Two men on the verge of middle age are taking a road trip to visit some hot springs in the middle of a wood. One of them has been singing the praises of the springs (referring, for example, to their "otherworldly peacefulness") and has persuaded the other to come along for the ride, leaving his pregnant wife behind. The relationship between the men is not quite what it was. They've drifted apart – made different life choices – and things are just a little awkward between them. Finding the legendary springs proves harder than expected and they get decidedly lost. Having left the city a long way behind them, surrounded by a panoply of different kinds of green (leaves, pine needles, grasses, mosses), they are repeatedly forced to turn their car about. At one point, upon discovering that a road sign is "literally blank", one of the men announces, in playful tones of mock awe, "We've entered a whole other zone!"
At this point during my first viewing of Kelly Reichardt's 2006 film Old Joy, of which the preceding passage is a description, I immediately thought of another film involving a group of middle-aged men, one of whom has also left his wife behind, whose relationships are strained and fractious, and who end up going round in circles during a kind of "road trip" from the city into a green world in search of a legendary location. The world that these men enter is explicitly named "the Zone" and the film, of course, is Andrei Tarkovsky's Stalker (1979). Both films also feature very significant canine performances, alongside some rather slimier creatures. (I've circled the snail in the second image from Stalker below as it's otherwise hard to make out from the still.)
Having associated these two films, though, what are we to make of the connection? Does it offer anything more than a piece of cinephile cleverness? ("Did you spot the reference to Tarkovsky? Who's Tarkovsky? Are you serious?") I certainly have no "smoking gun" to prove that either Reichardt or Jonathan Raymond, who wrote the screenplay to Old Joy based on his own short story (in which the term "zone" does not, I think, appear), intended any reference or homage to Tarkovsky. Still, there are some obvious connections to be drawn between the work of these two directors from such different times and places. There are affinities in the way they use colour, for example, in that both of them have the ability to wring a great deal of intensity and subtlety from palettes that, compared tone-for-tone with those of other filmmakers, might seem subdued. (The effect of the shift to colour in Stalker, breath-taking no matter how many times one has seen the film, is a perfect case in point.) Both of them also tend to operate at a slower pace than mainstream cinema has accustomed us to, so much so that they are frequently spoken of as exemplifying a form of art cinema known, precisely, as "slow cinema".
Slow cinema, it is often assumed, operates by taking the emphasis away from classical priorities such as character and narrative. It puts much more weight on sheer perceptual experience, so that the viewer is not encouraged to concentrate on, say, motivation but, rather, to focus on what it feels like to submit to the colours and rhythms of these films over long – very long – stretches of time. There are two broad modes that such films are held to operate in. Tarkovsky represents one of them, which we might call the "mystical" mode, in which the boredom that our action-hungry selves feel on initially encountering films that operate so differently gives way – for those who are prepared to go with it – to an almost-transcendent sense of aesthetic unity, even bliss ("otherworldly peacefulness", perhaps). The other mode, with which Reichardt is often associated, might be called the "political" mode. Here boredom is intended to be functional, to make us think, ultimately, about power and agency in late capitalist America. For Elena Gorfinkel, for example, Reichardt's films involve "dedramatised scenarios in which incident replaces event, and sheer profilmic happening challenges structures of legible or discrete causality", all with a view to revealing "the linkage of quotidian activity and forms of arduous, painful labour with temporalities of exhaustion and dispossession for subjects on the margins of American life".[1]
As plausible as it can sometimes be to see Tarkovsky and Reichardt as exemplifying these two very different ways of resisting the logic and pacing of mainstream – "classical" – cinema, automatic assumptions about "slow cinema" and what it entails can also obscure as much as they reveal. Jonathan Rosenbaum thinks that the association of Reichardt's films with slow cinema has – together with seeing her work through the lens of "neorealism" and a tendency to confuse "the personal with the autobiographical" – led to some "unfortunate viewing habits".[2] One of the things, I want to claim, that thinking about Old Joy and Stalker together might help clarify is how important character, in a fairly traditional sense, is to both Tarkovsky and Reichardt.
Consider how elusive (how hard to pin down with language), and yet how wonderfully precise, is the emotional texture of the sequence in Old Joy in which Kurt (Will Oldham) and Mark (Daniel London), the two protagonists, return to their car after finally locating, and bathing in, the hot springs. They walk along the path through the trees in silence, side by side, their hands hanging loosely. We get a sense that they are comfortable with one another, and yet somehow not truly relaxed; note the way that Kurt drops his rucksack on the ground while waiting for Mark to open the car door, the irritability that their silence hints at, and the loneliness evoked by the way the film holds the image of trees and road, after the Volvo has driven off, for just a fraction of a second longer that one expects. Some kind of renewed connection has surely been established between the two men (whether or not there was any kind of literally sexual encounter, Kurt's massaging of Mark is indubitably erotic), but the mood of the aftermath is rather bedraggled. Is this because of what happened (are they embarrassed?) or, instead, because it's over? Do the two men sense that, whatever happened, it was only – could only have been – momentary? That there is no way truly to recapture their "old joy"? The answers to these questions aren't clear, but what comes across beautifully is that it's not simply that the film doesn't know what they are – this has nothing to do with vagueness – but that Kurt and Mark don't know, either.
In the same piece I cited earlier, Jonathan Rosenbaum claims that "unfulfilled fantasies belonging to viewers and characters alike are present in all of Reichardt's features – namely, the failure of life and the world (nature, humans, society, even sometimes animals) to conform to the expectations molded by culture, genres, and many other conditioned reflexes". Old Joy is very much about this, about the way that fantasy is not an alternative to reality, but rather part of reality; that what we hope for, or regret, or fear, cannot but affect how we experience the world and one another. The novelist M. John Harrison, best known for his work in science-fiction and fantasy, said of his supposedly non-fantastic novel about mountain climbing, 1989's Climbers, that his goal was "to show fantasy and reality as co-dependent".[3] Stalker works in very similar territory. Even aside from its narrative of a Room that supposedly grants one's innermost wishes, many commentators on the film have explored the senses in which Tarkovsky's Zone seems to reflect the psyches of the characters exploring it, its dangers coming as much – if not more – from within as from without.
Here, however, we encounter another point of contact between Tarkovsky and Reichardt which has served as a stumbling block for some viewers, namely the presence in their films of distinctly unlikable characters. Even as sophisticated a critic as Rosenbaum writes of the character Gina (Michelle Williams) in 2016's Certain Women, that "because we aren't privy to so many self-doubts" as we are in the short story by Maile Meloy on which it is based, in the film "her chiding of her husband and daughter seem more self-centered". But what's wrong with characters that are a little self-centred? Aren't we all? Isn't that an important and also an interesting part of our lives? Rosenbaum at least comes close to implying a rather too-easy connection between character likability and viewer interest (the less likable the characters, the more boring the film).
The ending of 2013's Night Moves is a useful test case. For some viewers, the fact that Josh (Jesse Eisenberg) ends up trapped – his dreams of ecological heroism in ruins, guilty of a murder he committed simply not to be found out by the system, but now unable to get even the most menial of jobs precisely because he mustn't be found out by that very same system – will provoke a reaction of, "Who cares?" He's been selfish, thoughtless, and standoffish throughout the film, so why should we viewers care about him now? For me, however, the inexorability of his situation and the complete uselessness of his ever-deepening self-pity are both completely riveting and utterly terrifying, even if I certainly don't "like" the guy. Josh shares this self-pity with the eponymous protagonist of Stalker (Alexander Kaidanovsky), something that critics have tended to see as a mistake, as detracting from the character's supposed purity, even saintliness. I've written at length elsewhere that this is itself a mistake, and that Tarkovsky's film can be read as a compelling exploration precisely of self-pity.[4]
There's some self-pity in Old Joy as well. Though it doesn't come through nearly as strongly as in Night Moves or Stalker, both Mark's fear of the impending demands of fatherhood and Kurt's admiration of Mark's more settled life ("So fuckin' brave man – I have never gotten myself into anything that I couldn't get myself out of") contain elements of self-pity.[5] This might cue us towards a recognition that Reichardt's interest in friendship – one that runs through all of her films in one way or another – has more light-and-shade than is sometimes recognized. The double-edged quality of the epigram to 2019's First Cow ("the bird a nest, the spider a web, man friendship") seems to me to have been rather underplayed. Yes, Blake's proverb indicates that friendship is in some sense our natural state, but what follows from this? The nest is where birds rear their young, but the web is where spiders ensnare their prey. (This is, after all, a Proverb of Hell.)[6]
The trajectory of Old Joy takes us from one friend – Mark – alone in his garden, to the other friend – Kurt – alone in the city at night, some of the camera angles strangely canted. We are suddenly alone with Kurt for almost the first time in the film, just as the end of Stalker puts us alone in a room with the Stalker's daughter Monkey (Natasha Abramova) for the first time. Both films don't only tell the story of a journey to and from a special "zone" but also end with the discovery of new, hauntingly ambiguous zones. To decide whether either ending is or isn't a "happy" one would be as crude as it would be impossible. Just as Monkey's telekinesis could signal the arrival of a new form of humanity as easily as it could indicate the end of humanity as such, the end of Old Joy, in its quieter way, expresses loneliness (Kurt has nothing to do but wander among strangers) as much as it does human connection (he and the homeless man do speak to each other, however briefly).
Both Old Joy and Stalker emphasise the sheer range of human relationships. Loyalty and knowability (the dog-like aspects of people, we could say) are as characteristically human as inscrutability and alienation (their slug- or snail-like aspects, perhaps, although that is not all that the invertebrates in these films signify). But to say that we can't decide whether the endings are "happy" or not isn't to say that happiness is irrelevant to these movies; quite the opposite. They are about human happiness, about the idea of happiness. That in Old Joy it can seem that we can only say "I was happy"[7] – and in Stalker "I will be happy" – does not mean that happiness is merely an illusion. Both films show us, instead, that happiness can only be an origin or a destination, not a dwelling-place. We have to pass through the Zone, because we can't live there.
[1] Elena Gorfinkel, "Exhausted Drift: Austerity, Dispossession and the Politics of Slow in Kelly Reichardt's Meek's Cutoff" in Tiago de Luca & Nuno Barradas Jorge (eds.), Slow Cinema (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016), pp. 123-136: 124-5
[4] Dominic Lash, "'You Can't Imagine How Terrible It Is to Make the Wrong Choice' – Faith, Agency and Self-Pity in Andrei Tarkovsky's Stalker", Quarterly Review of Film and Video (2019), 36:4, pp. 264-285
[5] Compare, incidentally, that line of Mark's with the Professor's remark in Stalker that "one should never perform irreversible actions".
[6] A double bill of Old Joy and Alex Ross Perry's Queen of Earth (2015) would be a fascinating opportunity to explore the inextricability of the constructive and destructive aspects of human friendship.
[7] Compare Theodor Adorno's Minima Moralia, section 72.
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