Stalker prays for the Writer and Professor as they get closer to the Room in Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1979 film:
“Let everything that’s been planned come true. Let them believe. And let them have a laugh at their passions. Because what they call passion actually is not some emotional energy, but just the friction between their souls and the outside world. And most important, let them believe in themselves. Let them be helpless like children, because weakness is a great thing, and strength is nothing. When a man is just born, he is weak and flexible. When he dies, he is hard and insensitive. When a tree is growing, it’s tender and pliant. But when it’s dry and hard, it dies. Hardness and strength are death’s companions. Pliancy and weakness are expressions of the freshness of being. Because what has hardened will never win.”
I was thinking last night. In the film Professor smuggles a bomb into the Zone. When they reach the Room, he explains that he is going to blow the Room up. His reasoning is that when people find the way to the source of their dreams and power, despots inevitably will use the power of the Room, it must be blown up.
“Stalker perfectly exemplifies this paradoxical logic of the Limit which separates our everyday reality from the fantasmatic space. In Stalker, this fantasmatic space is the mysterious “zone”, the forbidden territory in which the impossible occurs, in which secret desires are realized, in which one can find technological gadgets not yet invented in our everyday reality, etc. Only criminals and adventurers are ready to take the risk and enter this domain of fantasmatic Otherness. What one should insist on in a materialist reading of Tarkovsky is the constitutive role of the Limit itself: this mysterious Zone is effectively the same as our common reality; 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. (No wonder that, when the heroes finally enter the mysterious Room, they become aware that there is nothing special or outstanding in it – the Stalker implores them not to impart this news to the people outside the Zone, so that they do not lose their gratifying illusions…) In short, the obscurantist mystification consists here in the act of inverting the true order of causality: 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. Or, to quote Tarkovsky himself: “I am often asked what does this Zone stand for. There is only one possible answer: the Zone doesn’t exist. Stalker himself invented his Zone. He created it, so that he would be able to bring there some very unhappy persons and impose on them the idea of hope. The room of desires is equally Stalker’s creation, yet another provocation in the face of the material world. This provocation, formed in Stalker’s mind, corresponds to an act of faith”. Hegel emphasized that, in the suprasensible realm beyond the veil of appearances, there is nothing, just what the subject itself puts there when he takes a look at it…”
I don’t agree entirely with Zizek’s reading. I would just point to the fact in the film an army division perished when they entered the Zone, perished for real. Unless the rusting tanks on the way to the Room are also a mirage from the “domain of fantasmatic Otherness”.
Further reading: