The Prayer of Tarkovsky's Stalker

Old People

I always felt there was something off with this Tarkovsky. It took me 13 years to understand since I posted this video on YouTube. People are not trees. Humans, as they get older, progressively turn into children. Like children, they depend on you, until they depend on you completely, like toddlers. The body as it ages becomes fragile. Being inflexible is the hubris of the youth. Do you see old fanatics?

Like children, the old are designed to live in a family. Literally under one roof with constant supervision. Like dogs, old people need to be taken for walks, sometimes several times a day. It comes the time when you need that baby monitor for your parents. In America, culture is not set up to live under one roof. Hence, the tragedy of a nursing home. Where old children are drugged and tortured.

I visit an apartment building often (for years). When I pass one apartment, I hear Russian TV inside. It’s on all the time, at night and during the day. But I have never seen anyone come out of this apartment. Imagine? Occasionally, I am tempted to knock, hello, is there a human there?

Old people are induced to ride walkers until the body looses the sense of balance. They are drugged, so the mind decays in a haze. It’s horrible what this culture does to children, and it’s horrible what is done to old people here. Everyone needs vigilant protection from the American medicine. It’s the hardest thing.

But I remember even in Russia, my grandmother suddenly disappeared to a “home”. I was just a boy. I remember my father sitting on the front steps of our dacha under the hazelnut trees, and telling me about his mother. There was something searing and sad in his tone that I still recall vividly. And everyone blamed it on the two soldier sons that she lost in the war. There is always an explanation.

I don’t buy people live longer excuse.

P.S. Everyone Many who participated in the Stalker film died from cancer young, including Tarkosky himself. It was filmed (twice, long story) in a deserted hydropower plant near Tallinn, Estonia. You can see the pollution in that opening well shot.

The late Mordechai Goldin was in Tallin in 1979, the year he left to America. There he met Tarkovsky by chance while Tarkovsky was working on this movie. There was a “theatrical” meeting. Mordechai told me the details when he was dying. Like Tarkovsky, Mordechai died in the young middle age. And he was lucid until the end.