"Stalker" (1979) Review + Analysis
It’s the beginning of the new year, which means there aren’t many new films I’m interested in reviewing out at the moment. In the meantime, I’d like to take opportunities like this to use Topline to discuss other films I’m watching, films I love that are new to me but not the world. These “Classic Reviews” won’t interrupt or take precedent over new film reviews I want to write, but will be a nice break from the need to chronically be up to date with each new release. I hope this is a welcome addition to this site; it’s a lengthy piece, but one I really enjoyed on Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker, and I would love to do more in the future.
While not nearly his most widely influential film (that honor goes to Solaris), Stalker is undoubtedly Andrei Tarkovsky’s science fiction masterpiece.
My journey to this film has been a long one. I first heard of it from a friend, Tyler, shortly after watching watching Solaris for the first time about a year and a half ago. I love Solaris and think its nearly perfect, but Tyler told me to just wait until I saw Stalker.
And so I did, about a month or two, until I sat down to watch. However, I’m a procrastinator and insomniac so my viewing likely began past 1 am and I fell asleep. This would be the first of three times I would make this mistake, not giving Stalker the time and energy it obviously required of me to get a full watch through. A little of a year out from Solaris, I decided if I was going to finally watch Stalker from beginning to end, I was going to do it right. To me, this meant starting at Arkady and Boris Strugatsky’s Roadside Picnic, the novella on which the film is based. I would read the text, have prior investment and understanding on the inspirational text, and watch the film fully primed (and at an appropriate hour).
I finished reading Roadside Picnic sometime in June or July of last year. I was sure I loved it, but wasn’t sure what it meant. The structure was unconventional, and I appreciated the worldly context it gives in addition to the fascinating story, but I struggled to glean anything particularly meaningful from the text. It’s also unabashedly and unsurprisingly very Russian, and it was clear there were Soviet cultural and historical elements I was not going to connect to without additional knowledge and research. I was left excited but concerned. Is the world of Roadside Picnic, and by extension Stalker, pure dour fancy without anything subtext for me to sink my teeth into, at least not that I was ready to grasp at the time? Subconsciously, I put it off even further.
Now, six months later, I come to the film completely removed from my planned journey but back at where I began, albeit from an unexpected angle: Soderbergh. Specifically, Stephen Soderbergh’s 2002 remake of Solaris, which I watched a few days ago. You can read my thoughts on why it doesn’t work in my Letterboxd review, but it assuredly does not, at least for me. It left a hollow feeling in my little film gut, watching a filmmaker I think is wildly talented like Soderbergh fail to channel or reinvent the mastery of an all time great like Tarkovsky. And so the only way to fill this hole, I thought, was to go to the source. It was time to watch Stalker. (fully caffeinated at 8 pm)
What immediately struck me about the film is how beautiful it is, even within the stale yellow haze covering everything. Every shot is deliberately slow, orchestrated to perfection, never crossing over or landing on something it doesn’t want you to fully absorb, and expertly utilizing set design and staging to create powerful in shot framing. Additionally, it’s much more contained than its source material. Gone are the chapters of fictional interviews about The Zone phenomena, and expositional moments in which we meet characters from all the relevant factions. While we do get a brief excerpt from the interview with which Roadside Picnic begins, all we truly know is that whatever the Zone is, it’s so important to our central character that he is willing to eschew his familial obligations to venture into it (with some relatively obnoxious tagalongs). The power of the city around the Stalker and his family is unavoidable, as well, with the passing trains constantly rattling their apartment, nearly knocking a glass of water off a bedside stool. And yet, I was still unsure of where Tarkovsky was taking me, once again faced with a scenario I find fascinating but lacking something to latch onto.
And then, 40 minutes in, enter The Zone. Gone is the suffocating atmosphere of cramped, industrial Russia, we’ve arrived in the colorful, breezy open air. It’s here that the first glimpse of the film’s core is revealed, a contrast of the noisy, grimy nature of our protagonists’ home and the natural beauty of a land they find so threatening. However, its not until 2 hours later, full of winding philosophical conversations, tense confrontations, and thoughtful silence later, at the films conclusion, that its true topic of interest is made abundantly clear: loss of faith in an industrialized world. Faith in what? Well, anything, but let’s take a look at a few possibilities.
The film is clearly engaging with some ecological themes, especially in its first half. Before entering The Zone, the industrial world is everywhere. passing trains wake you up and rattle every inch of your home, the air is so thick with pollution it turns the world monochrome, and The Zone is protected by armed guards and barbed wire fences. The dominating innovation of man is everywhere, choking out anything that was once there in its place. However, upon entering The Zone we see the folly and impermanence of it all. In one freak event it’s all rendered useless. Where homes, businesses, and factories once stood, nature has once again taken hold. Moss covers the barely noticeable remains of civilization, water flowing through once occupied structures and the rare animal having taken up residence. Tarkovsky is known for his molasses-slow pacing and long uncut takes, an element of his filmmaking that works exceptionally well here as the audience is able to slowly digest The Zone’s vast landscape. While The Zone doesn’t act naturally as we expect the world to, its an exaggeration of the untamable, adaptable essence nature as we know it possesses. Our failure to cope with this fact, and our attempts to overpower the literal forces of nature, reveal our first loss of faith, our faith in nature.
If one wanted to read The Zone slightly differently, as a man made catastrophe brought on by overreaching industrialism, this works as well. While it took place fifteen years after Roadside Picnic’s writing and seven years after Stalker’s release, parallels between The Zone and the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone are easy to draw. As man’s industrial ambitions grow more and more unwieldy, we inevitably lose control and are the makers of our own demise, leaving behind ruins of our own design. While it’s fairly clear The Zone is not directly nor indirectly human made, it is rumored in both the novella and film to come from a far superior alien society, meaning the text still supports the idea of sentient life manifesting its own downfall. The film itself seems to strike a balance with control over and coexisting with nature, many moments of natural wonder leaving me wondering if it was a lucky shot or if Tarkovsky is just masterfully manipulating it all. As the titular Stalker says, quoting ancient Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu, “hardness and strength are death’s companions. Flexibility and softness are the embodiment of life.”
Stalker also explicitly engages with the idea religious faith, regardless of my or any other viewer’s personal feelings about religion (it doesn’t get more obvious than a Bible verse and a crown of thorns). In an industrial and capitalist society, it’s drilled into man that we must forge our own way, that to attain happiness he must accrue wealth and succeed by his own hard fought merit. However, as is the case with not just Christianity but most widely practiced monotheistic religions, the religious are taught that one must only have faith in God to lead a full life, and that material wealth is a distraction from this bliss. In this way, The Zone and the wish fulfilling room The Zone’s end are nearly a God-like entity, fulfilling one’s innermost needs if they can faithfully make the journey and pass the room’s threshold.
Continuing with this metaphor, the Stalker then becomes a messianic figure, a messenger to and deliverer for the people of God. He sees his relationship to The Zone like this, but not in a self centered manner. Out of respect for the power of The Zone and a love for the people that surround him, he forgoes all other responsibility in order to connect people with The Zone, taking pleasure in it while never taking The Zone’s gift for himself. The Stalker’s journey through The Zone, then, is to be interpreted as Jesus carrying the cross or Muhammad’s Hajj, a burden to bear and an example to set for the rest of God’s followers. However, in the same way religious corruption becomes more rampant in the modernized, capitalist world, the Writer (played by Anatoliy Solonitsyn giving the the films best performance) cannot accept that the Stalker makes this journey out of the goodness of his heart but for selfish profit motives. Thus, the Writer’s cynicism towards the “prophet’s” purpose and his wish to not be the cause of another man’s material success results in a rejection of God/The Zone altogether, his loss of faith.
This also ties in with our final loss of faith, our faith in each other and humanity. This is most clearly explored through our third protagonist, the Professor. Near the end of Stalker, the Professor has multiple prolonged diatribes about his fear that the power of The Zone fall into the wrong hands, and what those hands might do with it, culminating in an attempt to bomb the room. He gives repeated warning about the possibility of dictators, corporate leaders, and the scum of the earth bending reality to their whim. However, as is subtly alluded to and the Writer correctly assumes, it isn’t just evildoers he wants to keep away from The Zone, but anybody who may benefit scientifically from it if he can’t first. If he can’t be the scientific benefactor of The Zone and be lauded for his efforts, nobody else should be.
The Writer, while calling out the Professor for this, is not excluded from his lack of faith in humanity, either. His career as an author is not driven by passion, but by a need to rise above the driveling masses and the need to convince others of his genius. We see this self importance on display in a wonderful Soviet-era example of mansplaining in which the Writer breaks down all of reality for some unwitting woman he’s attracted. As he tells the Professor in the bar, “if my books aren’t being read in 100 years, why bother to write?” On top of this, the Writer’s doubts about humanity aren’t limited to others; they’re internalized. His writing is not just meant to convince others of his intellect, but himself, as he has so little faith in his own humanity that he fears the room will make him content in his genius and cease writing entirely. Stalker’s examination of our lost faith in humanity not only encompasses humanity as a whole, but our faith in individuals and ourselves.
After nearly three hours, Stalker can feel beautiful yet desperately hopeless, an expertly crafted and performed work of art that leaves you with less faith than when you came to it. Humanity is too far gone from faith of any kind, lost in a world of material wealth and ever-expanding industrial gains, with nature’s spiteful endurance as our only respite. Tarkovsky doesn’t give up just yet though, and his films ends with a small glimmer of hope. After baring his soul to his wife and verging on losing his own faith, Tarkovsky cuts to Monkey, the Stalker’s daughter. We hear the familiar rumble of the train tracks, and the familiar shifting of glasses across the table. However, it’s not the power of the city or industry moving the glasses now, but of Monkey. Earlier in the film it’s suggested that her father’s exposure to The Zone has caused him to pass on some unclear physical malady, rendering her paraplegic. However, this connection to The Zone seems more fundamental, as if she has been granted abilities akin to the physics of The Zone, a living extension of all it stands for. Via Monkey (a suddenly appropriate name for the symbolic hope of mankind) Tarkovsky is reassuring us that no matter how little faith in anything may remain in the world, faith lives on through the faithful, no matter how small in number.
My experience with Stalker was a fairly profound one; it’s not often you get the rush of realizing you’re watching one of your new favorite films. While I don’t claim to completely understand it and admit its presentational ambiguity leaves room for vastly different interpretations than mine, it’s clearly a film made with abundant thought and care, and whose ambiguity is a feature not a fault.