전편에 이어지는 내용이며, 타르코프스키의 주로 <스토커>(<잠입자>)에 대한 분석이다. <노스텔지어>와 <희생>에 대한 내용도 포함돼 있다. 언젠가 시간이 나면 번역해두고 싶지만, 기약할 수 없는 일이다. 생계와 무관한 일이기에...
The same fantasmatic staging concludes Tarkovsky's Nostalgia: in the midst of the Italian countryside encircled by the fragments of a cathedral in ruins, i.e. in the midst of the place in which the hero is adrift, cut from his roots, there stands an element totally out of place, the Russian dacha, the stuff of the hero's dreams; here, also, the shot begins with a close up of only the recumbent hero in front of his dacha, so that, for a moment, it may seem as if he has effectively returned home; the camera then slowly pulls back to divulge the properly fantasmatic setting of the dacha in the midst of the Italian countryside. Since this scene follows the hero's successful accomplishment of the sacrificial-compulsive gesture of carrying the burning candle across the pool (after which he collapses and drops dead - or so we are led to believe), one is tempted to take the last shot of Nostalgia not only as the hero's dream, but as an uncanny scene which, since it follows his decease, stands for his death: the moment of the impossible combination of Italian countryside in which the hero is adrift with the object of his longing is the moment of death. (This deadly impossible synthesis is announced in a previous dream sequence in which Eugenia appears in a solidaric embrace with the hero's Russian maternal wife-figure.) What we have here is a phenomenon, a scene, a dream experience, which can no longer be subjectivized, i.e. a kind of non-subjectivizable phenomenon, a dream which is no longer a dream of anyone, a dream which can emerge only after its subject ceases to be... This concluding fantasy is thus an artificial condensation of opposed, incompatible perspectives, somehow like the standard optician's test in which we see through one eye a cage, through the other eye a parrot, and, if our two eyes are well coordinated in their axes, when we open both eyes, we should see the parrot in the cage.(7)
Tarkovsky added not only this final scene, but also a new beginning: while the novel starts with Kelanvin's space travel to Solaris, the movie's first half hour takes place in the standard Tarkovskian Russian countryside, in which Kelvin takes a stroll, gets soaked by rain and immersed into humid earth... As we have already emphasized, in clear contrast to the film's fantasmatic resolution, the novel ends with the lone Kelvin contemplating the surface of Solaris, aware more than ever that he has encountered here an Otherness with which no contact is possible. The planet Solaris has thus to be conceived in strictly Kantian terms, as the impossible apparition of the Thought (the Thinking Substance) as a Thing-in-itself, a noumenal object. Crucial for the Solaris-Thing is thus the coincidence of utter Otherness with excessive, absolute proximity: the Solaris-Thing is even more "ourselves", our own inaccessible kernel, than the Unconscious, since it is an Otherness which directly "is" ourselves, staging the "objectively-subjective" fantasmatic core of our being. Communication with the Solaris-Thing thus fails not because Solaris is too alien, the harbinger of an Intellect infinitely surpassing our limited abilities, playing some perverse games with us whose rationale remains forever outside our grasp, but because it brings us too close to what, in ourselves, must remain at a distance if we are to sustain the consistency of our symbolic universe - in its very Otherness. Solaris generates spectral phenomena that obey our innermost idiosyncratic whims, i.e. if there is a stage-master who pulls the strings of what happens on the surface of Solaris, it is ourselves, "the Thing that thinks" in our heart. The fundamental lesson here is the opposition, antagonism even, between the big Other (the symbolic Order) and the Other qua Thing. The big Other is "barred", it is the virtual order of symbolic rules that provides the frame for communication, while in the Solaris-Thing, the big Other is no longer "barred", purely virtual; in it, the Symbolic collapses into the Real, language comes to exist as a Real Thing.
Tarkovsky's other science-fiction masterpiece, Stalker, provides the counterpoint to this all-too-present Thing: the void of a forbidden Zone. An anonymous bleak country, an area known as the Zone was visited 20 years before by some mysterious foreign entity (meteorite, aliens...) which left behind debris. People are supposed to disappear in this deadly Zone, which is isolated and guarded by army personnel. Stalkers are adventurous individuals who, for a proper payment, lead people to the Zone and to the mysterious Room at the heart of the Zone where your deepest wishes are allegedly granted. The film tells the story of one such stalker, an ordinary man with a wife and a crippled daughter with the magic capacity of moving objects, who takes to the Zone two intellectuals, a Writer and a Scientist. When they finally reach the Room, they fail to pronounce their wishes because of their lack of faith, while Stalker himself seems to receive an answer to his wish that his daughter would get better.
As in the case of Solaris, Tarkovsky inverses the point of a novel: in the Strugatsky brothers' novel The Roadside Picnic, on which the film is based, the Zones - there are six of them - are the debris of a "roadside picnic", i.e. of a short stay on our planet by some alien visitors who quickly left it, finding us uninteresting; Stalkers themselves are also presented in a more adventurous way, not as dedicated individuals on a tormenting spiritual search, but as deft scavengers organizing robbing expeditions, somehow like the proverbial Arabs organizing raiding expeditions into the Pyramids (another Zone, for wealthy Westerners; are Pyramids not in effect, according to popular science literature, traces of an alien wisdom?). The Zone is thus not a purely mental fantasmatic space in which one encounters (or onto which one projects) the truth about oneself, but (like Solaris in Lem's novel) the material presence, the Real of an absolute Otherness incompatible with the rules and laws of our universe. (Because of this, at the novel's end, the hero himself, when confronted with the "Golden Sphere" - as the film's Room in which desires are realized is called in the novel -, does undergo a kind of spiritual conversion, but this experience is much closer to what Lacan called "subjective destitution", a sudden awareness of the utter meaningless of our social links, the dissolution of our attachment to reality itself - all of a sudden, other people are derealized, reality itself is experienced as a confused whirlpool of shapes and sounds, so that we are no longer able to formulate our desire...). In Stalker as well as in Solaris, Tarkovsky's "idealist mystification" is that he shrinks from confronting this radical Otherness of the meaningless Thing, reducing/retranslating the encounter with the Thing to the "inner journey" towards one's Truth. It is to this incompatibility between our own and the Alien universe that the novel's title refers: the strange objects found in the Zone which fascinate humans are in all probability simply the debris, the garbage, left behind after aliens have briefly stayed on our planet, comparable to the rubbish a group of humans leaves behind after a picnic in a forest near a main road... So the typical Tarkovskian landscape (of decaying human debris half reclaimed by nature) is in the novel precisely what characterizes the Zone itself from the (impossible) standpoint of the visiting aliens: what is to us a Miracle, an encounter with a wondrous universe beyond our grasp, is just everyday debris to the Aliens... Is it then, perhaps, possible to draw the Brechtian conclusion that the typical Tarkovskian landscape (the human environment in decay reclaimed by nature) involves a view of our universe from an imagined Alien standpoint? The picnic is thus here at the opposite extreme to that at the Hanging Rock: it is not us who encroach upon the Zone while on a Sunday picnic, it is the Zone itself which results from the Alien's picnic...
For a citizen of the defunct Soviet Union, the notion of a forbidden Zone gives rise to (at least) five associations: Zone is (1) Gulag, i.e. a separated prison territory; (2) a territory poisoned or otherwise rendered uninhabitable by some technological (biochemical, nuclear...) catastrophe, like Chernobyl; (3) the secluded domain in which the nomenklatura lives; (4) foreign territory to which access is prohibited (like the enclosed West Berlin in the midst of the GDR); (5) a territory where a meteorite struck (like Tunguska in Siberia). The point, of course, is that the question "So which is the true meaning of the Zone?" is false and misleading: the very indeterminacy of what lies beyond the Limit is primary, and different positive contents fill in this preceding gap.
Stalker perfectly exemplifies this paradoxical logic of the Limit which separates our everyday reality from the fantasmatic space. In Stalker, this fantasmatic space is the mysterious "zone", the forbidden territory in which the impossible occurs, in which secret desires are realized, in which one can find technological gadgets not yet invented in our everyday reality, etc. Only criminals and adventurers are ready to take the risk and enter this domain of fantasmatic Otherness. What one should insist on in a materialist reading of Tarkovsky is the constitutive role of the Limit itself: this mysterious Zone is effectively the same as our common reality; what confers on it the aura of mystery is the Limit itself, i.e. the fact that the Zone is designated as inaccessible, as prohibited. (No wonder that, when the heroes finally enter the mysterious Room, they become aware that there is nothing special or outstanding in it - the Stalker implores them not to impart this news to the people outside the Zone, so that they do not lose their gratifying illusions...) In short, the obscurantist mystification consists here in the act of inverting the true order of causality: the Zone is not prohibited because it has certain properties which are "too strong" for our everyday sense of reality, it displays these properties because it is posited as prohibited. What comes first is the formal gesture of excluding a part of the real from our everyday reality and of proclaiming it the prohibited Zone. Or, to quote Tarkovsky himself: "I am often asked what does this Zone stand for. There is only one possible answer: the Zone doesn't exist. Stalker himself invented his Zone. He created it, so that he would be able to bring there some very unhappy persons and impose on them the idea of hope. The room of desires is equally Stalker's creation, yet another provocation in the face of the material world. This provocation, formed in Stalker's mind, corresponds to an act of faith".(8) Hegel emphasized that, in the suprasensible realm beyond the veil of appearances, there is nothing, just what the subject itself puts there when he takes a look at it...
In what, then, does the opposition between the Zone (in Stalker) and the planet Solaris consist? In Lacanian terms, of course, their opposition is easy to specify: it is the opposition between the two excesses, the excess of Stuff over symbolic network (the Thing for which there is no place in this network, which eludes its grasp), and the excess of an (empty) Place over stuff, over the elements which fill it in (the Zone is a pure structural void constituted/defined by a symbolic Barrier: beyond this barrier, in the Zone, there is nothing and/or exactly the same things as outside the Zone). This opposition stands for the opposition between drive and desire: Solaris is the Thing, the blind libido embodied, while the Zone is the void which sustains desire. This opposition also accounts for the different way the Zone and Solaris relate to the subject's libidinal economy: in the midst of the Zone, there is the "chamber of desires", the place in which, if the subject penetrates it, his desire-wish is fulfilled, while what the Thing-Solaris returns to subjects who approach it is not their desire but the traumatic kernel of their fantasy, the sinthom which encapsulates their relation to jouissance and which they resist in their daily lives.
The blockage in Stalker is thus opposed to the blockage in Solaris: in Stalker, the blockage concerns the impossibility (for us, corrupted, reflected, non-believing modern men) of achieving the state of pure belief, of desiring directly - the Room in the midst of the Zone has to remain empty; when you enter it, you are not able to formulate your wish. In contrast to it, the problem of Solaris is over-satisfaction: your wishes are realized/materialized before you even think of them. In Stalker, you never arrive at, reach, the level of pure, innocent wish/belief, while in Solaris, your dreams/fantasies are realized in advance in the psychotic structure of the answer which precedes the question. For this reason, Stalker focuses on the problem of belief/faith: the Chamber does fulfill desires, but only to those who believe with direct immediacy - which is why, when the three adventurers finally reach the threshold of the room, they are afraid to enter it, since they are not sure what their true desires/wishes are (as one of them says, the problem with the Room is that it does not fulfill what you think you wish, but the effective wish of which you may be unaware). As such, Stalker points towards the basic problem of Tarkovsky's two last films, Nostalgia and Sacrifice: the problem of how, through what ordeal or sacrifice, might it be possible, today, to attain the innocence of pure belief. The hero of Sacrifice, Alexander, lives with his large family in a remote cottage in the Swedish countryside (another version of the very Russian dacha which obsesses Tarkovsky's heroes). The celebrations of his birthday are marred by the terrifying news that low-flying jet planes have signaled the start of a nuclear war between the superpowers. In his despair, Alexander turns himself in prayer to God, offering him everything that is most precious to him to have the war not have happened at all. The war is "undone" and, at the film's end, Alexander, in a sacrificial gesture, burns his beloved cottage and is taken to a lunatic asylum...
This motif of a pure, senseless act that restores meaning to our terrestrial life is the focus of Tarkovsky's last two films, shot abroad; the act is both times accomplished by the same actor (Erland Josephson) who, as the old fool Domenico, burns himself publicly in Nostalgia, and as the hero of Sacrifice, burns his house, his most precious belonging, what is "in him more than himself". To this gesture of senseless sacrifice, one should give all the weight of an obsessional-neurotic compulsive act: if I accomplish THIS (sacrificial gesture), THE Catastrophy (in Sacrifice, literally the end of the world in an atomic war) will not occur or will be undone - the well-known compulsive gesture of "If I do not do this (jump two times over that stone, cross my hands in this way, etc.) something bad will occur". (The childish nature of this compulsion to sacrifice is clear in Nostalgia where the hero, following the injunction of the dead Domenico, crosses the half-dry pool with the burning candle in order to save the world...) As we know from psychoanalysis, this catastrophic X whose outbreak we fear is none other than jouissance itself.
Tarkovsky is well aware that a sacrifice, in order to work and to be efficient, must be in a way "meaningless", a gesture of "irrational", useless expenditure or ritual (like traversing the empty pool with a lit candle or burning one's own house); the idea is that only such a gesture of just "doing it" spontaneously, a gesture not covered by any rational consideration, can restore the immediate faith that will deliver us and heal us from the modern spiritual malaise. The Tarkovskian subject here literally offers his own castration (renunciation of reason and domination, voluntary reduction to childish "idiocy", submission to a senseless ritual) as the instrument to deliver the big Other: it is as if only by accomplishing an act which is totally senseless and "irrational" that the subject can save the deeper global Meaning of the universe as such.
One is even tempted here to formulate this Tarkovskian logic of the meaningless sacrifice in the terms of a Heideggerian inversion: the ultimate Meaning of sacrifice is the sacrifice of Meaning itself. The crucial point here is that the object sacrificed (burned) at the end of Sacrifice is the ultimate object of Tarkovskian fantasmatic space, the wooden dacha standing for the safety and authentic rural roots of the Home - for this reason alone, Sacrifice is appropriately Tarkovsky's last film. Does this mean that we encounter here nonetheless a kind of Tarkovskian "traversing of the fantasy", the renunciation to the central element whose magic appearance in the midst of the strange countryside (planet's surface, Italy) at the end of Solaris and Nostalgia provided the very formula of the final fantasmatic unity? No, because this renunciation is functionalized in the service of the big Other, as the redemptive act destined to restore spiritual Meaning to Life.
What elevates Tarkovsky above cheap religious obscurantism is the fact that he deprives this sacrificial act of any pathetic and solemn "greatness", rendering it as a bungled, ridiculous act (in Nostalgia, Domenico has difficulties in lighting the fire which will kill him, the passers-by ignore his body in flames; Sacrifice ends with a comic ballet of men from the infirmary running after the hero to take him to the asylum - the scene is shot as a children's game of catching). It would be all too simple to read this ridiculous and bungled aspect of the sacrifice as an indication of how it has to appear as such to everyday people immersed in their run of things and unable to appreciate the tragic greatness of the act. Rather, Tarkovsky follows here the long Russian tradition whose exemplary case is Dostoevsky's "idiot" from the novel of the same name: it is typical that Tarkovsky, whose films are otherwise totally deprived of humor and jokes, reserves mockery and satire precisely for scenes depicting the most sacred gesture of supreme sacrifice (already the famous scene of Crucifixion in Andrei Roublev is shot in such a way: transposed into the Russian winter countryside, with bad actors playing it with ridiculous pathos, with tears flowing).(9) So, again, does this indicate that, to use Althusserian terms, there is a dimension in which Tarkovsky's cinematic texture undermines his own explicit ideological project, or at least introduces a distance towards it, renders visible its inherent impossibility and failure?
In Nostalgia, there is a scene which contains a Pascalean reference: in a church, Eugenia witnesses the procession of simple peasant women in honor of Madonna del Parto - they are addressing to the saint their plea to become mothers, i.e. their prayer concerns the fertility of their marriage. When the perplexed Eugenia, who admits that she is unable to comprehend the attraction of motherhood, asks the priest who also observes the procession how one becomes a believer, he answers: "You should begin by kneeling down" - a clear reference to Pascal's famous "Kneel down and that act will render you feeble-minded" (i.e. it will deprive you of false intellectual pride). (Interestingly, Eugenia tries, but stops half-way: she is unable even to perform the external gesture of kneeling.) Here we encounter the deadlock of the Tarkovskian hero: is it possible for today's intellectual (whose exemplary case is Gortchakov, the hero of Nostalgia), separated from naive spiritual certainty by the gap of nostalgia, to return to immediate religious immersion, to recapture its certainty by asphyxiating existential despair? In other words, does the need of unconditional Faith, its redemptive power, not lead to a typically modern result, to the decisionist act of formal Faith indifferent towards its particular content, i.e. to a kind of religious counterpoint of Schmittean political decisionism in which the fact THAT we believe takes precedence over WHAT we believe in? Or, even worse, doesn't this logic of unconditional faith ultimately lead to the paradox of love exploited by the notorious Reverend Moon? As is well known, Reverend Moon arbitrarily chooses the conjugal partners for the unmarried members of his sect: legitimizing his decision by means of his privileged insight into the working of the divine Cosmic Order, he claims to be able to identify the mate who was predestined for me in the eternal Order of Things, and simply informs by letter a member of his sect who is the unknown person (as a rule from another part of the globe) he is to marry - Slovenes are thus marrying Koreans, Americans are marrying Indians, etc. The true miracle, of course, is that this bluff works: if there is an unconditional trust and faith, the contingent decision of an external authority can produce a loving couple connected by the most intimate passionate link - why? Since love is "blind", contingent, grounded in no clearly observable properties, that unfathomable je ne sais quoi which decides when am I to fall in love can also be totally externalized in the decision of an unfathomable authority.
So what is false in the Tarkovskian sacrifice? More fundamentally, what IS sacrifice? The most elementary notion of sacrifice relies on the notion of exchange: I offer to the Other something precious to me in order get back from the Other something even more vital to me (the "primitive" tribes sacrifice animals or even humans so that God will repay them by sending enough rainfall, military victory, etc.) The next, already more intricate level is to conceive sacrifice as a gesture which does not directly aim at some profitable exchange with the Other to whom we sacrifice: its more basic aim is rather to ascertain that there IS some Other out there who is able to reply (or not) to our sacrificial entreaties. Even if the Other does not grant my wish, I can at least be assured that there IS an Other who, maybe, next time will respond differently: the world out there, inclusive of all catastrophies that may befall me, is not a meaningless blind machinery, but a partner in a possible dialogue, so that even a catastrophic outcome is to be read as a meaningful response, not as a kingdom of blind chance. How, then, are sacrifice and the Thing related? The very title of Claude Lefort's essay on Orwell's 1984, "The Interposed Corps",(10) provides the clue to this link. Lefort focuses on the famous scene in which Winston is subjected to the rat-torture - why are rats so traumatic for poor Winston? The point is that they are clearly a fantasmatic stand-in for Winston himself (as a small child, Winston behaved like a rat, ransacking refuse dumps for remainders of food). So, when he desperately shouts "Do it to Julia!", he interposes a corps between himself and his fantasmatic kernel, and thus prevents being swallowed by the traumatic Ding... Therein consists the primordial sense of sacrifice: to interpose an object between ourselves and the Thing. Sacrifice is a stratagem enabling us to maintain a minimal distance towards the Thing. We can see, now, why the motif of the Id-Machine has to lead to the motif of sacrifice: insofar as the paradigmatic case of this Thing is the Id-Machine that directly materializes our desires, the ultimate aim of the sacrifice is, paradoxically, precisely to prevent the realization of our desires...
In other words, the aim of the sacrificial gesture is NOT to bring us close to the Thing, but to maintain and guarantee a proper distance towards it; in this sense, the notion of sacrifice is inherently ideological. Ideology is the narrative of "why did things go wrong", it objectivizes the primordial loss/impossibility, i.e. ideology translates the inherent impossibility into an external obstacle which can in principle be overcome (in contrast to the standard Marxist notion according to which ideology "eternalizes" and "absolutizes" contingent historical obstacles). So the key element of ideology is not only the image of the full Unity to be achieved, but, even more, the elaboration of the Obstacle (Jew, Class Enemy, Devil) that prevents its achievement - ideology sets in motion our social activity by giving rise to the illusion that, if only we were to get rid of Them (Jews, the class enemy...), everything would be OK... Against this background, one can measure the ideologico-critical impact of Kafka's The Trial or The Castle. The standard ideological procedure transposes an inherent impossibility into an external obstacle or prohibition (say, the Fascist dream of a harmonious social body is not inherently false - it will become reality once one eliminates Jews, who plot against it; or, in sexuality, I will be able fully to enjoy once the paternal prohibition is suspended). What Kafka achieves is to traverse the same path in the OPPOSITE direction, i.e. to (re)translate external obstacles/prohibition into inherent impossibility - in short, Kafka's achievement resides precisely in what the standard ideologico-critical gaze perceives as his ideological limitation and mystification, i.e. in his elevation of (the state bureaucracy as) a positive social institution that prevents us, concrete individuals, from becoming free, into a metaphysical Limit that cannot ever be overcome.
What nonetheless redeems Tarkovsky is his cinematic materialism, the direct physical impact of the texture of his films: this texture renders a stance of Gelassenheit, of pacified disengagement that suspends the very urgency of any kind of Quest. What pervades Tarkovsky's films is the heavy gravity of Earth that seems to exert its pressure on time itself, generating an effect of temporal anamorphosis that extends time well beyond what we perceive as justified by the requirements of narrative movement (one should confer here on the term "Earth" all the resonance it acquired in the late Heidegger) - perhaps, Tarkovsky is the clearest example of what Deleuze called the time-image replacing the movement-image. This time of the Real is neither the symbolic time of the diegetic space nor the time of the reality of our (the spectator's) viewing the film, but an intermediate domain whose visual equivalent are perhaps the protracted stains which "are" the yellow sky in late van Gogh or the water or grass in Munch: this uncanny "massiveness" pertains neither to the direct materiality of the color stains nor to the materiality of the depicted objects - it dwells in the kind of intermediate spectral domain of what Schelling called "geistige Koerperlichkeit", spiritual corporeality. From the Lacanian perspective, it is easy to identify this "spiritual corporeality" as materialized jouissance, "jouissance which turned into flesh".
This inert insistence of time as Real, rendered paradigmatically in Tarkovsky's famous five minute slow tracking or crane shots, is what makes Tarkovsky so interesting for a materialist reading: without this inert texture, he would be just another Russian religious obscurantist. That is to say, in our standard ideological tradition, the approach to Spirit is perceived as Elevation, as getting rid of the burden of weight, of the gravitating force which binds us to earth, as cutting links with material inertia and starting to "float freely"; in contrast to this, in Tarkovsky's universe, we enter the spiritual dimension only via intense direct physical contact with the humid heaviness of earth (or stale water) - the ultimate Tarkovskian spiritual experience takes place when a subject is lying stretched out on the earth's surface, half submerged in stale water; Tarkovsy's heroes do not pray on their knees, with their heads turned upwards, towards heaven; instead they listen intensely to the silent palpitation of the humid earth... One can see, now, why Lem's novel had to exert such an attraction on Tarkovsky: the planet Solaris seems to provide the ultimate embodiment of the Tarkovskian notion of a heavy humid stuff (earth) which, far from functioning as the opposite of spirituality, serves as its very medium; this gigantic "material Thing which thinks" literally gives body to the direct coincidence of Matter and Spirit. In a homologous way, Tarkovsky displaces the common notion of dreaming, of entering a dream: in Tarkovsky's universe, the subject enters the domain of dreams not when he loses contact with the sensual material reality around him, but, on the contrary, when he abandons the hold of his intellect and engages in an intense relationship with material reality. The typical stance of the Tarkovskian hero on the threshold of a dream is to be on the lookout for something, with the attention of his senses fully focused; then, all of a sudden, as if through a magic transsubstantiation, this most intense contact with material reality changes it into a dreamscape.(11) One is thus tempted to claim that Tarkovsky stands for the attempt, perhaps unique in the history of cinema, to develop the attitude of a materialist theology, a deep spiritual stance which draws its strength from its very abandonment of intellect and from an immersion in material reality.
If Stalker is Tarkovsky's masterpiece, it is above all because of the direct physical impact of its texture: the physical background (what T.S.Eliot would have called the objective correlative) to its metaphysical quest, the landscape of the Zone, is a post-industrial wasteland with wild vegetation growing over abandoned factories, concrete tunnels and railroads full of stale water, and wild overgrowth in which stray cats and dogs wander. Nature and industrial civilization here again overlap, through their common decay - civilization in decay is in the process of again being reclaimed (not by idealized harmonious Nature, but) by nature in decomposition. The ultimate Tarkovskian landscape is that of a humid nature, river or pool close to some forest, full of the debris of human artifices (old concrete blocks or pieces of rotten metal). The actors' faces themselves, especially Stalker's, are unique in their blend of ordinary ruggedness, small wounds, dark or white spots and other signs of decay, as if they were all exposed to some poisonous chemical or radioactive substance, as well as irradiating a fundamental naive goodness and trust.
Here we can see the different effects of censorship: although censorship in the USSR was no less stringent than the infamous Hayes Production Code in Hollywood, it nonetheless allowed a movie so bleak in its visual material that it would never pass the Production Code test. Recall, as an example of Hollywood material censorship, the representation of dying from an illness in The Dark Victory with Bette Davis: upper-middle class surroundings, painless death... the process is deprived of its material inertia and transubstantiated in an ethereal reality free of bad smells and tastes. It was the same with slums - recall Goldwyn's famous quip when a reviewer complained that slums in one of his films look too nice, without real dirt: "They better look nice, since they cost us so much!" Hayes Office censorship was extremely sensitive to this point: when slums were depicted, it explicitly demanded that the set of the slum be constructed so that it not evoke real dirt and bad smell. At the most elementary level of the sensuous materiality of the real, censorship was thus much stronger in Hollywood than in the Soviet Union.
Tarkovsky is to be opposed here to the ultimate American paranoiac fantasy, that of an individual living in a small idyllic Californian city, a consumer paradise, who suddenly starts to suspect that the world he lives in is a fake, a spectacle staged to convince him that he lives in a real world, while all the people around him are effectively actors and extras in a gigantic show. The most recent example of this is Peter Weir's The Truman Show (1998), with Jim Carrey playing the small town clerk who gradually discovers the truth that he is the hero of a 24-hours permanent TV show: his hometown is constructed on a gigantic studio set, with cameras following him permanently. Among the predecessors of The Truman Show, it is worth mentioning Phillip Dick's Time Out of Joint (1959), in which a hero living a modest daily life in a small idyllic Californian city of the late 50s, gradually discovers that the whole town is a fake staged to keep him satisfied... The underlying experience of Time Out of Joint and of The Truman Show is that the late capitalist consumerist Californian paradise is, in its very hyper-reality, in a way IRREAL, substance-less, deprived of material inertia. So it is not only that Hollywood stages a semblance of real life deprived of the weight and inertia of materiality ?in late capitalist consumer society, "real social life" itself somehow acquires the features of a staged fake, with our neighbors behaving in "real" life like stage actors and extras... Again, the ultimate truth of the capitalist utilitarian de-spiritualized universe is the de-materialization of "real life" itself, its reversal into a spectral show.
It is only now that we confront the crucial dilemma of any interpretation of Tarkovsky's films: is there a distance between his ideological project (of sustaining Meaning, of generating a new spirituality through an act of meaningless sacrifice) and his cinematic materialism? Does his cinematic materialism effectively provide the adequate "objective correlative" for his narrative of spiritual quest and sacrifice, or does it secretly subvert this narrative? There are, of course, good arguments for the first option: in the long obscurantist-spiritualist tradition reaching up to the figure of Yoda in Lucas's The Empire Strikes Back, the wise dwarf who lives in a dark swamp, rotting nature in decay is posited as the "objective correlative" of spiritual wisdom (the wise man accepts nature the way it is, renouncing all attempts at aggressive domination and exploitation, any imposition of artificial order upon it...). On the other hand, what happens if we read Tarkovsky's cinematic materialism as it were in the opposite direction, what if we interpret the Tarkovskian sacrificial gesture as the very elementary ideological operation of overcoming the unbearable Otherness of meaningless cosmic contingency through a gesture that is itself excessively meaningless? This dilemma is discernible down to the ambiguous way in which Tarkovsky uses the natural sounds of the environs(12); their status is ontologically undecidable, it is as if they were still part of the "spontaneous" texture of non-intentional natural sounds, and simultaneously already somehow "musical", displaying a deeper spiritual structuring principle. It seems as if Nature itself miraculously starts to speak, the confused and chaotic symphony of its murmurs imperceptibly passing over into Music proper. These magic moments, in which Nature itself seems to coincide with art, lend themselves, of course, to the obscurantist reading (the mystical Art of Spirit discernible in Nature itself), but also to the opposite, materialist reading (the genesis of Meaning out of natural contingency).(13)
(7) Is not the exemplary case of such a fantasmatic formation combining heterogeneous and inconsistent elements the mythical Kingdom (or Dukedom) of Ruritania, situated in an imaginary Eastern European space combining Catholic central Europe with the Balkans, the Central European noble feudal conservative tradition with the Balkan wilderness, modernity (train) with primitive peasantry, the "primitive" wilderness of Montenegro with the "civilized" Czech space (examples abound, from the notorious Prisoner of Zenda onwards)?
(8) de Vaecque, op.cit., p. 110.
(9) See de Vaecque, op.cit., p. 98.
(10) See Claude Lefort, ?rire. A l'epreuve du politique, Paris: Calmann-Levy 1992, p. 32-33.
(11) See de Vaecque, op.cit., p. 81.
(12) I rely here on Michel Chion, Le son, Paris: Editions Nathan 1998, p. 191.
(13) Therein resides also the ambiguity of the role of chance in Kieslowski's universe: does it point towards a deeper Fate secretly regulating our lives, or is the notion of Fate itself a desperate stratagem to cope with the utter contingency of life?