We’re not even halfway through June and the summer has already knocked me off my weekly publication cycle. My schedule will only get busier from here—an international trip, a podcast season to research, a film project in the works—so I’m going to go ahead and say that The Haunted Screen newsletter is on “summer hours” from now to the start of the fall semester. I’ll still be writing, but don’t expect a regular rhythm until teaching reimposes some semblance of order on my life.
When I got off the Trailways bus upstate, I was immediately hit with the smell of campfires. In front of the B&B on Main Street, a fellow city slicker pointed his camera up toward a sun obscured by gray haze. I pulled out my phone and googled “wildfire catskills.” None of the results seemed relevant so I shrugged it off. It turned out, of course, that I’d underestimated the scale of the smoke. This was no localized phenomenon; it was an international incident. Though the skies over Phoenicia were ugly and unhealthy, things never reached the extremes they did back home in New York City. I only saw that otherworldly orange fog through images on the news and social media. As happens whenever the world takes an apocalyptic turn, people turned to the movies to describe what they saw, comparing the scene to Dune or Blade Runner 2049.
Given my line of work, it’s no surprise that my mind jumped to film, as well. One film, really: Stalker, Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1979 classic of Soviet science fiction. This slow, strange movie centers on recently released convict known only the Stalker. He and his family inhabit a bleak and toxic wasteland that glows with the same sepia tint that lingered over New York last week. Despite the pleas of his wife, the Stalker risks another stint in prison by accepting a job to lead two men—the Writer and the Professor—into a restricted area called the Zone.
After the three protagonists slip past the soldiers guarding the Zone’s perimeter, color enters the world, Oz-like, and the rules of reality begin to splinter. Space loses its integrity, as when the Professor backtracks to retrieve his rucksack, yet impossibly winds up in front of his two companions who had pressed forward without him. The Stalker leads them tentatively, tossing metal nuts tied to cloth strips ahead of their path to spring any of the potentially lethal “traps” that pepper the terrain. At the center of the Zone is their ultimate destination: the Room. Those who enter it are said to receive their heart’s innermost desire, of which no one can be sure until it’s granted.
It’s a cryptic film that lends itself to any number of readings. In his 2016 documentary HyperNormalisation, Adam Curtis interprets the Zone as a metaphor for the unstable reality of late Soviet society, where everyone could see the lie in their leaders’ stories of national prosperity, but “had to play along and pretend it was real, because no one could imagine any alternative.” (It’s a diagnosis Curtis also extends to life in neoliberal America.) Others have seen the movie as a religious allegory, a meditation on human consciousness, a struggle between art (the Writer) and science (the Professor), and even a prophecy of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster that would come seven years after the film’s release.
With the still smoke sloughing off the Catskills during my Stalker rewatch, I was particularly keyed in to Tarkovsky’s approach to the environment. I’m not the first to seize on this motif, and for good reason. The Zone is contaminated landscape, once industrial but now in the process of a slow submission to nature. Ruined buildings and abandoned machinery peek above a sea of fresh greenery. Slimy stalactites dangle from the ceiling of a drainage tunnel ominously referred to as “the meat grinder.” The Zone’s toxic tendrils stretch even beyond its borders and into the Stalker’s home, where the ambient radiation has left his daughter unable to walk.
Behind the scenes, the cast and crew endured environmental hazards equal to what we see onscreen. As Mark Le Fanu writes for Criterion about the shoot in Estonia:
When we are watching the film, we are thinking only of the strange beauty of the waterlogged landscape across which the Stalker, the Writer, and the Professor carry out their weird, experimental pilgrimage. And yet it was not beautiful at all, in fact it was horrific, for the people who were working there. In one of the locations—a disused refinery—the crew had to stand for hours on end up to their knees in stinking puddles of oil, while the effluent discharged, upriver, from a paper processing plant enveloped the set in a fetid miasma. This went on for months on end.
Though perhaps impossible to prove, some involved with the production believe that the results were deadly. Anatoly Solonitsyn, the actor playing the Writer, died of lung cancer in 1982 at just 47 years of age. In 1986, a 54-year-old Tarkovsky met the same fate, to be followed in 1998 by his wife and assistant director Larisa Tarkovskaya, a month before her 65th birthday.
Both in front of the camera and behind it, Stalker functions as a reminder of the connection between human desire and environmental degradation. It’s greed that drives the characters to risk life and limb on their journey to the Room at the heart of the Zone. The Writer admits his greed to recover his lost inspiration. The Professor says he’s greedy for a Nobel Prize. The Stalker is of course motivated by a paycheck, but he also appears to be in the thrall of a spiritual greed—an avarice to commune with whatever forces animate the Zone, even as his wife begs him not to go. And Andrei Tarkovsky’s singleminded pursuit of his artistic vision may have left three bodies in its wake, but it also birthed a masterpiece.
The unbreathable end-of-days air that flooded over New York and elsewhere last week is just the latest manifestation of two centuries of mechanized desire. Some of these desires are venal—the desire for wealth, for dominance—and some are ambiguous, or even admirable—the desire for the technologies that make life more bearable today than in, say, 1823. But whether or not our desires are noble, our attempts to fulfill them have consequences. Like the Stalker in the Zone, we’re left wandering, groping, praying that we’ll find a way out.
Stalker is available for streaming on both the Criterion Channel and Max.