So what kind of writer am I, reduced to writing a summary of a film? Especially since there are few things I hate more than when someone, in an attempt to persuade me to see a film, starts summarizing it, explaining the plot, thereby destroying any chance of my ever going to see it. In my defence I would say that Stalker is a film that can be summarized in about two sentences. So if summary means reducing to a synopsis, then this is the opposite of a summary; it’s an amplification and expansion. This still begs the question of whether the composition of such a summary is a reasonable way to spend one’s days. What is the purpose of such an exercise? The exercise is, of course, its own purpose, an end in itself. Whether it will amount to anything — whether it will add up to a worthwhile commentary, and whether this commentary might also become a work of art in its own right — is still unclear. The point is that, as a direct result of embarking on this summary, I am not in the despond in which Writer finds himself. I’m not perched on the edge of a tubular abyss in a soaking wet overcoat; I’m sitting at my desk in a nice warm cardigan. I’m getting on with something, making progress, moving towards a Room of my own. Certain kinds of writers, certain types of novelists, are reluctant to engage in anything that distracts them from their own work. Commentary, for them, is a distraction, of secondary or no importance. But there are other writers — and I don’t mean straight-down-the-line critics — for whom commentary is absolutely central to their own creative project, who insist that at some level commentary can turn out to be every bit as original as the primary work of the novelist. Besides, if mankind was put on earth to create works of art, then other people were put on earth to comment on those works, to say what they think of them. Not to judge objectively or critically assess these works but to articulate their feelings about them with as much precision as possible, without seeking to disguise the vagaries of their nature, their lapses of taste and the contingency of their own experiences, even if those feelings are of confusion, uncertainty or — in this case— undiminished wonder.
Writer has finished talking his talk and begins walking the walk towards the other two, through the sandy hummocks of the sand room. The camera angles slowly down to where he was standing, to where his feet were, to reveal something of significance that he left behind: a clue. We wait and look. But there’s nothing. Just the sand, slightly disturbed but unconcerned.
Stalker is happy again. Deep down, Writer must be a really good man, if he made it through the meat grinder. The meat grinder is a horrible place. Porcupine sent his brother to die there. His brother was a talented creature, a poet who wrote lines that Stalker proceeds to recite as if his life depends on it. Here’s another quirk or feature of the Zone: it never happens that all three men are happy at once. Writer is really pissed now. He reckons Stalker cheated when they drew lots, is convinced that Stalker has chosen Professor as his favourite. Diddums! It’s all getting a little fraught and fractious but here comes that black dog again, no longer looking like a messenger from the unconscious, just looking like a nice black doggy, padding through the puddles and all the bric-a-brac bobbing about in them as Writer harangues Stalker, telling him what a cheating little shit he is. They’re in a room, backlit by a window with a view of the greenish world outside, tightly framed by an open doorway. The phone starts ringing. Writer keeps ranting, then picks it up furiously — No, this is not the clinic — before ranting on again. Then, abruptly, in another of those comic moments for which Tarkovsky is absolutely unrecognized, they look at the phone as the emperor of Brazil, Dom Pedro II, did when he first encountered the new invention: ‘My God, it talks!’ It’s as if the whole film is a mysteriously extended version of one of those Orange Film Board-sponsored ‘Don’t let a phone ruin your movie’ shorts.
39 This moment of unexpected comedy, as Robin Bird points out, has its origin in a documented quirk of history: soldiers scrambling through the destruction of Stalingrad would occasionally come across odd vestiges of civilization, ‘such as ringing telephones.’ Proceeding on the principle that if it talks it works, Professor ignores Stalker’s warning— Don’t touch! — picks it up (it looks a bit like one of those dynamite plungers in westerns) and dials. It’s a rotary dial so this sequence has added fascination as gestural archaeology. In evolutionary terms the index finger enjoyed a long period of dominance in the era of the rotary phone but this action is now close to extinct. The index finger is entering a phase of quietude and disuse while the thumb enjoys a renaissance in the age of texting and mobiles. Professor gets through right away — and not to an automated answering system (which would have made the rotary dial a little problematic) but to an actual Russianspeaking human being. He’s made a personal call, possibly long-distance, another reminder of the past, when phone calls were prohibitively expensive and one grabbed every chance to make a call on someone else’s dime. He has a coded conversation that does not make sense but is full of mutual threat, counterthreat and foreboding. I’m in the old building, he says, Bunker Four. (This is another accidental detail reinforcing — as always happens with stray coincidences in the realm of conspiracy theory — the idea of the film as prophecy of nuclear doom: it was reactor number four that went into gradual meltdown at Chernobyl.) Clearly Professor is intending to do something, though what that something might be — in the words of the Buffalo Springfield song — ain’t exactly clear. The voice at the other end of the line — Russian, sinister-sounding — says that whatever it is he’s plotting is revenge for the fact that he slept with Professor’s wife twenty years ago. (Twenty years? That does seem a long time to have harboured a cuckold’s grudge.) Voicing our unspoken questions, Writer asks Professor what he’s planning. Imagine what it’s like when everyone comes here, Professor explains. All the tin-pot dictators and would-be führers, people who come not for money but to change the world.40 A good point, this. For many years now I have felt that I would like to be a dictator, the ruler of a regime that conforms in every detail to my ideas of how I think life should be lived and ordered. The world is full of people like me: idle Stalins and back-bedroom Lenins who are prevented from seizing and wielding power only by a chronic lack of drive, determination and ambition (desire backed by a willingness to achieve that which is desired). If we had access to the Room…I don’t bring people like that, says Stalker. They’re all standing in a room that for all we know might actually be the Room, in which case the Room would be a major disappointment, indistinguishable, in fact, from just about any other room. (Every bit as important as Tarkovsky’s capacity for doubt is his literalness; how fantastic — I mean how unfantastic — to call their destination, this Holiest of Grails, the Room.) We’re looking at them through the doorway still, the doorway without a door. Writer is fiddling with some string or twine and he’s not impressed by Professor’s little speech. No one cares enough about anything except their own trivial preoccupations. Revenge on your boss, something like that he can understand — strangely he doesn’t mention bigger sales or good reviews — but anything larger? No one who comes here is interested in that kind of stuff. A false distinction, surely. Dictators and ruthless autocrats start out with the idea of settling a few scores, want to advance to the next rung of the ladder so they can get even with whoever it was that snubbed them once, long ago, or for sleeping with their wife or some dimly remembered but unforgettable offence, if not the precise individual then the class or race of whom he is representative, and from there it’s a very small leap to deciding that the whole lot of them must be exterminated, followed by any other class or group that looks like it might be capable of extermination or of revenging itself on you or your descendants, and before anyone knows quite how it happened all of Scotland bleeds and we have the Gulag system that stalks Tarkovsky’s film like Banquo’s ghost. Stalker says it’s not possible to believe in happiness at the expense of someone else, which seems a little naive, especially to Writer, since the knowledge that someone might be a little unhappier than oneself — might have suffered worse reviews and even poorer sales — has been one of mankind’s sources of solace, if not since the dawn of time, then certainly since the advent of literary journalism. Writer pulls a switch and the lightbulb above his head, the bulb that looks like it’s not good for anything except not working, surges into a light so bright that they all flinch from its glare. It’s overexerted itself, though. After a few seconds, just like the light back home, when it was turned on by Stalker’s missus, it goes out with a ping. The Zone might be fundamentally different from the world back there but defective wiring would seem to be a problem from which there is no escape. Buried beneath other, more overt layers of allegorical suggestiveness, could this be the very heart of the film? If their deepest wish, even if only negatively demonstrated, is for a decent power supply, then perhaps this constitutes a coded critique of the failure of communism as famously promised by Lenin: Soviet power plus electrification of the whole country.