I really enjoy the films of Andrei Tarkovky. They are deep in the best sense, and invariably invoke hours of–what is the word?–not soul searching, perhaps viewing. I watch the world for some time through the prism he has given me, I see how things play out from past to future, I see farther out than I have, the world fragments and reassembles. This was, I think, his intention.
One thing I think I need to mention right up front is that we all must learn to defend our beliefs. It is the hardest thing in the world to be forced constantly to invent some new disease in response to the latest pessimism. You read Nietzche, or Sartre, or even Glenn Beck at his most pessimistic. You surround yourself with violence and conclude that peace is impossible. You can’t imagine life after death, or a just God.
It is important to create your world view consciously. This is a lot of work, but work that anchors you, and gives you hope for the future. You may not know what is going to happen to you, but you can speak with some confidence about who you will be.
Here, I will not summarize the movie. The plot is on Wikipedia, but to really get what he is doing you must watch the movie. He was a truly amazing cinematographer. Many of his long shots feel like they could be framed and hung on the wall as art. He has in there a monologue about music: I get the sense that his movies were in part created as visual symphonies, where different shots constituted different melodies–or similiar melodies, repeated with suitable variation.
To my mind, the most significant detail of the movie was that the flowers had no odor. Is odor not the most characteristic feature, other than color, of flowers? “Would a rose by another name not smell as sweet?”
What the Zone is, then, is a half-world, a retarded world. Yes, it grants wishes. But what really matters, it cannot provide. Why did Porcupine plow the flowers under? Their possible, but unrealized, full beauty tormented him. Despite their color, they were plastic, unreal: like him.
The Zone is a romantic view of the world, a world of unrealized yearning. Yes, you move from dingy browns and greys to greens when you go there. This is the romantic quest for “truth”. It is the quest of Tolstoy, who damaged many lives in his rolling around moaning, looking for some thing called “truth”, which of course doesn’t exist. Stalker does this to his own wife, and more or less abandons his own child.
The room doesn’t get you this thing called truth. It just gets you things. In my own terms, it cannot change your world qualitatively, only quantitatively.
For this part Stalker wants to believe in this thing called truth, but cannot stand the idea that he would not find it in the room. He wants someone else to find it for him, and bemoans their failure.
He is in despair, and yet magic is in the very next room, in the form of his child. A truth, a useful truth, is in the next room, for her part despairing too at her abandonment. Everyone loses when stupid people chase “truth”.
One could, I think, lay the nihilism that led to the Russian Revolution at the feet of truth-seekers. This is a Russian disease.
Now, I want to be clear about what I am saying. I am not saying there is no truth, that nothing is true. What I am saying is that it is not a thing, but a quality of how your mind-body-spirit complex interacts with the universe, and the people around you. There is no “thing-ness”. You can’t get truth. You can’t buy truth. You can’t read truth. You express it. Perhaps that is the best way of putting it.
For myself, I have cleared all the underbrush in my intellectual life. I have only three core beliefs, and everything else is contingent, and subject to alteration.
I believe you should never feel sorry for yourself.
I believe you should persist in the things that matter to you, and that what you persist in defines you.
I believe that as you persist, you should be thinking, perceiving, and SEEING the effects of your actions on both yourself and others, and calibrating them in the direction of happiness.
Tarkovskky called Stalker a tragedy in intent. The hamartia of Stalker was selfish sentimentality, and the cost was great and unneeded pain for him, his wife, and to my mind most importantly, his magical child.
One sees so much stupidity in this world. It makes me sad. Sometimes I am the stupid one. I try to fix this constantly. That’s all I can do. For all that, I have many, many very happy moments. We are surrounded by beauty and the capacity to do good in this world. What else can we ask for?
As I see it, the Room could only work for those who didn’t need it. Who knows: maybe it is out there at this very moment. I will not look for it. It is is irrelevant. It can’t give me anything I need.