WRITER AND PROFESSOR, meanwhile, are not totally convinced. Far from it. Professor (i.e., a man used to lecturing) explains that a meteorite fell here about twenty years ago. Or maybe it wasn’t a meteorite. Whatever it was, something happened here to cause it to become abandoned. The paradox of abandonment soon kicked in: anywhere abandoned serves as a magnet. In cities unoccupied houses become crack dens; empty warehouses become venues for illegal parties. Leckhampton station became an unofficial adventure playground for my friends and me. People came here and started disappearing, Professor continues. The authorities surrounded the Zone with barbed wire to stop people coming (again, that mirror image of the Gulag: a place surrounded by barbed wire not to keep people in, but to keep them out). More generally, the Zone looks back to a vision of the future — another paradox — sketched in 1946 by the Swiss writer Max Frisch as he surveyed the devastation of postwar Europe. ‘This is what exists, the grass growing in the houses, the dandelions in the churches, and suddenly one can imagine how it might all continue to grow, how a forest might creep over our cities, slowly, inexorably, thriving unaided by human hands, a silence of thistles and moss, an earth without history, only the twittering of birds, spring, summer and autumn, the breathing of which there is no one to count any more.’
Tremors from the future can be felt throughout Stalker. In less than a decade Professor’s summary of how the Zone came into existence had taken on the aura of a premonition fulfilled, and Stalker acquired yet another dimension of suggestiveness: in its foreshadowing of the 1986 disaster at Chernobyl, in Ukraine. Tarkovsky was not only a visionary, poet and mystic — he was also a prophet (of a future that now lies in the past).
The damaged reactor and much of the radioactive material at Chernobyl were sealed in a huge concrete ‘sarcophagus’. Nearby towns such as Pripyat were evacuated and a thirty-kilometre Zone of Exclusion was established around the plant. Like Stalker’s child — a Zone victim, as Professor explains — large numbers of the children of parents who lived near Chernobyl had birth defects. After the evacuation the Zone of Exclusion was littered with the rusting remains of vehicles that had been used as part of the emergency cleanup. Plants stitched the empty roads and cracked concrete. Trees thrust through the warped floors of derelict buildings. Leaves changed shape. Veg-etation clambered up the crumbling walls of abandoned homes. Photographs taken by Robert Polidori of Pripyat and Chernobyl in 2001 (and collected in his book Zones of Exclusion) look like stills from a retrospective location shoot from the set of Stalker.20 Except it might not be quite as simple as Polidori and others documenting a world which had come to resemble a film made thirty years earlier. It could be that the photographers’ aesthetic — their tacit sense of what they were looking for — was partly formed by Stalker, so that the film has helped generate and shape the observed reality that succeeded it.
Rumours began to circulate that within the Zone there was another place (in any magical realm there is always a deeper recess or chamber of more powerful magic) where your wishes could come true. There you have it. In the most concise form imaginable, Professor has outlined the birth of a myth and religion: a place where something may or may not have happened; a place with a power that was intensified — possibly even created — by being forbidden. That’s certainly the view of another professor, good old Slavoj Žižek, who reckons that the cordoning off is the defining aspect of the Zone: ‘What confers on it the aura of mystery is the Limit itself, i.e. the fact that the Zone is designated as inaccessible, as prohibited.’ In a classic Žižekian bit of reverse dialectics, ‘the Zone is not prohibited because it has certain properties which are “too strong” for our everyday sense of reality, it displays these properties because it is posited as prohibited. What comes first is the formal gesture of excluding a part of the real from our everyday reality and of proclaiming it the prohibited Zone.’
Irrespective of how it was created, a cult grew around this Zone. Special powers were ascribed to it. Did it have these powers? It is not made clear. But the belief that such a thing or place exists can bring it into existence — as with the Unicorn in one of Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus: the animal that never was, but was loved just the same. That love, the love of the people who loved this thing that had not been, created a space in which it might be:
They fed it, not with corn,
but only with the possibility that it might be.
And this gave the beast such strength
that a horn grew from its brow.21
It’s a gift, this place, the Zone, Professor continues, diligently tying bandages to the nuts. Some gift, says Writer, hand pressed to the side of his head as if talking on a mobile phone. Why would they give it to us? To make us happy, says Stalker, back from his walk, tail wagging. He’s in a really good mood now, smiling, clambering past the rotting telegraph poles (part of one actually falls apart as he goes past). Even a reprise of the spooky anguished animal howl does not dent his good humour. Yes, he’s having the time of his life — so much so that, without even checking his (wife’s) watch he declares, It’s time, and sends the trolley clanking back the way it came, along the curving rails, past an abandoned tanker, back into the mists, into the world of black-and-white, and ultimately out of sight, beyond the Zone, beyond the screen. He might just as easily have announced the opposite — it’s not time. Or at least it’s very difficult to work out how much or little of it is passing. Still, sending back the trolley like this begs an obvious question and Writer is the one who asks it: How are we going to return? (It is only now that I notice that they are literally at the end of the line; the rail, here, is blocked by debris. Either the Zone causes the railway to stop or the Zone begins wherever the railway ends. Either way, the Zone is a place you can’t pass through, only ever arrive at.) Stalker ignores the question but it seems possible that a well-read fellow like Writer has come across the answer before, in one of Kafka’s Zürau Aphorisms: ‘Beyond a certain point there’s no return. That’s the point that must be reached.’ The surprising thing — they’ve only just got here — is that they’ve reached that point already.
Stalker tells Professor to make his way to the last telegraph pole, by the abandoned car. The camera glides towards the car. Plants sway in the breeze a bit. We can hear the sound of footsteps on grass, can see tufts of grass being flattened at the bottom of the screen, so presum-ably, even though there is no attempt to visually convey the slight jolt of walking, this is the professor’s P.O.V. The vehicle, we can see now, contains the burned corpses of two figures hunched over the rusted remains of a machine gun. Scary. Hint of horror. These, I’m guessing, were some of the troops mentioned in the caption, sent into the Zone to…do what? To quell it, as the Soviet tanks did in Prague and Hungary? But what was there to quell? There was no uprising, no people on the streets — not even any streets. Nothing. The mere existence of the Zone was a threat. Through the window can be seen the hulks of burned-out tanks in the distance and, nearby, coming into frame, Stalker, Professor and, finally, Writer. So it was not Professor whose eyes we were seeing through. Or at least if it started out that way then it changed without our realizing. This happens repeatedly. We assume that we are sharing the view of one of the participants only to find that he comes into his own field of vision, thereby creating the sense that there is another watcher. The convention whereby the movements of a potential victim are tracked by a camera pregnant with menace — the camera as stalker — is common to all suspense films but here the movement from participants’ subjective view to that of an undisclosed third party creates a disquieting sense of there being an extra pair of eyes. There is never a sense that this is the point of view of an actual person, of someone who is stalking the Stalker: it is like an additional consciousness (that of the Zone itself?), alert and waiting. Perhaps this is what Tarkovsky meant when he said that he wanted us to ‘feel…that the Zone is there beside us.’ In other words, that extra person (that extra pair of eyes) is us (are ours). The Zone is film.