Back to Back 49 - Somewhere Between One and Five Women in Total
Comparing movies that meld some (feminine) minds and shatter some destinies
Persona (1966) - writer/director Ingmar Bergman
3 Women (1977) - writer/director Robert Altman
The courage of the shut mouth, in spite of artillery!
The line pink and quiet, a worm, basking...
But how about the eyes, the eyes, the eyes?
Mirrors can kill and talk, they are terrible rooms
In which a torture goes on one can only watch.Sylvia Plath, “The Courage of Shutting-Up”
When we retreat to silence, we make two movements: away from the noise and bluster of the world, but also away from our role as adult human being with a place in that world, while at the same time moving toward an inner self. So much might seem obvious to the complacent humanist with a clear and fixed idea that there actually is an inner self there. But what if there isn't?
What if the only self you've ever had is constructed from bits and pieces of your experience and learning, from things that were told to you, scraps you read, lessons taught to you by teachers and parents? What if you look behind the curtain of language and social relations, look in absolute silence, and there is no there there, just a howling void of nothingness where you thought there was an individual?
This might be the greatest horror of all, and it has been confronted most passionately and powerfully by works of art in the expressionist mode, oftentimes horror-inflected, like Roman Polanksi's seminal psychohorror Repulsion with Catherine Deneuve (1965), and its successors Rosemary's Baby (1968) - more evidently a horror piece - and then The Tenant (1976). And then there's the more classically inflected Ingmar Bergman, who started to go all expressionist in the mid-60s and produced one of the greatest works of cinematic and dramatic art ever made, Persona.
Bergman’s film, profoundly upsetting, at moments terrifying, relates the horror of the dissolution of personality: Alma crying out to Elizabeth at one point, “I’m not you!” And it depicts the complementary horror of the theft (whether voluntary or involuntary is left unclear) of personality, which mythically is rendered as vampirism: we see Elizabeth kissing Alma’s neck; at one point, Alma sucks Elizabeth’s blood.
Susan Sontag "Ingmar Bergman's Persona", first published in Sight and Sound Magazine, 1967
Film as violence. Not violent films, splatter movies or gore flicks, but the act of making films itself as a form of violence, of emotional/spiritual vampirism. At one point in the film the profession of actor is shown to be just like the thirst of a vampire to suck up life energy. The film begins with a series of images and sounds that are terrifying though not overtly violent, then the blood spilled, the sacrifice of a lamb - and the dreadful sight of a thumb closing on te eye to gouge it), then the extreme close-up of the hands of the crucifixion, nails being driven in. Then there is a resurrection of sorts, and the story begins. This is possibly the strongest and most shocking opening sequence in history, and it contains a lot, though it is strictly unnecessary to the plot. This is part of why it exists - to show that the plot is not really what counts here.
But to recap the surface level plot: it's the story of two women who become one, a kind of reverse-doppelgänger tale. Elisabet (Liv Ullmann) is a famous actress who now has gone silent, though there is nothing physically or mentally ailing her. The psychologist believes it is another performance, that she will (and must) give it up and go back to normal when the act becomes no longer interesting. A nurse, Sister Alma (Bibi Andersson) is hired to take care of Elisabet. The two women go to a remote island cottage where their boundaries will dissolve and they will become one.
This is a highly contrived setup, a theatrical experiment which could give rise to a huge number of cavils and objections: How can they know there's literally nothing wrong with her? If she has decided to read and write and make gestures, is it really such a grave problem of dissociation? Why does this act of wilful defiance or withdrawal need treatment anyway? And in a world full of people with problems not of their own choosing, why should we care about the self-denying whim of a pampered privileged woman anyway?
The resulting drama is a tour de force of the filmmaker's art. Both breathtakingly unconventional and powerfully rooted in the tradition of intimate Nordic chamber drama like that of Strindberg, it is a radical exploration of self. The drama is built around Elisabet's withdrawal from the world of life, family and profession, and Alma's struggle to hold on to that world as she encounters a stronger personality determined to challenge her (and that life) precisely with silence (though the key 'betrayal' is conducted through Elisabet's written letter, a kind of bending of the rules of silence and withdrawal). There is no real backstory to Elisabet, no reason given for the viewer to care or identify with her.
But the film is determined to force you into caring with all the persuasive tools at its maker's command. The techniques of horror: very early on, after the intro sequence focussing on violence, the crucifixion and the resurrection, Elisabet is alone in her room when the TV shows the self-immolation of Thich Quang Duc, a Buddhist monk who protested the tyranny of the American-imposed Catholic regime of South Vietnam. Later she will react with horror at the Stroop Report photo of Nazis clearing the Warsaw Ghetto, an iconic image of Nazi atrocity that was made by the Nazis themselves.
By associating Elisabet so closely with horror at these harrowing images, the director is manipulating us mercilessly into taking this experimental psychodrama of the ultra-bourgeois Nordic classes to be a universal portrayal of the Problem of Evil. It's a highly adept move, but quite dishonest in its way and it leaves me, for one, feeling slightly defiled as the passive participant in this dramatic experiment.
Because Elisabet's withdrawal from the world of speech - of her profession, of expression and communication - is only partially in protest/revulsion at this world of horror that she lives in. Mostly it is, as the doctor suggests, an experiment. Susan Sontag discusses this psychoanalytical explanation coming from the coldly detached doctor:
I am inclined to impute a privileged status to the speech made by the psychiatrist to Elizabeth before she departs with Alma to the beach cottage...But even if one treats this speech as setting forth a privileged view, it would be a mistake to take it as the key to Persona; or even to assume that the psychiatrist’s thesis wholly explains Elizabeth’s condition… Bergman has, in effect, both taken account of psychology and dispensed with it. Without ruling out psychological explanation, he consigns to a relatively minor place any consideration of the role the actress’s motives have in the action.
Susan Sontag, Ingmar Bergman’s Persona
She concludes that “Persona takes a position beyond psychology” and goes on to discuss it in terms of the opportunities presented by the post-linear, post-psychological fragmented form of new narrative - what today we would call post-modern. Her singling out of the film as an exemplar for this type of narrative — or post-narrative, or anti-narrative or even fractal narrative — is a master text of the postmodern era in narrative art.
The advantages of keeping the psychological aspects of Persona indeterminate (while internally credible) are that Bergman can do many other things besides tell a story. Instead of a full-blown story, he presents something that is, in one sense, cruder and, in another, more abstract: a body of material, a subject. The function of the subject or material may be as much its opacity, its multiplicity, as the ease with which it yields itself to being incarnated in a determinate action or plot.
Robin Wood comments on the difference between the Brechtian-Godardian techniques of distancing and the self-referential moments in this film, finding it shocking but not distancing, but rather the opposite:
What Bergman does here has nothing in common with the continual and delicate — at times near-subliminal — play of distanciation devices with which Godard preserves the spectator’s analytical detachment. Bergman, on the contrary, draws the spectator into the film, demanding total emotional involvement: the pre-credit and credit sequences shock and disturb rather than detach; the fiction that follows up to the midway point engrosses, with nothing either to distance or distract us from a moral and psychological exploration of the characters and their relationship, via the emotional-intellectual processes through which we customarily experience fictional narratives.
Robin Wood, Ingmar Bergman (1969) p145
So for all its skill and undisputed mastery of the cinematic technique, the film is a very traditional exercise in forcing an emotional response on the viewer, hence its strong resemblance to, and references alluding to, classic horror cinema. Vampirism, ghosts, night walkers... all the apparatus of the Gothic is reined in.
The film is manipulating us into feeling something, so what? All films do so. This brings me to my second problem, which stems from Bergman's deep-seated Lutheran upbringing, his sense of Original Sin and the condition of humankind as essentially Preterite or damned to hell. If the Christian belief of that philosophy is stripped away, if God is Dead, then what does that leave? A highly nihilistic pessimism of the kind that pervades the whole story.
As the women merge identities in this Jungian Shadow-Play, as the dark takes over the sunny humanistic disposition of Alma (her name meaning 'The Soul'), the human essence as portrayed here by Bergman is shown to be deeply aggressive, treacherous, selfish and downright evil. This is the nature of the performance that Elisabet has initiated with her silence. There is no sense of reintegration of this human soul with postitive emotions and impulses. So Jung is curtailed and distorted, and the Jungian Shadow wins out totally, it would seem.
Manipulative and irredeemable: these are the two adjectives that come to characterize the women shown here, and to describe humanity in general in the Bergman world-view. I would say it also serves to characterize the film, which, though one of the finest-crafted pieces of work ever made, I find quite repulsive because of its dogged advocacy of a Nordic pessmism that condemns each individual to isolation and fear.
Michael Woods, who wrote a rave review in defence of this film, largely provoked by the philisttine witterings of the English press reviewers, and partly inspired by Susan Sontag's bravura analysis, later revised his opinion, particularly with relation to the last part of the film.
If Bergman’s “breakdown” enabled him, in the first part of Persona, to move into completely new, potentially both rich and radical, areas, the remainder of the film can be read as a hysterical retreat back into the ambiguous comfort of neurosis... My own experience has been that the film’s first half retains its fascination and its resonance, while the sections following Elizabeth’s perusal of the Warsaw Ghetto photograph becomes increasingly difficult to sit through, not because they are disturbing but because they yield so little, are merely unpleasant in the worst sense, as representations not of the horrors of contemporary human existence but of the artist’s own sickness, in which he permits his authentic creativity to drown.
Michael Wood, "Persona Revisited" (2007) in Wood, Michael & Grant, B.K. (eds), Ingmar Bergman (2012), p269
It's that individual obsession with the pre-condemned soul which makes it so self-obsessive and so flawed in the end. Bergman needed more Marx or more Nietzsche in his life, and less Kierkegaard and Ibsen. Though he broke from his strict Lutheran upbringing, he never really ditched the Christian obsession with damnation, and recast the eschatological drama of the preterite damned as the Freudian Oedipal primal scene, and damnation as bourgeois neurosis.
— INTERMISSION —
I’m trying to reach toward a picture that’s totally emotional, not narrative or intellectual, where an audience walks out and they can’t say anything about it except what they feel.
Robert Altman on 3 Women
The movie is whole and complete without being lucid and logical.
Roger Ebert on 3 Women
This story begins as one thing, a character study and a mannered realistic dramedy about two misfit women, and ends as a completely different thing, the realism and the characters' identity having fragmented along the way. Finally it resolves into something mythical, and the key to that change is the third woman, the dreamer. It's another answer to the problem posed by Bergman's Persona and other dramas like it: what happens to the individual when that person's self is completely broken down and fragmented, or even absorbed into a stronger personality? Does the person cease to exist? Or become another person? Or is something new and mythical reconstituted from the fragments?
Being art, neither Bergman's nor Altman's films propose an answer to this conundrum, nor should they. They are there to explore the implications of having the self - constituted largely through habit and passive acceptance of what society has prescribed, just as Millie has built her personality from women's magazines - utterly shattered by trauma and subjected to the stress of a dominant force.
Roger Ebert studied this film intently, having done a scene-by-scene analysis after many rewatches, and the result is the kind of insight he gave when he really worked on understanding rather than falling back on received platitudes (too often his default method):
There are scenes of acute social observation... Much is made of specifics: How to use the time clock, how to get off early on Fridays... Sometimes the details repeat as in a dream - the way Millie's dresses always get caught in a car door, for example. And against these realistic details Altman marshals the force of dreams.
Roger Ebert
And the force of dreams, the language of dreams, is conveyed in symbols: from obvious ones like mirrors and monsters, to more subtle ones like the repetition of twins (twin sisters, twin beds) or water and waves, to almost invisible ones like raw bloody food against processed supermarket food.
The two principal characters, Millie (Shelley Duvall), and Pinky aka Mildred aka Millie (Sissy Spacek) are only differentiated by Millie's somewhat greater experience and saturation in popular 'women's' culture of dating and recipes, but it's all a sham. She's as much of an outcast as the evidently oddball Pinky. Her personality is a self-performed drama with an audience of one, until Pinky comes along to be a willing audience member, then participant, and finally her scriptwriter and director.
Once Pinky starts assimilating herself to her friend, all boundaries start to blur, as represented at first by colour of dress but later more literally by ID documents and family history. Pinky comes to erase Millie's identity before she takes it, calling her 'what's-her-name' as she writes - in Millie's diary which she has taken over - of her desire to erase her completely and be alone (read: integrated). It's classic Jungian anima and shadow stuff, realised beautifully in the fractured dreamy narrative.
Ebert sees the Bergman connection clearly enough:
Altman says Ingmar Bergman’s Persona was one of his influences, and we can see that in the way Pinky does secret things to hurt Millie, spies on her secrets, and eventually tries to absorb and steal her identity. Persona has a central moment of violence in which the film seems to break and the story must begin again, and Pinky’s dive into the pool works in the same way, as a definitive tear in the structure of the film. It reassembles itself with Pinky in control.
But there’s an added wrinkle here: there are three women, not the two of Bergman’s drama. During most of the film Willie (Janice Rule) is on the edges of the story, seen creating her troubling and monstrous images of eroticized creatures and treated as an outsider and weirdo. But of course, at the end the film has become her story.
How her character comes to absorb the other two women, and somehow make them whole again, is left as a mystery. Millie somehow becomes Pinky’s ‘Mom’, but Willie, having lost a boy child, becomes mother to them both. The abusive and drunken waster Edgar (Robert Fortier), sad John Wayne emulator and lord of the Dodge City wasteland, has been erased - literally rubbed out - and the titular three women have become one, a kind of mystical trinity of crone, mother and maiden from the primordial soup of human consciousness.