Andrei Tarkovsky once said, “It is a mistake to talk about the artist looking for his subject. In fact, the subject grows within him like a fruit and begins to demand expression. It is like childbirth.” This means that art springs from somewhere other than the controlling elements of the conscious, rational mind. In such a realm, film often reflects slow meditation minus tranquility.
In Stalker, a man dedicates his life to guiding others through perilous environments. Against his wife’s wishes, he navigates a professor and writer across a post-apocalyptic landscape. Their names are “Stalker,” “Professor,” and “Writer,” nothing more. The three men creep through a sepia-toned industrial wasteland, breach a guarded barrier, and escape into a colorized region called the “Zone.” We are told that the Zone functions as a dangerous, even deadly, entity to those who enter it. The film’s opening credits include these lines: “One way or another, our small country has seen the birth of a miracle – the Zone. We immediately sent troops there. They haven’t come back.”
Yet this mysterious otherworld also harbors a place called “the Room” that can supposedly fulfill anyone’s innermost desires. Writer wishes to find greater artistic motivation. Professor claims he wants to research the Zone in order to earn a Nobel Prize. Later, the men learn that Professor wants to blow up the Room with a nuclear device in order to prevent it from falling into evil hands. Stalker, it seems, lives to serve others by guiding people to the Room. The men quarrel along the way. Professor and Writer spend a fair amount of time attacking each others’ characters, motivations, and philosophical positions. Then, the three assault each other when Professor reveals his true intentions. The film ends back at Stalker’s house on a mysterious closing note.
Tarkovsky channels dreams in the guise of film. In Stalker, plot and action seem nearly incidental. More than anything else, they serve as a loose frame for subconscious expression. Each scene advances slowly, haltingly, offering barely enough cinematic shape to capture something just beyond conscious reach. The effect can be both maddening and startling. Very little conventionally engaging action happens throughout a series of long takes in a film that runs 163 minutes.
Still, it’s easy to puzzle over each moment, absorbing as much as possible without ever being certain why. Viewers must engraft their own impressions onto this oneiric place to create meaning, which makes for illimitable possibilities. Stalker says the Zone’s dangers are invisible. For unknown reasons, the men must take a circuitous path to reach the Room. Professor turns back at one point, leaving Stalker and Writer to move forward. Yet when they arrive at a building nearer the Room, Professor is already there. No one seems to know how this happened. Why Professor disassembles his bomb is unclear. Once the three men reach the doorway next to the Room, they choose not to enter. And at the end of the film, does Stalker’s daughter push three bottles psychokinetically across a table? Tarkovsky leaves these ambiguities up to his audience to decide.
We can draw at least a few stable conclusions from the film’s dream motif. First, the Zone’s behavior undermines wish fulfillment. None of the three men achieve their wish, at least so far as we know. Perhaps more telling, Stalker mentions a previous stalker named “Porcupine” who led his brother to death, entered the Room, became rich later, and then hanged himself. This outcome subverts the very nature of the wish and implies that innermost desires are unachievable in the subconscious realm. Even the setting contributes to this theme. The ground is always uneven, thick with vegetation, or strewn with debris. Everything is dank and wet. In nearly every way, difficulty and uncertainty prevail.
Tarkovsky also deconstructs the notion of meaningful archetypes. The three main characters’ names are synecdoches that imply archetypal significance, yet along the way, the men discover the pointlessness of their symbolic purpose. If the Zone frames a dream dimension, then subconscious identity expressing itself from some undisclosed source will, by default, be non-linear and often unfathomable. The Quest, the film’s primary archetype, ends in bitter failure for everyone, and none of the men seem heroic in the traditional sense. Writer says it best upon accepting a hard truth:
There’s no such thing as facts, especially here. All this is someone’s idiotic invention. Don’t you feel it? And you, of course, must find out whose invention it is. But why? What good can your knowledge do? Who’s going to feel pangs of conscience? Me? I’ve got no conscience, only nerves. Some bastard criticizes me – I get wounded. Another one praises me – one more wound. I put my soul into it, I put my heart into it – they gobble up both my soul and my heart. I remove the filth from my soul – they gobble that up, too. They’re all so literate. They all have sensory deficiency. They’re all swarming around: journalists, editors, critics, endless women. And they all demand, “More! More!”
What the hell am I a writer for if I hate to write? It’s constant torment for me, a sickening, shameful occupation, like squeezing out hemorrhoids. I used to think someone would get better because of my books. No, nobody needs me. Two days after I die, they’ll start gobbling up someone else. I wanted to change them, but it was they who changed me, making me in their own image. The future used to be just a continuation of the present, and all the changes loomed far beyond the horizon. Now the future and present are one. Are they ready for that? They don’t want to know anything. They only know how to devour!
Dreams inform us precisely because they come from somewhere the rational mind doesn’t expect. Some choose to reduce them to a portion of the brain offering corrective advice to the waking mind. Others see dreams as desire fulfilled through safe, plausible means. And so on. Tarkovsky’s films take us into an inner sanctum where, after a certain point, phenomena we’ll never fully understand lead us into a state of uncertainty and doubt “without any irritable reaching after fact & reason,” as Keats mentions in explaining Shakespeare’s genius to his brothers. We arrive at a place familiar and strange, unsettling and mesmerizing. As Writer says, “We dream of one thing, but we get quite another.”
