What I liked about Stalker

If you haven't seen Stalker, that's fine. There's no harm in reading this, but don't deprive yourself of the film. As I say, it's a polarising movie, I think you'll either really like it or really dislike it, but the benefits of liking it are greater than the detriments of disliking it. That said, it's like 3 hours long so buckle up. It's the sort of film that has an intermission. 

Stalker was loosely based on a book called Roadside Picnic, and was screenwritten by the same brothers who wrote the book. The videogame, S.T.A.L.K.E.R., is even more loosely based on both the book and the film. Each is very different from the others: where the book pretty much says "yeah, it was aliens," the film stays away from any sorts of explanations as to the origin of the Zone, and focuses more on the characters' trek through the Zone. Oh yeah, it's about an area of land called The Zone, cordoned off by the military, where treacherous invisible things can hurt you, but there's a magical thing in the center that grants innermost desires. That pretty much applies to all three versions. Now I have to confess that some of my understanding or interpretations of the film might be influenced by the book and even by the game.

Enjoy some music:

Some people really, REALLY, like this movie. Some people say that Andrei Tarkovsky's Stalker is the best film humans have come up with, but I think there's no doubt that it's a polarising thing. In fact I'd bet that most people would watch it, hate it, and say "I don't get it". I'll straight up admit that I don't get it, or I didn't get it when I first watched it. Or, perhaps, that I didn't think I got it.

It always concerns me when books and movies come across as highly intellectual, because I worry that I'm not smart enough to comprehend it. They make me feel dumb. But I think there's two types of thing that can have this result. On one hand, take Lynch's Mulholland Drive - At the end I didn't get it. There were layers of symbolism and metaphors that I'm sure will become clearer the more you watch it over and over. On the other hand, there's Murakami's Wind-up Bird Chronicles, or Stalker, where at the end you might initially be confused, but repeated readings/viewings aren't necessarily going to help. The point of these things, I think, is the journey, whereas the first category is more about gaining a holistic view of the whole thing and then stepping back and analysing and understanding it. I enjoyed the Wind-up Bird book right until the end, where I said, "well what was the point?", then I eventually decided that there isn't a point. It's not about where it ends up, it's about the stuff that happens along the way. Similarly, when I watched Stalker and thought I didn't understand it, what I really didn't understand was why people raved about it so much. My problem, I think, was that I was looking too deeply.

Sure there's probably metaphors in the book that I missed, but that's always okay. You shouldn't have to pick up every metaphor in a thing in order for it to be entertaining, and I think that's where Stalker succeeds. It looks good on the surface: it's got very pretty images, which go well with a high quality soundtrack to really put you in the scene. And another way it does this is through pacing. It is without doubt a boring film. Shots will linger on nothing very interesting for a very long time, which sounds like a bad thing. A lot of people would see that as undesirable, but films like this don't do things like that by accident. I believe it hangs on these images for so long to sort of help you tune out of your real life, and take in the beautiful scenery within the film. This is also something that I think is meant to emulate what the characters are going through, and has to do with being outside and in nature. The main guy, the Stalker, really loves the Zone. He keeps going back there despite the danger, and the first thing he does when he gets there is goes and chills out in the bushes, because he feels at home there. Now it's worth noting that the film depicts everything outside of and untouched by the Zone firstly in dull sepia tones, and secondly as highly industrialised yet decrepit and uncomfortable, and maybe the Zone is the closest thing left in the fictional world to just nature. Flora has been allowed to overgrow, a dog runs wild, and human structures are falling apart from disuse. It's a land that nature has reclaimed, despite its decidedly unnatural origins and threats. I like the idea that the Stalker has developed some emotional or even spiritual connection with the Zone because it reminds me that we can or should similarly develop and foster our own connections with the natural world. Being outside and away from civilisation and technology is really nice and cathartic, whether that be a pulling force, our natural inclination to be outdoors in our primal element, or a push to get away from modern city life. When you are outdoors, camping or hiking or whatever, I don't know about you but I can easily sit down and just appreciate the environment for quite some time, and I think that's what the long shots in the film are really about. Just chilling out and appreciating nature. I think that's the effect the film's trying to give you.

This nature thing really appeals to me. Stalker's about a whole lot more than that, it's got lots of themes and references to religion and faith, but that just doesn't interest me when I watch it and it's not what I take away from it.

Three out of three and a half stars for Stalker.

Riddick, Sexism

The new Riddick film is okay. It's like a cross between Pitch Black and The Chronicles of Riddick, which may seem like an obvious or stupid thing to say, but those two are clearly very different films. Pitch Black is a small, self-contained horror story, and Chronicles is an epic, planet-hopping adventure. In Pitch Black some people die. In Chronicles, political regimes change. The new one is again a self contained story, set on a desolate faraway world (which is implied to be Earth, maybe), filled with predators that want to eat people. Unlike Pitch Black, the plot has nothing to do with darkness, rendering Riddick's eyeshine irrelevant. The biggest problem I had with the new Riddick film was the character himself. I felt that it was a different character to that seen in Pitch Black, in the video game, and even in the  Chronicles of Riddick. He was cruder, ruder, and more actively a dick. Before, my understanding of the character was that he would more or less keep to himself unless provoked, and then would just kill a guy and walk away. But in this one he seemed almost sadistic, allowing or causing people to suffer more or less needlessly. Maybe I fundamentally misunderstood the guy from the beginning.

There was one line in particular which really irked me, and I'm going to go ahead and tell you, don't worry about spoilers because it's not that big of a deal. So Katee 'Starbuck' Sackhoff is the only female in the film (besides another who's there for about 2 minutes, I'm pretty sure just so they can say "look, we have TWO girls!") So Starbuck's the only girl, and she's a bad-ass mercenary, so naturally she's a lesbian, (as revealed in the clumsiest way possible,) and there's this bit where Riddick's tied up and he's telling the mercenaries about exactly how he's going to kill them when he gets out of these chains, (with no throwback reference to killing guys with a teacup in the 2nd film) and then he says, "And then I'll be balls deep in...[whatever the girl's name is]". Excuse me, Riddick? You're not one to talk about women that way. "But only because she asked me," he says. And what's worse is that by the end of the film, she inexplicably switches sexual orientation and propositions him. This is all covered here in a review by Theresa Delucci. I've never linked anyone else's work in a blog post before. Do I have to inform them? I hope she doesn't mind. Anyway that basically says everything I was disappointed with in the film re: sexism, especially in contrast to Pitch Black, which basically was great in it's portrayal and inclusion of women.

But fair portrayals of women in film and literature is something I've been thinking about lately. I don't know if this film upsets me because it's actually pretty bad or because my gaze has changed. Now, I'm very much against vomiting up angry, socio-politically charged hatred and signing off with the horrendously nerdy "/rant", so I'l try to keep this fairly objective.

There's no doubt that most protagonists are male, and that's not a bad thing. There are a couple of reasons as to why this is, the most convincing of which is something I read recently, but have since, unfortunately, forgotten. Whatever it was, it wasn't misogynistic in any way, it was just a straight up logical reason. Anyway, forget that because I'll never remember, instead we'll look at some others. There's the one about marketability, and this, as I see it, has two ideas. One is that moviegoers are more likely to be male, and therefor want male characters to identify with. I think that's even more bullshit than the idea that gamers are overwhelmingly male (an idea heavily disputed by those above-mentioned rants). Two is that both male and female audiences prefer male protagonists, as this study suggests. Some people might say that most screenwriters and authors are male, but that, too, I disagree with, since even a lot of things written by women have male protagonists. One theory is that female characters often act emotionally, and therefor become unpredictable driving forces in stories, whereas male characters are often reactionary to other things happening in the plot (possibly including female characters), and so the audience naturally identifies with them. Who knows.

There's this thing called the Bechdel test, which asks whether a thing contains a conversation between at least two women, about something other than a man. So, first of all you have to have enough females in the story that at some point two will be alone and talking, and then they have to be interesting enough that they have things to talk about besides men. Apparently a lot of films fail this test. So this is something that's on my mind when doing this stoner film script (that I haven't properly started yet. I'll get started once this other book's done). I'm going to actively work into the story a conversation satisfying this test, but is that tokenism? I think only if it doesn't seem organic, which, hopefully, it will. That's something I've realised about my writing: I'll have my plan of all the things I want to happen in the story, and if one of them doesn't seem to easily and organically arise, it gets cut, too bad. There's this female character in this (idea for a) film, who initially appears sweet and innocent but turns out to be a bit of a psychopath, kind of like Soap from Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, except actually violent. This would of course still be funny if it's an initially innocent seeming male character, but I think it's even funnier because she's a girl. I don't know if that's being exploitative or not. I'm also concerned about girls always appearing as love interests. I considered having one of the two main stoner characters, who are housemates, being female. But I think that would be difficult to have a man and woman live together in a story without any romantic or sexual relationship, even though it happens all the time in real life. Unfortunately readers like romance, I've been told, so rejecting the idea of romance for the sake of romance could leave you with a story which some audiences might consider boring.

As far as I'm concerned, I stick with male protagonists because, truthfully, I'm afraid of messing up a female - not being one myself - so I stick with my boring, blank slate character, reactionary males. How women appear is constantly on my mind when I do my stories. Same with other historically oppressed groups. In Wilkinson IV there was a black guy, a Russian, and two women, and I was paranoid about accidentally coming across in some way racist or sexist. I still am now, although, I guess I won't ever screw the sexism thing up as badly as Riddick did.