ZIZEK, Slavoj - The Thing From Inner Space - On Tarkovsky

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The thing from inner space on TarkovskySlavoj Žižek

Online Publication Date: 01 December 1999

To cite this Article Žižek, Slavoj(1999)'The thing from inner space on Tarkovsky',Angelaki,4:3,221 — 231

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Angelaki: journal of the theoretical humanities 4:3 1999

Jacques Lacan defines art itself with regard to the

Thing: in his seminar on the ethics of psycho-analysis, he claims that art as such is always orga-nized around thecentral void of the impossible/real

Thing - a statement which, perhaps, should bereadas avariation onRilke's oldthesis that beauty is the

last veil that covers thehorrible.1 Lacan gives somehints about howthis surrounding of the void func-tions in thevisual arts and in architecture; whatwe

shall do here is not provide an account of how, in

cinematic art also, the field of thevisible, of repre-sentations, involves reference to some central and

structural void, to the impossibility attached to it -

ultimately, therein resides thepoint of thenotion of

suture in cinema theory. What I propose to do is

something much more naive andabrupt: to analyse

the way the motif of the Thing appears within the

diegetic space of cinematic narrative - in short, to

speak about films whose narrative deals with someimpossible/traumatic Thing, like thealien Thing in

science-fiction horror films. What better proof of

the fact that this Thing comes from Inner Spacethan thevery first scene of Star Warû At first, all

we see is the void - the infinite dark sky, the

ominously silent abyss of the universe, withdispersed twinkling stars which are not so muchmaterial objects asabstract points, markers ofspacecoordinates, virtual ob jects; then , all of a sudden, in

Dolby stereo, wehear a thundering sound comingfrom behind our backs, from our innermost back-ground, later rejoined by the visual object, the

source of this sound - thegigantic spaceship, akindof space version of the T itanic - which triumphantlyenters the frame of screen-reality. Theobject-Thingis thus clearly rendered as a part of ourselves thatwe eject into reality... Th is intrusion of themassiveThing seems to bring a relief, cancelling thehonor

vacui of staring at the infinite void of theuniverse;however, what if its actual effect is the exact oppo-site? What if the true horror is that ofSomething -

the intrusion of some excessive massive Real —where we expect Nothing? This experience of

"something (thestain of the Real) instead of noth-ing" isperhaps at theroot of the m etaphysical ques-tion "Why is there something instead of nothing?"

Furthermore, I want to focus on the specificversion of this Thing: the Thing as the space (the

sacred/forbidden zone) in which the gap betweenthe Symbolic and the Real is closed, i.e. in which,

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THE THING FROM

INNER SPACE

on tarkovsky

to put it somewhat bluntly, ourdesires aredirectlymaterialized (or, to put it in the precise terms of

Kant's transcendental idealism, the zone in whichour intuition becomes directly productive — a stateof things which, according to Kant, characterizesonly the infinite divine Reason).

This notion of Thing as theId-Machine, a mech-anism that directly materializes our unacknowl-edged fantasies, possesses a long, if not alwaysrespectable, pedigree. In cinema, it all began withFred Wilcox's The Forbidden Planet (1956), whichtransposed onto a distant planet the story-skeletonof Shakespeare's TheTempest:a father living alonewith hisdaughter (who hadnever metanother man)

on an island, and then their peace disturbed by the

intrusion of an expedition. On The Forbidden

Planet, the mad/genius scientist (Walter Pidgeon)lives alone with hisdaughter (Anne Francis), whentheir peace isdisturbed by thearrival of a group of

space-travellers. Strange attacks of an invisiblemonster soon start to occur, and, at thefilm's end,

it becomes clear that this m onster isnothing but the

materialization of the father's destructive impulses



the thing from inner space

against the intruders who disturbed his incestuouspeace. (Retroactively, we can thus read the tempestitself in Shakespeare's play as the materialization ofthe raging of the paternal superego...) The Id-

Machine that, unbeknownst to the father, generatesthe destructive monster is a gigantic mechanismbeneath th e surface of this distant planet, the myste-rious remnant of some past civilization thatsucceeded in developing such a machine for thedirect materialization of one's thoughts and thusself-destroyed... Here, the Id-Machine is firmly setin a Freudian libidinal context: the monsters itgenerates are the realizations of the primordialfather's incestuous destructive impulses againstother men threatening his symbiosis with thedaughter.

The ultimate variation of this motif of the Id-Machine is arguably Andrei Tarkovsky's Solaris,

based on Stanislaw L em's novel, in which the Thingis also related to the deadlocks of sexual relation-ship. Solaris is the story of a space agency psychol-ogist, Kelvin, sent to a half-abandoned spaceshipabove a newly discovered planet, Solaris, where,recently, strange things have been taking place-(scientists going mad, hallucinating and killingthemselves). Solaris is a planet with an oceanic fluidsurface which moves incessantly and, from time to

time, imitates recognizable forms—

not only elabo-rate geometric structures, but also gigantic child-bodies or human buildings; although all attempts tocommunicate with the planet fail, scientists enter-tain the hypothesis that Solaris is a gigantic brainwhich somehow reads our minds. Soon after hisarrival, Kelvin finds by his side in his bed his deadwife, Harey, who, years ago on Earth, kiDed herselfafter he had abandoned her. He is unable to shakeHarey off, all attempts to get rid of her fail miser-ably (after he sends her into space with a rocket, sherematerializes the next day); analysis of her tissue

demonstrates tha t she is not composed of atoms likenormal human beings - beneath a certain micro-level, there is nothing, just void. Finally, Kelvingrasps that Harey is a materialization of his owninnermost traum atic fantasies. This accounts for theenigma of strange gaps in Harey's memory - ofcourse she doesn't know everything a real person issupposed to know, because she is not such a pe rson,but a mere materialization of his fantasmatic imageof her in all its inconsistency. The problem is that,

precisely because Harey has no substantial identityof her own, she acquires the status of the Real thatforever insists and returns to its place: like fire inLynch's films, she forever "walks with the hero,"

sticks to him, never lets him go. Harey, this fragilespectre, pure semblance, cannot ever be erased -she is "undead," eternally recurring. Are we thusnot back at the standard Weiningerian antifeministnotion of the woman as a symptom of man, a mate-rialization of his guilt, his fall into sin , who can onlydeliver him (and herself) by her suicide? Solaris

thus relies on science-fiction rules to enact in real-ity itself, to present as a material fact, the notionthat woman merely materializes a male fantasy:Harey's tragic position is that she becomes awarethat she is deprived of all substantial identity, that

she is nothing in herself, since she only exists as theOther's d ream, in so far as the Other's fantasies tu rnaround her - it is this predicament that imposessuicide as her ultimate ethical act: becoming awareof how he suffers on account of her perm anent pres-ence, Harey finally destroys herself by swallowing achemical stuff that will prevent her recomposition.(The ultimate horror scene of the movie takes placewhen the spectral Harey reawakens from her first,failed suicide attempt on Solaris: after ingestingliquid oxygen, she lies on the floor, deeply frozen;then, all of a sudden, she starts to move, her bodytwitching in a mixture of erotic beauty and abjecthorror, sustaining unbearable pain - is thereanything more tragic than such a scene of the failedself-erasure, when we are reduced to the obsceneslime which, against our will, persists in thepicture?) At the novel's end, we see Kelvin alone onthe spaceship, staring into the mysterious surface ofthe Solaris ocean...

In her reading of the Hegelian dialectics of lordand bondsman, Judith Butler focuses on the hiddencontract between the two: "the imperative to the

bondsman consists in the following formulation: yoube my body for m e, but do not let me know that thebody that you are is my body." 2 The disavowal onthe part of the lord is thus double: first, the lorddisavows his own body, he postures as a disembod-ied desire and compels the bondsman to act as hisbody; secondly, the bondsman has to disavow thathe acts merely as the lord's body and act as anautonomous agent, as if the bondsman's bodilylabouring for the lord is not imposed on him but is

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his autonomous activity... This structure of double(and the reby self-effacing) disavowal also renders th epatriarchal matrix of the relationship between manand woman: in a first move, woman is posited as amere projection/reflection of man, his insubstantialshadow, hysterically imitating but never able reallyto acquire the moral stature of a fully constitutedself-identical subjectivity; however, this status of amere reflection itself has to be disavowed and thewoman provided with a false autonom y, as if she actsthe way she does within the logic of patriarchy onaccount of her own autonomous logic (women are"by nature" submissive, compassionate, self-sacrific-ing...). The paradox not to be m issed here is that thebondsman (servant) is all the more the servant, themore he (mis)perceives his position as that of anautonomous agent; and the same goes for woman -the ultimate form of her servitude is to (mis)perceiveherself, when she acts in a "feminine"submissive/compassionate way, as an autonomousagent. For that reason, the Weiningerian ontologicaldenigration of woman as a mere symptom of man —as the em bodiment of male fantasy, as the hystericalimitation of the true m ale subjectivity - is, whenopenly admitted and fully assumed, far more subver-sive that the false direct assertion of feminine auton-omy— perhaps, the ultimate feminist statement is toproclaim openly: "I do not exist in myself, I am

merely the Other's fantasy embodied."What we have in Solaris is thus Harey's two

suicides: the first one (in her earlier earthly "real"existence as Kelvin's wife), and then her secondsuicide, the heroic act of the self-erasure of her veryspectral undead existence: while the first suicidal actwas a simple escape from the burden of life, thesecond is a proper ethical act. In other w ords, if thefirst Harey, before her suicide on Earth, was a"normal human being," the second one is a subjectin the most radical sense of the term , precisely in sofar as she is deprived of the last vestiges of her

substantial identity (as she says in the film: "N o, it'snot me... It's not me... I'm not Harey... Tell me ...tell me... Do you find me disgusting because of whatI am?"). The difference between the second Hareywho appears to Kelvin and the "monstrousAphrodite" who appears to Gibarian, one ofKelvin's colleagues on the spaceship (in the novel,not in the film: in the film, Tarkovsky replaced the"monstrous Aphrodite" with a small innocent

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blonde girl), is that Gibarian's apparition does notcome from "real life" memory, but from purefantasy:

A giant Negress was coming silently towards

me with a smooth, rolling gait. I caught agleam from the whites of her eyes and heardthe soft slapping of her bare feet. She waswearing nothing but a yellow skirt of plaitedstraw; her enormous breasts swung freely andher black arms were as thick as thighs.3

Unable to sustain confrontation with his primordialmaternal fantasmatic apparition, Gibarian dies ofshame.

Is the planet around which the story turns -composed of the mysterious matter which seems to

think, i.e. which in a way is the direct materializa-tion of though t itself - not again an exemplary caseof the Lacanian Thing as the point at whichsymbolic distance collapses, the p oint at which thereis no need for speech, for signs, since, here, thou ghtdirectly intervenes in the Real? This gigantic brain,this Other-Thing, involves a kind of psychotic shortcircuit: in short-circuiting the dialectic of questionand answer, of demand and its satisfaction, itprovides — or, rather, imposes on us — the answerbefore we even raise the question, d irectly material-izing our innermost fantasies which support our

desire. Solaris is a machine that generates/material-izes in reality itself my ultimate fantasmatic objec-tai supplement/partner that I would never be readyto accept in reality, although my entire psychic Lifeturns around it.

Jacques-Alain Miller draws a distinction betweenthe woman who assumes her nonexistence, herconstitutive lack ("castration"), i.e. the void ofsubjectivity in her very heart, and what he calls la

femme à postiche, the fake, phony woman.4 Thisfemme à postiche is not what common-sense conser-vative wisdom would tell us (a woman who distrusts

her natural charm, abando ns her vocation of rearingchildren, serving her husband, taking care of thehousehold, etc., and indulges in the extravaganzasof fashionable dressing and make-up, in decadentpromiscuity, career, etc.), but almost its exact oppo-site: the woman who takes refuge from the void inthe very heart of her subjectivity, from the "nothaving it" which marks her being, in the phonycertitude of "having it" (of serving as the stable




support of family life, of rearing children, her truepossession, etc.) - this woman gives the impression(and has the false satisfaction) of a firmly anchoredbeing, a self-enclosed life, a satisfied circuit of

everyday life (her man has to run around wildly,while she leads a calm life and serves as the safeprotective rock or safe haven to which her man canalways return...). (The most elementary form of"having it" for a woman is, of course, having achild, which is why, for Lacan, there is an ultimateantagonism between woman and mother: in contrastto woman who "does not exist," mother definitelydoes exist.) The interesting feature to be noted hereis that, contrary to the common-sensical expecta-tion, it is the woman who "has it," the self-satisfiedfemme à postiche disavowing her lack, who not only

does not pose any threat to the patriarchal maleidentity, but even serves as its protective shield andsupport, while, in contrast to her, it is the womanwho flaunts h er lack ("castration"), who poses as ahysterical composite of semblances covering a void,who poses the serious threat to male identity. Inother words, the paradox is that the more thewoman is denigrated, reduced to an inconsistentand insubstantial composite of semblances around avoid, the more she threatens the firm and substan-tial male self-identity (Otto Weininger's entire workcentres on this paradox); and, on the other hand,

the more the woman is a firm, self-enclosedsubstance, the more she supports male identity.

This opposition, a key constituent ofTarkovsky's universe, finds its clearest expressionin his Nostalgia, whose hero, the Russian writerwandering around northern Italy in search ofmanuscripts of a nineteenth-century Russiancomposer who lived ther e, is split between Eugenia- the hysterical woman, a being-of-lack try ingdesperately to seduce him in order to get sexualsatisfaction - and his memory of the maternal

figure of the Russian wife he has left behind.Tarkovsky's universe is intensely male-centred,oriented on the opposition woman/mother: thesexually active, provocative woman (whose attrac-tion is indicated by a series of coded signals, likethe dispersed long hair of Eugenia in Nostalgia) isrejected as an inauthentic hysterical creature, andcontrasted to the maternal figure with closely knitand kept hair. For Tarkovsky, the moment awoman accepts the role of being sexually desirable,

she sacrifices what is most precious in her, the spir-itual essence of her being, and thus devaluesherself, turns into a sterile mode of existence:Tarkovsky's universe is permeated by a barely

concealed disgust for the provocative woman; tothis figure, prone to hysterical incertitudes, heprefers the mother's assuring and stable presence.This disgust is clearly discernible in the hero's (anddirector's) attitude towards Eugenia's long, hyster-ical outburst of accusations against him, whichprecedes her act of abandoning him.

It is against this background that one shouldaccount for Tarkovsky's recourse to static longshots (or shots which allow only a slow panning ortracking movement). These shots can work in twoopposed ways, both of them exemplarily at work in

Nostalgia: they either rely on a harmonious rela-tionship with their content, signalling the longed-forspiritual reconciliation found not in elevation fromthe gravitational force of the Earth but in a fullsurrender to its inertia (like the longest shot in hisentire oeuvre, the extremely slow passage of theRussian hero through the empty cracked pool witha lit candle, the meaningless test the dead Domenicoordains him to accomplish as the path to his salva-tion - significantly, at the end , when, after a failedattempt, the hero does reach the other border of thepool, he collapses in death fully satisfied and recon-ciled); or, even more interestingly, they rely on acontrast between form and content, like the longshot of Eugenia's hysterical outburst against thehero, a mixture of sexually provocative seductivegestures with contemptuous dismissing rema rks. (Inthis shot, it is as if Eugenia protests not only againstthe hero's tired indifference, but, in a way, alsoagainst the calm indifference of the long static shotitself which does not let itself be disturbed by heroutburst - Tarkovsky is here at the very oppositeextreme to Cassavetes, in whose masterpieces the(feminine) hysterical outbursts are shot by a hand-held camera from an over-proximity, as if thecamera itself was drawn into the dynamic hystericaloutburst, strangely deforming the enraged faces andthereby losing the stability of its own point of view.)

Solaris nonetheless supplements this standard,although disavowed, male scenario with a keyfeature: this structure of woman as a symptom ofman can be operative only in so far as the man isconfronted with his Other-Thing, a decentred

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opaque machine which "reads" his deepest dreamsand returns them to him as his symptom, as his ownmessage in its true form th at the subject is not readyto acknowledge. It is here that one should reject theJungian reading of Solaris: the point of Solaris is

not simply projection, materialization of the (male)subject's disavowed inner impetuses; what is muchmore crucial is that, if this "projection" is to takeplace, the impenetrable Other-Thing must alreadybe here - the true enigma is the presence of thisThing. The problem with Tarkovsky is that hehimself obviously opts for the Jungian reading,according to which the external journey is merelythe externalization and/or projection of the innerinitiatory journey into the depths of one's psyche.Apropos of Solans, he stated in an interview."Maybe, effectively, the mission of Kelvin on

Solaris has only one goal: to show that love of theother is indispensable to all life. A man without loveis no longer a man. The aim of the entire Solarisbusiness is to show humanity must be love." 5 Inclear contrast to this, Lem's novel focuses on theinert external presence of the planet Solaris, of this"thing which thinks" (to use Kant's expression,which fully fits here): the point of the novel isprecisely that Solaris remains an impenetrableOther with no possible communication with us -true, it returns us our innermost disavowedfantasies, but the "Che vuoi?" beneath this actremains thoroughly impenetrable (Why does Solarisdo it? As a purely mechanical response? To playdemonic games with us? To help us - or compel us- to confront our disavowed truth?). It would thusbe interesting to put Tarkovsky in the series ofHollywood commercial rewritings of novels whichhave served as the basis for a movie: Tarkovskydoes exactly the same as the lowest Hollywoodproducer, «inscribing the enigmatic encounter withotherness into the framework of the production ofthe couple-

Nowhere is this gap between the novel and thefilm more perceptible than in their differentendings: at the novel's end, we see Kelvin alone onthe sp aceship, staring into the m ysterious surface ofthe Solaris ocean, while the film ends with thearchetypal Tarkovskian fantasy of combining withinthe same shot the otherness into which the hero isthrown (the chaotic surface of Solaris) and theobject of his nostalgic longing, the home dacha

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zizek

(Russian wooden house in the country) to which helongs to return, the house whose contours are encir-cled by the malleable slime of Solari s's surface -within the radical otherness, we discover the lostobject of ou r innermost longing. More precisely, the

sequence is shot in an ambiguous way: just prior tothis vision, one of his surviving colleagues on thespace station tells Kelvin that it is perhaps time forhim to return home. After a couple of Tarkovskianshots of green weeds in water, we then see Kelvin athis dacha reconciled with his father; however, thecamera then slowly pulls back and upwards, andgradually it becomes clear that what we have justwitnessed was probably not the actual return homebut still a vision manufactured by Solaris: the dacha

and the grass surrounding it appear as a lone islandin the midst of the chaotic Solaris surface, yet

another materialized vision produced by it...

The same fantasmatic staging concludesTarkovsky's Nostalgia: in the midst of the Italiancountryside, encircled by the fragments of a cathe-dral in ruins, i.e. of the place in which the hero isadrift, cut from his roots, there stands an elementtotally out of place, the Russian dacha, the stuff ofthe hero's dreams; here, also, the shot begins with aclose-up of only the recumbent hero in front of hisdacha, so that, for a moment, it may seem that hehas effectively returned home; the camera then

slowly pulls back to divulge the properly fantas-matic setting of the dacha in the m idst of the Italiancountryside. Since this scene follows the hero'ssuccessful accomplishment of the sacrificial/compul-sive gesture of carrying the burning candle acrossthe pool, after which he collapses and dies - or sowe are led to believe — one is tempted to take thelast shot of Nostalgia as a shot which is no t simplythe hero's dream, but the uncanny scene whichfollows his decease and thus stands for his death:the moment of the impossible combination ofItalian countryside, in which the hero is adrift, and

of the object of his longing is the moment of death.(This deadly impossible synthesis is announced in aprevious dream sequence in which Eugenia appearsin a solidary embrace with the hero's Russian mater-nal wife-figure.) Wh at we have here is a phenom e-non, a scene, a dream experience, which can nolonger be subjectivized, i.e. a dream which is nolonger anyone's dream, a dream which can emergeonly after its subject ceases to be... This concluding




fantasy is thus an artificial condensation of opposed,incompatible perspectives, somehow like the stan-dard optician's test in which we see through one eyea cage, through the other eye a parrot, and, if our

two eyes are well coordinated in their axes, when weopen both eyes we should see the p arrot in the cage.(When I recently failed the test, I suggested to thenurse that, perhaps, I would be more successful ifmy motivation were stronger, if, say, instead of theparrot and the cage, the two images would be of anerect penis and a spread vagina, so that, when youopen both eyes, the penis is in the vagina - the poorold lady threw me out... And, incidentally, mymodest proposal was justified in so far as, accordingto Lacan, all fantasmatic harmonious coordinations- in which one element finally fully fits the other -

are ultimately based on the model of the successfulsexual relationship, where the male virile organ fitsthe feminine opening "like a key into the openingof a lock.")

Tarkovsky added not only this final scene, butalso a new beginning: while the novel starts withKelvin's space travel to Solaris, the movie's firsthalf hour takes place in the standard TarkovskianRussian countryside with a dacha, in which Kelvintakes a stroll, gets soaked by rain and im mersed intohumid earth... As we have already emphasized, inclear contrast to the film's fantasmatic resolution,the novel ends with the lone Kelvin contemplatingthe surface of Solaris, aware more than ever that hehas encountered here an otherness with which nocontact is possible. The planet Solaris has thus to beconceived in strict K antian term s, as the impossibleapparition of thought (the thinking substance) as athing-in-itself, a noumenal object. Crucial for theSolaris-Thing is thus the coincidence of utter other-ness with excessive, absolute proximity: the Solaris-Thing is even more "ourselves," our owninaccessible kernel, than the unconscious, since it is

an otherness which directly "is" ourselves, stagingthe "objectively-subjective" fantasmatic core of ourbeing. Communication with the Solaris-Thing thusfails not because Solaris is too alien — the harbingerof an intellect infinitely surpassing our limited abil-ities, playing some perverse games with us whoserationale remains forever outside our grasp - butbecause it brings us too close to what, in ourselves,must remain at a distance if we are to sustain theconsistency of our symbolic universe; in its very

otherness, Solaris generates spectral phenomenathat obey our innermost idiosyncratic w hims, i.e. ifthere is a stage-master who pulls the strings of whatgoes on on the surface of Solaris, it is ourselves,

"the thing which thinks" in our heart. The funda-mental lesson here is the opposition, antagonismeven, between the big Other (the Symbolic Order)and the Other qu a Thing. The big Other is"barred," it is the virtual order of symbolic rulesthat provides, the frame for communication, while inthe Solaris-Thing the big Other is no longer"barred," purely virtual; in it, the Symboliccollapses into the Real, language comes to exist as areal Thing.

Tarkovsky's other science-fiction masterpiece,

Stalker, provides the counterpoint to this all-too-present Thing: the void of a forbidden zone. In ananonymous bleak country, an area known as theZone was visited twenty years ago by some mysteri-ous foreign entity (meteorite, aliens...) who leftbehind debris. People are supposed to disappear inthis deadly area called the Zone, isolated andguarded by army personnel. Stalkers are adventur-ous individuals who, for a proper payment, leadpeople to the Zone and to the mysterious Room atthe heart of the Zone where your deepest wishes areallegedly granted. The film tells the story of a

Stalker, an ordinary man with a wife and a crippleddaughter with the magic capacity of moving objects,who takes to the Zone two intellectuals, a writer anda scientist. When they finally reach the Room, thewriter and the scientist fail to pronounce theirwishes because of their lack of faith, while theStalker himself seems to get an answer to his wishthat his daughter get better.

As in the case of Solaris, Tarkovsky turnedaround the point of the novel: in the Strugatskybrothers' 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 shortstay on our planet by some alien visitors whoquickly left it, finding us uninteresting; Stalkersthemselves are also presented in a more adventur-ous way, not as. dedicated individuals on a torment-ing spiritual search, but as deft scavengersorganizing robbing expeditions, somewhat like theproverbial Arabs organizing raiding expeditions intothe P yramids - another Zone — for wealthy

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Westerners (and, effectively, are the Pyramids not,according to popular-science literatu re, traces of analien wisdom?). The Zone is thus not a purelymental fantasmatic space in which one encounters(or onto which one projects) th e tru th about oneself,

but (like Solaris in Lem's novel) the material pres-

ence, the Real, of an absolute otherness incompati-ble with the rules and laws of our un iverse. (Becauseof this, at the novel's end, the hero himself, whenconfronted with the Golden Sphere - as the film'sRoom in which desires are realized is called in thenovel— does undergo a kind of spiritual conversion,but this experience is much closer to what Lacancalled "subjective destitution": a sudden awarenessof the utter meaningless of our social links, thedissolution of our attachment to reality itself - all ofa sudden, other people are derealized, reality itself

is experienced as a confused w hirlpool of shapes andsounds, so that we are no longer able to formulateour desire...) In Stalker as well as in Solaris,

Tarkovsky's "idealist mystification" is that heshrinks from confronting this radical otherness ofthe meaningless Thing, reducing/retranslating theencounter with the Thing to the "inner journey"towards one's truth.

It is to this incompatibility between our ownand the alien universe that the novel's title refers:the strange objects found in the Zone which fasci-

nate humans are in all probability simply thedebris, the garbage, left behind by aliens whostayed briefly on our planet, comparable to therubbish a group of humans leaves behind after apicnic in a forest near a main road... So the typi-cal Tarkovskian landscape (of decaying humandebris half-reclaimed by nature) is in the novelprecisely what characterizes the Zone itself from

the (impossible) standpoint of the visiting aliens:

what is to us a miracle, an encounter with awondrous universe beyond our grasp, is just every-day debris to the aliens... Is it then, perhaps, possi-

ble to draw the Brechtian conclusion that thetypical Tarkovskian landscape (the human envi-ronment in decay reclaimed by nature) involvesthe view of our universe from an imagined alienstandpoint? The picnic is thus here at the oppositeextreme to that at the Hanging Rock: it is not uswho encroach upon the Zone while on a Sundaypicnic, it is the Zone itself which results from thealiens' picnic...

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For an ex-citizen of the defunct Soviet Union, thenotion of a forbidden zone gives rise to (at least) fiveassociations: the Zone is (1) Gulag, i.e. a separatedprison territory; (2) a territory poisoned or other-wise rendered uninhabitable by some technological

(biochemical, nuclear...) catastrophe, likeChernobyl; (3) the secluded domain in which thenomenklatura lives; (4) foreign territory to whichaccess is prohibited (like the enclosed West Berlinin the midst of the GDR); (5) a territory where ameteorite struck (like Tunguska in Siberia). Thepoint, of course, is that the question "So which isthe tru e m eaning of the Zone?" is false and mislead-ing: the very indeterminacy of what lies beyond thelimit is primary, and different positive contents fillin this preceding gap.

In what, then, does the opposition between theZone (in Stalker) and the planet Solaris consist? InLacanian terms, of course, their opposition is easyto specify. It is the opposition between the twoexcesses: the excess of stuff over symbolic network(the Thing for which there is no place in thisnetwork, which eludes its grasp); and the excess ofan (empty) place over stuff, over the elements whichfill it in (the Zone is a pure structural void consti-tuted/defined by a symbolic barrier: beyond thisbarrier, in the Zone, there is nothing and/or exactlythe same things as outside the Zone). This opposi-

tion stands for the opposition between drive anddesire: Solaris is the Thing, the bünd libido embod-ied, while the Zone is th e void which sustains desire.This o pposition also accounts for th e different waysthe Zone and Solaris relate to the su bject's libidinaleconomy: in the midst of the Zone, there is theRoom, the place in which, if the subject penetratesit, his desire/wish is fulfilled, while what the Solaris-Thing returns to subjects who approach it is nottheir desire but the traumatic kernel of theirfantasy, the sinthome which encapsulates their rela-tion 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 blockageconcerns the impossibility (for us corrupted,reflected, nonbelieving modern men) of achievingthe state of pure belief, of desiring directly - theRoom in the midst of the Zone has to remainempty; when you enter it, you are not able to formu-late your wish. In contrast to it, the problem of




Solaris is over-satisfaction: your wishes are real-ized/materialized before you even think of them. InStalker you never arrive at, reach, the level of pure,innocent wish/belief, while in Solaris yourdreams/fantasies are realized in advance in thepsychotic structure of the answer which precedesthe question. For this reason, Stalker focuses on theproblem of belief/faith: the Room does fulfildesires, but only for those who believe with directimmediacy — which is why, when the three adven-turers finally reach the threshold of the Room, theyare afraid to enter it, since they are not sure whattheir true desires/wishes are (as one of them says,the problem with the Room is that it does not fulfilwhat you think you wish, but a wish of which youmay be unaware). As such, Stalker points towards

the basic problem of Tarkovsky's two last films,Nostalgia and Sacrifice: how, through what ordealor sacrifice, is it possible today to attain the inno-cence of pure belief?

The hero of Sacrifice, Alexander, lives with hislarge family in a remote cottage in the Swedishcountryside (another version of the very Russiandacha which obsesses Tarkovsky's heroes). Thecelebrations of his birthday are marred by the terri-fying news that low-flying jet planes signalled thestart of a nuclear war between the superpowers. Inhis despair, Alexander tu rns in prayer to God, offer-

ing him everything that is most precious to him tohave the war not happen at all. The war is undoneand, at the film's end, Alexander, in a sacrificialgesture, bums his beloved cottage and is taken to alunatic asylum...

This motif of a pure, senseless act that restoresmeaning to our terrestrial life is the focus ofTarkovsk y's last two films, shot abroad; the act is inboth films accomplished by the same actor (ErlandJosephson) who, as the old fool Domenico, burnshimself publicly in Nostalgia, and, as the hero ofSacrifice, burns his house, his most preciousbelonging, what is "in him more than himself." Tothis gesture of senseless sacrifice, one should give allthe weight of an obsessional-neurotic compulsiveact: if I accomplish this (sacrificial gesture), the

catastrophe (in Sacrifice, literally the end of theworld in an atomic war) will not occur or will beundone - the well-known compulsive gesture of "IfI do not do this (jump twice over that stone, crossmy hands in this way, etc., etc.) something bad will

occur." (The childish nature of this compulsion tosacrifice is clear in Nostalgia where the hero,following the injunction of the dead Domenico,crosses the pool with the burning candle in order tosave the world...) As w e know from psychoanalysis,this catastrophic X whose outbreak we fear is noneother than jouissance itself.

Tarkovsky is well aware that a sacrifice, in orde rto work and to be efficient, m ust be in a way mean-ingless - a gesture of "irrational," useless expendi-ture - or ritual (like traversing the emp ty pool witha lit candle or burning one's own house); the idea isthat only such a gesture of just "doing it" sponta-neously, a gesture not covered by any rationalconsideration, can restore the immediate faith thatwill deliver us and heal us from the modern spiri-

tual malaise. The Tarkovskian subject here literallyoffers his own castration (renunciation of reason anddomination, voluntary reduction to childish"idiocy," submission to a senseless ritual) as theinstrument to deliver the big Other: it is as if onlyby accomplishing an act which is totally senselessand "irrational" that the subject can save the deeperglobal meaning of the universe as such.

The crucial point here is that the object sacri-ficed (burned) at the end of Sacrifice is the ulti-mate object of the Tarkovskian fantasmatic space,the wooden dacha standing for the safety and

authentic rural roots of the home - for this reasonalone, Sacrifice is appropriately Tarkovsky's lastfilm. Does this mean that we encounter herenonetheless a kind of Tarkovskian "traversing ofthe fantasy," surrender to the central elementwhose magic appearance in the midst of the strangecountryside (planet's surface, Italy) at the end ofSolaris and Nostalgia provided th e very formula ofthe final fantasmatic unity? No, because thissurren der is functionalized in the service of the bigOther, as the redemptive act destined to restorespiritual meaning to life.

What elevates Tarkovsky above cheap religiousobscurantism is the fact that he deprives the sacri-ficial act of any pathetic and solemn "greatness,"rendering it as a bungled, ridiculous act (inNostalgia, Domenico has difficulties in lighting th efire which will kill him, and the passers-by ignorehis body in flames; Sacrifice ends with a comicballet of men from the infirmary running after thehero to take him to the asylum - the scene is shot

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as a children's game). It would be all too simple toread this ridiculous and bungled aspect of the sacri-fice as an indication of how it has to app ear to every-day people immersed in their run of things andunable to appreciate the tragic greatness of the act.

Rather, Tarkovsky follows here a long Russiantradition whose exemplary case is Dostoyevsky's"idiot" from the novel of the same name: it is typi-cal that T arkovsky, whose films a re otherwise totallydeprived of humour and jokes, reserves mockeryand satire precisely for scenes depicting the mostsacred gesture of supreme sacrifice (already thefamous scene of crucifixion in Andrei Roublev isshot in such a way: transposed into the Russianwinter countryside, with bad actors playing it withridiculous pathos, with tears flowing).6

So, again, does this indicate that, to useAlthusserian terms, there is a dimension in whichTarkovsky's cinematic texture undermines his ownexplicit ideological project, or at least introduces adistance towards it, renders visible its inherentimpossibility and failure? Or is there, nonetheless,something inherently false in the Tarkovskian sacri-fice? More fundamentally, what is sacrifice? Themost elementary notion of sacrifice relies on thenotion of exchange: I offer to the Other somethingprecious to me in order to get back from the Othersomething even more vital to me (the "primitive"

tribes sacrifice animals or even humans so that godswill repay them by rainfall, military victory, etc.).The next, already more intricate, level is to conceiveof sacrifice as a gesture which does not directly aimat some profitable exchange with the Other to whomwe sacrifice: its more basic aim is rather to ascertainthat there is an Other out the re who is able to reply(or not) to our sacrificial entreaties. Even if theOther does not grant my wish, I can at least beassured that there is an Other who, maybe, nexttime will respond differently: the world out there,inclusive of all catastrophes that may befall me, is

not a m eaningless blind machinery, bu t a p artner ina possible dialogue, so that even a catastrophicoutcome is to be read as a meaningful response, notas a kingdom of blind chance... Lacan goes here astep further: the notion of sacrifice usually associ-ated with Lacanian psychoanalysis is that of agesture that enacts the disavowal of the impotenceof the big Other: at its most elementary, the subjectdoes not offer his sacrifice to profit from it himself,

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but to fill in the lack in the Other, to sustain theappearance of the Other's omnipotence or, at least,consistency.

Let us recall Beau Geste, the classic Hollywoodadventure m elodrama from 1938, in which the elder

of three brothers (Gary Cooper) who live with then-benevolent aunt, in what seems to be a gesture ofexcessive ungrateful cruelty, steals the enormouslyexpensive diamond necklace which is the pride ofthe aunt's family, and disappears with it, knowingthat his reputation is ruined, that he will be foreverknown as the embezzler of his benefactress - so whydid he do it? At the end of the film, we learn thathe did it in order to prevent the embarrassingdisclosure that the necklace was a fake: unbe-knownst to all others, he knew that, some time ago,the aunt had to sell the necklace to a rich maharajain order to save the family from bankruptcy, andhad replaced it with a worthless imitation. Just priorto his "theft," he learned that a distant uncle whoco-owned the necklace wanted it sold for financialgain; if the necklace were to be sold, the fact that itwas a fake would undoubtedly be discovered, so theonly way to retain the aunt's and thus the family'shonour was to stage its theft... This is the properdeception of the crime of stealing: to obscure thefact that, ultimately, there is nothing to steal — thisway, the constitutive lack of the Other is concealed,

i.e. the illusion is maintained that the Otherpossessed what was stolen. If, in love, one giveswhat one doesn't possess, in a crime of love, onesteals from the beloved Other what the Otherdoesn't possess - to this alludes the "beau geste" ofthe film's title. And therein resides also the mean-ing of sacrifice: one sacrifices oneself (one's honourand future in respectful society) to maintain theappearance of the Other's honour, to save thebeloved Other from shame.

However, Lacan's rejection of sacrifice as inau-thentic locates the falsity of the sacrificial gesturealso in another, much more uncanny, dimension.Let us take the example of Jeannot Scwarz'sEnigma (1981), one of the better variations on whatis arguably the basic matrix of cold-war spy thrillerswith artistic pretensions à la John le Carré (an agentis sent into the cold to accomplish a mission; when,in enemy territory, he is betrayed and captured, itdawns on him that he was sacrificed, i.e. that thefailure of his mission was from the very beginning




planned by his superiors in order to achieve the tru egoal of the operation — say, to keep secret the iden-tity of the true mole of the West in the KGB appa-ratus...). Enigma tells the story of a dissidentjournalist-turned-spy who emigrated to the Westand was then recruited by the CIA and sent to EastGermany to get hold of a scrambling/descramblingcomputer chip whose possession enables the ownerto read all communications between KGB head-quarters and its outposts. However, small signs tellthe spy that there is something wrong with hismission, i.e. that East Germans and Russians werealready informed about his arrival— so what is goingon? Is it that the Communists have a mole in theCIA headqua rters who informed them of this secretmission? As we learn towards the film's end, the

solution is much more ingenious: the CIA alreadypossesses the scrambling chip, but, unfortunately,the Russians suspect this fact, so they temporarilystop using this computer network for their secretcommunications. The true aim of the operation isthe attempt by the CIA to convince the Russiansthat they do not possess the chip: they send an agentto get it and, at the same time, deliberately let theRussians know that there is an operation going onto get the chip; of course, the CIA counts on thefact th at th e R ussians will arrest the agent. The ulti-mate result will thus be that, by successfully

preventing the mission, the Russians will beconvinced that the Americans do not possess thechip and tha t it is therefore safe to use this commu-nication link... The tragic aspect of the story, ofcourse, is that the mission's failure is taken intoaccount: the CIA wants the mission to fail, i.e. thepoor dissident agent is sacrificed in advance for thehigher goal of convincing the opponent that onedoesn't possess the opponent's secret. The strategyhere is to stage a search operation in order toconvince the Other (the enemy) that one does notalready possess what one is looking for - in sho rt,

one feigns a lack, a want, in order to conceal fromthe Other that one already possesses the agalma,

the Other's innermost secret.

Is this structure not somehow connected with thebasic paradox of symbolic castration as constitutiveof desire, where the object has to be lost in order tobe regained on the inverse ladder of desire regulatedby the Law? Symbolic castration is usually definedas the loss of something that one never possessed,

i.e. the object/cause of desire is an object whichemerges through the very gesture of its loss/with-drawal; however, what we encounter here, in thecase of Enigma, is the obverse structure of feigninga loss. In so far as the Other of the symbolic Lawprohibits jouissance, the only way for the subject toenjoy is to pretend that he lacks the object thatprovides jouissance, i.e. to conceal from the Other'sgaze his possession of it by way of staging the spec-tacle of the desperate search for it. This also casts anew light on the problematic of sacrifice: one sacri-fices not in order to get something from the Other,but in order to dupe the Other, in order to convincehim that one is still missing something, i.e. jouis-

sance. This is why obsessionals experience thecompulsion repeatedly to accomplish their rituals of

sacrifice - in order to disavow their jouissance inthe eyes of the Other. And does, at a different level,the same not hold for the so-called "woman's sacri-fice," for the woman adopting the role of remainingin the shadow and sacrificing herself for herhusband or family? Is this sacrifice not also false inthe sense of serving to dupe the Other, of convinc-ing him that, through the sacrifice, the woman iseffectively desperately craving to obtain somethingthat she lacks? In this precise sense, sacrifice andcastration are to be opposed: far from involving thevoluntary acceptance of castration, sacrifice is the

most refined way of disavowing it, i.e. of acting asif the Other effectively possesses the hidden trea-sure that makes him a worthy object of love...

In his unpublished seminar on anxiety (1962-63,lesson of December 5, 1962), Lacan emphasizes theway the hysteric's anxiety relates to the fundamen-tal lack in the Other which makes the Other incon-sistent/barred: a hysteric perceives the lack in theOther, the Other's impo tence, inconsistency, fakery,but she is not ready to sacrifice the part of herselfthat would complete the Other, fill in the Other's

lack - this refusal to sacrifice sustains the hyste ric'seternal complaint that the Other will somehowmanipulate and exploit her, use her, deprive her ofher most precious possession...

More precisely, this does not mean that thehysteric disavows his castration: the hysteric(neurotic) does not hold back from his castration(he is not a psychotic or a pervert, i.e. he fullyaccepts his castration); he merely does not want tofunctionalize it, to put it in the service of the Other,

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i.e. what he holds back from is "making his castra-tion into what the Other is lacking, that is to say,into something positive that is the guarantee of thisfunction of the Other." (In contrast to the hysteric,the pervert readily assumes this role of sacrificing

himself, i.e. of serving as the object/instrument thatfills in the Other's lack - as Lacan puts it, thepervert "offers himself loyally to the Other's jouis-

sance") Th e falsity of sacrifice resides in its under-lying presupposition, which is that I effectivelypossess, hold in me, the precious ingredientcoveted by the Other and promising to fill in theOther's lack. On a closer view, of course, thehysteric's refusal appears in all its ambiguity: Irefuse to sacrifice the agalma in me because there

is nothing to sacrifice, because I am unable to fillin your lack.

One should always bear in mind that, for Lacan,the ultimate aim of psychoanalysis is not to enablethe subject to assume the necessary sacrifice (toaccept symbolic castration, to renounce immaturenarcissistic attachm ents, etc.), but to resist the terri-ble attraction of sacrifice - attraction w hich, ofcourse, is none other than that of the superego.Sacrifice is ultimately the gesture by means ofwhich we aim at compensating the guilt imposed bythe impossible superego injunction (the "obscuregods" evoked by Lacan are another name for thesuperego). Against this background, one can see inwhat precise sense the problematic of Tarkovsky'slast two films, focused on sacrifice, is false andmisleading: although, no doubt, Tarkovsky himselfwould passionately reject such designation, thecompulsion felt by the late Tarkovskian heroes toaccomplish a meaningless sacrificial gesture is thatof the superego at its purest. The ultimate proof ofit resides in th e very "irration al," meaningless char-acter of this gesture - the superego is an injunctionto enjoy, and, as Lacan puts it in thefirst lecture of his Encore, jouissance is

ultimately that which serves nothing.

notes

1 See chapte r X VIII of Jacques Lacan, The E thics of

Psychoanalysis (London: Routledge 1992).

2 Judith Bu tler, Th e Psychic Life of Power (Stanford:

Stanford UP, 1997) 47.

zizek

3 Stanislaw Lem, Solaris (New York : Harcour t ,

Brace, 1978) 30.

4 See Jacques-Alain M ille r, "D es semblan ts dans la

relation entre les sexes," in La Cause freudienne 36

(1997): 7-15.

5 Quoted f rom Anto ine de Vaecque, Cahiers du

Cinema,special issue "Andrei Tarkovski" (1989):

108; my trans.

6 See de Vaecque 98.

Slavoj ŽižekE-mail: [email protected]

ZIZEK, Slavoj - The Thing From Inner Space - On Tarkovsky

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