{"id":114003,"date":"2017-08-15T13:00:30","date_gmt":"2017-08-15T17:00:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=114003"},"modified":"2017-08-15T13:06:43","modified_gmt":"2017-08-15T17:06:43","slug":"the-sneaky-brilliance-of-geoff-dyers-into-the-zone","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/08\/15\/the-sneaky-brilliance-of-geoff-dyers-into-the-zone\/","title":{"rendered":"The Sneaky Brilliance of Geoff Dyer\u2019s \u201cInto the Zone\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Still from Andrei Tarkovsky\u2019s Stalker<\/em>.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

I recently fell asleep in a movie theater. I think the movie is a masterpiece. An hour in, the three main characters, on an expedition into mysterious territory called simply the Zone, have just emerged from a slog through an aqueduct, shouting over the sound of crashing water. They each lie down, exhausted, on the brown-green moss that blankets the water\u2019s edge. The characters speak with each other about where they are going, and for what. It is a late-night road-motel talk\u2014fatigued, but searching. A character called Writer begins a monologue about fame, the future, technology, and soon it doesn\u2019t matter, because he is talking to himself, in the shorthand that exists only in each individual head, using big, meaningless, opaquely personal words like \u201cLife\u201d and \u201cArt.\u201d What matters is the tone of his voice\u2014soft and drifting and stretched seemingly over one long yawn. He is talking himself to sleep. A guitar drone intensifies. And as he went on, I found myself becoming heavily tired, too, and I slumped over. I had a dream that I cannot remember, except that it feels like a kernel lodged under my tongue, and involved a river. I woke up only when a tall man sitting next to me gently tousled my hair and told me in a stage whisper that I had spilled popcorn all over my lap. The characters are sitting up, awake now, listening to a voice telling them about his<\/em> dream. In my memory of the film, there is a blank.<\/p>\n

The movie was Andrei Tarkovsky\u2019s Stalker<\/em>, recently remastered and finishing its months-long run at the IFC Center. Geoff Dyer wrote about the film and his relationship with it for our Fall 2011 issue, in \u201cInto the Zone<\/a>,\u201d an excerpt from his full-length book Zona<\/em>. \u201cInto the Zone\u201d is, as much as an essay can be like a movie, an imitation of Stalker. <\/em>The essay proceeds by summarizing each scene of the movie chronologically. Each scene summary takes on the pace and tone of the scene being described. When the pace picks up, so does Dyer\u2019s prose, and his thoughts come quick and abbreviated. When the movie slows to a pan, or arrests on a static shot, so does Dyer, and he takes the placid moments to tell us things he knows, stories, about Tarkovsky: about Tarkovsky and his relationship with Michelangelo Antonioni, about the fights Tarkovsky had with Mosfilm over the meditative pace of Stalker, <\/em>about Flaubert and style, inventories of films shown in other films, about time as it exists and is manipulated by movies, about his desire for a drink when he sees characters drinking, and finally, during the scene Dyer calls \u201cone of the great sequences in the history of cinema\u201d\u2014the long, seemingly unbroken shot of the trolley ride into the Zone itself\u2014about himself and things he wants and can\u2019t have. \u201cInto the Zone\u201d is Dyer\u2019s thought, in all its allusiveness and wit and sneaky brilliance, welded inextricably to the rhythms of Stalker.<\/em> This is the only narrow path to Stalker\u2014<\/em>a film that is both direct and maddeningly slippery.<\/p>\n

The plot is simple, even generic\u2014three men are on a journey to a room in the Zone that grants the deepest desire of anyone who enters. The room is a MacGuffin\u00a0that refuses any set dressing. And yet, it is this nakedness that makes the film so evasive, for the room and its intentional abstraction opens a void at the heart of the film. The room is withheld\u2014to engage with Stalker<\/em>\u00a0the viewer must give something of ourselves over, must subject ourselves to the question of what the room would find in us. The room, as the characters come to realize, is, in its power to reveal, more of a trial than a gift. What if they do not actually want what they tell themselves they want? In the end, they do not cross the threshold, and the room remains purely potential. \u201cInto the Zone\u201d is Dyer giving himself over unabashedly to the film, expressing himself in its strictures, letting the film guide his intellect, subjecting himself most of all to Tarkovsky\u2019s time<\/em>. Dyer acknowledges the anxiety of this exercise: \u201cI mean, do you think I would be spending my time summarizing the action of a film almost devoid of action\u2014not frame by frame, perhaps, but certainly take by take\u2014if I was capable of writing about anything else?\u201d<\/p>\n

There is the question of whom Dyer is addressing in \u201cInto the Zone.\u201d He consistently asks questions to a \u201cyou,\u201d while at the same time invoking \u201cwe,\u201d the communal viewing audience\u2014a viewing audience that, of course, is not at the moment watching the movie. He also at points speaks directly to the characters of Stalker\u2014<\/em>he yells \u201cattaboy!\u201d to one of the characters chugging a beer. I remember learning that the Romans were incapable of reading silently, that even when alone they would read aloud to themselves. Any good Roman home had a designated reading room where the learned could read without disturbing the rest of the house. Dyer is not addressing anyone\u2014he is simply speaking.<\/p>\n

This year marks the hundredth\u00a0anniversary of the Russian Revolution. Stalker <\/em>has a reputation for prophecy in regards to the USSR. Seven years after the movie\u2019s release, the Soviet authorities would cordon off the irradiated area around the Chernobyl nuclear plant and name it the \u201cZone of Exclusion.\u201d And twelve years after Stalker<\/em>, the room would come to the USSR in the wake of its collapse\u2014suddenly the freedom to pursue desire, and to find out what is desired. The bursting forth of countless notions of life, each endlessly idiosyncratic. Secondhand Time<\/em>, Svetlana Alexievich\u2019s oral history of the collapse of the Soviet Union,<\/em> published last year, is constantly striking Stalker<\/em>-ish notes: \u201c<\/em>Freedom turned out to mean the rehabilitation of bourgeois existence, which has traditionally been suppressed in Russia. The freedom of Her Highness Consumption. Darkness exalted. The darkness of desire and instinct\u2014the mysterious human life, of which we only ever had approximate notions.\u201d \u201cThe world shattered into dozens of colorful little pieces. We were so terribly eager for the gray Soviet everyday to turn into a scene from an American movie!\u201d The moment the characters cross over into the Zone, Stalker <\/em>switches from sepia to full color, like The Wizard of Oz. <\/em>Dyer notes this parallel, and then admits he has never seen The Wizard of Oz. \u201c<\/em>Into the Zone\u201d is not an exercise of authority. He is not trying to convince us<\/em> of anything.<\/p>\n

As the characters slip into the Zone, Dyer approaches his private room, the personalized Stalker<\/em>, a place where things are revealed privately: \u201cI am as badly in need of the Zone and its wonders as any of the three men on the trolley as they sit there and the blurry landscape clangs past. The Zone is a place of uncompromised and unblemished value. It is one of the few territories left\u2014possibly the only one\u2014where the rights to\u00a0Top Gear<\/em>\u00a0have not been sold: a place of refuge and sanctuary.\u201d The pure Top Gear <\/em>is a perfect detail, his madeleine\u2014if we could unspool it, the rest of Dyer would follow. Nostalgia for Top Gear <\/em>is Dyer speaking impenetrably to Dyer in the dark of a movie theater.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Subscribe<\/a>\u00a0now to read \u201cInto the Zone\u201d\u2014and everything else we\u2019ve published\u00a0over the past sixty-four years.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

Matt Levin is a writer in New York.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cInto the Zone\u201d is Dyer\u2019s thought, in all its allusiveness and wit and sneaky brilliance, welded inextricably to the rhythms of Stalker.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1219,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1188],"tags":[7497,27376,79,30017,8450,19907,1761,9167,30115,30119,81,30118,30117,30116],"class_list":["post-114003","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-from-the-archive","tag-andrei-tarkovsky","tag-dream","tag-film","tag-film-comment","tag-film-criticism","tag-from-the-archive","tag-geoff-dyer","tag-ifc-center","tag-into-the-zone","tag-mcguffin","tag-movies","tag-stalker","tag-zona","tag-zone"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nThe Sneaky Brilliance of Geoff Dyer\u2019s \u201cInto the Zone\u201d<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"In his book-length summary of Tarkovsky\u2018s 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