Stalker. Tarkovsky 1979:

Perhaps inevitably after watching Made in Abyss, I got around to watching Stalker, which I had already downloaded. Tarkovsky’s films have a reputation for being esoteric to a fault, which is true of the other Tarkovsky film I’ve seen, his earlier Solaris adaptation of a Stanislaw Lem novel, but I think that this reputation is unearned for Stalker which struck me as perfectly comprehensible—ironically, Tarkovsky’s Stalker (ostensibly an adaptation of the Strugatsky brothers’ novel) is in some ways more faithful to Stanislaw Lem than his actual Lem adaptation. Specifically, it reflects the spirit of His Master’s Voice, with shades of Dostoevsky’s “The Grand Inquisitor”.

As I take it, the Zone, like the planet Solaris, is an alien intelligence creating an environment reflecting the humans exploring it; those who are flexible, responsive to the world, present in the moment, survive the Zone, avoiding traps, while the thoughtless and violent and inflexible are destroyed by the Zone reifying their mind. The ‘Room’ at the center of the Zone is a gift from the aliens (stand-ins for God) and does in fact reveal & grant visitors’ innermost wishes; but unfortunately, as the Writer deduces, the futility of knowledge is exposed by this: the gift of self-knowledge is, like freedom, a poisoned chalice for all the humans who drink it. The knowledge, like that of His Master’s Voice, is a mirror which reveals too much and is either useless or self-destructive. The Writer therefore refuses to enter. All humans are fallen, including the ‘louse’ of the Stalker protagonist, who though a louse is a Jesus-like figure sacrificing himself to guide humans to the Room in the hope that some human can prove to have the basic decency to withstand self-knowledge and benefit from their wish being granted; he therefore must refrain from entering. Finally, the Physicist sought to destroy the Room to prevent an evil person from being empowered by it or a good person destabilizing the world, but concludes that his mission was unnecessary, as evil people would be destroyed by the Room and there are no good people who might enter it, and discards the hidden atomic bomb; naturally, he does not enter either. At the end, the Stalker is left in despair: his mission to humanity is a failure, as the 2 great representatives of the Russian intelligentsia have both failed the test of the Room and not just that, like the Grand Inquisitor of Jesus, concluded there is not even any need to interfere with the Stalker or destroy the Room. (The connection to “The Grand Inquisitor”, curiously, doesn’t seem to have been made in English film studies, although inquiring, apparently it’s widely noted in Russian sources including by Tarkovsky himself.) The world is, as the Writer complains in his opening monologue, a boring bland tissue of lies, a world where UFOs or ESP do not and cannot exist, with the only exception being the walled-off Zone, an irruption of outside context into ‘normality’; the Stalker’s mission having failed, and having always been doomed, it seems that we are left with bleak nihilism—except that the Stalker’s daughter, mutated by severe birth defects in her legs, demonstrates in a closing scene a secret ability to telekinetically move objects. A ray of hope appears: the stasis may yet be broken by a (divine?) intervention.

The sets are disturbingly realistic, eerily portentous—how striking that final room of sand dunes—and one wonders how such an extraordinarily convincing environment, with so much filth & rubbish and decaying buildings and infrastructure could’ve been constructed by Tarkovsky for the 3 actors to splash and stumble their way through the waste, so reminiscent of the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone (I couldn’t help but notice how Stalker is bracketed by shots of nuclear-style cooling towers, though of course it could not be a Chernobyl reference as that did not happen for another 7 years & I doubt Tarkovsky would’ve been permitted much less funded if it had happened already); it is all the more disturbing when one recalls that this was filmed in the old USSR, which was one continuous country-wide environmental disaster zone. It turns out that the sets are so realistic because it was a chemical plant disaster zone and the ‘special effects’ like ‘snow’ were god-knows-what horrors, and many people involved, like Tarkovsky himself (at age 54 barely 7 years later), died young of cancers. While actors sometimes undergo considerable danger for their craft, it’s hard to think of examples as extreme as Stalker, and there is something eerily appropriate about that and the fact that the movie had to be filmed twice (a film lab destroyed the first version).

One’s overall assessment of Stalker will depend on how much one is willing to indulge Tarkovsky’s almost 3-hour running time, extremely slow pace (you’ll be staring at closeups of ears for what must be 10 minutes in the rail-car ride sequence into the Zone which particularly tried my patience), taste for ruin porn & all-too-real toxic sludge, and a cinematography-oriented way of expressing the plot & theme as I summarized it above.