Cinema has been coined “the seventh art” by Italian film critic Ricciotto Canudo. But, as an art, cinema differs from others as it is in a constant and difficult dilemma: to choose between industry and real art. Industry needs to make cash. Art must, as Soviet director Andrei Tarkovsky wrote in his book ‘Sculpting time’, prepare us for our own death.
Forget Netflix and Hollywood, forget productions that divert us from essential questions and pervert crowds by engaging them to think about absurd causes they shouldn’t worry about. Light, easy entertainment is of course always needed but can’t be a priority. We offer here a different and free interpretation of two enigmatic masterpieces that help understand the meaning of our lives. One for men, one for women.
Because, as the French say, “age before beauty,” but also because the one concerning women is existentially more important, we’ll start with men and a primordial work from 1979.
‘Stalker’, by Andrei Tarkovsky, is the loose adaptation of ‘Roadside Picnic’, a novel by famed Soviet sci-fi writers the Strugatsky brothers. The writers didn’t like the result, because the mystical Tarkovsky removed all the phantasmagorical and magical substance of the book in order to make a quasi-religious movie that requires a thorough examination. Not only because this film is endless (to such an extent that most lazy viewers fall asleep), but also in order not to get tricked by the sci-fi aspect of the project. In reality, the core meaning of the movie is much simpler than it seems.
The ‘Stalker’ is an ordinary man. He’s a total loser, even. He lives in a slum not far from some railway station with his wife and daughter, he doesn’t have a job, and he’s already been in jail. His world is far from glamorous.
The opening scene, in black and white, shows him sleeping in a bed with his wife and daughter, as a train passes by. He gets up and prepares to leave. His wife gets hysterical, realizing where he’s going and that he’s facing prison again. But he goes. He has to.
He meets two men in a gloomy bar: a scientist and an alcoholic writer. These two hired him to take them into the mysterious, anomaly-ridden ‘Zone’, and within it, into the ‘Room’, which, according to some legend, fulfills your heart’s desire. The writer, running out of creative ideas, wants to find inspiration there. The scientist wants to understand the inexplicable. Entering the Zone is outlawed, because wandering around there could be fatal. No one knows what happened there – perhaps a nuclear disaster – but the fact remains that trying to enter it is likely to land you in prison. The three men manage, not without difficulty, to get there.
Suddenly, the film switches from black and white to color. Interesting symbolism: is it because they entered the magical Zone? No, not at all. They wander through the Zone, more or less heading toward the famous Room. The Stalker guides, gives orders, throws clamping nuts to check for gravity anomalies and other dangers barring the way ahead. Of course, nothing ever happens. The Zone is just a huge abandoned lot. After many philosophical and religious considerations (a PhD thesis could be written about these), the men arrive in front of the Room. The writer refuses to enter and make his wish. The scientist has a bomb – what he really wants is to destroy the Room because he can’t stand his inability to understand it. He and the Stalker fight, then realize that all this makes no sense. And then they end up sitting like idiots in front of the door to the Room they will never actually enter. Back to ordinary life, the film switches back to black and white.
Beyond Tarkovsky’s very interesting and complex mystical considerations throughout the film, the message is actually very simple: a man, to have meaning in his life, must have a mission. The writer has to write, the scientist to understand (or destroy out of frustration), and the Stalker… Well, he also, however much of a loser he is, has one mission in his life: people think that he is the only one who can guide them, even though he knows perfectly well that the Zone is not dangerous. He says it at the end: it is the only way for him to find happiness and freedom. He is a loser, but he is a guide for some. At the end of the film he cries next to his wife, worrying that from now on people will “lose hope” in the Zone.
Hence the shift from black and white to color and back: a man’s life as meaning only while he’s on a mission. To do, and to give hope. All three of the characters are, in their own way, trying.
Let’s move on to women. ‘Ghost in the Shell’ (the 1995 anime, not the Hollywood cinematic garbage with Scarlett Johansson), by Japanese filmmaker Oshii Mamoru, is arguably the greatest animated film ever made. Working on an adaptation (a very lose adaptation, as in the case of ‘Stalker’) of the eponymous manga, Oshii made out of it a work that no one in the Western world could have accomplished from an aesthetic and poetic point of view.
The film opens with the creation of the female cyborg Motoko, who will then join the police force. Counter-intuitively, the inspiring opening soundtrack is a traditional Japanese wedding song. Motoko is a cyborg whose only human part is her ‘ghost’, that is, her deep intelligence (not the cyber-augmented one), her heart, basically: her soul.
A dark hacker case quickly unfolds. Major Motoko, now a member of the anti-terrorist unit, is tasked with finding this man that no one can identify but who seems invincible and is known only as the ‘Puppet Master’. It turns out that the hacker isn’t a person, but, according to its own words “a living, thinking entity that was created in the sea of information.” An AI. It is therefore everywhere and nowhere. But it must be destroyed.
What initially appears to be a cyberpunk thriller for brainless geeks turns out to be a very poetic philosophical metaphor of loneliness.
The scenes where Motoko wanders alone in the city or dives in the city bay, hounded by her own reflection or fleeting glances of some kind of doppelgänger, are only the expression of the profound malaise of this woman, no matter how beautiful, intelligent, talented… no matter how truly strong and independent she is. Because what is left for her – apart from her job, which is clearly not ideal? Well, it’s very simple: the contemplation of the void.
The contemplation of the void, like the basset hound that looks at Motoko from a bridge as she wanders through the city, a basset hound that director Oshii Mamoru personally considers a symbol of loneliness. Motoko has a soul, but she cannot reproduce. That is the true theme of the film. As she points out to her colleague Batou, she can’t even get drunk, since her body doesn’t react to alcohol. If something so physiologically trivial is outside her reach, then the complex biological process of procreation is a definitive impossibility. She is a woman, with feminine aspirations, stuck in a robotic body that prevents her from realizing them.
Motoko is the hero of the movie, and she’ll obviously do anything to fulfill her official mission. In a life-and-death battle with the Puppet Master controlling a futuristic walking tank, and while saved in extremis by Batou, what is Motoko’s final decision? To merge with the AI. In other words, to create a new individual. Reproduction. That is the core meaning of life for a woman.
In conclusion, let’s get back to the Stalker, to complete the picture. At the end of the film, his wife has an almost three-minute monologue in front of the camera, in which she recounts her first encounter with the Stalker and their miserable existence, against which everyone had warned her. She chose to be with him anyway. Because happiness only exists in a dialectic tension with unhappiness. And without this dialectic, there would be no hope. Hope, yes. That’s what the Stalker wants to give and what Motoko aspires to. The last images of the two films? The Stalker’s daughter. And Motoko rebuilt as a new, younger girl.
The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.
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