Last night I watched Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker (1979), his last film made in the Soviet Union before a self-imposed exile. It is a movie perhaps best explained in the Christian tradition of via negativia, a telling of what it’s not. As the central character remarks en route to a place (“The Zone”) where your most secret desire is realized, “There are no direct paths.” It’s not science fiction, per se. It’s not realism either. It’s not a Christian allegory, nor is it a supposed prophecy of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. It’s not a horror film. It’s not of a piece with modern cinema. It’s not “so boring it’s sublime,” as one critic described the film India Song. It’s not misogynistic or homoerotic. It’s not even particularly beautiful, cinematographically, like Andrei Rublev, my introduction to Tarkovsky.
Perhaps that is why Stalker is so beguiling and enchanting. It is so many things, and yet, like descriptions of God, none capture its true essence. But let’s try. It is, I think, a film deeply indebted to the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer. “Willing,” he writes, “springs from lack, from deficiency, and thus from suffering.” The infamous “Room” of the film is rumored to fulfill the will of those who dare to enter it, to finally and irrevocably end suffering and orient them to happiness. But, Tarkovsky seems to propose, it’s a ruse. If what is willed is anything other than the Truth of Christ, one is doomed. Happiness is an illusion. The ambitions of science and art, even those of the holy fool, all are earthly manifestations of the insatiable will and are, therefore, unable to confer “a satisfaction that lasts and never declines.” Only death, “the correction of a grave mistake,” says Schopenhauer, is “a joy, so great, so deep.” That is the “unavoidable, deeply pessimistic core,” says The New Criterion’s Roger Kimball of Schopenhauer’s teachings. That is also, paradoxically, the triumphantly optimistic revelation of Tarkovsky’s Stalker and the escape—from desire, from suffering, from the temporal, from Russia—offered through the Cross.
And yet, here it is. Here we are, living. Stalker feels to me like a profoundly human film. Tarkovsky’s sympathy for his characters’ fears, their petty wants and foolish pride, like Christ’s for his disciples, never falters. Instead of sneering at the folly of mankind, he seems to make the case for–at all costs–brotherhood. Individually the Stalker, the Writer and the Professor (avatars for, I think, mysticism, art and science, respectively) loathe the other’s actions and aims, but it is their mutual dependence on each other that brings them to–and from–the very threshold of Truth, i.e. the “Room.” Whether or not any of the characters come to this realization isn’t disclosed. I don’t think they do. They are human, after all. Tarkovsky is, then, yes, an empathetic puppet master, but never a romantic one.
If not “science fiction,” what is Stalker? I think it’s a capital-em Mystery, an ode to the Mystery of Mysteries. “Christianity,” said Malcolm Muggeridge, “is a stupendous riddle without a solution; a stupendous joke without a point; a stupendous song without a tune; a stupendous waking dream that we lose in sleeping; a death in life and a life in death.” Schopenhauer would have loved it.
Photo: Stalker. Directed by Andrei Tarkovsky, performances by Alexander Kaidanovsky, Anatoly Solonitsyn and Nikolai Grinko. Mosfilm, 1979
Impolitic 