Stalker

On the Road to Emmaus

“INTERVIEWER: But eventually you had to believe.
DR. PILLMAN: Eventually, yes.”

– Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, Roadside Picnic

Stalker, 1979: Stalker’s Wife sits on the edge of the bed as she cleans Stalker’s face with cotton. He laments atrophied faith. Feathers hang in the air; it looks like it is snowing inside the bedroom. Her hands are hard at work.

There is a story in the New Testament, “On the Road to Emmaus,” from the Gospel of Luke. In the Zone, Stalker wakes from a dream on a bed of moss. He is surrounded by water. He begins reciting a version of this story:

That same day…two of them…were going to a village called Emmaus. And it came to pass that Jesus himself drew near and walked with them, but they did not recognize him. “What manner of discussions are these…that you have one to another as you walk and are sad?” And one of them named—

The rest of the story goes that the two men spoke with Jesus about what had happened in the preceding days. They were referring to his crucifixion and resurrection. Jesus responds to their story, “Oh, how foolish you are, and how slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have declared! Was it not necessary that the Messiah should suffer these things and then enter into his glory?”¹ He then interprets the scriptures for the men as they walk down the road to Emmaus. Their hearts burn. As they approach the village, the men urge Jesus to stay with them as the day is nearing its end. They break bread together and “Then their eyes were opened, and they recognized him; and he vanished from their sight. They said to each other, ‘Were not our hearts burning within us while he was talking to us on the road, while he was opening the scriptures to us?’”² In Stalker’s version of the story, he says “they did not recognize him,” in reference to the men’s inability to recognize Jesus even as he walked alongside them. In Stalker’s telling, the two men have agency; they are active in their failure of recognition. The New Revised Standard Version of the story translates their sightlessness differently, “but their eyes were kept from recognizing him.”³ Here, something beyond themselves prevents the men from recognizing the Messiah. So much depends on this semantic detail.

Notoriously impenetrable, Tarkovsky returns to sci-fi adaptation with Stalker. Put simply, the film follows three men on a journey. It is not unlike the familiar genre of the road movie in that an interior journey is mapped onto a physical one, with the interior world externalized. The Stalker, a guide, leads two men, the Writer and the Professor, into a restricted area called the Zone. The characters are unnamed and are instead referred to by their vocations. Inside the Zone lies the Room of Desires, where one’s innermost wish will be granted. Stalker tells the story of his teacher, Porcupine, who entered the Room with the belief that his innermost desire was to bring his brother back to life. Instead, he left the Room and found himself an incredibly wealthy man. His heart was not pure. In the end, Porcupine committed suicide. In the Zone, unseen hazards threaten to derail Stalker’s goal of bringing the Writer and Professor to the Room. Nevertheless, the three men arrive at the threshold of the Room of Desires. Unable to confront the truth of their hearts, neither the Writer nor the Professor enter the Room. The Stalker does not enter either. They exit the Zone. What is so intentionally oblique about Stalker is not the plot, but what the viewer is to make of it.

The story of the walk to Emmaus is embedded within Stalker. Not only does Tarkovsky choose to have Stalker recite the story while on his own journey in the Zone, but he creates a triangular relationship between Stalker, the Writer, and the Professor that mirrors the relationship between Jesus and the two men on the road to Emmaus. On their journey through the Zone, the Writer and the Professor discuss their motivations for approaching the Room of Desires. The Writer fears he has lost his gift. Later, it is revealed the Professor brought a bomb into the Zone and intends to destroy the Room. He does not. Like the two men on the walk to Emmaus, the Writer and the Professor fail to see Stalker’s true nature. They do not recognize him as a Christlike figure, and are blind to his purity of heart, strength of faith, and unrelenting devotion to sharing belief. In Sculpting in Time, Tarkovsky writes, “The Stalker seems to be weak, but essentially it is he who is invincible because of his faith and his will to serve others.” In 1980 in an interview with Aldo Tassone in Rome, Tarkovsky acknowledged his positioning of Stalker as a Christlike figure explicitly,

Q: The Stalker is something of a prophet. He’s a Christ-like figure…

T: Yes, he’s a prophet who believes that humanity will perish for lack of a spiritual life. Actually, this story is about the crisis of one of the world’s last remaining idealists.⁴

However, behind Stalker lies a quieter voice. After Stalker returns from the Zone, his wife and daughter meet him at the dingy bar where the journey began. They walk home. The film settles into a warm sepia tone. Stalker’s Wife pours a bowl of milk for the black dog who followed the men home from the Zone. Like in Nostalghia, the dog threads together disparate times and spaces, weaving together dreams, memories, and reality. In Stalker’s moment of profound despair regarding the Writer and Professor’s atrophied faith, Stalker’s Wife assumes the role of caretaker. She lifts him from the floor and guides him to bed. The home is warmer than I remember it being from the opening moments of the film. It is full of books. The bed is inviting. Stalker’s wife helps him remove his clothes. I hear the sound of a cuckoo clock.

The moment that struck me begins when Tarkovsky cuts to a wide shot of the bedroom. Stalker is in bed, under a quilt. Stalker’s Wife sits on the bedside. She adjusts his pillow. The camera begins subtly tracking closer to the couple. It appears as if it is snowing inside the bedroom.

STALKER: My God, what kind of people are they?STALKER’S WIFE: Calm down. It isn’t their fault. They should be pitied not abused.

She lifts Stalker’s head and tips a cup of water into his mouth. He swallows medicine. She gently cleans his face with cotton.

STALKER: Their eyes are blank. They’re thinking how not to sell themselves cheap, how to get paid for every breath they take. They know they were born to “be someone,” to be an elite! They say, “You live but once.” How can such people believe in anything at all?

Stalker’s wife caresses his face. The camera continues to probe inward. His eyes are closed.

STALKER’S WIFE: Relax now. Try to get some sleep. Go to sleep.

What initially appeared to be snow is actually the feathers from down pillows hanging in the air. Stalker is crying now; his eyes are still closed. The camera frames his face in closeup. Within the frame, the hands of Stalker’s Wife tend to him.

STALKER: Nobody believes. Not only these two. Nobody. Who shall I take there? Oh, Lord. The most terrible thing is that nobody needs that Room and all my efforts are in vain.

The camera remains fixed on Stalker. His eyes remain closed.

STALKER’S WIFE: Why do you say that? Don’t.
STALKER: I’ll never go there again with anyone.

She wipes away his tears and brushes the white down from his chin.

STALKER’S WIFE: If you want, I’ll go there with you. Do you want that? Do you think I’ve nothing to ask for?

Stalker opens his eyes to look at his wife. The camera withholds her from the frame.

STALKER: No. You mustn’t.

The sound of a train whistle in the distance.

STALKER’S WIFE: Why?
STALKER: No. What if you fail too?

Stalker closes his eyes and turns his head away from his wife and the camera.

In this moment, the long-take tracking shot brings the spectator inward, deeper into the terrain of Stalker’s interior world. The slow, forward momentum of the camera is probing. It is a continuation of the contemplative cinematographic style of the Zone. It is ascetic, almost monastic. In Cinema as Poetry, Maya Turovskaya writes, “The world of Stalker in its ordinariness, with its laconic, pared-down simplicity, is a world reduced to such a tense singularity that is almost ceases to be an ‘external’ world, appearing instead as a landscape of the soul, unburdening itself by confession.”⁵ The close-up Tarkovsky works toward in this moment, the visual point of arrival, punctuates the moment of deepest interiority. Stalker ends in doubt, “No. What if you fail too?” Throughout so much of this dialogue, Stalker’s eyes are closed. He chooses not to see his wife. At the end of the conversation, the viewer no longer sees her either. She is outside of the frame, though we hear her voice and see her hands at work.

Stalker’s Wife strikes me as the other unrecognized Christ figure of the film. To Stalker’s judgment of the Writer and the Professor she professes forgiveness and tolerance. Her line, “Calm down. It isn’t their fault. They should be pitied not abused” is not unlike Jesus on the cross saying, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.”⁶ Stalker’s Wife embodies forgiveness and love. Tarkovsky writes of her in Sculpting in Time,

There before them is a woman who has been through untold miseries because of her husband, and has had a sick child by him; but she continues to love him with the same selfless, unthinking devotion of her youth. Her love and her devotion are that final miracle which can be set against the unbelief, cynicism, moral vacuum poisoning the modern world, of which both the Writer and the Scientist are victims.⁷

I remember watching Stalker for the first time. I remember the peculiar experience of time, the lingering shots on the napes of someone’s neck, the camera’s languid crawl forward. The film found its way into my life at a pivotal moment. For the first time, I was at the precipice of engaging with spirituality on my own terms. Stalker’s Wife spoke to me, clearly and simply. She delivers a monologue directly to the camera just after this moment in the bedroom. Her eyes engage ours with direct frontality. She says, tearful and smoking,

You know, Mama was very opposed to it. You’ve probably already guessed that he’s one of God’s fools. Everyone around here used to laugh at him. He was such a wretched muddler. Mama used to say, “He’s a stalker, a marked man, an eternal jailbird. Remember the kind of children stalkers have.” I didn’t even argue. I knew all about it– that he was a marked man, a jailbird, about the kids. Only what could I do? I was sure I’d be happy with him. I knew there’d be a lot of sorrow. But I’d rather know bittersweet happiness…than a gray, uneventful life. Perhaps I invented all this later. But when he came up to me and said, “Come with me,” I went. And I’ve never regretted it. Never. There was a lot of grief and fear and pain. But I’ve never regretted it nor envied anyone. It’s just fate. It’s life. It’s us. And if there were no sorrow in our lives, it wouldn’t be better. It would be worse. Because then there would be no happiness either. And there’d be no hope. So…

Stalker’s Wife embodies suffering, forgiveness, sacrifice, love, and hope. These values lie at the tender beating heart of Tarkovsky’s cinematic project. In his lifetime, Tarkovsky regarded Stalker as his best film, writing time and time again in his journals that he believed it would be his finest work. Within the diegesis, it is Stalker’s Wife, in her brief screen time, who occupies the center of the film. Around her, doubt, despair, and faithlessness revolve, but she is the center that holds. While we follow Stalker, the Writer, and the Professor into the Zone, we know she is waiting on the other side, steadfast.

Tarkovsky wrote in Sculpting in Time, “In the end, however, it is simply a woman who startles him by her faithfulness and by the strength of her human dignity.”⁸ Rewatching the film, I was looking for the moment where Stalker is startled by her faithfulness. He confides in her and shares his spiritual crises, however, the final line he delivers to her is one of doubt, “No. What if you fail too?” To arrive at the Room of Desires, one must be prepared to confront the marrow of their soul.⁹ One must be assured of the purity of their heart. Perhaps this is impossible in our fallen world. Stalker is not sure that his wife’s heart is pure, fearing what would happen if she failed to enter the Room of Desires. He is unable to see what is apparent to the viewer. Within the diegesis, there is one character who embodies the ultimate forgiving love and sacrifice: Stalker’s Wife. The onus of recognizing this rests on the viewer. An alternative reading is that Stalker’s Wife may not need to enter the Zone to confront her inner world. It is possible Stalker knows this. She may not need the jolt of looking into herself because her heart is pure and her desires are true. Turovskaya distills the role of Stalker’s Wife simply, writing, “unlike the short-sighted seekers after the meaning of life, she is motivated by the simplest, most concrete and unfeigned of all emotions: love.”¹⁰

I read Roadside Picnic, the novel by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky on which Stalker is based. The Stalker of the novel, more of a vigilante than a monk, finally arrives at the Golden Sphere, the novel’s rendering of the Room of Desires. The final paragraph reads,

And he was no longer trying to think. He just kept repeating to himself in despair, like a prayer, “I’m an animal, you can see that I’m an animal. I have no words, they haven’t taught me the words; I don’t know how to think, those bastards didn’t let me learn how to think. But if you really are—all powerful, all knowing, all understanding—figure it out! Look into my soul, I know—everything you need is in there. It has to be. Because I’ve never sold my soul to anyone! It’s mine, it’s human! Figure out yourself what I want—because I know it can’t be bad! The hell with it all, I just can’t think of a thing other than those words of his—HAPPINESS, FREE, FOR EVERYONE, AND LET NO ONE BE FORGOTTEN!”¹¹

Is this wish—“HAPPINESS, FREE, FOR EVERYONE, AND LET NO ONE BE FORGOTTEN!”—not the epitome of selfless loving desire? Is this what it means to arrive at the Room with a pure heart? I imagine if Stalker was to take his wife into the Zone, this is what she would find when she confronted the marrow of her soul. Tarkovsky reflects, “In Stalker I make some sort of complete statement: namely that human love alone is—miraculously—proof against the blunt assertion that there is no hope for the world.”¹² This statement, though cliché, is rendered wholly original in Stalker. It is as if he peels scales from our eyes and the triteness of love being the answer is made somehow radical and fresh. Watching Stalker for the first time was nothing short of an epiphany. It was as if I was seeing something true for the first time. It was also the impetus to enter Tarkovsky’s filmography fully, equipped with the necessary tools and desire to understand.

When I read the story of the walk to Emmaus, or watch Stalker, what I leave with is the impulse to seek that which is Christlike in all of us, to recognize the burning heart in a stranger. In Sculpting in Time, Tarkovsky quotes a Pushkin poem…

Shadows of night lie on the Georgian hills;
In front of me roars the Aragva
I feel at ease and sad; there’s a radiance in my sighs,
My sighs are all of you,
Of you, and you alone…My melancholy
Is untouched by torment or distraction,
And my heart is burning and loving once more
Because it cannot do other than love.¹³

Those last two lines, “And my heart is burning and loving once more / Because it cannot do other than love” embody Tarkovsky’s answer to so many of the problems he poses throughout his filmography—the problem of evil, the suffering of the innocent, crises of faith, inability to access the real. To these problems, Tarkovsky offers us Stalker’s Wife. He offers us love. Near the end of Sculpting in Time, Tarkovsky puts this answer simply:

In the end everything can be reduced to the one simple element which is all a person can count upon in his existence: the capacity to love.That element can grow within the soul to become the supreme factor which determines the meaning of a person’s life. My function is to make whoever sees my films aware of his need to love and to give his love, and aware that beauty is summoning him.¹⁴

On a metacinematic level, watching Stalker again I saw so much of Tarkovsky the filmmaker in the work. Continually and starting early in his career, Tarkovsky positioned himself as a guide, not unlike the Stalker. A year before he died, Tarkovsky published Sculpting in Time. When I began working on this project, it was the first book I read. I invited Tarkovsky the guide into my life and allowed him to lead me through his work. As I learned how to watch and what to look for, I eventually strayed from interpreting his work solely on his terms. Nevertheless, Tarkovsky the guide is an important paratext for immersing oneself in his poetics. Tarkovsky clearly saw himself in Stalker—an artist, an expert in his craft having learned from generations of Stalkers, on down the line to his teacher Porcupine, and eventually to him. He seeks to provide an experience that will radically change the very composition of the participant, however, only to those who are willing to be moved. The Stalker is not unlike the filmmaker. Perhaps Tarkovsky, simply and clearly, is telling us how we are to meet him: pure of heart and loving in spirit. He compares the Stalker’s faith and will to serve others to the work of the artist: “Ultimately artists work at the profession not for the sake of telling someone about something, but as an asserting of their will to serve people.”¹⁵ If we see Tarkovsky in Stalker, then in the Zone we see art itself. In Elements of Cinema, Robert Bird writes, “The Zone, then, is the quintessence of Tarkovsky’s spaces: a locus of experience formed of inquisitive human gazes and an uncanny impersonal gaze that cannot simply be identified with the camera. The Zone is where one goes to see one’s innermost desires. It is, in short, the cinema.”¹⁶

In his interview with Aldo Tassone, Tarkovsky reflects,

Q: What sort of faith are you referring to?

T: Faith is faith. Without it, man is deprived of any spiritual roots. He is like a blind man. Over time, faith has been given different content. But in this period of the destruction of faith, what’s important to the Stalker is to light a spark, a belief in the heart of people.¹⁷

It is clear to me that like Stalker, Tarkovsky lit a spark, a belief in the heart of the people, if not for God, then for cinema.

Luke 24:25-26, (NRSV). ↩︎
Luke 24:32, (NRSV).
↩︎
Luke 24:16, (NRSV). ↩︎
John Gianvito, ed., Andrei Tarkovsky: Interviews (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2006), 59. ↩︎
Maya Turovskaya, Tarkovsky: Cinema as Poetry, ed. Ian Christie, trans. Natasha Ward (London: Faber and Faber, 1989), 109. ↩︎
Luke 23:34, (KJV). ↩︎
Andrei Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time, trans. Kitty Hunter-Blair (Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press, 1987), 198. ↩︎
Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time, 199. ↩︎
Danielle Pajak, “The Cinematic Poet | Tarkovsky’s Stalker: On The Road to Emmaus,” Substack newsletter, Cross Processing (blog), May 14, 2021, https://crossprocessing.substack.com/p/stalker-on-the-road-to-emmaus. ↩︎
Turovskaya, Tarkovsky: Cinema as Poetry, 114. ↩︎
Arkady Strugatsky and Boris Strugatsky, Roadside Picnic, trans. Olena Bormashenko (Chicago, Illinois: Chicago Review Press, 2012), 193. ↩︎
Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time, 199. ↩︎
Ibid, 95. ↩︎
Ibid, 200. ↩︎
Ibid, 181. ↩︎
Robert Bird, Andrei Tarkovsky: Elements of Cinema (London: Reaktion Books, 2008), 69. ↩︎
Gianvito, ed., Andrei Tarkovsky: Interviews, 57. ↩︎