Stalker (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1979)
Do you know yourself; would you even want to?
Second Tartovsky restoration of the year and I remain unmoved. No doubt a dense text but not nearly as inaccessible as Solaris. Although I predict that like I'll like Solaris a lot more on my second watch.
At first glance the decision to shoot this sans any discernible special effects reads like an attempt to ground the whole thing as a more earthly metaphor for soviet russia. The true dream of worker-led country quashed, under the weight of military and bureaucracy.
But more than that it lends a comic touch. Clearly the major theme here is the dialectic between art, reason and faith. The fact that the zone is a space demanding exploration, imagination and most of all, ritual suggests that the zone is not so much the alien technoworld as the source text indicates but a sort of temple both metaphorical and real. The priest guiding its skeptics using a nut and handkerchief feels equal parts mystic and comic. And yet Pascal's wager: you'd rather believe in the devil, even as a concession, than risk not for eternal rot. Quite a thing to suggest in a country that is slavishly atheist almost with a sort of Christian fervour.
At times I wondered if 'the zone' was more about the process of writing itself. 'One must have discipline' the Stalker yells only for him to later entertain ideas of luck and hope. All this corresponding to my painful past experiences of writing anything, me oscillating between rule and whim.
But the zone is presented as a room where one's deepest desires come true. Not the desire articulated, but the desire deep seated. And as the stalker, professor and writer tiptoe their way to the inner sanctum the film litigates the very nature of these latent desires and rooted beliefs. That the three eventually choose to not go into the room suggests that none dare to confront what they truly want, what they truly are. It also represents a cheap pyrrhic victory asserting their belief in the struggles of the material world as an end in itself as opposed to surrendering agency to their base impulses. But the cynic in me reads this as cowardice. Not because I would dare confront myself: fuck no I still tremble before my therapist. But because it represents the victory of the state. That citizens under authoritarian rule even when confronted with a blank slate to construct a utopia might in fact look away, or wish for the very paternalistic guiding hand to allay their fears of the unknown.
The parting shot (well, not exactly) of the Stalker and his family standing in front of the nuclear reactor feels especially prescient considering this film was released a mere six years before the Chernobyl disaster. There's a whole other reading of this film in light of that particular event.
Thinking about all this is real fun. The film is a skeletal structure upon which one may hang their interpretations. But watching this was, in parts, a real chore. It's not that I'm unused to a slow pace or a ponderous plot. In fact I love movies that wash over me. It's the pedantic writing. I don't mind if a movie a. goads me b. pities me (preferred) or even c. scolds me. But fuck I cannot stand to be lectured at. And a lot of the dialogue here is simply high-school psych class level spoken as though it was some philosophical treatise. I think Tartovsky makes splendid images and his pictures are indeed worth a thousand words but his words are worth far, far less.