STALKER THROWS ONE of the bandage-trailing nuts to indicate the route they must take. The three figures make their way towards moss-covered, rusting tanks, troop carriers and artillery pieces. All of this is observed, roughly, from the window of the burned-out vehicle with the charred figures hunched over the machine gun. Is theirs the consciousness implied by the camera’s silent watching and waiting?22 Is the Zone a place where the dead retain their ability to observe and to see, a consciousness absorbed by the twitching vegetation it apprehends?
One by one they disappear from view into a dip, first Professor, then Writer, finally Stalker himself. We see, for the first time, that Stalker was right: there really is no one here, not a soul, only this graveyard of long-abandoned matériel, rotting in the grass, in the open air, just that and the breeze and the vegetation twitching in the breeze, watched and watching.
A LONGISH SHOT of the three of them, framed by trees, plants, foliage, heading towards us, towards the place they’re heading. For the first time they seem not exactly dwarfed but diminished by their surroundings. The woody sound of a cuckoo, which might be a wood pigeon. Stalker throws another nut. As a method of route-finding this nut-thro wing is a bit puzzling. The suggestion is that they are at the mercy of the nut itself, of where it happens to land, as a gambler’s fate is decided by where the ball ends up on a roulette wheel. But unless Stalker is a complete klutz, the nuts always land within a few feet of where he intends them to, so there’s nothing random about the route. Maybe this is part of Stalker’s skill and vocation: reading the landscape, seeing the signs inscribed invisibly within it — like an old woman divining a future only she can see in the pattern of tea leaves in a cup — working out where to go and throwing the nuts as temporary signposts, signposts that are good for one journey only. Stalker said that Porcupine was the teacher who opened his eyes — opened them, presumably, to the mythic significance of certain places and landmarks, to the events that are indistinguishable from the places where they occurred. When did they occur? They occurred here, and here, and here. While Stalker went off on his own to commune with the Zone, Professor told Writer that the meteorite — which may not have been a meteorite — landed about twenty years ago but Stalker’s sense of what happened can’t be expressed or measured in these units. The story of the Zone, for him, is like Aboriginal Dreamtime: not a set of events that took place in the over-and-done-with past, but lurking in the permadepths of the present.
Other than the nut-throwing not much is happening. Except the camera is closing in, so slowly and so slightly it makes almost no difference, other than to alert us— even if only subliminally — to the fact that something is always either happening or is about to happen or might happen. The Zone is a place — a state — of heightened alertness to everything. The tiniest movement makes a difference. Any deviation from the route indicated by the chucked nuts, Stalker claims, is dangerous. Stalker here is using the word route in precisely the opposite sense of Milan Kundera in Immortality. For Kundera a route ‘has no meaning in itself; its meaning derives entirely from the two points that it connects.’ Whereas a road is ‘a tribute to space’, a route is ‘the triumphant devaluation of space.’ Kundera is using the word route in the sense of route map (which is actually a map of roads in the sense of highways). The route through the Zone is nothing if not a tribute to space. Be that as it may, Writer, having been initially fearful, is getting fed up with Stalker’s nutchucking idea of route planning. He might be Russian but he is the embodiment of a distinctly English attitude: fuck this for a game of soldiers! Why can’t we go straight to the Room? We could be there in a few minutes. In other words he’s impatient with the route precisely because it is not a route in Kundera’s sense. It’s dangerous, Stalker says again. Actually, the main danger seems to be coming from Stalker himself. When Writer starts idly tugging on a tree, vandalizing the place, Stalker (who, let’s not forget, had himself damaged a telegraph pole just a few minutes earlier) chucks a weighty metal tube at his head for being flippant.
After this little set-to Writer, naturally enough, is in need of a drink. Stalker, uncharacteristically, seems to want one himself. Writer hands him the bottle but any hopes he may have entertained that Stalker will take a slug, that this might after all turn out to be a pedestrian equivalent of a booze cruise, prove short-lived. The mood of buoyant optimism that animated Stalker after his solitary walk proves almost as short-lived; his face has reverted to its default look of profound dismay, of generalized and specific woe. Stalker pours away the contents of the bottle, a gesture that could also be construed as some kind ofpuja: making an offering to the gods of the Zone, wetting their whistles.
Undeterred, Writer insists on going straight ahead, at his own risk, with or without a drink. The Room looks even nearer than previously thought: about fifty yards? He strides ahead confidently enough but, when the camera jumps in close, right up to the back of his head, he seems to be moving with considerable trepidation. In its way it’s a terrific bit of acting on Solonitsyn’s part: rarely has the back of someone’s bald head expressed such a rich combination of bravado — I said I’d go, so I’ll keep going! — and naked dread.23
Stalker has felt the wind picking up but it is only when Writer is seen from the front, making his hesitant way forwards, that we become aware of this wind. The branches sway and bend more deeply. The breeze is becoming a sudden gale. We have seen this wind before, near the beginning of Mirror, sweeping past the same actor, stopping him in his tracks as he walks away from the woman he has just met, sitting on a fence. Already sentient, the landscape becomes suddenly animate. Writer insists that the landscape amounts to no more than its physical features, which are susceptible to empirical measurement and conscious calculation — that from here to there can only take so long. At this moment the movement of wind through the trees shows the unconscious making itself felt, becoming visible, staking its claim. There is an abrupt accumulation of noise, the flap of birds’ wings. A voice orders, Stop! Don’t move! and the camera withdraws, sniper-like, more deeply into the building. Whose order was this? Writer comes scurrying back like a whupped dog, demanding to know who told him to stop. Stalker? No. Professor? Not him either. It’s your own fear, Professor tells him. You’re too frightened to go on so you invent a voice telling you to stop. That sounds about right, but the thing about the Zone is that it’s always subtly reconfiguring itself according to your thoughts and expectations. You want it to seem ordinary? It’s ordinary — or is it? And at that moment something occurs to make you think maybe it’s not ordinary, whereupon it does something briefly extraordinary. (Or does it?) Whereupon it becomes quite ordinary again. The Zone manifests itself even as it withholds itself — and vice versa.24