wytchcroft | Roadside Picnic, Stalker and Zone

The Perilous Miracle of Transformation

Like Crustaceans we depend upon... a shell of historic cities

and houses filled with things

belonging to definable portions of the past.

George Kubler, The Shape of Time; Remarks on the History of Things 1962

To bring this exploration of the Zone to a conclusion, I shall first briefly summarise the plot of novel and film and then explore some of the potential thematic elements of both.

So then, the novel of Roadside Picnic concerns a scavenger called Red Schuhart, what Schuhart scavenges are the artefacts left over from a series of mysterious alien visitations.

These visitations have left their mark in the form of strange areas known as Zones. Schuhart collects the Alien debris both for scientific and for personal reasons. Such a profession has the title Stalker (just as the Profession of Bounty Hunter is known as A Blade Runner in the Ridley Scott movie).

Going into the Zone is dangerous - there are substances such as the 'Witches Jelly' tat will take the bones from a man's legs, there are blinding thunderbolts, dislocations of gravity, time and space, and reality itself can become suddenly malleable causing sudden transformations in objects and people.

Still, there is an endless scientific fascination with the Zone(s) and constant speculation over what may have lain behind the original visitation. The Scientist Pillman speculates that this very fascination explains the truth; The Aliens were simply picnicking, and we are the animals chewing through their trash.

However - even this is not a final analysis since the transformative effects are felt beyond the radius of the Zone itself in the form of genetic mutations. Perhaps it is after all some sort of Alien Invasion, the extraterrestrial manifesting in the skin of the generations to come.

One such mutant is Red's own daughter, given the nickname Monkey. Monkey is quite hairy, has no white to her eyes and in the course of time moves from being an energetic out-going girl to a sullen and unresponsive 'zombie'.

Critics have suggested that this ‘second [invasion] explanation’ is a clumsy get out, one that detracts from the seriousness of the book. I disagree, I think such a view over looks the idea of people treated other people as things. As her mutation becomes more obvious so Monkey (already denied a human name) because more and more of an object – an object of pity and an object of fear, but either way, dehumanised and misread just as the alien artefacts are.

Finally Red and his companions go into the Zone searching for a Wishing Machine - perhaps the key, cure and meaning will be discovered when they locate the object.

The Wishing Machine is simply that, a machine that grants your every wish. Red watches the small child Arthur use the machine.

I could play the wild mutation...

The conclusion of the book is a literal miracle (by the existing terms of science) but it is also a nightmare. This is prefigured through the story as a whole by the oddness of the Zone and the weird effects it has on people, objects and perception.

In literature - and especially Science Fiction, such transformations are often treated ambivalently. Reading the Strugatsky book I kept wondering if JG Ballard (interested himself in other-world transformations since as early as The Chrystal World) had done the same and written the Unlimited Dream Company as result.

Dream concerns what happens to a small town after the mysterious arrival of a 'ghost plane', a sesna, and its pilot. Gradually the pilot discovers he has messianic powers and can transform people into animals, teach them to fly and release their inhibitions, their dreams become real. Is such a change monstrous or miraculous and can humans adapt to the possibilities offered by this new form.

Ballard’s novel could easily be set at the beginning of Roadsides time line, shortly after the initial visitations whilst at the same time showing the potential emptiness behind the novels climax and the Wish that is made.

In Michael Moorcock's Jerry Cornelius novels, similar breakdowns and changes occur - eventually involving the protagonist himself whose wild transformations eventually lead to something of a Harlequinade - Jerry reachig a form that can hold all the previous identites within it, all the previous myths of the popular culture he moved through (see also, below). This same process occured to David Bowie who, at the turn of the decade decided to abosrb his old Rock personas, accept them and move on. To this end he too underwent a Harlequinade.

The Zone then is a place of potential as much as terror. In this respect the mutation of Monkey could be seen in a favourable light; a new step in Evolution – a change to something new and remarkable (ala Ballard).

Tarkovsky and Bergman:

The ending of the film balances this suggestion against the possibility that there is nothing particularly alien in Monkey at all. The final scene could be explained as paranormal experience or simply the passing of a train. Tarkovsky is telling a Mystery Play after all. The Brothers Strugatsky are not. What they are exploring is the idea that the big picture (and you could call this God, Alien intelligence, the Earth, anything) is swallowed by out way of constructing personal mythologies around detritus.

Though they play with some imagery, such as the figure in the graveyard, death himself almost, there is little direct sense of the spiritual search so heavily rendered by Tarkovsky. If the novel briefly suggests an appearance by Death, then the movie takes this and answers by creating in the Stalker a figure very close to Block in Bergman’s Seventh Seal.

stalker the seventh seal

Bergman and Tarkovsky had long respected one another and had a similar sensibility in many ways, both films share a sense of pre-determination to the apparent journey - and both films are framed so that figures group together in the manner of medieval religious art.

figure grouping in stalker

Such a long article as this could be seen to suggest that the works cited are masterpieces beyond compare. This is not the case, nothing is flawless. In the novel, most of the characters are ciphers – cartoons almost. And women are virtually non-existent. The pulp pastiche of the prose negates the opportunity for character development beyond a rudimentary level and annexes the female sex all but completely.

By the close of the novel, even though she has had a fair number of scenes, all we know about the one woman in the novel, Red’s wife, is that she is long suffering, concerned for the family and cooks well. Adding a woman to the dynamic might have been distracting for the writers – but it might have energised them too, a pity, because this dates the work somewhat.

The flaw in Stalker is simply its lack of variation in tone, what it gains in hypnotic power it loses in human appeal, by which I mean the novels characters may act ridiculously but there is a medieval sense of parody and rambunctiousness to off set this. Tarkovsky may probe more deeply but he loses a little of the likeability of the characters, they become harder to identify with. In this respect I would suggest Solaris is superior. Solaris also deals with the hopes, desires and fears of people in a less abstract way. The focus is on their relationship to one another as well to the mysterious world of Solaris (a sort of Zone itself) and the characters and feelings are more defined.

Points of Entry and the Zone inside

Everyone will have experienced some sort of Zone in their lives. I have mentioned that the Zone of Roadside and Stalker is compared to Chenobyl, inside of which the Stalker terminology was rapidly adopted. However, just as everyones’ experience of the literary and cinematic Zone will be different so to wil the manifestation of a Zone in their lives. On a personal level I can think of two strong associations for myself:

Taking the Zone as a place where communication is possible and the social barriers and/or inhibitions decay – then I would say that this reminds of the space created by deaf students whom I worked with. I had no experience of Sign Language and the group were not lip readers, nonetheless – mutual curiousity and need meant that we met somewhere in the middle, evolving a method of communication that would appear nonsensical or cryptic to the outside world but which worked very productively for us. A translator friend of mine calls this the Golden Cauldron – a pot in which all are willing to pour their resources, and from which is drawn more than the sum of the individual contributions. I can therefore apply this to my communication attempts on the internet with friends from Russia, Japan, Sweden and elsewhere. In striving to overcome the language barrier, we meet each other halfway, somewhere in the Zone.

The second analogy for me is with Apollinaire’s poem ZONE. Zone anticipates much modern 20th century poetry as well directly influencing works such as Cocteau’s Orphee, Elliott’s The Wasteland and Ginsberg’s Howl. Like the Wasteland, Zone describes what Freud would call ‘The City without time*’ (Civilisation and its discontents). A fascinating notion of a city in which all times may converge.

In the case of Apollinaire, an apparent series of verses to a lover are in fact a love song to Paris – urging it to transform for the new modern era, to become a crucible which will give birth to a new fusion of poetry and art, and therefore ultimately, to the poet himself.

The Zone contains many eras and locations snatched from different times and locations around France, Europe and beyond.

I have often been struck, wandering around London and Manchester by how many different periods ARE to be found, simply turn a corner from a contemporary set of buildings and one may find stretches of Victorian or Roman architecture to a degree that seems almost ghostly. It is as if one can step straight into the past – or pull from it souvenirs, trinkets, inspiration. In other words I have walked through many cities as a Stalker.

*i have mentioned this in relation to Holmes and Florizel also.

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i hope this has been an ejoyable article to read - it was certainly interesting to explore.:))
thanks for all the encouraging comments!

Current Mood: mellow
Current Location: the zone
Current Music: Scott Walker Tilt