Stalker (1979) is a film by Andrei Tarkovsky based on Roadside Picnic by the Strugatsky brothers. It shows a day from the life of a stalker, a man who enters the so-called “Zone”, an Alien landing site, where he leads people to a room that grants people’s innermost desires, which is what they really value and crave. As is often with a film adaptation of a book, the story of Tarkovsky’s Stalker is not identical with the story of the book. The director used some basic ideas to convey his own story. Yet, the wish-granting room remains the same.
This time, the Stalker takes two men with him to the Zone: the Writer and the Scientist. They both are intrigued by the wish-granting room although for different reasons. Most people who come to the room want to get money, prestige, women. But in the words of Tarkovsky, “the Writer in Stalker reflects on the frustration of living in a world of necessities, where even chance is the result of some necessity which for the moment remains beyond our ken. Perhaps the Writer sets out for the Zone in order to encounter the Unknown, in order to be astonished and startled by it.”1 The Scientist at first does not want to reveal his motives but in the end, it turns out that he wants to blow the Room up so that nobody with bad wishes or a desire for total power may enter it. In the end, he abandons his plan at least partly because he is convinced by the Stalker that a room should exist, “where people can come and still hope, people who want something, who need an ideal.”2
When the three finally arrive at the Room, neither the Writer nor the Scientist wants to enter it. They know the story of another stalker, nicknamed Diko-óbraz, who once entered the Room, wishing for his brother to be resurrected (the brother’s death was Diko-óbraz’s fault), but instead, he became enormously rich. “The Zone had granted what was, in reality, his most heartfelt desire, and not the wish that he had wanted to convince himself was most precious to him.”3 In the end, Diko-óbraz hanged himself. Whether the story is true or just a fruit of imagination, it functions as a warning for anybody wanting to enter the Room. The Room does not trust people’s words but can search their hearts to find out what their true desires are. Something that people probably more often than not, do not want to do on their own. We prefer to live in a world created by our lies, half-truths, pretensions, and fake stories. A look into the heart would reveal things we would rather keep secret, and it could also destroy the life we have so carefully constructed. Yes, the truth can set us free, but only by killing us. Because only death leads to new life. And so, nobody enters the room. It is primarily fear of the knowledge of oneself that prevented both the Writer and the Scientist from letting the room reveal the innermost desires of their hearts. They suspect what would be the outcome of getting to know themselves, and they retreat with misgiving.
The Stalker is shaken by the unbelief and hesitation of his two companions. He undergoes a crisis of faith. To lead miserable and lost people to the room is the calling of his life, what gives it its meaning. He wants to give them hope. Yet, it turns out that the price for hope is too high because it is the truth about oneself. “The Stalker needs to find people who believe in something, in a world that no longer believes in anything (…) Faith is faith. Without it, man is deprived of any spiritual roots. He is like a blind man. Over time, faith has been given different content. But in this period of the destruction of faith, what’s important to the Stalker is to light a spark, a belief in the heart of people,”4 says Tarkovsky. As it turns out, one cannot have faith on his own, in the exclusive singularity of one’s existence.
They all leave the Zone and return to a pub in the nearby town where they also met before entering the Zone. They all have suffered a failure. But maybe it is an apparent failure, as Tarkovsky remarks5. Because the experience in the Zone served as katharsis. Especially for the Writer. Even without entering the room, they have learned something important about themselves, namely that the desires of their hearts were grim and gruesome. Yet, the Writer, at first looking for something that could astonish and amaze him again, fill him with awe, finds it in the person of the Stalker’s wife, and he finds it exactly in her love. “There before them is a woman who has been through untold miseries because of her husband and has had a sick child by him; but she continues to love him with the same selfless, unthinking devotion as in her youth. Her love and her devotion are that final miracles which can be set against the unbelief, cynicism, moral vacuum poisoning the modern world, of which both the Writer and the Scientist are victims.”6 The Writer understands now “that human love alone is—miraculously—proof against the blunt assertion that there is no hope for the world. This is our common and incontrovertibly positive possession. Although we no longer quite know how to love.”7 He is cured of his cynicism, at least for now.
In a way, Stalker follows the Biblical pattern of faith, hope, and love. At first, though, the faith is weak and even misplaced, perhaps it exists only as a wish. We see it mostly in the person of the Stalker who is the only left idealist in the story. Yet, the fact that both the Writer and the Scientist have come for an adventure in the Zone, shows that they also had not abandoned all hope yet. They are still seekers, although disenchanted ones. The journey into the Zone is a struggle of hope. In the end, they find love.
James B. Jordan describes the sequence of faith, hope, and love in his From Bread to Wine. These are the three stages of coming to maturity and wisdom, to the fullness of life. Most of life is the hope-phase, as we come through all kinds of crises. Yet, it is love that perpetuates us. If we lose it from our sight for too long a period, we are doomed, and all hope is gone, and eventually, also all faith is extinguished. We stop even wishing anything. So, in Stalker, the sight of the Stalker’s wife and her sacrificial love receives almost a sacramental-like meaning and effect. It feeds the weak faith, and it strengthens the newly recaptured hope. But now they know, that the fulfillment of heart’s desires is only to be found at the end of a long, hard, and dangerous road which, among others, has the capacity of cleansing us from ignobleness and gullibility. Perhaps, the crisis in the Zone, and chiefly at the entrance to the Room, has not been wasted, after all.
Tarkovsky asked about the meaning of the Zone, claims that “the zone is a zone, it’s life, and as he makes his way across it a man may break down or he may come through. Whether he comes through or not depends on his self-respect, and his capacity to distinguish between what matters and what is merely passing.”8 If that is the case, then we approach the Room in many different forms more than once in our lifetime. Whenever we can make a wish, when we dream about a better life, when we pray to God Almighty, is like entering the Room. What do we ask Him for? Do we speak from the bottom of the heart? And is it any good? What do our prayers reveal about us? And what do they bury deep underground to keep it secret even for ourselves?
In the end, Tarkovsky asserts that Stalker is a film about “dignity; and of how a man suffers if he has no self-respect.”9 One loses self-respect to the degree that one does not want to look into himself in fear of what he could find there. In effect, one becomes more and more a hollow and plastic figure with less and less weight which is glory. If he continues, one day he will become just a puff of fog. Evading the disconcerting knowledge of oneself is a way to perdition. Yet, we chose it for it is easier. So, in the end, we suffer anyway. In such a case, perhaps it would be better to choose the right kind of suffering for the proper objective.
The film ends with Stalker’s daughter showing her miraculous ability to move objects without touching them. Yes, she suffers due to her father’s adventures in the Zone, his faith based life. But the suffering is connected with new and extraordinary abilities and contingencies. Perhaps, this ending indicates that after successfully undergoing katharsis some new perspectives or opportunities open for us and for our loved ones. Instead, of looking for an apocalyptic and definitive end to all our misery, we should start looking into ourselves, as scary as it may be, because truth can truly make us free. Provided we start with the truth about ourselves.
Bogumil Jarmulak is pastor of Evangelical Reformed Church (CREC) in Poznan, Poland. His PhD is from Christian Theological Academy in Warsaw, Poland.