Through a Glass Darkly

I feel quite tired out with writing so much over the last few days, but the films that I've been making my way through steadily interact with the experiences that face me so compellingly that I feel like I owe it to the circumstances to record them down properly. It really doesn't happen very often nowadays, the feeling of the inspiration to write exceeding my need to write. Suddenly, I find that my writing here is impelled by more than my own interests; I find that I am writing for something more than myself.

Just finished Bergman's Through a Glass Darkly. I've watched some other Bergman films before, and I'm finding that his more realistic films speak to me more than his more fantastical portrayals, and so I find that I like The Face and this film more than The Seventh Seal, an opinion that would probably upset some Bergman enthusiasts. But it is a matter of taste; we are all agreed that Bergman is a master of the medium - perhaps even the master of the medium. Preferences among his films differ due to differences in the attitudes and perceptions of each individual viewer, and in fact it affirms his capability as a filmmaker who is able to faithfully and compellingly chronicle the spectrum of human experience, in that any individual viewer cannot approach his whole oeuvre without feeling a range of appreciation, revulsion, discomfort and awe in reaction to it. It is something to celebrate, that his work is not simple - not simple at all.

Symbolism, connotation and meaning are thickly layered throughout the film, so that everything - every shot - can be cross-examined and productively dissected. It would be futile to try to do justice to the whole film by writing about it in one short entry, and I don't think I will try to write something that is worth reading alongside watching the film. But there are certain things that immediately struck me, new meanings as well as familiar ones that have been portrayed with unexpected and uncommon clarity.

The whole film is set on a desolate coastline on a deserted island. Vast expenses of sea and sky are contrasted starkly with the puny artifacts of human presence, the rickety jetty that leads to the rough two-storey family house, and, further down the rocky beach, the broken hulk of a wrecked hull. The spartan backdrop serves partly to emphasise the actions and the human happenings, making them stand out more clearly against an unmoving or immovable scene, but it also serves to act as a counterbalance against the tendency to over-romanticise and sentimentalise the action, because one is always reminded of the triviality and vanity of all these human sussurations when compared against the scudding clouds, the crashing waves and howling storms of a much larger, much emptier world. Whatever one may feel in response to the characters and the happenings, the aspect of futility and pitifulness is emphasised by the omnipresence of the surrounding void.

Bergman is also careful and evocative in his use of fluids: the shots of ripples and waves that open the film, the empty waters dappling the brilliant sunlight; the slouds that billow and refract the light; the milk that one of the characters, a young boy, spills on the rocks of the beach in petulance, milk that is shockingly white and diffuses inexorably and somehow horrifyingly through the rock pools. On the one hand, the great expanses look uniform, but encompassed in that impression is a constantly chaotic process; there is a roiling; there if flux. And among this flux, the characters are set adrift; their intermittent grasp on conventions and reality make even the island seem like flotsam, as the references to the outside world (taking the form of an unseen farm with the island's only telephone connection, the boat trips to an unseen mainland for unidentified provisions, and a helicopter that visits the island as a shadow first and then as a retreating silhouette dissolving into a shot of the stirring seas) dissolve and ultimately turn in on themselves, effecting the impression of a true and complete isolation of the island and its inhabitants.

Against this, the issue of perceptions is brought out. In the film, there are four characters: Karin, a young woman who is losing her mind to schizophrenia, her husband Martin (played by the consummately expressive Max von Sydow, who also did the magician Vogler in The Face), her father David, a successful writer in the process of finishing a novel, and her younger brother Minus. For Karin, her illness casts her off from the familiar anchor points of what we would normally regard as reality; or rather, sets her free to perceive the things around her in radically different ways. She starts by hearing things, and then goes on to seeing things, and her hallucinations modify her behaviour towards the people around her, especially her brother, until they also start to lose contact with certainties that are taken for granted. Minus finds her coming onto him as if she viewed him as a replacement or substitute for Martin; David admits to a detached fascination with the development of Karin's illness, a fascination that he says horrifies him even as he feels a need to dutifully record her disintegration as material for future books; Martin tries to tether Karin to reality through sensual appeals, but finds her pushing him away. And yet, all the characters lose their bearings on old certainties while maintaining a disconcerting clarity and self-awareness, so that David can discuss with Martin a secret desire for Karin to die conveniently, and Minus can converse with Karin as she reveals her fear of going insane to him. But the most disturbing moments of clarity come in Karin, who, even as she shifts between worlds uncontrollably, can describe the sensations to her enthralled family vividly and lucidly, and can even experiencethe fear of losing her mind even as she loses her mind. Karin's illness sets not only her own mind free, but unfetters those of her family as well, as they begin to think things that are not allowed, things that fascinate them because they had not imagined themselves capable of thinking them before. Madness, like magic, liberates the mind.

There is also a clear problem of communication. The idea of individuals essentially being islands isolated from each other is not new; man is an island, but no man should be an island. Previously, this idea had been evocatively brought out for me in Winterson's Gut Symmetries, and it was not a long shot to interpret the film's symbols of islands and boats in the terms that Winterson used. On the one hand, we have obstacles to communication. Karin finds that her own husband is too literal and practical to understand her metaphorical and symbolic attempts to communicate what she is perceiving, and turns to Minus as an eager and unquestioning receptacle of her...well, "parables" is the closest term I can find to what I see in the film. Minus complains that David is never around, being too caught up in his writing abroad and, even at home, seeming distant and incapable of connecting with his family. David also keeps a diary which contains his private thoughts about Karin's condition, a diary that Karin stumbles over, to catastrophic results.

And on the other hand, we have fumbling, even desperate attempts to cross the gulf that separates one individual from another. David and Martin talk most candidly about Karin when they are on boats in the middle of the water, and while they are moored offshore on a trip to town for provisions, Martin confronts David about his diary. In that episode, David confides a disturbing story of how he had learned of Karin's illness while abroad, and had made up his mind to commit suicide. He had rented a car, had set out to drive off a precipice, and had already found himself empty of all emotions and connections as he sent the car careening towards the edge, when the engine suddenly stalled, and he rolled to a stop with the front wheels hanging over the edge and with him gripped by terror and a (somewhat unlikely) renewed love for his distant family. And Karin, Martin and Minus put up a play for David, a play about an artist who is asked by a ghost to choose love even at the cost of death, in a sense then to choose a purely poetic trade and end. The artist backs down from the trade at the last minute, turning away from the gates of death. David feigns approval of Minus' writing attempt, but the children can see the contempt that roils just under the facade.

Here, then, in an environment refracted by madness, we see, on the one hand, people withholding what needs to be said, and on the other hand, people using whatever means they have on hand to get through to other people. Two forces erode the effectiveness of the communication: firstly, the enormity and complexity of the truths they want others to understand, and secondly, the complexity of the rituals and the imprecision of their vocabulary, so that the act of communcation, the attempt at connecting, becomes the central challenge rather than the more crucial meaning that needs to be communicated. Here, again, Karin's madness seems to be an advantage. In one scene near the end of the film, when her illness is coming to a head, she stands in the middle of an unused and decrepit room, standing ramrod straight and talking to the torn and mildewed wallpaper. She keeps repeating, "I understand." And if we can see schizophrenia as a sort of unusually acute and accurate psychic communication between the imagination and the consciousness, then indeed she does understand, clearly and precisely. The painfulness comes from seeing her father and husband huddled at the door, staring at her in incomprehension. The pain is in her inability to communicate to others what she has clearly grasped through her modified perception.

In the film, there is also a hint of Bergman's longstanding fight with the nature of God. It's something that is perhaps more clearly brought out in The Seventh Seal: a sort of agnosticism, a yearning to acknowledge the existence of God that is tortured by an inability to find faith. Through the course of the film, Karin is subjected to a repeated hallucination, in which she enters the decrepit room and hears voices telling her to prepare for the arrival of something. She sees people in white, "bright and good" people as she calls them, all looking at a door expectantly. She says that she doesn't know what exactly is expected, but she thinks it is the Second Coming. And, at the end of the film, she is in the room repeating "I understand", because apparently the arrival is about to take place. The door to an empty closet creaks open; she looks at it expectantly. Then, she shrieks and screams and goes into hysteria. When the men calm her down, she describes what she had seen: a spider, which had emerged from the closet and tried to violate her, and had crawled over her body and face and then disappeared into the wallpaper. She describes being unable to take her eyes off its eyes; she finally concludes that "I have seen God".

However, in the end, this theme seems to be rather clumsily treated, because in an epilogue that by Bergman's own admission had been hastily appended, David and Milus come to the conclusion that God is in fact love, and that the existence of love in this world is enough to believe that God exists. I agree with this viewpoint, but Bergman is right; it is not a viewpoint that I expected the characters to come to after what they had gone through, and in its abruptness it seems artificial and contrived. But then again, maybe that was Bergman's intention, to create this impression of contrivance in the viewer.

Another extended theme is the characters' anticipation of a storm. The men keep asking themselves whether it will rain when they're out at sea, and although it may be a social phenomenon to talk pleasantries about the weather, their persistence still creates a sort of futile anticipation and expectation of something that may never come, like what one can find in Pinter's The Dumbwaiter or (at least I am told, since I've not actually read it myself) Beckett's Waiting for Godot. There is a very powerful scene, though, when Karin suddenly becomes convinced that it will start raining, and runs off by herself. Milus searches for her all over the seafront, and eventually finds her huddled in the hull of a wrecked fishing boat just as the storm properly starts. Amidst the mould, flotsam, broken rafters and crazily tilted decking, we see Karin lying in her stylish summer suit, on the verge of being soaked through. It is as if we are seeing into her mind, in that frame. And then, as thunder peals and rainwater pours into the shattered hull, Karin suddenly lunges at Milus, and the siblings careen towards a moment of incest, before the camera cuts away. One is left wondering whether Milus, too is loosed from the bonds of reality; but I get the impression that he actually did restrain himself before it went too far, or at least I would like to think so.

However, at the end, it is also revealed that Karin's mental condition is hereditary, and it is possible that Milus' hyperactivity throughout the film is an early symptom of it in him. While waiting in the wreck for Martin to call an ambulance helicopter, David admits to Karin that he had tried to escape from the family because he could not bear the thought of seeing the illness that had overcome his late wife take Karin as well. And indeed, in the epilogue, when Milus bursts in on David and demands an explanation for why Karin had relapsed, there is a certain madness in his eyes. And yet, in the end, one gets the feeling that Karin is the prop for the family; she is the one who is trying her best to get them all to come to terms with her condition, through trying to explain to them what she is going through, and comforting them when they come to her and confess their shameful thoughts to her. At times, her laying of her hands on her family members in compassion almost seem like acts of benediction. This only goes further in amplifying the ambiguity of her condition: it is disconcerting, and it is liberating; it is demanding, and it is forgiving; it is delibitating, and yet it is empowering.

All in all, therefore, it is a great film to watch, certainly worth the time to see it and then to think about it. It is a rich film, in that it packs enough substance to warrant hours of interpretation, and even multiple viewings. And yet, in a testament to Bergman's storytelling skills, it is also a generous film, in that the insights it is pregnant with are not couched in abstractions and inscrutable symbology. It is therefore insightful without being obstruse; it manages to be compelling without being confusing. And it is definitely a film that deserves every bit of recognition that it can get.