One thing’s for sure: the Zone has comprehensively disabused Writer of Kundera’s distinction between ‘the world of routes’ and ‘the world of roads and paths [where] beauty is continuous and constantly changing; it tells us at every step: “Stop!”’
Stalker says he has no idea what goes on in the Zone when there’s no one here; but as soon as people enter it the Zone becomes a system of traps. (One of the big unanswerables: what is the Zone like when there is no one here to witness it, to bring it to life, to consciousness? I was going to ask, rhetorically, if the Zone even existed in the absence of visitors, but one of Tarkovsky’s technical preferences suggests that the answer would be yes. The characters are all the time stepping into shot, into an already established frame: screen and Zone are there waiting for them, watched and waiting.) Stalker puts the emphasis on what we want from the Zone, on the needs it answers. But there is always the latent, unasked question of what the Zone needs from the people who come to it, from us. What use is a miracle if there is no one there to witness it?
Everything that happens depends on us, says Stalker. The relationship between pilgrims — even the most sceptical or outright cynical, even those who don’t consider themselves pilgrims — and the Zone is absolutely recipro-cal. To be in the Zone is to be part of the Zone. It may be impossible to tell whether a given action is initiated by people or place but the feeling that the Zone is an active participant in whatever occurs becomes increasingly tangible. Stalker is framed against a green so dark it is almost black — what Conrad, with his irresistible urge to overegg any and all puddings, would have called an impenetrable darkness. This darkness makes Stalker’s face and blue eyes burn more brightly as he speaks. With what? With the intensity of his belief, but also — and it is this which distinguishes him from jihadists and born-again Christians — with the intensity of his despair. The Zone is not simply a source of solace, the heart of Marx’s heartless world, it is a source of torment, a system of traps that constantly tests, teases and threatens not just his clients but Stalker himself. No one is immune to the capriciousness of the Zone. And another thing, too, separates him from the jihadists. One of Tarkovsky’s strengths as an artist is the amount of space he leaves for doubt. In Grizzly Man, Werner Herzog looks into the eyes of the bears caught on film by Timothy Treadwell and decides that the chief characteristic of the universe — or ‘the jungley’ as he metonymically termed it in Burden of Dreams—is ‘overwhelming indifference’. For Tarkovsky the artist, despite his Russian Orthodox Christian faith, despite his insistence that the epic scenery of Utah and Arizona could only have been created by god, it is an almost infinite capacity to generate doubt and uncertainty (and, extrapolating from there, wonder). This, it hardly needs saying, is a far more nuanced position than Herzog’s. The story of Porcupine, Tarkovsky said later, may have been a ‘legend’ or myth, and spectators ‘should doubt… the existence of the forbidden Zone’. So to give oneself entirely to the Zone, to trust in it as Stalker does, is not only to risk but embrace betrayal by the principle from which he draws his life. That’s why his face is a ferment of emotions: everything he believes in is threatening to turn to ashes, the ledge he clings to is poised to crumble beneath the weight of his need for it, the weight that also supports it.
Another word on that wind, the wind that springs from nowhere: Tarkovsky is the cinema’s great poet of stillness. To that extent his vision is imbued with the still beauty of the Russian icons, like the ones painted by Andrei Rublev. But, as he himself explained, this stillness is the opposite of timeless: ‘The image becomes authentically cinematic when (amongst other things) not only does it live within time, but time also lives within it, even within each separate frame. No “dead” object — table, chair, glass — taken in a frame in isolation from everything else, can be presented as [if] it were outside passing time, as if from the point of view of an absence of time.’ Tarkovsky’s stillness is animated by the energy of the moving image, of cinema, of which the wind is expression and symptom. Out of this comes the most distinctive feature of Tarkovsky’s art: the sense of beauty as force.25
Professor sums up Stalker’s little sermon: so the Zone lets the good ones pass and the bad ones die? (Well, it’s more complicated than that, obviously, and simpler too.) Stalker doesn’t know. It lets pass those who have lost all hope, the wretched, he says in an agony of wretched-ness, never once realizing that he might (by definition) be among their number. Does wretchedness ever have this capacity to transcend itself? Or is it simply a path to further wretchedness? The fathomless implications of this can be seen pressing down on Stalker as he turns from the darkness and walks into the light, where Writer and Professor are framed against the drifting mist and trees of the Zone.
On the very last page of the postscript to The Varieties of Religious Experience, William James writes of people’s willingness to stake everything on the chance of salvation. Chance makes the difference, says James, between ‘a life of which the keynote is resignation and a life of which the keynote is hope.’ Again the impossible paradox of Stalker’s relationship to the Zone makes itself felt. The keynote of his life is hope, but the Zone will let through only those who have lost all hope. Stalkers, we learn later, are forbidden entry to the Room. Forbidden, perhaps, by virtue of their belief — their hope — in it.
This speech of Stalker’s has had an effect on Professor, who is all too ready to resign himself to a life whose keynote is resignation. He’s decided to call it a day. If they reached the point of no return surprisingly quickly it’s even more surprising to find that one of them has already reached the point of giving up. Sometimes the two are one and the same; the usual difference is that there’s only one point of no return whereas the point of giving up is constant — the opposite of a point, in fact — and can be yielded to at any and every step of the way. You go ahead and I’ll wait here, says Professor. Given the awesome publicity generated by the Zone — a place where all your holiday hopes will come true! — Stalker has not proved himself to be a very successful tour operator. Or perhaps he’s had the misfortune of lumbering himself with two extremely hard-to-please clients. Either way, both of them have pretty well lost faith and interest in the promised package. (In holiday terms the weather is pretty dismal, would probably have been much better in the first-choice destination, Tajikistan.) Writer seems game to go on even if he is scarcely ecstatic about the prospect, but Professor wants to sit here in this nice little picnic spot with his thermos and his coffee and wait for them on the way back. Unfortunately that’s not possible. You don’t come back the way you go. (So even if you want to give up you have to keep going; the Zone is nothing if not lifelike.) The only option is for them all to return imme-diately. Stalker will offer them a refund minus a certain amount for his trouble (strain on his marriage, getting shot at, wet feet and so on). Reluctantly, Professor gets to his feet. Go on then, he says, resigning himself to having to live in hope for a bit longer. Throw your nuts. Stalker does so and they tramp off, screen left. There is the call of cuckoos. The camera stays behind, raises itself up slightly so that, above the mist, we can see the Room, the ruined house, which at this moment — the moment when it has become, depending on your point of view, either impossibly far away or barely worth visiting — seems nearer than ever.