Stalker asks Professor, Why are you so worried about your knapsack? You’re going to the Room, where all of your wishes will come true. If that’s what you want it will drown you in knapsacks. Good point — though people have set their hearts on stranger, more trivial things. That, in fact, is a version of the good life we are encouraged to pursue, in the misguided belief that an abundance of knapsacks — or iPads or cars or Armani suits — will bring us happiness. (In the case of my Freitag bag, though, it’s not that I believed it would bring me happiness; it was happiness, I realize now, or a component of my happiness, and not having it now is a source of unhappiness.) Still, one sympathizes with Stalker: these clients have got into that complaint-disappointment loop. Everything is turning out badly. Nothing is good enough for them. Especially Writer; ever since he bottled it going towards the Room he’s stopped grumbling to Stalker’s face and has contented himself with going all hangdog and generally dragging his feet. They are not in the Room yet but they are realizing that one of mankind’s deepest wishes is the need to complain, to moan, to be disappointed. Perhaps that’s why gods were invented, so you could moan at them for the way things turned out, for things not happening, even, at that relatively late stage of human development (as personified by Thomas Hardy), for not existing. Professor asks, How far is it, this Room? In the context of their immediate dispute this could be taken as meaning something along the lines of Exactly how long will I have to wait till I get all these knapsacks? More generally, it’s a huge and multilayered question, absolutely central to the film. If you go straight, says Stalker, about two hundred metres, but, as we all know, there’s no going straight. And the usual measurements of space and distance — miles and kilometres, hectares, acres— are irrelevant. All that matters here is cinematic space. The camera moves forward in what we assume is a linear fashion only for us to discover that we are back where we started. ‘The single most important force in Tarkovsky’s construction of space,’ writes Robert Bird, ‘is the motion of the camera.’
Same with time. As one of the characters in Roadside Picnic says, ‘There really is no time in the Zone.’ Stalker and his clients seem to be there for just a day, but once they start taking naps and their dreams merge into the depiction of the actual journey — which is, in any case, all but indistinguishable from a less literal, spiritual journey— time dissolves.27
They prepare to get going, Writer first, followed by Stalker. They’re perched, a little precariously, above what seems less like a river than a flow of molten water, polluted by something that makes it more beautiful to look at than simple, natural running water.28 The next time we see Writer he is wherever it was they were headed to, bedraggled, mud-smeared and looking more than a little bewildered. He moves off-screen to the right, leaving his plastic bag behind. To our eyes this is an unpardonable bit of littering. The Zone is full of junk: rusting bits and pieces of civilization and warfare but, as they rot and rust, they add to the beauty of the place, whereas this notoriously unbiodegradable plastic bag really is an eyesore. No wonder the camera does not dwell on it but instead drifts right, in Writer’s wake, past partly tiled walls, hanging light fixtures and rotting archways through which can be seen — and heard — a brown torrent of falling water. We assume we are progressing but we end up back with Writer again, barely a few feet from where we last saw him. There is no verifiable link — to go back to a point made a few paragraphs ago — between the amount of ground the camera has covered and how far or where it has actually gone. Quaintly, this spot is called the Dry Tunnel, according to Stalker. Very droll. Certainly, by now, the very idea of keeping dry seems laughable as they wade knee deep through running water and make their way through the pouring waterfall. Professor has gone missing — he’s gone back for his stupid knapsack, which means he’s as good as dead. The other two press on. Impossibly, in the midst of all this watery dampness, the ground pulses with glowing embers as though we are getting close to the burning centre of the soggy earth. Through the swaying water the camera gazes down at the tiled, mossy floor, littered with the soaked, handwritten pages of a notebook or ledger, a rusted machine gun, a syringe.
Freshish out of university, when I first saw Stalker, I scanned these objects in the frustrated assumption that their significance — their place in the symbolic scheme of things — would be revealed. But it wasn’t. They never mean more than what they are, these things; they are just things — a machine gun, pages, a syringe — lying there while the film of water washes over them and the film of them and the water washing over them washes over us.29
HERE’S A LUCKY BREAK. Professor has not been gobbled up by the Zone. As Writer announces with unfeigned delight, he’s here, waiting for them, reunited with his beloved knapsack, munching cake, drinking warm coffee from his thermos and, relatively speaking, dry as a bone. He’s even built a wan little fire. But how did he get here ahead of them, how did he overtake them? What do you mean? Professor wants to know. He just came back here for his knapsack. It’s true. They’ve ended up where they were before all that white-water rafting (without the raft)! T. S. Eliot’s overquoted lines about the end of all exploring, how we end where we begin but know the place for the first time, have been proved true in an incredibly short space of time and space (insofar as space and time mean anything in the Zone). Actually that’s not quite true, because they don’t know the place for the first time, not even Stalker, who looks around amazed, as if he can’t believe what he’s seeing — especially since the nut he threw to show the way ahead is here, back where they started. And not just the nut: unless I’m mistaken, that’s Writer’s plastic bag waiting for him. Suddenly the film is all about men being reunited with their bags, either cherished or disposable. (If only my Freitag bag were here too!) Stalker, though, has more important things on his mind, is struggling to process this latest, deeply perplexing bit of data: the fact that they’re back where they were however long ago it was that they were last here, wherever that is. The Zone has turned into Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain, where ‘the then is constantly repeated in the now, the there in the here.’ My god, it’s a trap, Stalker realizes. Porcupine must have put the nut there to trip them up, to trap them. It’s too much to take in. He won’t take another step, he says, stepping away from them, until he’s fathomed out what’s happening. By fathomed out he means take a rest. According to conventional standards of hiking this seems a singularly inappropriate place to camp: there’s hardly a dry spot to be seen. Writer finds a mossy mound surrounded by water, Professor wedges himself on a bit of high ground and Stalker beds down on the edge of what looks like a soaking wet foxhole in a quiet corner of Stalingrad. (No wonder he’s coughing.) Writer’s delight at finding Professor again is short-lived, or at least it turns quickly to derision at what he perceives as the Professor’s motives in coming here, as suggested by what he guesses is in that muchcoveted knapsack. Professor is here to measure the Zone, to measure a place whose defining quality is its immeasurability, to conduct scientific tests on miracles, to reduce it all to the predictable and quantifiable procedures of science. Writer is one of those people whose default relation to others is to get on their wrong side, to rub them up the wrong way. Snuggled up comfortably enough, Professor responds with a few retaliatory jibes of his own: Writer is a blabbermouth, fit only to daub stuff on public walls. At one level they are now having a more conventional threemen-in-a-Zone-type outing, getting down to the true stuff of male friendship: goading and taking the piss, the British discourse known as banter — albeit in the slightly unusual mode of quasi-pillow talk in which the pillow is a lump of soaking earth and the bed as dank as a riverbed. Their hearts are not really in it, they’re all drifting into sleep, slipping into a dream on the fringes of which a black dog comes paddling along the murky river with its linger of mist. The dog stands and looks at us, like it’s bearing an important doggy message from the unconscious. We slip briefly into swampy monochrome but they’re not quite asleep, not yet. Writer asks Stalker — or Chingachgook as he’s now taken to calling him — what other people have wanted from the Zone. Happiness, he guesses, looking surprisingly comfortable given where he’s lying. Writer says he’s never known a happy man in all his life. Stalker might have replied that it takes one to know one but instead, brow more furrowed than ever, concedes, no, neither has he. A strange point to agree on and a little hard to believe — unless this apparent inability to be happy is a distinctly Russian or Soviet indisposition. John Updike reckoned that America was a vast conspiracy to make people happy. Soviet Russia was perhaps its equally vast antithesis. Writer keeps on: Has Stalker never wanted to visit this Room? Obeying the first principle of drug dealers in any and all films — don’t get high on your own supply — Stalker says no. Initially, in keeping with Roadside Picnic, Stalker was ‘some kind of drug dealer or poacher’ but, as the film evolved — especially when its very existence was jeopardized by the catastrophe of the ruined footage — he became ‘a slave, a believer, a pagan of the Zone.’ So he’s fine as he is, thank you, has nothing to ask of the Room in which he believes so passionately, on whose power he has staked his life. He’s just tired, whereupon the nice black doggy — so black he is never more than a dog-eared silhouette — comes and sits with him. Writer still wants to talk. What if he returns a genius? Writing comes out of torment, self-doubt. If he returns knowing he’s a genius, what incentive is there to write? This is what might be called the Prozac tradeoff or at least a version of the argument often heard in the blissful dawn of the Prozac era, when it seemed likely that Prozac was the formula for universal happiness: surely this would lead to the extinction of the urge to create. Professor begs him to keep quiet, he wants to sleep, but the knowledge that you’re keeping someone else awake is one of the incentives for prolonging onesided conversations like this, even if Writer himself is almost in the land of nod. They’re like a married couple who actually get along by bickering (like Stalker and his wife). Neither of them can let it go. One thing Writer does know is that men were put on earth to create works of art, images of the absolute truth — implicitly, works of art like Stalker. This is obviously not a universal truth— one could as easily argue that men were put on earth to swill beer, drop napalm on villages or build extensions to their bungalows — but in this context it is persuasive and alluring. One thinks of paintings of bison in the Lascaux caves. Van Eyck. Raphael. Van Gogh. Pollock…But you can’t stop the clock. The history of art keeps ticking along, keeps being added to, even in a world — as Kundera bleakly envisions it—‘where art is dying because the need for art, the sensitivity and the love for it is dying’. It might be a source of regret, but the fact that the history of art includes the likes of Tracey Emin and Jeff Koons undermines Writer’s claim except in so far as ‘works of art’ connote luxury goods of great financial value. (All people think about, Stalker will later lament, is how to get paid for every breath they take.) The conversation drifts on, blood sugar levels have dipped and with the people on-screen barely able to keep their peepers open we, the audience, are hoping that something will happen to revive their energy, to keep us involved. It’s the one part of the film that seems to lack conviction and momentum, as if Tarkovsky is trying to make up his mind what to do and where to go next. This is not necessarily a bad thing, strengthening the impression that the film is in some way about itself, a reflection of the journey it describes.