She is on the floor in the first scene. Curled, wet hair, knees against cold linoleum, begging him not to go again. He goes. The film begins with her refusal and his decision to ignore it, which is, in a sense, the entire marriage compressed into ninety seconds before the credits have finished rolling.
Her mother warned her. She tells us so at the end. She knew what he was, knew what marrying a Stalker would cost, knew there would be a daughter who didn’t walk, knew there would be the bar and the prison sentences and the long absences and the days he came home with nothing. She married him anyway. That is the only act of unironic faith in Stalker. Not his belief in the Zone, which performs as belief and is undercut every time he opens his mouth, but her belief in him, which is exhausted and unromantic and absolute.
The Stalker performs faith. The Writer performs suffering. The Professor performs competence. All three costumes are exposed by the film, sometimes gently, sometimes with knives. The Wife performs nothing. Tarkovsky doesn’t expose her because there is nothing to expose. The strangest thing about her presence in a film this paranoid about sincerity is that she registers as sincere.
She is not a saint. She is not a martyr the way the Writer is a self-issued martyr. She is not a victim. The reading is available and Tarkovsky is too careful a filmmaker to have prevented it, so the temptation is on the audience to flatten her into the long-suffering wife, the holy peasant figure Russian art has been recycling for two centuries. She refuses the role from inside the role. Her closing monologue is argument, not lament. If there had been no sorrow in our lives it would have been worse, not better. That sentence is a claim, defended. She is making a case. She is defending her life against the audience’s pity.
That she is permitted to speak to the audience at all is the load-bearing decision of the film. Tarkovsky films two and a half hours of male metaphysics in a haunted industrial wasteland and ends on a woman in an apartment looking directly into the lens. None of the men get this. The Stalker recites a poem to no one. The Writer monologues at a closed door. The Professor falls silent. She is the only character permitted direct address, and what she says, addressed to us, is that she would do it again.
Then there is the daughter. The Zone is supposed to be the supernatural site, the place where the impossible happens. The Room grants wishes. Pilgrims travel for days through wire and water and meat grinders to get there. Meanwhile, the actual miracle in the film is sitting at a kitchen table moving glasses across the wood with her mind. The Stalker brought home a wonder he cannot access through the Room. The Wife raised her. The men go searching for the supernatural in a wasteland. She lives with it and pours its tea.
This is the inversion the Writer’s piece set up and didn’t complete. Costume on the wrong head gets you the wreath in the meat grinder. Miracle in the unsanctified room, the kitchen, the apartment, the place Tarkovsky films in the same hushed register he uses for the dunes, gets you Monkey. The sacred has been here the whole time. The men were never going to find it where they looked.
She probably can’t enter the Room and probably wouldn’t. The Stalker fears his wish is impure. The Professor wants to detonate it. The Writer fears the costume coming off. The Wife is the only character whose relationship to desire is settled. She made her wish years ago by saying yes to her mother’s worst warning, and the wish was granted, and the granting hurt, and she has not asked for anything since. She doesn’t need a Room. The Room is for people who haven’t decided what they want.
The film ends with her face. The men have left the Zone. The Stalker is asleep in the bedroom, defeated. The Writer is in a bar somewhere already writing the trip. The Professor has gone back to whatever apartment a man like that goes home to. She is at the table. The dog the Zone gave them is at her feet. The daughter is in the next room moving glasses with her mind. She looks at the camera and she does not blink.
Three men went to the Zone to find something. The Wife is already there. The Wife has been there the whole film. The Zone the men were looking for was the apartment they came home to, and the only person who knew it is the only person Tarkovsky lets speak to us directly.
The series: https://tomwellborn.substack.com/s/stalker-a-tarkovsky-film