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experience of being made one in Christ with God Himself.”23 Here, a final trinitarian analogy within the film is especially important, that of the Stalker, his wife, and his daughter. This image of family, and the love that it signifies, will be the concluding focus of this article. The End of Desire as the Beginning of Love? The first and last shots of the film point to this particular significance of the Stalker’s family. While the scene on the threshold of the Room is one of discord, the film opens on the threshold of the Stalker’s bedroom, within which the Stalker, his wife, and his daughter peacefully share one bed. The film’s first shot tracks through the opening of the double doors and slowly closes in on the bed; then Tarkovsky cuts, and another tracking shot (this time a close-up) moves over the faces of the three bedfellows, serenely asleep. Much later in the film, Tarkovsky breaks his general rule of treating all scenes outside the Zone with sepia tone and presents the viewer with a vision of the Stalker’s family walking together, in resplendent colour. These imag- es appear in contrast to those within the Zone; the two “portals” (one to the Room and one to the family bedchamber) and the two “trinities” (of the three travellers and of the three family members) seem to embody alternative meanings – or rather alternative approaches to finding meaning. Journey implies an end, an eschaton. Within the motif, destination is at once an end-space and an end-time, and the end of the film’s journey – the end of desire – is the Room. It represents a tremendous salvific end (the fulfilment of one’s inner- most desire), achieved through faith (“most importantly you must believe”24). Ex- cept, crucially, none of Tarkovsky’s characters enter the Room. At face value, this is because the Writer and the Professor lack the requisite faith, because “they don’t believe in anything”.25 Yet the Room does not represent salvation for the Stalker either. A friend of the Stalker’s, nicknamed Porcupine, is revealed to have had his hope spurned and distorted by the Room. The viewer is told that Porcupine sought the Room to wish for his brother’s resurrection but when he reached the Room, the wish that was granted was not his conscious desire to bring his brother back to life, but his subconscious desire to become rich. Porcupine’s story ends with his guilt-ridden realisation of this, which drives him to suicide. Here, then, is an alterna- tive presentation of the Room by Tarkovsky: it is an idol of salvation, in which the characters mistakenly place their hope. 23 Hart 2005, 31. 24 Stalker (Andrei Tarkovsky, USSR 1979), 02:06:16. 25 Stalker (Andrei Tarkovsky, USSR 1979), 02:30:28. The End of Desire? | 49www.jrfm.eu 2020, 6/1, 37–52