Who'd be a Mother?

Ingmar Bergman – Persona

In Woody Allen’s Annie Hall the hero arrives 2 minutes late to a screening of an Ingmar Bergman film. He refuses to go into the movie because he is too ‘anal’ to tolerate having missed the start. The first two minutes of Persona are remarkable.  It starts with some really disturbing sounds and images – screeching violins, flashing lights, a single frame shot of an erect penis, repeated close ups of a hand being nailed to a cross – that make for very uncomfortable viewing.  If you can keep watching (and it is very hard to watch – perhaps not as hard as certain sequences in a film like Come and See – but this is not the feel good hit of the summer) the rest of the film is a surface into which the opening nightmare constantly threatens to irrupt.

So, ten years later than Bergman’s Summer with Monika, this is a nightmare of a film that engages with some of the same themes: motherhood and female sexuality. In addition it is a film about the dissolution of sanity and the psychological agony that goes with it.

The plot of the film is banal. An actress, struck dumb for some psychological reason that is not expounded is accompanied to a house on the seaside by a young nurse. The relationship between the women is, by turns, professional, erotic, violent, treacherous. The actress never really speaks and the nurse, after opening herself to her charge and having her secrets betrayed by her, hardens her heart against her.

There are themes of motherhood and failing at motherhood again. Where Monika exits the stage in Summer with Monika, the failure of the actress to be a mother is foregrounded in this movie. There is no escape from the fingers pointed and the voices raised by the nurse. The relationship between the two women becomes sadistic. The nurse harangues her charge ruthlessly, cruelly. The actress remains silent.

Why is the actress silent? She refuses to speak and plays most of the film just listening to the nurse.  At the beginning and ending of the film there is a framing shot of a young boy holding up his hand touching a barrier (window?) in front of what appears to be an enormous poster of his mother – the actress in the movie. So is this a movie about motherhood and its costs its failings? And if it is, then where can I bring its insights?

It doesn't seem to have any insights other than life is terribly painful. Mothers occupy the limits and core, the heights and depths, the fundament and the firmament – there is no other reality and the burden of that responsibility has taken its toll on the first lead.

I suppose the burden of motherhood is a heavy one.  More precisely it is an onerous one. Who wants to be a mother if the job description is so voracious? If, even in the best case, becoming a mother is an utter apocalypse into whose vortex all previous reality is devoured, who could take on such a job? The actress’ response – muteness, denial – reminds me of Sylvia Plath’s description of motherhood as ahistorical and all devouring:

I’m no more your mother

Than the cloud that distils a mirror to reflect its own slow

Effacement at the wind’s hand

On the question of imports and exports, we should definitely import a system of publicly funded childcare.

Of course, Ireland has been exporting mothers for generations. Especially the unwanted ones: the poor ,the unmarried. What is this? A misogyny at the core of the national psyche?  Nothing more unusual, nothing more disgusting here than the time – honoured tendency to control, proscribe, limit, warn about female sexuality. Misogyny is part and parcel of policing what women can and can’t do with their bodies.

We should export this misogyny. I'm not sure anyone would take it off our hands, though!

Although very hard to watch, Bergman’s movie scrutinises insanity and exposes the loneliness and weight of motherhood – this fearless scrutiny is something we should import.