Stalker as Spiritual guide

Star’ets in Russian means spiritual guide (literally, “elder”). In Andrey Tarkovsky’s 1979 film Stalker is the slang term for another kind of guide. In a future dystopia, possibly post-nuclear, there is an off-limits area called the Zone. Stalker is a play on star’ets. It is possible to interpret the film as a reference to mystical ascent, through the fallen world, under the guidance of a spiritual master.

An icon well known in Russia (not so well in the West) depicts this ascent as described by St. John Climacus (John of the ladder, 7^th C., Sinai). Figures climb the ladder propped against the wall. Many fall to their doom even from the top rungs. The spiritual path is dangerous. An experienced guide is indispensable. Even the most experienced can fall. Stalker, like any Russian star’ets, is an ascetic who cares nothing for the things of this world. Comfort, reputation and wealth do not interest him: only the Zone. The Zone is this world transfigured. (Filmed in vivid color as opposed to the depressing sepia/gray of the ordinary world.) Because of his contempt for ordinary life, Stalker appears to worldly people as a misfit or a freak. One of his clients, Writer, even calls him yurodiviy, referring to a specific kind of Russian saint: the “Fool for Christ” or “Holy Fool.” Little-known in the West since the Middle Ages, this particular kind of saint appears in Russia to this day. An apparent idiot (cf.: Dostoyevsky’s great novel), the yurodiviy has gifts of prophecy and clairvoyance, and a fearless willingness to rebuke the powerful. The great church on Red Square is named for such a one: Basil the Blessed, who alone was able to subdue the syphilitic rages of Ivan the Terrible.

The ordinary preoccupations of worldly people, represented by Stalker’s clients, Writer and Professor, are of no importance to Stalker. Or rather they are obstacles to be overcome. Both of these clients are intellectuals, and both skeptics but they are men of different spiritual temperaments. Professor is a scientist, a materialist for whom only the sensible is real. The triumph of scientific reasoning will bring universal peace and happiness. Professor is the best of the Soviet system, which erected an enormous sign across the river from St. Basil’s proclaiming “Literacy + Electrification = Communism.” Science and technology will cure human misery.

Writer scoffs at Professor’s materialism as a naïve illusion. Writer has thought everything through to the end. Having begun with compassion for humanity, he has lost all hope. He is a nihilist: comfortable, but bored to death. Writer is to Professor as Ivan Karamazov is to Dimitri. The man of letters versus the man of action, the mental versus the physical side of human nature. Stalker could be compared to Alyosha Karamazov, or to the latter's star’ets, Fr. Zossima.

Professor and Writer are passionate. That is, they suffer insatiable desire. This must be purged if they are to survive the spiritual journey — climbing the Ladder of mystical ascent, up through the Zone, to its central feature, a ruined building with the proportions (though not the domes) of a pre-Mongol, Russian church. It is the task of the spiritual guide to help them shed their dangerous delusions [prelest], and to lead them on the path that will strip them of their passions. Because, if their passions do not destroy them on the way (Writer’s liquor and his gun, Professor’s preoccupation with his knapsack), they will certainly annihilate them if they reach their destination with them. Stalker himself is utterly humble, without self-regard, but fierce in his insistence on the correct path. He has reached the level Orthodox mystics call apatheia, passionlessness. Like an actual star’ets, Stalker prays for his disciples with profound compassion. They have to be purified by water and fire. He addresses his prayers to the bottom of a well.

This feminine symbol, rooted in pre-Christian religion, persists in Russian Orthodoxy. Many churches and monasteries have holy wells, adorned with icons of the Mother of God overseeing the fountain of the Water of Life. The water of these wells is drunk and carried home by the faithful. The water into which Stalker speaks his prayers reflects his own face, and beneath the surface is an icon of the Savior. When the nihilistic Writer produces a pistol, the gentle Stalker violently wrestles it out of his hands and throws it into the well. Water is a key element in Tarkovsky’s cinematic vocabulary, especially indoor rain (cf.: Nostalghia, 1983), and water sometimes catches the light in such a way as to appear to be liquid gold. (Cf.: the final shot in Sacrifice, 1986, Tarkovsky’s last film) . In iconography, gold signifies divinity — the Uncreated Light. Golden rain might be interpreted as the water of Baptism, which the Orthodox call Illumination. Water suffused with Light, water joined with fire.

Stalker’s clients must complete purification in this Water of Light before they can reach their goal, inside the House. There, a golden rain falls across the threshold of a Room, in which those who enter realize their innermost wish (cf.: Solyaris). The trouble is that one may not be aware of one’s own innermost wishes. Stalker’s own guide, whose name was “Teacher” and who Stalker says “opened my eyes”, entered the room wishing for world peace. When he returned to the sepia world, however, all he got was money, and — like the one Russians remember as the lover of money, Judas — he hanged himself. After this incident, no stalker had ever entered the Room, and Teacher was remembered as “Porcupine.”

In order to enter the Room of realization, one must pass through a rain of gold, which separates the Room from the rest of the House. Professor and Writer wonder why Stalker will not go. “I am fine as I am,” he answers. Perhaps he has no desires to realize, so there is no point in entering the Room; or maybe he remembers Porcupine and fears his own subconscious. Writer and Professor turn out to be afraid to enter the Room, too, because they have begun to sense  that they are not free of passion, and they might realize something they might not like. (A similar theme is found in Tarkovsky’s earlier film, Solyaris, 1972).

Professor’s knapsack turns out to contain a nuclear device with which to blow up the Room, and thereby to free humanity from the dangers of its innermost wishes – along with access to unseen Reality. [The materialist would destroy the numinous.] But something about the journey has changed him. Although he fends off Stalker's repeated attempts to wrestle the bomb away from him, in the end, Professor dismantles it and throws it into the golden water.

Writer, too, cynical as ever, has to admit that there is something he does not know, namely his own innermost desire. Stalker's guidance has taught him at least enough humility to make him afraid to enter the Room. He announces that he will go back to his villa and drink himself to death.

Stalker himself returns to his own miserable house, where his wife comforts him as he lies on the floor, commenting on his own exhaustion. In the last scene, his daughter sits at a table. The sepia-world regards her as defective in some way, mental or physical. The film closes as she moves a glass of wine across the table without touching it. Her superior consciousness, regarded by the world as an infirmity, actually dominates the “reality”  of material appearance. 

Meanwhile, supernatural Reality, blazes away, unseen, in the transfigured Zone. The numinous is not entirely absent from the world.  It is Forbidden, however, and the authorities of dystopian, sepia-world do everything they can to hide it and to keep people away from it.