In the Flesh: Stalker (Patreon)

Three men stand on the threshold of a place of power, a place where by the manifestation of inner desire the nature of the self is irrevocably exposed. One fears that to enter would mean facing his own venal nature. Another uses the same thought to cloak himself in sarcasm and worldly ennui. The third contemplates destroying this place, the Room, which is the object of the film’s meandering journey. To him it is a hopeless thing, a place where unhappy people are brought face to face with their own inadequacy, where a demagogue might find the means to exert his will over the earth. Does he fear that these qualities lurk within humanity, or in himself? Whatever his anxieties, in the end he disassembles his device and casts its components into standing water.

Stalker, decompressed and largely plotless, wanders in discursive circles around questions of the self and God just as its titular guide to the Zone leads his clients through that place’s physical and spiritual labyrinth. There are no straight paths here. Tarkovsky’s movie is both mirror and scrying glass, a place where the truth hides in plain sight within the fractured reflection of our anxieties and guesswork. Who am I? Do I know already? Can I bear to know for certain? Though fear takes a different form in each of the three travelers, none of them are free of it. Knowing one’s self beyond the ability to deny that self is a dangerous proposition, one that might paralyze any of us at the threshold of desire.

The beauty of Tarkovsky’s film is that these men already know their inner selves, and when faced with the prospect of being forced into acknowledging those selves they instead choose the shadows of ambiguity and the courageous self-deception of wanting to be better than they know themselves to be. Later, lying drained and querulous in his bed, the Stalker says no one believes in miracles anymore, that no one has faith that the Room could bring them happiness, and that perhaps they’re right. Coming after his desperate assertion that while he has no worth he can guide people to salvation keeps him going it’s a gutting moment of defeat, utter exhaustion sweeping away everything on which his life is built. Is his daughter’s manifestation of psychokinesis in the film’s last scene, set against Beethoven’s Ode to Joy and the mounting rumble of a nearby train’s approach, a divine answer to his agonized doubt or another sign of some essential human truth that can only exist in a state of mystery, eternally sought and never attained?