ROADSIDE PICNIC
While the reading of theoretical works can give insight on basic principles of operations and structures of the Zone as a concept, a far more profound, attentive and generative understanding of the issue can be drawn from art and literature. For this, this inquiry turns to the work of both Andrei Tarkovksy and the Strugatsky brothers and their instrumentalisation of the Zone.
Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Stalker[14] has been loosely adapted from the 1972 science fiction novel Roadside Picnic by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky.[15] Both works are set in and around a ‘Zone’ – a site (in a fictitious country) of a supposedly alien ‘visitation’, the origins and purpose of which have not been understood so far. While the nature of the visitation remains unclear, and mostly irrelevant, the focus is centred around its residue and the engagement with it. In both works the Zone is a place which defies our common understanding of the world, laws of physics, space, time, causality and logic. It exhibits a number of anomalous formations in its territory, which pose potential lethal danger to anyone trespassing it. The Zone attains its own logic of spatiality and temporality and thus renders conventional scientific or rational engagement with it futile and potentially dangerous.
The central characters of both the film and the book are stalkers – persons who found their vocation in entering and navigating the dangerous and mysterious Zone for different purposes. These stalkers work mostly illegally – as the Zone is guarded and off-limits to the general public – and have attained special skills and ways of traversing the little understood and dangerous anomalous terrain. In the novel specifically, both scientists and stalkers are venturing into the Zone to collect artefacts – objects with anomalous physical properties which have been left as residue from the alien visitation. As those objects exhibit physical properties that exceed contemporary human comprehension, they are very sought for to be either studied in the case of the former, or sold on the black market in the case of the latter.
While those notions of course come from an exercise in science fiction and have little to do with reality, they nevertheless offer an intriguing and generative line of investigation that can be employed to make sense of the impact that the Zone has on the territory it carves out from the previously ‘conventional’ space. First, the metaphor of the ‘Roadside Picnic’ used by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, draws interesting parallels to the context at hand. The Strugatsky brothers use ‘Roadside Picnic’ for their Zone as an analogy to how a group of humans on a road trip briefly stops on the side of the road, introduces some anomalous (to the local biosphere) processes and leaves a number of traces which are then explored by the animals and insects with awe and fascination, as alien objects incompatible with any logical explanation that could come from the realm of the local biosphere.
‘A picnic. Picture a forest, a country road, a meadow. Cars drive off the country road into the meadow, a group of young people get out carrying bottles, baskets of food, transistor radios, and cameras. They light fires, pitch tents, turn on the music. In the morning they leave. The animals, birds, and insects that watched in horror through the long night creep out from their hiding places. And what do they see? Old spark plugs and old filters strewn around… Rags, burnt-out bulbs, and a monkey wrench left behind… And of course, the usual mess—apple cores, candy wrappers, charred remains of the campfire, cans, bottles, somebody’s handkerchief, somebody’s penknife, torn newspapers, coins, faded flowers picked in another meadow.’[16]