Caroline Tracey has a PhD in geography and a new book about salt lakes, but the writer she credits most for teaching her how to see the American West is Andrei Tarkovsky. In an essay for Literary Hub, Tracey describes how Stalker—his 1979 masterpiece set in a cordoned-off industrial wasteland called the Zone—reoriented her understanding of what a landscape can hold:
Though Stalker critiques the environmental harms of the Soviet Union’s rapid industrialization, it does so not by focusing on the ills of factories, but by reaching deep into Stalker’s heart to show their affinities with nature. What was most inspiring to me was that Tarkovsky could make this feel so clear in such a damaged landscape.
What struck me reading Tracey's essay is how much Tarkovsky refused to treat the environment as backdrop. Where Hollywood directors used Monument Valley as scenery—a stage for John Wayne to stand in front of—Tarkovsky pushed the ruined marshlands of the Zone to the foreground, making the land itself the moral and emotional center of the film. As evidence, he spoke of Monument Valley. “It’s not American. It’s another world, not the material one,” he said. “It wasn’t put there so westerns could be shot, but as a place to meditate.”
In an era where game-makers and world-builders have so much access to digital environments, as players, we need to take a step back and breathe more in the places we inhabit. Tracey's essay is a reminder that the vocabulary for foregrounding environment over narrative has been developing in film long before games found it. The connection is worth sitting with.
Her book, Salt Lakes, is out now from W.W. Norton.
