by Geoff Dyer
Having got so much off their chests everyone simmers down. Writer is having doubts himself. Why did Porcupine hang himself? Because he came here with mercenary motives. So why didn’t he come back to repent? Because, he understands now, not all wishes will be granted here, only your innermost wish, which, in Porcupine’s case, was for money. Confronted by his true nature, he hanged himself. The truth revealed by the Room is ontological. ‘Each one of us comes into the world with her or his unique possibility—which is like an aim, or, if you wish, almost like a law,’ says a character in John Berger and Nella Bielski’s play A Question of Geography. ‘The job of our lives is to become—day by day, year by year, more conscious of this aim so that it can at last be realized.’ Unless you’re a paedophile, say, or any one of a dozen other types of sicko. Then the job of your life is to bury that urge, to make sure you never get near the gates of a primary school or anything that might turn out to be the Room.
Another, less dramatic, scenario: what if you got here and went into the Room, believing in it absolutely, and it turned out that you didn’t have an innermost wish, that all the things you thought you wished for you didn’t actually want? You leave the Room, leave the Zone and, unlike Porcupine, nothing happens. Jack shit. Would you con-clude from this that you were absolutely content, purring on a daily basis like a cat or a dog whose bowl of milk was constantly replenished? Unlikely. Or at least if you had been content—without realizing it—now you would most certainly be filled with discontent. You would conclude that the Room did not work. That you’d been sold a pup. That Stalker had not undergone the changes that he went through as Tarkovsky and the much-put-upon Strugatskys reworked, rewrote and reshot the film. You would phone him, demand a refund, threaten to blacken his name, turn him in to the authorities or, at the very least, refuse to recommend him to friends considering a once-in-a-lifetime trip to the much-vaunted Zone. Of course Stalker would have none of it. In the extremely unlikely event that he returned or even answered your calls he would insist that it had worked, that it was working perfectly. And so you would be left seething, dissatisfied, cheated, unable to accept that this was your innermost wish, your innermost nature.
They are all back where they were before Professor unveiled his bomb, his stainless steel IED, before the scuffle in this waterlogged place, on the threshold of the Room, whose light can be seen, off to the right. Stalker is on his knees, collapsed on the floor. Writer is holding forth like a detective who has just solved a difficult case, who has spotted the clues and unravelled the contradictions that escaped the attention of other, less subtle, minds. And he’s not finished. How do we know it’s true, that the Zone grants all your wishes? Who actually said that the Room granted these wishes? One assumes Writer is speaking to Stalker but Professor replies, He did, meaning Stalker, as if the whole idea of the Zone and the Room were entirely his invention.43
Writer is at the edge of the Room and, overcome by his own oratorical prowess, stumbles forward, is about to fall into the Room, is about to tumble into having his own innermost wish accidentally realized—more sales than Wilbur Smith, more critical acclaim than Sebald, more chicks than Bukowski—but Stalker pulls him back and they huddle on the ground together. The phone is ringing again. Writer puts his arm around Stalker’s shoulders. Professor stands up, begins dismantling his thermos-bomb, chucking bits of it into the water, asking the question that is on everyone’s lips—What is the point in coming here?
The purpose of coming here was to get to the point where that question could be asked of oneself rather than someone else. There always comes a moment in the writing of a book when its purpose is revealed: the moment when the urge—Nabokov’s famous ‘throb’—that led one to consider writing it is made plain. Actually there are two moments, or, if it makes sense to put it like this, the moment comes in two phases. First when one realizes that yes, there is a book here—however faintly it can be discerned—not just a haphazard collection of jottings and crossings-out clustered round an inadequately formed idea. Since, in principle, getting to that point should be easy, it’s disheartening to find that so much time and energy have to be wasted, that so many pointless detours, irritating obstacles, self-imposed tests and excuses (that voice constantly whispering or crying out ‘Stop!’) conspire to get in the way. But at the point when you realize that there is a book, even a short one with little hope of critical approval or large sales, you see that all those diversions were necessary and inevitable and so, strictly speaking, were not diversions at all (even if the whole journey is, ultimately, no more than a diversion). From that point on—the point that Kafka said must be reached—there is no turning back and, despite setbacks, the going gets generally easier. The next moment comes not when the book is finished—that is better conceived as the last bit of the previous phase—but some time after it is published, when you see it for what it is (weirdly, page proofs always retain some of the glow of how it was intended to be rather than what it is). Then you see that actually those big desires and hopes, your deepest wishes, turned out not to be so deep at all, that actually even to consider life and writing in terms of a single wish is absurd, that there are numerous wishes and numerous books to be written—or, by reference to something mentioned earlier, further extensions (more rooms) to be built, more beer to be drunk, and more countries to be napalmed. You wonder if you wouldn’t have been better off summarizing a different film, Where Eagles Dare, say, or writing a different book, about tennis perhaps. There’s no Room, or at least this one, this room, wasn’t it. And so one sets off again, trying to find another.
Since we’ve come this far, since we are still on the threshold of the Room and could conceivably sneak in there while these three are recovering from all that scuffling, perhaps I should say what it is that I most want from—what is my deepest wish for—this book. Easy: success. Success that, by definition, will be enormous success. If it is published, if someone will deign to publish this summary of a film that relatively few people have seen, then that will constitute a success far greater than anything John Grisham could ever have dreamed of. And that wish, as you can tell, has been granted. As a result the original wish has been updated and upgraded because I’m now thinking that this summary that is the opposite of a summary does have some commercial appeal—in an admittedly niche sort of way—and is actually deserving of serious critical attention, maybe even a little prize of some kind.
Professor tosses bits of the bomb into one part of the waterlogged room, other bits into other parts. There are lots of bits—it’s more complicated, bomb-wise, than it looked at first—but there’s a lot of water too. It’s not only the wiring, the plumbing is shot to hell too. The phone is no longer ringing. There is the sound of birds again and of dripping water, the two not entirely distinct, as if the birds were amphibious, still partly fish, the sounds one might have heard in the early days of creation, before there were people, when there was no one around to hear, when there was no difference between god and evolution, and Darwin himself was probably just a swimming fish, trying to breathe with wings or fly with gills. The three of them sit there and the camera pulls back, into the Room itself, revealing the water-immersed tiled floor. (None of the humans has made it into the Room—only the camera whose deepest wish has been realized before our eyes.) They’re worn out, by the journey, by the scuffle, by the combination of disappointment and enlightenment, by the uncertain distinctions between faith, hope and belief, by the complex simplicity of whatever it is they have learned or not learned, by not knowing whether the lessons of evolution—of learning as you go—are ever going to be over with. The light, which has been silvery and dank, glows gradually golden and warm, then fades, Turrell-ishly, to dank and silver again. Stalker says what he said at the beginning: How quiet it is here. Can you feel it? It isn’t, but we can. He wonders why he doesn’t come and live here with his wife and child, Monkey, where there’s no one else, where no one can harm them. Is it because at some level he doesn’t want to? That maybe
the Zone won’t live up to his hopes after all, will be unable to sustain, as Fitzgerald said of Gatsby (we are back there again), the colossal vitality of his illusions? A crack of thunder, of unseen lightning. Bringing rain: internal rain, rain that knows how to behave in a room. A shower of room rain, gentle at first, falling between us and the three men sitting there. Then becoming heavier and louder, more storm than shower, falling into the flooded area between us and them. As much a shower of light as of rain even though the rain has no wish to be anything other than what it is. Any such desire evaporated long ago but it will come around again as surely as day follows night. As the rain rains Professor chucks more parts of his bomb—harmless now—into the water which is a thousand small explosions of glitter. The storm is soon a shower again—light rain, raining light—and then the shower is over except for the usual drip and drop and they continue sitting there. Professor lobs the last bits of his bomb into the glitter-ripple of water. Drip, drip. We can see part of it, parts of the bomb that is no longer a bomb, resting on the tiles beneath the water, gone the way of the machine gun and syringes—the opposite of souvenirs—seen earlier.
‘Everything, after passing through time, returns to eternity,’ writes Unamuno. ‘The scenes of life pass before us as in a film, but on the other side of time the film is one and indivisible.’ A couple of curious fish nuzzle up to the ex-bomb, ascertaining whether or not it might be edible. A black film, inky, with threads of blood—from the fish?—spreads over the water as the sound builds of a train moving swiftly and blaring a bit of Ravel’s Boléro, a piece of music whose place in film history is indelibly linked with Bo Derek and Dudley Moore in 10. Not that Bo Derek is on anyone’s mind, certainly not the fishes’, as vibrations from the train make the water rock and sway over the harmless remains of the bomb and the curiously harmless fish, causing the black oily film to sway and shudder over bomb, fish, water and screen.
IT SEEMS LIKE THE END but it’s not the end. We are back at the bar, in the bar in fact, looking out through the smeary door that has not been washed in the however-long-it-is interlude while they have been busy not thinking about Bo Derek, having the time of their lives— though not quite the time they thought they were going to have—in the Zone. The bar door is open. Across the stretch of industrial water we can see the power station, looking all Didcot and grey because—oh yes, we’re also back in black-and-white, here in the world that is not the Zone. The noise of the train, the 6:10 to Boléro. Just outside the door is Stalker’s wife, all bundled up in a sheepskin coat and she has their daughter, Monkey, with her, and some crutches leaning by the stairs. The wife comes up the stairs to the boozers—there they are, the three of them. Luger, the barman of few words, is there too, and he’s the first to see her. Uh-oh. They’re back, though we have no idea how they got back. Stalker kept telling them there was no going back but, among the lessons learned and not learned, one might be that there is nothing but going back.44
The wife could be forgiven for thinking that they’ve been here all the time, on a colossal bender, or having ingested a powerful psychedelic, getting so fucked up that mere survival—the avoidance of liver failure or mental breakdown—seems like an achievement. They all look pretty messed up: rumpled, mud-smeared, damp, but not totally Boris-Mikhailoved—nothing that couldn’t have been the result of a half-decent drinking session. If she didn’t know her husband better…Well, whatever it is they’ve been up to they’re none the wiser for it. Or per-haps they’re a hell of a lot wiser if, by wiser, we mean sadder and if, by sadder, we mean damper. The thing about wisdom is that it rarely reveals itself in appearances; one never knows what it looks like in human form.
But wait—something is different. They’ve got a dog with them. The dog, from our point of view, is the only proof that they’ve been where they say, proof that this place called the Zone exists. It’s like the rose that Coleridge mentions, the one you dreamed you found in paradise (the one, to be honest, that I’ve had cause to mention elsewhere, in a not unrelated context) and then, on waking, find in your bed. Stalker is feeding the dog. Other than that nothing has changed, but then that’s always the way when you go anywhere and come back. Nothing has ever changed, even if the place you come back to has changed unrecognizably, which is definitely not the case with this dump. The lonesome whistle is still blowing, doesn’t sound any less lonesome. Luger is still smoking and the bar is still a bit of a dump. The flickering light, it goes without saying, is still flickering. The wife comes into the bar, one part local sheriff confronting three gunslingers, one part stern mum whose adolescent son and his mates have been caught drinking. And they have been drinking, we can see now: they’ve got a beer each and who can blame them? No one could begrudge them a few beers after what they’ve been through, even if it’s not clear what it is they’ve been through. She asks about the dog and plonks herself down on the bench. Does either of you two want dogs? They don’t. Writer has five at home already—seems a lot but maybe he’s got a bigger house than we imagined. So you love dogs, do you, she says. That’s a good thing (as though liking dogs could ever be anything other than a good thing).45
So, says the wife, are we going?
The dog trots out of the bar, followed by Stalker and his wife. (Could it be that Stalker did set foot in the Room after all, that his deepest wish was to have a dog?) Writer and Professor—the pair of them look so dirty they could be in a socialist-realist drama about coal miners—watch them go: Stalker, his wife, the dog, and Monkey, their kid. Writer is smoking a cigarette, squinting through the smoke in a writerly way, watching them go, looking like he’s learnt something, something that he may one day put into writing: An empty bar, possibly not even open, with a single table…
From here on we are in a realm of loveliness unmatched anywhere else in cinema. We are able to believe in something blatantly untrue, an amendment to the idea that men were put on earth to create works of art: that the cinema was invented so that Tarkovsky could make Stalker, that our greatest debt to the Lumière brothers is that they enabled this film to be made.
SWITCH TO COLOUR, to the daughter, Monkey, in profile and in close-up, swathed in a golden-brown head scarf, walking through the bare blur of trees, with the dog. So, colour is not the unique preserve of the Zone after all. Something that is almost snow—sleet, gobs of rain, sky-blossom—is falling. The music on the sound track is that spooky electronic drone again that we heard right at the beginning, before they went to the Zone. We can still see only her head bobbing along but the focus is not as tight and we watch her moving through more of the landscape, covered in snow or pale ash. The lake or river is a dull grey. As the camera pulls back we see that Monkey is not walking; she is on her father’s shoulders, and the landscape, though desolate, has a desolate beauty. They make their way through the wasteland, Stalker, his wife and child, Monkey, and the dog. In Kenzaburo Oë’s story, ‘The Guide (Stalker),’ a dinner guest, Mr. Shigeto, comments on ‘the excellent acting of the dog in [this] scene’. Mr. Shigeto’s wife disagrees: ‘Fine acting on the part of dogs is mere coincidence, with the exception of super movie dogs like Lassie or Rin Tin Tin. And even their acting, she claimed, wasn’t acting in the truest sense, for their roles were always the same.’ She is here echoing a point made by Béla Balézs, that only ‘plants and animals do not act for the director.’ If they are right then this actually fits in well with what Tarkovsky required of his human actors too. Donatas Banionis—Kris in Solaris—was uneasy with the director’s lack of interest in psychological motivation and his exacting demands that the characters move a certain number of steps or remain quite still for a precise number of seconds. For Banionis this was not acting but ‘posing’ or ‘counting one-two-three.’ Dogs can’t count but this one does everything required of him, moving like the director’s counter on a Ludo board, tail wagging, tagging along with Stalker and his wife and child.46 One assumes that if the dog had strayed into the Room he would have wanted to go on as he was, with his untroubled doggy
life. Or maybe not. Maybe he was lonely padding around the Zone, wandered into a room and, although he didn’t know this room was the Room, his innermost wish—to be adopted and taken home by a nice family of humans— was granted. (Inconceivably cynical, surely, to suggest that his deepest wish was to be a movie-star dog?)
Paradise Lost ends with Adam and Eve making their way out of Eden ‘with wandering steps and slow.’ There is something similarly touching about this scene, though now it is a nice little family (with a new dog) and it’s not a life of exile and unprecedented adventure that lies ahead but a return to the familiar contentments and frustrations of home. It’s reminiscent, in its dreary, postindustrial way, of the pure winter scenes—enhanced by the Brueghel echoes—in Mirror. In the background, across the lake or the river, is the power station, pouring out clouds of smoke or steam. The dog pads on ahead, tail wagging, and then circles back to join the others. They look like the last family on earth, sole survivors of the catastrophe that everyone else calls life.