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INTRODUCTION
Every year on the second Sunday of March and October in most if not all western countries at 2 am sharp a time jump takes place. I am not entirely sure if I should call it that though, it is merely our constructed interpretation of the force that is “time” that jumps. In a sense that only makes it weirder though. This apparatus that is the clock has almost entirely subsumed any other possibilities of experiencing time. Rasterized it into a routine of 12 numbers, 2 pointers and 24 hours, like drawing borders on a map.
To use the terminology that Mark Fisher1 proposes, the clock is Weird (with a capital W). It gives me this sense of unease, as if it shouldn’t exist but does. Yet it leaks into so many aspects of our life, work and art. A Zone that encompasses all our minds.
How does such an apparatus even function, and how does it have much power?
WRITER: The Zone and Zones
Stalker2 is a movie directed by Andrej Tarkovsky and was published in 1979. In the 2 hour and 43-minute-long movie you follow 3 characters and their relationship to the Zone (which is a character in its own right). An area reclaimed by nature and a place where the normal laws of physics don’t apply anymore.
As our main character lays in the grass and you soak in the green and lush environments in the long shorts of the flora that are present, you notice the clear contrast between that and how the real is portrayed in the movie, a very grey and almost desolate shell of something. It feels more real than reality.
This is what French philosopher Jean Baudrillard3 called the “Hyperreal.” The Hypereal is defined as a simulation of reality or an aspect of reality that replaces the reality it is simulating. The abstract reproduction becomes the product. This is the reason why it feels more “real” than real, it is because reproductions look for any kind of core that the real could have and strips away what is deemed unnecessary. In Stalker you for example can’t smell anything in the Zone.
The nature of how humans perceive and identify zones is inherently centralized in our minds. We tend to take our personal zone as the status quo and sometimes even disqualify it from the label zone itself. I am at fault for this myself by criticizing the normal world of stalker but still using it as the origin of my analysis. The Zone can’t be alien without having something familiar to contrast it.
An example of this is time zones, they are especially interesting because they thread a line between us realizing we’re in one but ignoring it nonetheless. We familiarize our time zone and use it as the zero, the starting point of our perception of the world of global time. Yet it is just a single slice of that globe. It is a very clear and present (if encountered) zone. The jetlag you experience when changing zones too fast is a very common experience in this globalized world.
While time zones do have a connection to the sun (which is often considered the arbiter of time) they are artificial. Someone decided that Amsterdam and Warsaw are part of the same zone and London isn’t. These decisions have cultural and economic significance.
It has deliberately been divided. Rasterized.
The same is true for the workday. Sleep, work and free time are tightly knit together and influence each other greatly yet there is a massive wall strung up between the 3 different states of being and those walls are strung up between certain moments, the 9 to 5 workweek. Who or what put those walls there and why there?
I have been trying to tiptoe around it, but that question is the question that fascinates me the most about these rasterized zones like time zones, the 9 to 5 work week and the Zone in Stalker. What power do these zones have, and what power do we have to affect these zones?
SCIENTIST: Zones and Power
The three main characters in Stalker aren’t really characters in the common sense. They are more like anthropomorphized philosophies. They are human in the physical sense, but their entire character is built around a specific way of thinking and the conflicts in the story happen because those ways of thinking clash against each other. Every piece of backstory is there to expand on those philosophies.
In the film the three characters are on a journey to the room. A space in the zone in which your deepest desire is realized. One of the main conflicts in the film between the Stalker4 and the Scientist is because the scientist revealed that he wants to blow up this room because he concludes that the room is a zone too powerful and if it falls into the wrong hands, it could easily be used as a tool for evil.
The nature of the Zone and the room are a stark contrast to time as a zone in our world because time has clearly been shown that it can be used as a tool for power, by power. It has seeped into every aspect of our life. Controlling our life.
“Capital is at every level an eerie entity: conjured out of nothing, capital nevertheless exerts more influence than any allegedly substantial entity”5
From the moment we are born till our deathbed and even after that, it can haunt us, dept.
Dept is a ticking timebomb that exists for the notion that existence has a price. A price that you need to pay by selling your time to someone.
It exists with no direct link to time, but it uses time to exert power over a big part of the world’s population.
On the opposite side of dept, you have social media which uses the notion that they simply want us, the consumer, to give them our time and in return, they give us entertainment. All the while it fosters an entire economy around time because in this case, time stands for information, information that you can sell. Using time as a tool to generate capital but a very devious tool because the game is rigged, they made the media as addictive as possible. They need you to stay.
In the end, the need that the Scientist feels to blow up the room is a desire to lay claim and control the Zone and make it A zone instead of THE Zone. Appropriating it and turning it into what we consider time today. A multitool that has been claimed by nobody really, it is larger than us. to make borders between who has and who doesn’t, who is the consumer and who is the consumed, who gives and who takes.
CONCLUSION
What our guide through the Zone, the Stalker, eventually tells the viewer is that the zone is a machine that creates meaning. You can’t simply destroy or appropriate the zone, there is a way higher risk that the zone destroys or appropriates you in return.
There is no real of zones, but you can learn and think critically about zones, realize what the purposes of different zones are and what power they hold over you.
Potentially by avoiding the can-do attitude the Scientist has and striving more for collective optimism by looking at how zones have changed in the past we can dismantle or displace the zones that we disapprove of. You can’t simply blow up a zone on your own, but they aren’t permanent and untouchable structures either.
But do thread carefully, we live as much in the Zone as the Zone lives in us.
BILBIOGRAPHY
Tarkovsky, Andrej: Stalker, Soviet Union 1979
Fisher, Mark: The Weird and the Eerie, London 2016
Baudrillard, Jean: Simulacra and Simulation, The University of Michigan, 1994
Greenaway, John and Darrow, Ashley: ‘175- Stalker review!’, Horror Vanguard, <https://open.spotify.com/episode/1KbnGWuQA90sBlOug66z13?si=d6ed9e4b92984d98> oct. 2021 (last accessed 19.05.2022)
NOTES
1Mark Fisher (1968-2017) was a teacher, writer and media theorist best known for his book Capitalist Realism
2Tarkovsky: Stalker, 1979
3Jean Baudrillard (1929-2007) was a French post-modern philosopher best known for his work Simulacra & Simulation
4 Stalker does not refer to the english word “stalker.” In Stalker a stalker(/Сталкер) is someone who tries to learn about and guide people through the Zone
5Fisher: The Weird and the Eerie, 2016 p. 11