‘The darkness grew loud with the sound of falling water, which turned out to be bands of mysterious subterranean rain…falling from the confusion of ruin overhead. We moved through the rain, and fifty yards farther on climbed on to the dry ground of a catwalk built above an area of heavy machinery. We paused where the catwalk ended, in a latticework stairs heading down into the floodwater on the far side. By then we had progressed deep into the pile, and by ordinary measures were only a short distance from the main chiller plant…The place looked like a trap, and dangerous as hell’.
This reads like a passage from a book written by Writer after he got back: Zona, the best-selling, true-life story of his adventures with Stalker. It’s actually from American Ground, William Langewiesche’s account of ‘The Unbuilding of the World Trade Center’ in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. Once again, I am struck by the film’s reach, its ability to bathe events — both actual and cultural — in its projected light.
Writer sees something, something — to judge by his expression — horrible and terrifying. A door, he shouts. Stalker, keeping well back, tells him to open it. Writer at this point is, as we used to say at school, bricking it. Whatever lies beyond that door — another of those submarine-type hatches — could be extremely unpleasant. He draws a gun. A terrible mistake. By drawing the gun he is sealing his fate. Stalker begs him to get rid of it: Remember the tanks! Writer pauses. Perhaps he is recalling the exclamations of amazement—’Bullets just bounce off it!’—in those American sci-fi movies where the monster from outer space is, as often as not, a symbol of the implacable menace of Russians among whose number Writer must, of course, count himself (so that effectively he is his own worst enemy). Accepting the probable uselessness of a weapon in the face of whatever threat may or may not be lurking, Writer drops the gun. Opens the door. There is a chamber full of water — it’s like a scene from The Poseidon Adventure but set on the Kursk, the stricken sub that became the doomed sub. Not just any old water. It looks cold, suddy (as if some of the world’s dirtiest dishes had been washed in it), polluted and possibly radioactive to boot. Nevertheless Writer descends the stairs, up to his chest. He’s so inured to the soaking conditions of the Zone that he doesn’t even take off his overcoat and hold it over his head. He’s absolutely drenched. Professor follows but Stalker, worried, now, about what these clients of his might be carrying, asks Professor if he’s got something like that. Like what? Like a gun? No, just an ampoule of poison in case, he says, descending into the washing-up water, holding his beloved knapsack above his head like a grunt carrying his M16 through a monsoon-swollen river in Nam. What? Did he come here to die, Stalker wants to know. Professor doesn’t answer; he’s too busy wading. He’s absolutely drenched too. In terms of who’s winning the Soak the Bloke competition there’s nothing to choose between them. They’ve both had their Zonal baptism. Stalker follows, nudging Writer’s discarded pistol into the water, where it will assume the status of harmless relic, symbol of everything that it is and isn’t. Then he’s yelling again at Writer, who, having been reluctant to take the lead, has failed to stop, has marched on into a huge room filled with hummocks of sand. It’s like Walter De Maria’s New York Earth Room but made of sand and far bigger. A nut thrown by Stalker bounces slow-motionly off the sand. Stalker and Writer dive for cover, hit the deck, the deck of sand. Writer looks bemused, unsure of his bearings. A flash of light blinds him. A bird flaps past, flies deep into this interior meadow of sand and, before it can land, disappears, is CGI’d (in the days before CGI) into nonexistence. Another bird follows immediately and doesn’t disappear, just lands like a normal bird would land. That’s the Zone for you: completely weird and completely ordinary.37
It was not a case of love at first sight: the first time I saw Stalker I was slightly bored and unmoved. I wasn’t overwhelmed (to put it slightly stupidly, I had no idea that, thirty years later, I would end up writing an entire book about it), but it was an experience I couldn’t shake off. Something about it stayed with me. I was living in Putney at the time and one day my then-girlfriend and I went walking in Richmond Park. It was autumn and a bird flew over the sloping ground towards a clump of trees, flapped and flew in a way that was strangely reminiscent of the way that second bird had flown into this vast room of sand. I wanted to see the film again immediately after that, and since then the desire to see it again— and again and again — has never gone away.38 Until now. After this watch-a-thon, I might never want to set eyes on it again; after this, I might have laid it to rest for good. We shall see. As for the disappearing bird, I now feel that it might have been better if it hadn’t disappeared, if it had been a regular flying bird, not a magical disappearing bird. In fact, I could do without most of the overtly spooky or magical bits of the Zone — that voice calling out ‘Stop’ to Writer, for example. I am so convinced of the magic and mystery of the Zone that there is no need for it to be anything other than completely natural and normal — though maybe that magic could not have been achieved without things like the disappearing bird. Oh, and the acid ripple of the earth — I would always want that to be there.
Professor and Stalker peer above the sandy hillocks like they’re on a soundstage for a sci-fi remake of Sands of Iwo Jima. (Mention of a soundstage makes me realize something that I’ve been reluctant not only to admit but even — after all these viewings — to notice: that some of these interior sequences in the Zone look a bit too much like they were filmed in a film studio, as opposed to looking like they were scouted out, discovered, chanced upon. They look designed and manufactured, which is to say they look overdesigned.) Writer has suffered some kind of collapse. He’s lying in a puddle of water: he’s adapted so thoroughly to the idea of never getting dry that he’s practically amphibious. Behind him is a round metallic container or drum. He gets up, walks towards it, peers inside, walks back, picks up a rock — possibly the same rock thrown by Stalker, even though, strictly speaking, that’s impossible (if it makes sense to talk of the impossible in a realm in which anything is possible) and drops it into this shallow drum. Maybe it is the same stone, the stone that makes no sound when it lands, because there is no splash or clang at all, nothing — and then, after ten or twelve seconds, there is an echoey, clanging splash suggesting that the drop is about the height of the Empire State Building at least. It’s only now that something seen earlier makes sense: the splashing moon right at the beginning of Part 2, with the poetry intoned over it. That, presumably, was a view from above of the stone striking the surface of the mercury-water at the bottom of this tube or drum or whatever it is. Given the depth, it’s quite ballsy of Writer to perch on the rim of this drum — a drum that is in fact a mile-deep shaft — as if on the edge of a paddling pool made from Meccano.
Writer is by now a wholehearted believer. Dropping the stone — a Professorly experiment of sorts — has proved to him that there are no facts here. It’s all someone’s idiotic invention — but whose? Well, Tarkovsky’s, if one subscribes to the auteur theory of cinema, I suppose. Not that Writer is interested in answers to this rhetorical question. He’s basically having a good old snivel and, like most writers given half the chance, the snivelling soon takes the form of whining about critics, about how his work has not been properly understood, snivel snivel. What the hell kind of writer is he if he hates writing? A true writer, as defined by Thomas Mann: someone who finds writing more difficult than other people. Not that this is any consolation. Quite the contrary. Writing is the opposite of consolation, it’s torment, like squeezing out haemorrhoids, he reckons — a comparison that actually has its uplifting side too. In François Ozon’s film Swimming Pool, Charlotte Rampling says that literary prizes are like haemorrhoids: sooner or later every asshole gets one. In Rerberg and Tarkovsky: The Reverse Side of ‘Stalker’, this speech by Writer is taken as a vicarious monologue by Tarkovsky. Writer wanted to change ‘them’ but it’s actually he who’s been changed by ‘them’, has been gobbled up by ‘them’. Tarkovsky’s vision is uniquely, uncompromisingly his own — or so it seems to us. For his part, Tarkovsky believed that his ‘entire life has consisted of compromises’. By now the camera has moseyed right up to Writer — this is his soliloquy, his Hamlet moment, his close-up. Or put it another way, whenever you want to pour your heart out Tarkovsky’s camera is always there, moving subtly closer, ready to lend an ear and an eye. Writer’s really distraught. The Zone is working its drippy magic as, sitting on the edge of the infinite drop, he peers into the depths of his own being, talking directly at us, encouraging a reciprocal response from this member of the audience.