STALKER - TARKOVSKY - 1979

In Tarkovsky's STALKER, a hired guide, called a Stalker, guides a writer and a scientist into a restricted area called "The Zone," the site of a mysterious event in the past. They are looking for "The Room," a place rumored to fulfill one's most deeply held desires. It is the adaptation of a science-fiction novel by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, and was Tarkovsky's final feature to be made in the Soviet Union.

There is a lot happening in this movie, so what I write here should not be considered to fully encompass my thoughts on its meaning. It should also be said that I interpret everything through the lens of Catholic Tradition. I do this for two reasons.

1.
It is my culture and everyone interprets everything through the lens of their own culture.

2.
I believe Catholic Tradition is the archetypal fulfillment of all myth, history and symbolism.

So this is my interpretation of what I consider to be the core of the film through that lens. Since Tarkovsky lived in The Soviet Union at the time, I find it doubtful that I’m outright wrong about a lot of this as it’s likely he would have been Catholic or Orthodox and probably pretty oppressed for it. The typology and imagery of the movie also suggest this.

From here on, you will encounter "spoilers" for the film's plot. So if you haven't seen it and would like to see it before having these things revealed, I suggest you stop now and go do that. If you don't care, go right ahead and keep reading.

The Stalker, The Scientist and The Writer upon arriving in 

The Zone

The first thing in STALKER that immediately jumped out at me was that the two men that the Stalker is guiding, The Writer and The Scientist, are seeking a mysterious place called The Room. The rumor is that it grants the innermost desire of anyone who enters it. At one point, early in the journey, they can apparently see their destination and it is quite close, but the Stalker insists that you cannot go strait to it. The landscape within The Zone changes and is constantly trying to trap people who venture into it. The Stalker reveals that The Zone is like a living thing and it must be respected. No one can travel by a strait path there, the path is never the same and no one returns the same way they came. The Writer insists on trusting his own instincts and leaving the path anyway and all three of the men actually witness the danger that is inherent in doing this, confirming the validity of the Stalker's warnings. Even so, the two men continuously mistrust their guide, voice endless skepticism concerning his knowledge and accuse him of all sorts of shortcomings and deceptions instead of just following him. This continues to happen even after the men witness the miraculous dangers of straying from his guidance.

The Writer takes his chances.

The most immediate connection that this generated for me is the experience of being a mystagogue. I’ve guided a few inquirers through the process of entering the Catholic Church and all of them express a desire for the Sacraments at some point, but at the same time, many of them want to skip the process of formation that is required of them before the Sacraments can be received. It is common for them to go through periods of stubborn skepticism toward their guides. They see others receiving the Sacraments and it looks simple enough for them and so they figure, "why can't I just walk right over there and do it right now?" Sometimes the skepticism is even seemingly justifiable as a Catholic mystagogue or catechist can sometimes be pretty bad at his or her job.

What is being missed here is that this is one of the fundamental lessons of mystagogia: humility. You don't just grasp at Christ and take Him how and when you want to. You prepare yourself to receive Him. The former is like trying to scoop the reflection of the moon out of a puddle of water and take it home with you. The latter often requires unimaginable humility. You see this idea all over the gospel and in the people of today. They are philosophically set back 3,000 years because they reject the idea that religion has ever had any value. But they want the things that are only possible through the humble and respectful and often, what seems to them, rewardless practice of religion.

Dante and his mystogogue, Virgil, at the gate of Hell.

From Dante's "Divine Comedy"

This paints the Stalker as a typological mystagogue. I guess some people might say “evangelist,” but I say mystagogue. There is much more than evangelism happening on his part. He isn’t just trying to tell them about something new, but rather, he’s trying to guide them into a life they've already claimed they want to live. In the end, his frustration seems to be that the people of the culture he is dealing with do not have the humility, patience or discipline necessary to obtain what they demand, nor the philosophical background necessary to make sense of the Truth. They have no common texts, no universal platform of meaning from which to jump. They only have their own egos, which they guard viciously. A powerful representation of this frustration is played out upon the Stalker's return home. He lies on the floor and dumps all of this despair out on his wife who patiently tries to get him up off the floor. My wife and I immediately recognized this illustration of despair and depression as she has had to do the same for me many times, figuratively and literally.

The Writer and The Scientist seem to clearly illustrate the set up for a Catholic concept that Father Louis Merton has repeatedly expounded upon. He calls it “The New Man.” The idea is that we all wrap experiences around ourselves to deliver the illusion of some kind of complex identity to others who might examine us. We wear certain clothes, we read books, learn music theory, maybe we do yoga, adopt particular political positions or climb mountains. We wrap these experiences around ourselves to create the illusion of a True Self. But it is really just wrappings. If you take the wrappings off, there’s nothing there that subsists on its own. This is also part of the meaning behind THE INVISIBLE MAN by the way and is subtly referenced in the character of Andros in my own film, THE DANGER ELEMENT. To strip away these descriptors is to face true horror. The knowledge that under them, you are really no one.

The Stalker brings these men to the threshold of a room in which the innermost desire of anyone who enters it is supposedly granted. Over the course of the journey, however, The Writer and The Scientist begin to realize what this means. It doesn’t mean that The Room grants you what you ask for. It means that The Room grants you what you truly are. This presents a terrifying implication. These men, in the end, are so terrified of their unknown selves that they choose to walk away from the room even as they sit at its threshold after a grueling and frightening journey to reach it.

The Stalker, The Scientist and The Writer

at the threshold of The Room.

I think some viewers would see this choice as an expression of wisdom on the parts of The Writer and The Scientist. But if it is, I see it  only as a fool's wisdom that is contingent upon a fear of the Truth and an unwillingness to adapt to it. The Catholic concept that Merton calls “The New Man” faces this idea head on. The idea is that the only way to become your True Self is to surrender the throne of your ego entirely to Jesus Christ, who is the perfect union of God and His creation. Human beings, even devout Catholics, and even monastic hermits who have supposedly devoted their entire lives to this concept, struggle with it. People naturally think of God as a being or a thing. We are beings, so we think of God as a being. Beings cannot occupy the same space. They compete. So we tend to think that if we surrender our ego entirely to Christ, it will drive our own True Self out and it will be replaced with an alternate competitive self. That of Christ. This fear of losing the self prevents a lot of people from really facing this idea.

The reality of Christianity, however, is that God is not a thing that is in competition with other things. God is that in which all things find the very advent of being itself. God IS being. Therefore, the closer God comes to a thing, the more that thing becomes what it truly is. It does not become less itself, it becomes more itself than is imaginable. Therefore, when a man surrenders his entire self, his whole ego, his whole identity in favor of the identity of Christ, that man does not become replaced by Christ, he rather becomes the perfect version of himself. More himself than he could ever possibly imagine. As such, to fear losing our own identity by surrendering it in favor of Christ's identity within us is much more like the idea of Pinocchio fearing to become a real boy because it will mean his false wooden self will cease to exist.

The Writer sits at the threshold of The Room and faces this in perplexity and fear. He realizes that he does not know his True Self, and by association he does not know his innermost desire. He decides not to enter The Room. He does not want to face the potential horrors that are hidden under the wrappings of  this false identity that he has constructed to give visibility to an invisible self. He ends up walking away from The Room with nothing because he fears what he actually is, but also fears losing his own notion of what he is.

The scientist has another motive altogether. Upon reaching The Room he reveals that he has brought with him a powerful bomb with the intention of destroying The Room and its power forever. His motivation for doing this is that he fears that the power of The Room will eventually fall into the wrong hands. If The Zone will allow someone like The Scientist to reach it, even with his intention to destroy it, why wouldn't it permit other men to approach it with worse intentions? I can't help but make connections between this and the tendency of many anti-Catholics to adopt an attitude of "scientism." That is to say, an excessive belief in the power of science or even the desire to  reduce or restrict all knowledge to scientific knowledge, an attitude that is not itself scientific, but philosophical.

It seems to me that this kind of links up with other imagery surrounding the Zone in STALKER. It is understood that at some point in the past, the government was interested in The Zone. The implications are obvious. Perhaps they thought that a government that controlled The Room would control unimaginable power, both militarily and politically. All of this invokes the memory of positions taken by the Nazis and the Soviets toward the Catholic Church. At first, they both saw it as a potentially powerful tool if it could be made to serve the ends of the government. But the Church  proved, being as it is the very living Body of Christ on Earth, to be something that could not be used, but literally something that pours out a curse upon anyone who tries to use it as means of personal gain. Not unlike the Holy Grail of THE LAST CRUSADE or the ARK OF THE COVENANT in RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK. In the early 1300s, one of the greatest Catholic writers in history, Dante Alighieri, also depicted many popes, bishops and statesmen suffering in Hell for their own attempts at exploiting the power of the Catholic Church for their own selfish gain.

The Soviets, in their turn, were driven to realize that they would need to instead destroy the Church. It had power that would not serve them and yet it gave power to those they wanted to control and oppress. Therefore, for a time, the Catholic Church actually was seemingly wiped off the entire surface of the Soviet union and driven mostly underground and out of the public sphere. Clergy and parishioners were sent to prison camps.

The Stalker, The Scientist and The Writer 

illegally enter The Zone through a heavily guarded gate.

The imagery of the battlements and fences that cut The Zone off from the rest of the world in STALKER do a good job of invoking those memories. One might ask why the government did not

destroy The Zone and its Room altogether, but we are shown that it can't be done. The landscape of The Zone is littered with derelict military vehicles and powerful weapons, confounded and ultimately consumed by the mysterious power of The Zone. This leaves the government in a position of having to guard the perimeter of The Zone in frantic paranoia, making it illegal for anyone to enter it. They no longer try to enter it themselves having found it to hold nothing for them but a pit of horrors. The Soviet Union, likewise, proved completely unable to destroy the Catholic Church, but tried in vain to control it and cut it off from society. It eventually resurfaced in Poland and triggered the fall of the entire Soviet Union from the inside out without the firing of a single shot. The Catholic Church truly is a living thing and it was the Soviet Union's worst nightmare.

Another element of the story is the daughter of the Stalker whom he refers to as "Monkey." She is a child born with some kind of mutation caused by the event that created The Zone. This mutation has made it impossible for her to walk on her own. Throughout the film, she is largely ignored or talked about as if she isn't there when she is present. But in the end, it is revealed that she has the power to do something miraculous.

I see Monkey as kind of a profound statement about suffering as a path to wonder. She calls to my mind the idea that people have that the disabled are somehow unjustly designed that way by God without purpose and I think some viewers even automatically jump to this conclusion about the character. The place is bleak, she doesn't look happy, she can't walk, she never speaks, no one notices her.

Once again, if you look at this through the lens of Catholic Tradition, you get an entirely different message. In reality, her state in life, her suffering, her “limitations,” are actually true paths to the extraordinary. Christ's incarnation, Life, Suffering, Death and Resurrection divinized suffering. Christ, in becoming a human being and suffering as one of us turned the suffering of all human beings into a path to Eternal Life. Therefore, those of us who live in Christ have the freedom to unite our very suffering to His own suffering. I believe Monkey represents this. She is the miracle at the center of the Zone that others are risking their lives to get to, but fail to see it when it is present in another person who's sitting right in front of them. She does not find her true self by avoiding suffering or limitation, but by embracing it. For in Christ, suffering and death themselves are divinized and made the path to a new creation. As usual, she is overlooked by those who have not grasped this. The practice of navigating The Zone takes place within Monkey at all times. If you notice, the few glimpses of the world that are shown from her perspective outside the Zone are in full color. Something that, until then, only ever happens inside the Zone. To me she seems to represent the archetypal “New Man.”

There are so many other things in this film that I want to talk about that I have to stop or I will end up writing an entire book. Suffice it to say that looking at this film through the right lens yields nearly endless treasures.