The Virtue of Indifference: a review of "Stalker" (1979)

Stalker (1979), like many of Tarkovsky's films, proceeds slowly and thoughtfully through familiar landscapes made strange.  The plot is allegorical: two men, one a scientist and the other a writer, engage a "stalker" to guide them to the heart of the "Zone."  The Zone looks for the most part like normal countryside, except that there are burned out tanks and a few ruined, Soviet-style bunkers laying about.  It was cordoned off by the military of the small, imaginary country in which the film is set, after a few units of soldiers had mysteriously disappeared.  But rumors have it that in the heart of the Zone, there is a room that grants the deepest desire of those who step through its door.  

The Zone represents the Unconscious, and the film is an investigation of the logic of desire.  Its argument is that desire invents its own objects (success, revenge, meaning, escape) but can never be satisfied.  A desiring existence is unbearable--endlessly deferring and disappointing.  

Not until the conclusion of the film does Tarkovsky seem to suggest two alternatives to the manacles of desire.  These are presented by the wife and daughter of the Stalker.  The wife, speaking directly towards the camera, attempts to make suffering into a universal principle, something to be accepted even.  But whom is she trying to convince?  Her eyes, her nervous way of smiling, clearly belie her desperate rationalizations.  The stalker's daughter, on the other hand, never says a word.  In the final scene, her father places her at a table (she was born crippled...or perhaps without the desire to walk); when he leaves, she lays down her head and with a disinterested, bored look on her face seems to push three glasses across the surface with her mind...or at least appears to.  She, it seems, is wired differently, with a mind that does not desire nor accept but rather rejects and destroys indifferently.

When Robot-Hell is Full, Will the Robot-Dead Walk the Earth?

I've done such an excellent job keeping up with this adventure, haven't I? Last post was in March. What have I done all summer and a good part of the fall? Some stuff, to be sure. But what can I say? The will-to-nothing is strong in me, and I think I should read more Schopenhauer.

Anyway, I came across an abstract of a decade-old essay recently posted by the author at On the Human. The essay is William G. Lycan's "Qualitative Experience in Machines," which performs a two-fold sort of thought-experiment comparing human beings and machines. (He refers to those who maintain essential boundaries between the two as "chauvinists," which is fun.) But the gist of the experiment involves Harry, a flawless human simulator, and Henrietta, a human who has been gradually, piece by piece, had her organic parts replaced with inorganic parts until no flesh is left.

It is fairly uncontroversial to me to suggest that the differences between humans and machines are only accidental (this is not meant as a slight against Lycan). But I found the conclusion of the essay thought-provoking:

She [Henrietta] started out as a normal human being but was gradually turned into a machine. Did she go from being a living organism to being non-living, inanimate? In that case, if she had been alive and then ceased to live, she died, and obsequies are in order. It would be both hard and easy to make her funeral arrangements: Hard, because we would first have to persuade her that she was dead and that services should be held at all; she might resist that suggestion fairly indignantly, especially when we got around to the question of burial vs. cremation. But then easier, because we would not have to guess posthumously at her wishes; we could just ask her what hymns she wanted, whether there should be a eulogy or a general sermon, and so forth, right up till the last minute. I must say I think I would enjoy attending that funeral; I am not so sure that Henrietta would, herself.

A classic reductio ad absurdum, I suppose. Except that I've been coming around to the position that what makes aesthetic thinking different from other (more proletarian...pardon me if I just scoffed all over you) thinking is it's relationship to death, whether that relationship take the form of attraction or repulsion.

Certainly a machine could develop to experience 'qualia' but could it experience tragedy? Which, if un-conceiving the subject we also un-anticipate the inevitability of its death, is also to ask, can we [sic]? Tragicomedy, a la Beckett, maybe?

I'm in the middle of reading a longish story by Stanislaw Lem, "Tale of the Three Storytelling Machines of King Genius," which has a 1001 Arabian Nights structure sort of structure to it which is relevant to the point I'm trying to make as far as the connection between narrative and survival is concerned, but the reason I bring it up is because in the middle of one story within a story within the story, robotic organisms, acting out a revenge fantasy against a sort of robot Marx who died over a hundred years earlier (he suggested they all wire themselves together serially rather than in parallel), derive the algorithm (soul) of robot Marx from his writings and reconstitute him in a new body regularly in order to beat him to death once more.

Well, I don't know. My thoughts have become muddled again. I don't know what I'm anxious about. Henrietta can always pretend she did die, and that would be just as good, I think.