TIME TO GET GOING. They step through the doorless doorway, the way. Writer, indulging in a last bit of baiting, tells Stalker he won’t forgive him. As he does so we see what it is that he’s been weaving together: a crown of thorns, no less. He puts it on and, credit where it’s due, it fits him like a glove — but it’s not a glove, of course, it’s a crown of thorns. Ring any bells? Something biblical going on there? An allusion to Bob Dylan’s ‘Shelter from the Storm’? Writer as Christ? I dunno. Everything just is. Or isn’t. But may be. So we’ll have to leave it at that. Writer is wearing a crown of thorns of his own making but attempting to say exactly what this symbolizes or means is like making a rod for your own back. Quite an achievement, this, to have someone wearing a crown of thorns and to leave us the option of not buying into a theological or symbolic reading of something that seems to exist solely — it keeps you neither warm nor dry — in the realm of the symbolic. Tarkovsky’s hostility to symbolic readings of his films extended to questions about the meaning of the Zone itself: ‘I’m reduced to a state of fury and despair by such questions. The Zone doesn’t symbolize anything, any more than anything else does in my films: the zone is the zone, it’s life, and as he makes his way across it a man may break down or he may come through.’ Ah, so the Zone is more than just a zone — it is, as Tarkovsky himself conceded, ‘a test.’41
Professor is distracted by the whining of the dog who sits on his haunches before the skeletal remains of two figures rotting in the dust, prior visitors — pilgrims or saboteurs? — who have perished for reasons that will never be revealed, which is not to say that they perished for no reason. The camera moves in on the perished pair: skeletons locked in a skeletal embrace.
THEY ARE IN a big, abandoned, derelict, dark damp room with what look like the remains of an enormous chemistry set floating in the puddle in the middle, as if the Zone resulted from an ill-conceived experiment that went horribly wrong. Off to the right, through a large hole in the wall, is a source of light that they all look towards. For a long while no one speaks. The air is full of the chirpy chirpy cheep cheep of birdsong. It’s the opposite of those places where the sedge has withered from the lake and no birds sing. The birds are whistling and chirruping and singing like mad. Stalker tells Writer and Professor — tells us—that we are now at the very threshold of the Room. This is the most important moment in your life, he says. Your innermost wish will be made true here. And we believe him. This is the purpose of the journey, to make us believe the literal truth of what Stalker says at this point. Ideally, one would live one’s whole life as though at this threshold; every moment would be like the one that is imminent. Not that you have to wish for anything explicitly, Stalker explains. You just have to concentrate on your past life. This makes the moment you enter the Room seem like death, when your life flashes before your eyes, when you look back on your life and assess its futility in the face of its absolute finitude and unrepeatability (or, if you are a Nietzschean, its eternal repeatability— repeatable but unvarying, which amounts to the same thing). Stalker grows reflective. When a man thinks of the past he becomes kinder, he says. A lovely idea, but manifestly untrue. There comes a point in your life when you realize that most of the significant experiences — aside from illness and death — lie in the past. To that extent the past is far more appealing than the future. The older you get the more time you spend thinking about the past, the things that have happened. Old people spend almost all of their time thinking about the past. But if their faces are anything to go by, this past fills them with bitterness as often as tenderness. The past becomes a source of regret; you think of hopes that were unrealized, disappointments, betrayals, failures, deceptions, all the things that led to this point which could be so different, so much better, but which, however you reshuffle the deck, always ends up at this point, leaves you holding — and lacking— the same cards.
But the most important thing…Stalker is in a state of more acute anxiety at this point than we have ever seen. Or is he? It is as difficult to find the right word to describe his expression — or expressions, plural, for his face seems to be running the full gamut of emotions every fraction of a second, or rather it is expressing a whole range of emotions simultaneously — as it is for him to say what is the most important thing about this moment. It is a mixture of exhaustion, turmoil, sincerity and hopelessness and… His back is to the others. He walks away from them. The most important thing is…to believe. To believe in this moment, in the Room, is to bring its power into existence. If you believe it will work it will work.