souls At Zero
Christian and Visual Symbolism in Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker
In terms of cinema, the world of science-fiction invariably conjures up a series of particular, iconic images we have come to associate with the genre: alien landscapes with impossible terrain and tangerine skies; dystopian cities drenched in the permanent rain of a future world; colossal star ships cruising through the ink-black silence of deep space. The sight of three balding Russian men, huddled together in a deserted, flooded room, deep in existential debate, doesn’t seem to be one of them. But this is certainly no ordinary science-fiction movie. We are in the organic, poetic, speculative territory of Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker (1979).
Based on Arkady and Boris Sturgatsky’s novel, Roadside Picnic, Stalker concerns the allegorical journey of three men, Stalker (Alexander Kaidanovsky), Writer (Anatoly Solonitsin) and Scientist (Nikolai Grinko) across a forbidden, industrial landscape (The Zone) towards a location (The Room), said to possess the supernatural ability to grant innermost wishes. Cordoned off and guarded by the state, The Zone is rumoured to be the result of a meteorite strike, which caused a massive, radiation-induced change in the physics and metaphysics of the landscape, although the book attributes the effect to an alien landing.
The backgrounds of the three men appear to have been chosen carefully in order to represent different, opposing fractions of man’s faculty to contemplate. Writer represents the arts, the ability of man to transcend the actuality of his existence. Scientist symbolises man’s need to explore and explain, to rationalise everything in terms of facts and figures. Their guide, Stalker, is an unskilled worker, a non-intellectual who relies on his faith to assess the world. He represents man’s need for a higher understanding, or possibly the way man turns to religion when he has little else to hold his life together.
Having been assigned titles rather than actual names, the trio are representations of sections of society rather than characters. This arrangement ensures their journey through The Zone is replete with philosophical debate and existential conjecture. As their individual character arcs develop, the three men become, by turns, comrades, opponents, foils and disputants. Above all else, their discussions assess their individual need to travel to The Room, and it is within the mechanics of these discussions that the film’s underlying themes are explored, and one theme in particular: that of faith.
A graduate of the Moscow State Film School in 1960, Tarkovsky was a devout member of the Russian Orthodox Church until his death in 1986. He viewed his work as, “…about one thing: the extreme manifestation of faith,” 1 a philosophy apparent in all his work, none more so than Stalker. "Certainly in today's world, which leans so heavily towards the material and the technological, the Church shows no sign of being able to readdress the balance with a call to a spiritual awakening." 2
Clearly, Tarkovsky’s paramount concern was that the state communism of his Marxist homeland was, by extension, a form of extreme spiritual repression. The Soviet government under which Tarkovsky lived was fundamentally atheist. Indeed, prior to Perestroika, it was mandatory for university students to complete a course in ’scientific atheism’, and in excess of fifty thousand priests were either executed or sent to labour camps during the first twenty years of communism.
Turning his back on the thirty-year-old, state-approved, Socialist Realist film movement, which sought to represent the Marxist regime as a unified socialist utopia, Tarkovsky’s response was to invest his films with an intensely personal vision of spirituality and faith. Perhaps inevitably, the Soviet authorities were keen to censor what they viewed as a subversion of the communist agenda. As a consequence, Tarkovsky often struggled against the entire Soviet film system to receive script approval, financing and distribution. In spite of gaining international accolade and awards, his films were not only censored in his homeland, but their releases were delayed, sometimes for years, and also withheld from festivals.
Mosfilm, the biggest and most powerful Soviet film studio, had previously granted Tarkovsky the large budget he required for his epic Andrei Roublev (1966). But when Soviet authorities demanded cuts on the grounds of violence and nudity, and generally found the film too dark, Mosfilm, possibly bowing to state pressure, refused such lavish budgets in the future. 3 The state censors began to insist upon reviewing an advance copy of all scripts prior to filming. By way of response, Tarkovsky altered his work significantly during the filming and editing stages. Stalker was no exception.
Its original script appeared to attack western capitalism, and the United States in particular. But when the completed film was revealed to be a study on the need to place faith above materialism in the search for personal satiety, the Soviet authorities were furious. As symbolised by the characters in Stalker, Tarkovsky saw the Soviet Union as scientific, artistic and literary, but ultimately without faith. Stalker was consequently the last film Tarkovsky would make in the Soviet Union, and he went into exile a few years later.
The depiction of a totalitarian state’s attempts to repress the spiritual needs of the individual, delineated on screen by the military’s cordoning off of The Zone, is perhaps where the roots of Tarkovsky’s exile were sewn. The Room at the centre of The Zone is a clear metaphor for God and freedom, and the barbed wire and armed guards on the edge of The Zone is the state’s way of preventing the common man from reaching it. The Room is where innermost desires are made manifest, where prayers are answered. As faith and belief were the antithesis of Marxist theory, Stalker stated Tarkovsky’s belief that the state was smothering the human need for spirituality.
The question of faith seems to permeate every aspect of Stalker. Each of the three protagonists undergoes a crisis of faith at some point during their journey through The Zone. Writer has no faith in himself as an artist. ”…what hell of a writer am I, if I hate writing?” he asks, “…a painful, shameful occupation…nobody needs me.” Clearly, his very profession dictates he should be faithless, as outlined in: “A man writes because he’s tormented, because he doubts…he has no faith.” Neither has Writer any faith in hard facts, as highlighted in his attack on Scientist’s need to measure and extenuate. “So you decide to pack a knapsack full manometers and other nuts…and put all these miracles to an algebra test.”
In turn, Scientist has no faith in The Room to bring happiness to the world, and believes its powers will eventually be used to corrupt. He lacks faith in mankind as a whole, and harbours a purely rational, cynical view of the needs of individuals. Perhaps he is bound to this form of belief by his experience of witnessing every advance in technology ultimately employed in the pursuit of power and greed, and fears the powers of The Room will be used to similar ends. “But if this thing gets into the wrong hands…” he warns the others. Scientist is Tarkovsky’s personification of the state; unconcerned with spiritual cultivation, merely intent upon a state-run, proletarian system in which the individual contributes labour in return for ignorance of the divine.
Stalker’s lack of faith lies with himself and his place in the world. He feels his only worth is to act as a guide to those without hope who wish to visit The Zone. When near The Room, he confesses, “my happiness, my freedom, my self-respect, it’s all here.” The Zone is his salvation. Stalker is the personification of someone who has forsaken the state system, and can only find wellbeing in the face of God. He states the only people The Zone will allow near The Room are those without hope. I feel Tarkovsky’s statement here is that when worn down by the system, when stripped of all hope by the systematic oppression of the state, people will eventually turn to God. But Stalker fears the state may be too strong, and that if communism completely eradicates the need for God, he will be stripped of the only occupation of which he feels worthy. “And nobody believes,” he complains. “Who am I going to take there?”
The Zone appears to induce a sense of self-loathing and introspection in those who travel within it, eroding all trace of egotism and selfishness so it can clearly see the innermost wishes of those who near The Room.
Perhaps an image placed ominously at the start of their excursion into The Zone should have made the three men further heed the significance of their journey. As they stand at the border of the cryptic, green landscape ahead of them, the area is marked by ruined, leaning telegraph poles, poignantly and unmistakably shaped like crosses. The ultimate sign of personal, physical and spiritual sacrifice, the crosses foreshadow the journey ahead. Indeed, the entire sojourn can be seen as a life-altering journey through the conscience of the three men. The more they explore and discover the landscape, the more they explore and examine their own brittle psyches.
Here perhaps lies the great irony of Stalker, in that after their long, tiring trek through The Zone, the three men become hesitant as they stand at the threshold of The Room. Perhaps suddenly fearful of what it holds for them, Stalker, Writer and Scientist never enter The Room, but appear content to arrive at some form of nihilistic impasse, and instead sit huddled in the dirt to witness a glorious rainfall from an indoor ceiling. Writer and Scientist have proved themselves men without faith, and so now, at the very moment when The Room can grant them their deepest desires, their humility prevents them from risking being proved wrong. “In short, they can’t, at bottom, summon up the life-and-death sincerity which converts desire into fruition.” 4 Instead of lifting the veil to see the face of God, they would rather remain in darkness; faithless and ignorant, but at least never having witnessed the means to believe otherwise. Tarkovsky’s point here is that perhaps there are no answers to be found in faith, no concrete resolutions or revelations in the search for God, only fulfilment in the search itself.
Stalker himself isn’t burdened like Writer and Scientist, isn’t bound by the constraints which keep faith uncomfortably at arm’s length for them. He has no academic qualifications, no great intellectual grounding in the arts. He is a simple man, a weak man; his soul hasn’t been hardened by the certainty of science and knowledge. “When a man is just born, he is weak and flexible,” he says. “When he dies, he is hard and insensitive…hardness and strength are death’s companions. Pliancy and weakness are expressions of the freshness of being. Because what has hardened will never win.” Stalker feels that belief is power, and that instead of being hardened to its influence, the ability to be open and welcoming to faith and belief means only his prayers can be answered. We feel he is the only one of the trio with sufficient faith to step inside The Room, articulated by one simple sentence of his: “You have to believe.”
But perhaps the biggest act of faith results from the film’s complete lack of dramatic irony. Stalker claims The Zone is a dangerous territory, subject to constant change, and navigating it is extremely hazardous. But apart from the sudden disappearance of a bird in one of the latter scenes, we never witness any outward confirmation of its supernatural capabilities. As an audience, we are spared any advance views of The Room that will signal their journey’s end. We only have Stalker’s word that it even exists. As a consequence, we remain as ignorant as Writer and Scientist to their destination, as blind as they on their journey of discovery. The Zone we see is a series of lush fields, decaying buildings and rusted industrial debris. The Zone in which we are required to believe is a conscious, living landscape; attentive and aware. It is a leap of faith made easier through Tarkovsky’s meticulous use of camera movement, sound, script and production design, allowing us to sense beyond the landscape we see and hear, to the one we suspect.
Tarkovsky’s combination of monochrome and colour also serves to highlight certain narrative conceits within the film. The early scenes set outside The Zone are depicted in sombre black and white; dark, oppressive and devoid of beauty, a world to escape from. But when the three men arrive on the edge of The Zone, the landscape’s sudden rendering in colour hints at the hope and possibilities ahead of them. And at the film’s climax, when the men have returned to the outside world, black and white is used again, emphasising they have returned empty-handed into hopelessness. This dichotomy between the light and dark of the world signifies the twin extremes of salvation and ignorance.
The trip through The Zone is one where Tarkovsky hints that the natural world created by God is indiscriminate, and will eventually overcome any intrusions by the materialistic world. The landscape of The Zone is littered with the remains of a militaristic and technological past. Early in their journey, the men encounter a group of abandoned tanks, overgrown with grass and moss; a military outpost smothered by the progress of nature. Every building they pass through or inhabit is decayed beyond repair, every field they navigate their way across is strewn with machinery half-hidden in the grass. Possessions are rendered useless and obsolete in The Zone, highlighted by the many slow camera movements across the surface of flooded interiors and streams. Coins, hypodermic needles, religious icons, guns, a calendar, machinery components and ceramics are seen submerged in the water, rusting into obscurity; symbolic of all things beginning and ending in water. In keeping with Tarkovsky’s world view, these objects represent materialism, rendered useless outside the context of everyday circulation, and ultimately discarded in the search for God.
Water acts as an important, recurring theme throughout the entire film, symbolic of thirst, baptism and purity. Barely a scene goes by without its presence. As part of their journey, the men encounter waterfalls, rivers, streams, flooded interiors and tunnels, pools, indoor rain and dripping roofs. They each walk chest-deep through water without any sign of needing to dry themselves, a purification as they near the threshold of The Room.
The many images of items submerged in water also hint at the dangers of pollution, and many critics have drawn a stark parallel between The Zone and the threat of nuclear contamination. Stalker was made seven years or so before the 1986 nuclear disaster at Chernobyl, though rumours of a smaller disaster in the 1960’s, covered up the state, sparked debate about the origin and warnings of Tarkovsky’s The Zone. Indeed, a zone similar to that in Stalker has long been established around the former nuclear facility in Chernobyl. Its radiation-polluted atmosphere, altering the physics of the environment, mirrors that in Stalker.
A chilling premonition of disaster is narrated over one of the sequences showing the polluted water; a Biblical prophecy from Revelation 8:7-11. It prophesises in verse the falling of a great star from the sky, Wormwood, causing catastrophe on a global scale. A third of the earth will be burned, the seas will turn to blood, a third of creatures will die, and poisoned water will kill a great many people. The literal Russian translation of the word Wormwood is Chernobyl.
The very fact that The Zone is a vast, environmental disaster is seen in Stalker’s daughter, Monkey, unable to walk because of her father’s repeated exposure to The Zone’s polluted environment. Throughout the journey, we suspect Stalker’s innermost wish is to cure Monkey. At the end of the film, it seems he has succeeded. We see a close-up of Monkey’s face, apparently walking with her parents. But as the camera pulls away, Monkey is revealed to be sitting on her father’s shoulders, as crippled as ever. We recall how we never actually saw Stalker enter The Room. Indeed, we remember him saying to Writer at its threshold how guides should never enter The Zone or The Room with an ulterior motive. This is reinforced by the tale of Porcupine, a guide who had accidentally caused his brother’s death. Porcupine had entered The Room in the hope of being granted his wish that his brother return back to life. But on his return home, he found a far deeper wish had been granted, resulting in great wealth. With his remorse too great to bear, Porcupine hanged himself. Stalker has clearly learned the morality of this tale. He could have entered The Room to pray for Monkey’s cure, but was ultimately fearful it might recognise a deeper desire within him.
Monkey is, however, the only person seen in colour in the world outside The Zone, suggesting she is the signal for a future generation of hope. This proposal is stressed by the film’s enigmatic closing scene, in which Monkey apparently uses telekinesis to make three glasses slide untouched across a tabletop. Tarkovsky suggests here that, as Monkey appears to have been gifted this ability through her father’s contamination, The Zone has the capacity to evolve mankind, to elevate his senses into the realm of the supernatural. In the presence of miracles, does this bring him closer to God? Or, with miracles manifest and thus the need for faith curtailed, maybe he doesn’t need Him after all.