Page - 48 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 06/01

ological, recur in trinities: fire, water, and mist seen as the three travellers congre- gate in their camp; rainwater, still water, and running water, whose sounds blur into each other, are briefly isolated, and then distorted with electronic music.16 Yet there are more distinctly theological trinities, the most prominent of which is that of the three travellers. Here is an interpersonal trinity, which Tarkovsky treats fluidly, using it sometimes to represent the divine persons and sometimes to ex- plore social dialectics, such as that between abstraction and practicality, which is the respective dialectic between the Writer and the Professor. Always, though, it is used to explore relationality, as evidenced by the way the film unfolds as one long conversation between the travellers. In representing the divine persons, the character of the Stalker is crucial, for he is portrayed as a Christ-figure. The journey, rendered vain by the climactic fight on the threshold of the Room, is a reconfigured Passion narrative. Ultimately, the Stalker’s prayer for the Writer and the Professor (“let them believe in themselves”17) goes unanswered and neither has the faith to enter the Room. According to Tarkovsky, “They had summoned the strength to look inside themselves – and had been horri- fied; but in the end they lack the spiritual courage to believe in themselves.”18 In oth- er words, they doubt the goodness of their desires and fear that the Room might grant some suppressed and shameful wish. The Stalker, their guide to the salvific promise of the Room, is rejected and spurned at the end of the film, despairingly asking, and with no apparent answer, “Who am I going to take there?”19 (See fig. 5.) Christological analogy is a theological method common to many of Tarkovsky’s films. For example, the working title of Andrei Rublev was “The Passion according to Andrei”, while Ivan’s Childhood analogously explores the gratuitous sacrifice of innocence. I have already mentioned the resurrection scene in Solaris in this regard. Such Christological analogy is nothing less than a way of doing theology in his films, a way of opening up theological concepts to the viewer. As David Bentley Hart has written, “analogy is the felicitous coincidence of the apophatic and the cataphatic […]; it ‘clarifies’ language about God not by reducing it to principles of simple similitude, but by making it more complex.”20 Tarkovsky operates theologi- cally in a similar way, and both Christology and Trinity are especially receptive to this kind of analogical discourse, particularly in terms of the relational language which theologians use: Christ is to God as son is to father, yet Father and Son are one God. 16 Consider especially the waterfall scene; see Smith 2007 for a discussion of the use of sound in this scene. 17 Stalker (Andrei Tarkovsky, USSR 1979), 01:07:25. 18 Tarkovsky 1986, 198. 19 Stalker (Andrei Tarkovsky, USSR 1979), 02:33:15. 20 Hart 2003, 310. The End of Desire? | 47www.jrfm.eu 2020, 6/1, 37–52