A Typology of Islands Part Two

The Island and the Death of Hope Shame by Ingmar Bergman

This is one of a number of Bergman's films that were shot on the Swedish island of Fårö.

The Film begins with bedroom scene depicting a married couple whose relationship is not in a healthy state.  Eva (Liv Ullmann) and her husband Jan (Max Von Sydow)  have been living on an island for four years, their phone is being cut off, their radio is always broken and in parallel with a crisis in their marriage it seems that a war is breaking out. It’s not clear what the historical context is in that respect.

One way or another they have come to this island to escape from their lives on the mainland. They had both involved in a concert orchestra but there is very little music on this island; metaphorical or otherwise. Their plans, this escape, this island are all starting to unravel.

Eva is increasingly at odds with her husband’s disengagement from the word:

“It’s better not to know anything…I’m so fed up with your escapism”

They go to the mainland, the military is everywhere, they buy some wine, have a chat with their conscripted and depressed shopkeeper and return to the island.

Soon after they have a conversation about having children – she wants one, he doesn't want one now – and instead of the cinematic staple of alternative over the shoulder close ups as each character speaks Bergman films in one shot over Von Sydow’s shoulder, all the time Liv Ullman is facing him, and her love for this man is etched on her face. Why did he use this perspective? To underline his lack of commitment to a common plan for the two of them?

Whatever common plans they’d had are shelved when the war comes to their island. They’re attacked by enemy paratroopers, arrested by their own side an eventually released by their acquaintance, the mayor. Their relationship breaks down, One scene where they are pulling stones from garden plot together is reminiscent of the plight of two anti-heroes ofWaiting for Godot

The mayor takes a liking to Eva. On one visit he has sex with her in exchange for money. Soon after the rebels arrive. The mayor tries to buy his life with money he’d given Eva. Her husband has the money but lies saying that he doesn’t. The mayor is then executed by the rebels; in a twist, they force Jan to pull the trigger. The rebels burn their house to the ground and now, more than ever they resemble Vladimir and Estrgon from Waiting for Godot

The two 'tramps' try to survive. The war has taken everything from them and when a deserting soldier arrives at their farm Jan shoots him and takes his equipment. At this stage the once pacifist Von Sydow has become a ruthless kill or be killed survivor who has no time for sentiment or love. The war has burned those excrescences away.

They  take to a boat to escape their island – it has become a place of war and probably famine. Their journey leads them out to sea where they get caught up in a crowd of dead soldiers’ bodies. Von Sydow works the boat through this grisly soup with a long pole.

In one shockingly bleak shot the pilot of the boat just slips over the side to his death. His hopeless suicide is witnessed by Jan, who looks on silently.

The couple lie down and as Eva tells her husband about a dream she’d had where she saw plane destroy a garden where the burning flowers were nonetheless beautiful the film ends with their boat adrift in a nameless hopeless ocean.

This is a film about the abandonment of the island. After hope has gone, when killing is the only currency there can be no islands, there are no utopias, there is no comfort. This is a bleak film.

Accountancy Island aka England in the Caribbean - Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe

As islands go there are few more famous than Crusoe’s. Ironically, in a story that has become a byword for adventure and the exotic,  Defoe’s narrator manages to bleed the whole affair dry of these very properties: After the reader navigates his way through Crusoe’s interminable inventories, lists and accounts, endures his painstaking descriptions of every last, banal detail of the twenty seven years of his time on the island and suffers his turgid and repetitive musings on religion and morality there is very little in the way of adventure and the exotic left.

Defoe takes his reader to an island in the Caribbean but his narrator never really leaves England.

The problem is, Robinson Crusoe is a tiresome bore. The only thing worse than having to read this novel again would be the horrific vista of ever meeting someone like him.  As for spending time with him on a desert island? Perhaps this is what Colonel Kurtz saw in the depths of the Congo when he uttered his soul – scourged words of despair: “The horror, the horror!”

Crusoe’s accountant’s sensibility almost performs an act of reverse alchemy: He almost turns a fantastic setting and a riveting plot into a depressing ledger of profit and loss, of good and evil, of civilisation and barbarism of goods inwards and goods outwards.

For all that, Robinson Crusoe has to appear on any list, or inventory or ledger of islands in fiction. It is all here: It is a refuge, a place of nightmare, a simulacrum in which the old world, the settled world of Europe is reimagined, repackaged.

Crusoe’s arrival on this island is an accident. He does not seek it out. His narrative does begin in flight, however. In defiance of his parents’ advice to follow the “middle station of life” and settle down to a middle class life of relative ease and comfort he goes away to sea. In the early part of his narrative, Crusoe sounds like Odysseus! He repeatedly uses Odysseus’ narrative trick of claiming to have suffered immensely:

“never any young Adventurer’s Misfortunes, I believe, began sooner, or continued longer than mine”

“it was always my fate to choose for the worse”

The contrast with Odysseus is instructive in understanding what kind of character is telling this story. Odysseus is an inveterate adventurer – his use of rhetorical hook that his life has been one of great suffering is consistent with the excitement of his story.

When Crusoe gets to the island the adventure changes – he is no longer an explorer. He has found a home. For Crusoe this island is a terminus and a foundation. Unlike Odysseus, Crusoe seeks to build a society from the ground up. He is not homesick; the thought of returning to England does not enter his narrative until more than twenty five years have passed.

What is this island society like?

It is one based on private property. At various points he considers himself to be the king of the island. This is not a metaphor. Early in his stay he declares: “I was king and lord of all this country indefeasibly, and had a right of possession”. Much later on, when some other sailors visit the island Crusoe throws his weight about and demands that the visitors follow his orders:  he is referred to as “Governour” and his word is law in the resolution of a dispute involving the sailors. Finally, having left the island, Crusoe returns and tells us that even though he lets others stay on the island he considers himself to be the actual owner: “I shared the Island into parts with ’em reserved to myself the property of the whole, but gave them such parts respectively as they agreed on”.

Crusoe does not have an imagination. He has a work ethic. He plants crops, builds a series of fortifications, makes boats, tailors clothes, plots time, tames, farms and milks goats, builds a canal – reading the lists of his herculean feats is probably not as exhausting as actually carrying out the work described but at times I was wondering.

Crusoe’s island is an island where Christians and Savages know their place. Crusoe is the lord; Friday is, without question, a subordinate. Time and again Crusoe sets Friday to work at various tasks:

“I pointed him to run and fetch the bird I had shot”

“I order’d Friday to take one of the canoes….I order’d him to go and bury the dead bodies….I order’d him to bury the horrid Remains of their barabarous feast”

Friday is, nonetheless, grateful for having been subordinated. He has none of the defiance of Caliban, not even the vague disenchantment of Ariel. He is a docile beast, happy to have been delivered from his state of barbarism by this benevolent Christian lord:

“You do great deal much good, says he, you teach wild man be good, sober, tame man. You tell them know God, pray God, and live new Life ”

From the mouths of savages. This island is a utopian fantasy about the benevolence of European empire building. The slaves are delighted to be slaves.

The accountancy is all part of this process. The sheer ubiquity of this mode is astonishing, He counts and inventories everything. At one stage he details and inventory of how he, Friday and a Spanish prisoner freed from certain death at the hands of cannibals account for those cannibals:

“The account of the whole is as follows: Three killed at our first shot from the tree; two killed at the next shot; two killed by Friday in the boat; two killed by Friday of those at first wounded; one killed by Friday in the wood; three killed by the Spaniard; four killed, being found dropped here and there, of the wounds, or killed by Friday in his chase of them; four escaped in the boat, whereof one wounded, if not dead - twenty-one in all.”

Crusoe undergoes a religious transformation while on the island. The island therefore becomes a place of spiritual salvation for him: “I was going to give Thanks to God for bringing me to this place”. 

Crusoe’s religious beliefs are as protestant as his work ethic. He is distrustful of ‘papists’ indeed, at one point he says:

“I had rather be delivered up to the Savages and be devour’d alive than fall into the merciless Claws of the Priests”

Despite this prejudice, Crusoe, in an echo of Thomas More’s Utopia professes that freedom of worship is important on his island:

“It was remarkable, too, I had but three subjects, and they were of three different religions - my man Friday was a Protestant, his father was a Pagan and a cannibal, and the Spaniard was a Papist. However, I allowed liberty of conscience throughout my dominions”

This island is not a wilderness . It is private property. Everything on this island is to be counted, fenced off, marked as the possession of its lord and master. This is an island of hard work. It is an island of protestant worship. It is an island with a clearly defined class structure. It is an island whose nearest neighbours are cannibalistic, heathen savages.

Sounds an awful lot like England, doesn’t it?

High Noon – the Death of the Cowboy Lawman

High Noon - Edited by Elmo Williams & Harry Gerstad, Music by Dimitri Tiomkin, Directed by Fred Zinneman - 1952

High Noon is a masterpiece of montage and a celebration of simplicity in storytelling. It describes a time when the lone defender of the law was becoming an historical aberration. It is a lament for the death of courage and principles. It is an indictment of the spread of a culture of fear and self-interest.  

It tells the story of Marshal Will Kane, played by Gary Cooper, who, on the day of his wedding and retirement is faced with the imminent return to his town of a criminal, Frank Miller, who he’d helped to put in prison. Kane makes a stand. He puts off his departure and prepares to stand up to the returning Miller and his three henchmen.

One by one his erstwhile allies desert him until he is alone in the street, facing down the villains. The final, climactic scene is a masterpiece of narrative tension which is described through perfectly realised montage and photography and accentuated by the tense soundtrack.

Every shot of this film seems perfectly edited, expertly worked into a unified whole of form and content. The story and the acting, the music and the photography interrelate with sympathy, symmetry and at times, irony.

From the beginning High Noon is a primer in the basics of the grammar of film making: The opening scene has no dialogue. The story is introduced through music and montage. Close ups, landscape shots, medium shots are beautifully and elegantly edited into the narrative thread.

Time, or rather, time running out is a key theme of this film. Twelve noon, high noon is when the train bringing Miller back to town arrives at the station. The photography reinforces this theme and creates a sense of claustrophobia and tension that builds as the film approaches the climax:

The repeated shots of the clock in the Marshal’s office; the Marshal himself walks past a store advertising ‘Watches Repaired’ on a number of occasions; the long shots of the train line disappearing to the horizon. The actors’ faces in close up are (with the exception of Grace Kelly) sweaty and tense. The soundtrack adds to this sense of heightening fear.  

Towards the end, after the Marshal has been abandoned by every man and woman in the town, he is shown in the deserted street waiting for the showdown. A fantastic pull back and crane shot captures Cooper’s isolation (You can see a still from this shot at the top of this post). He is truly alone; his time, his options and, indeed his life has run out.

Of course, Cooper’s life is not running out. He kills all four villains – I love Lee Van Cleef’s character; he does not say a single word throughout the film but he is so sinister – he prevails against all the odds. The Marshal flings his badge into the dirt, takes his wife and leaves the cowardly, craven townspeople  to fend for themselves.

Cooper’s departure indicts the townspeople. He had, in the past saved their town. One character tells him:

“When you cleaned this town up you made it fit for women and kids to live in”

But they deserted them in his hour of need. A town full of Judases. How did this happen?  The film is set sometime late in the nineteenth century. Historically speaking, it had to happen.

A debate in the church midway through the film amongst the townspeople reveals this historical context.  The people are debating what to do rather than immediately taking arms to defend themselves. These are people of reflection  and thought more than they are of action – this is late in the long day of the settlement of the American West – the Indians have been tamed and the newly settled whites are looking to put down roots – quiet and undisturbed. I suppose this is a film about the birth of suburbia.

“People up north are thinking about this town , thinking might hard thinking about sending money down here to put up stores and to build factories…but if they’re going to read about shooting and killing in the streets,  what are they going to think then?”

Economic security, self-interest, at any cost. There is no place for a lone upholder of the right and the good. The day of the cowboy/sheriff had passed.  Cooper’s character did not die but he might as well have.

In Celebration of the Oldest Profession.

No, not prostitution;  parenting! And let’s be historically honest, here, what I want to celebrate is motherhood.

Not only is motherhood the oldest profession.  It is one of the least rewarded and least visible. It is often a journey for which there are no maps, no reliable vessels and rapidly diminishing supplies.

The seafaring metaphor is apposite: I want to look at motherhood in Homer’s Odyssey and also in one of its more recent great, great, great, grandchildren, the Coen Brothers’ film Brother Where Art Thou?

The Odyssey is the great epic of nostalgia. The hero, Odysseus, takes a twenty-year detour on his way home from the Trojan War (modern day Turkey) to his island home of Ithaca (off the western coast of Greece). At home is his wife, Penelope. [Spoiler alert!] After many fantastic adventures, he eventually reaches home.

Brother Where Art Thou? Casts George Clooney in the role of Odysseus – his name is Ulysees Everett McGill. Like, Odysseus, Everett is trying to get back to his wife. Like Odysseus, Everett undergoes trials and tribulations, adventures and excitements, but the much longed for reunification eventually happens [sorry, spoiler alert!].

At the level of plot both of these texts follow the same trajectory. The pull of home is far greater in the Coen brothers’ movie, though.

Why is this? In simple terms, George Clooney loves and respects his wife and the mother of his 6 children. Odysseus does not live in a world where you love and respect your wife;  Penelope is just another piece of property – and an untrustworthy one at that – she is competing for attention alongside so many other things. These other things – the lust for adventure, the good in itself that is storytelling, the danger, the death, the killing and the wondrous challenges of navigating through a world controlled on all sides by the supernatural – are what make The Odyssey so very compelling and beguiling a story. And while these ingredients are mixed into Brother Where Art Thou?  too, the ostensible reason for the journey – reuniting with his wife and the mother of his children -  is actually the real reason, the real motivating factor for the Coen brothers’ Odysseus.

Again and again, Odysseus describes himself and is described as a victim:

“But not even so could he bring his troubles to an end” (Bk 17 575)

“Here Odysseus sat, the man of many trials” (BK 19 112)

“I’m a man who’s had his share of sorrows” (Bk 19 130)

The Coen brothers take up this theme with Ulysses Everett McGill performing the song A Man of Constant Sorrows.

There is a difference of tone that sets the two versions of Odysseus poles apart ,though. While For Odysseus, this claim is really nothing more than a narrative flourish, a storyteller’s trick to win the sympathetic ear of his audiences, the hero of Brother Where Art Thou? is genuinely sorrowful that he can't be with his wife.

Clooney’s character, just like Odysseus has a great way with words; however there is a difference of tone here, too.

Pallas Athena scolds her favourite mortal for spinning a web of fiction upon his initial return to Ithaca:

“not even here, on native soil would you give up those wily tales that warm the cockles of your heart”

Ulysses Everett McGill describes himself as follows to the modern day Polyphemus, played by John Goodman:

“I detect, like me, you’re endowed with the gift of the gab”

Homer’s hero’s raisons d’etre are killing, cunning and living to tell the tale. He’s going back to his wife but he has so many more interesting things to do it takes him twenty years to avoid the anti-climax.

The Coen brothers' hero is an adventurer, he is a storyteller but he is these things second – he loves his wife first.

Penelope is mother to Telemachus. Telemachus, by any standards a cheeky, disrespectful brat in how he talks to his mother:  (Bk 11 518)

So, mother, go back to your quarters. Tend to your own tasks, the distaff and the loom, and keep the women working hard as well. As for giving orders, men will see to that, but most of all I hold the reins of power in this house….Astonished she took to heart the clear good sense in what her son had said” (BK 1 410)

Penelope’s role is to keep her mouth shut, let the men make the decsions, but above all she must not exercise any free will over her sexuality.

The thing is that women are not trusted in Homer’s Odyssey: 

The ghost of Agamemnon tells Odysseus  “the time for trusting women’s gone forever” (Bk 11 518) and the women in the story – human and supernatural alike confirm this: Circe, Calypso, Helen, Clytemnestra, the Sirens all prove to be unpredictable and deadly.

The women in Brother Where Art Thou? are different. The 'Sirens' are not out to enchant and destroy. Enchant, yes, but destroy - no. Clooney's character is not afraid. Unlike the Homeric prototype who had himself tied to the mast of his ship lest these fatal temptresses lure him to his doom, this Odysseus is respectful and stammering- most un-Geroge Clooney-like!

The Penelope of this film is a strong willed and determined mother. She has six daughters. And she has taught them well. When they see their father, Everett, they tell him “You ain’t bona fide”.

Unlike Odysseus, Everett is not wearing the trousers in this family. This Odysseus cannot dismiss his wife, indeed, he does not want to. Her job – mother to her children – is more important than his adventures, his tale telling, his plan. He has to prove himself to his wife.

George Clooney, then is a post-feminist Odysseus because in this film the mother and the wife, her struggles and her concerns are celebrated, trusted, revered.

This is how Odysseus would have acted had he been married to Pallas Athena!

A Typology of Islands - Part One

[The Island of the Dead - Arnold Bocklin ]

Why are we fascinated by islands? An island is a single thing. It has a prelapsarian simplicity that tells us that meanings are clear, that identities are fixed, that the way ahead is mapped out for us; that we are safe.

If there are apriori faculties in our minds that recognise truth, beauty, logical identity, or, why not? God , than I imagine that an island is a mirror in which we can see these reflected. The arithmetic and geometry of an island switches us on at a very deep level – its number (one) and its shape confirm that we are in the world, that we are not alone in the world and that we belong there.

To look at it from a post-lapsarian point of view, islands encourage flights of romantic fancy such as that in the last two paragraphs. They are symptomatic of loss. If an island is a mirror it reflects as much horror as it does joy.

One way or another, islands are rarely just islands. I am talking here about islands as they are put to work in literature, art, music and film. They are magical, wild, tormenting, consoling, revitalising, terrifying places. They are places where normal rules – legal, moral, physical, existential and so on – do not apply.  They are simulacra of the ‘normal’ world (in both derivative and autonomous senses) that, even if they insult and terrorise us, they do so by seduction. This seduction is rooted in the indiscriminate and protean human sympathy for islands that I mentioned at the beginning.

The Island as a Political Restoration The Tempest,  William Shakespeare (1611)

The Tempest is Shalespeare’s last written play. The Duke of Milan, Prospero, has been usurped of his title and power by his brother, Antonio and has come to an island in exile with his daughter, Miranda. Prospero  may have been overthrown in the real world, but on this island, normal rules do not apply. Where previously he’d been vulnerable because of his interest in art and philosophy and consequent neglect of the darker political arts, here he is absolute ruler.

He rules through magic and he has enslaved the native sprites and spirits – Caliban, the half-human son of a witch is in his thrall as is Ariel the wood sprite. Ariel in particular, does Prospero’s bidding in manipulating the shipwrecked sailors to bend to his master's design and will.

The shipwrecked sailors include the King of Naples and his son as well as Prospero’s own brother, Antonio.

As Caliban points out to some of the vistors (with whom he wants to join forces to liberate himself from Prospero’s rule), this is an enchanted island: “The isle is full of noises/Sounds and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not”

The pleasantness of the island is obvious to Ferdinand, the son of the King of Naples: “Let me live here ever! So rare a wondered father and a wise makes place paradise” He falls in love (with more than a little help from Prospero’s magic) with Prospero’s daughter, Miranda. However, this island is not a place where one can stay. Proepero’s intentions are entirely worldly, His goal in marrying his daughter and the heir to the kingdom of Naples is to re-enter political life in his native Italy.

Accordingly, his strictures for his daughter’s marriage to Ferdinard are straight out of St Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians in their prohibition of fornication and veneration of marriage: this is a very, very conservative and serious plan, despite the magic, sprites and trickery:

If thou dost break her virgin knot before

All sanctimonious ceremonies may

With full and holy rite be ministered,

No sweet aspersion shall the heavens let fall

To make this contract grow, but barren hate,

Sour-eyed disdain, and discord shall bestrew

The union of your bed with weeds so loathly

That you shall hate it both.

Prospero knows that he cannot stay here. The respected counsellor, Gonzalo sees this too: “All torment, trouble, wonder and amazement/Inhabits here. Some heavenly power guide us out of this fearful country”

So, once Prospero has used magic to restore his earthy power renounces that magic. He has chastened the erstwhile usurper and will return to his own country where normal rules – political, sexual, succession, physical – will apply again.

By the end of the play the island has served its function: It has restored the natural order.

The Island as the Forge of Heroism The Odyssey Homer (8th Century BC)

The world of Homer is not that of Shakespeare. Magic permeates the Odyssey. There is no return to a ‘normal world’ because home is just as fantastic as what lies over the horizon. It is understood that the gods can intervene in the lives of human beings anywhere, anytime.

The islands that Odysseus encounters are fantastic, incredible places – not unlike Prospero’s island – but no-one bats an eyelid at the basic realities that are confronted. The islands in The Odyssey do not restore the natural order of a putative home place. This is because, despite all of Odysseus’ and Telemachus’ grieving over the loss of home nostalgia is not as powerful as excitement!

Odysseus wants to go home. But the thing is, he wants not to go home much more. The forging of hero status through adventure is the point of the journey – not the ostensible return to Ithaca.

The Odyssey starts off with Ulysses on an island, imprisoned by Calypso and kept from home by Poseidon. This island – Ogygia/Atalntis – can’t be all that bad. Odysseus stays there for seven years. For a man of his immense prowess this is far too long an exile to be endured without some degree of consent on his part.

You might think that in a story about the loss of a beloved home place and wife every island which is visited will be more or less a prison or scourge of some kind. Not so: these islands –  each is memorable in its own way – are pretexts for adventure.

The Odyssey is a story about a man who is too busy, too heroic to be homesick. These islands are purely excuses for heroic adventure.

For example, the islands of the Lotus Eaters and the Cyclops (Book 9) have dangers of their own kinds – the former robs Odysseus’ men of their will to turn for home by drugging them; the latter is a bounteous place (“His cheese-racks were loaded with cheeses, and he had more lambs and kids than his pens could hold”) that is guarded by Polyphemus, the Cyclops. This Cyclops is a true monster.  He has no fear of the Gods and manages to devour six of Odysseus’ men before the hero outwits him.

The part when Polyphemus, drunk on wine given to him by Odysseus, vomits out huge lumps of partially digested human flesh is memorable. The island serves its typical Odyssean function:  a wonderful story has been told that has, because of its island setting, a uniqueness, a ‘galaopogean’ identity that burns it into the memory of anyone who hears it.

The islands of The Odyssey, are, in contrast with that of The Tempest islands of unrestrained fun and joy.

I will return to The Odyssey in later posts about islands!

An Island of Torture and the Ultimate Cinematic Taboo Shutter Island Director Michael Scorsese  (2010)

The island in this film is not one of joy.  Neither is does it serve a political/remedial function in addressing deficits in the rules of the normal world. This island, this film is a prison. The walls of this prison are made from the terrible pain of insanity and the nightmare crimes of infanticide and the Nazi death Camps.

The beginning of this film uses music and photography to terrify the audience. The effect is to mark the introduction to the audience of the island itself as a damned location. The moment the ferry heaves out of the fog under an angry sky on the way to the island we know we’re being transported to somewhere other.  The portentous foghorns and Trombone set the scene before we ever get there. When it is finally presented it is an ominous sight:

A single, throbbing note is sounded out by the fog horn; this motif gains volume and intensity as the ferry pulls into the wharf:  The fog horn is amplified by a trombone, French Horn, Trumpet and recorded tapes– the music is “Fog Tropes” by the American composer, Ingram Marshall:

The sense of foreboding created is unsubtle but stylistically gothic, almost the stuff of horror movies. One thing is clear – this island is a very sinister place. Scorsese manages to create the cinematic version of “Lasciate Ogni Spreanza voi che entrate” or, more appropriately “Arbeit Macht Frei”.

The scene set, this island of despair delineated, the story begins: Two federal Marshalls have come to the Top Security Psychiatric Institution for severely damaged and highly dangerous inmates on the island to investigate the disappearance of a patient.

The men investigate. They do not make much headway, however. Soon the weather turns against them. Everything seems to conspire to imprison the men on the island. There is a terrible storm - a kind of pathetic fallacy on steroids – in which the men are nearly killed. This island seems to have a sinister intelligence that  reminds me of the (far inferior) TV series, Lost.

Gradually, Leonardo Di Caprio’s character is revealed not to be a Federal Marshal but a tortured inmate of the institution. The ‘investigation’ is a wild fantasy invented by his sick brain.

This truth is revealed gradually:

One inmate writes the word “Run” on a piece of paper, another inmate tells him: “You’re not investigating anything. You’re a fucking rat in a maze”

As the film progresses the visions of hell become more and more graphic. The symmetries and coincidences become more fantastic – the island in this film is a refutation of Donne’s assertion that ‘no man is an island’. It turns out Di Caprio's been on the island for 2 years.

The true island in this movie is DiCaprio’s tortured, lost mind. The climactic scene in which he remembers  pulling the dead bodies of his children from the lake where his wife had drowned them gives the audience an appalling vision of the horror he undergoes.

There is probably no greater cinematic taboo than representing the dead bodies of children. That graphic scene is not gratuitous, however. It is entirely legitimate in the context of this depiction of profound, wretched mental suffering. The island – and particularly how it is shown to be a place without hope in the opening scene or how it is shown to be malicious and intelligent in the storm scene – is an essential tool for breaking this taboo.

Scorsese needs an island to delineate the horror, to fence it off, to hold it up. Putting it on the mainland would have required that the normal rules of film making should apply.  

This is not an island that restores the mainland. This is not a repository of healing nostalgia. It is not an island of adventure. It is a nightmare.

An Island of Celtic Barbarians The Wicker Man  Directed by Robin Hardy (1973)

Normal rules do not apply on the island, "Summerisle" in The Wicker Man. It is a pagan insult to the Christian mainland. Its gods are those of the sun and of the crops.  Myth replaces science, kinship replaces bureaucracy, paganism replaces Christianity, promiscuity replaces chastity, feeling replaces reason and in the iconic final scene where the protagonist is burned to death in a wicker man as a sacrifice to the gods of the harvest, the judicial process is replaced by mob execution.

The story: Police Sergeant Howie is an extremely conservative Christian who’s called to the island to investigate the disappearance of a 12 year old girl. His journey to the island sets the scene. He flies there and from the first moment it’s clear that he’s not welcome. His police authority is not respected here.

Gradually he discovers that this is a very odd place:

Walking at night he happens upon couples having sex in a field. This is a profound insult to his Christian values. It gets worse. He goes to a school where he is again appalled to witness a bizarre question and answer session in which the children tell the teacher that the maypole is a ‘phallic symbol...which is venerated in religions such as ours”

The basic point, which is underlined by the dreadful, hippyesque, sub-folk scatological drivel of the film’s soundtrack, is that sex and procreation, in the human, animal and plant kingdoms alike, is the most cherished activity of all – it is sacred.

In passing, it is easy to see that this island is a reflection of the sexual revolution that had been underway for a few years (well, in certain parts of the western world amongst a certain cohort of people at least) and so it’s not really an island where normal rules do not apply!

However, the investigation finds more than the islanders’ ‘alternative’ sexuality. In time Howie begins to suspect that the girl has already or is about to be sacrificed to the ancient gods in order to restore the harvest.

Then, as in Shutter Island the protagonist of Wicker Man is barred from leaving the island – his plane won’t start. It turns out that he’s being kept to be sacrificed to the gods! Sergeant Howie has been lured to the island for this very purpose. The harvest of fruits has failed this year and sacrifice is the only solution.

Howie is burned to death at the end. The island does not attempt to rehabilitate or make right the normal world. Its values are, notwithstanding the hippyesque sexuality, antithetical to those of the state, culture and society of mainland Britain. This island is an outright rejection of the modern world.  

Part of me thinks that this island is a projection of Britain’s fear of and desire for the world of its ‘Celtic’ neighbours and its own Celtic past. Viewed in this way, this island plays around with ideas that are not permitted in the Britain of 1973. The effect is to represent the peripheral as barbaric, highly dangerous, and atavistic

These adjectives – barabaric, dangerous, atavistic - would have been used quite often in 1973 in Britain to describe the ‘wild wests’ of Ireland and Scotland

The Island as Commonwealth Utopia, Thomas More (1516)

Utopia is one of the most famous islands in the history of literature. This island is very much a place where normal rules do not apply

Utopia is claimed by More’s interlocutor, Raphael, to be a true commonwealth: there is no private property, no money, no religious intolerance, no poverty. 

Farming is undertaken by all and production surpluses are shared.

Marriage is protected. Pre-marital sex, adultery and divorce are all frowned upon. Potential husbands and wives are allowed to inspect one another naked prior to marriage as physical deformities are recognised as a serious impediment to marital happiness!

Religious intolerance is a taboo, however, the faithless are not to be trusted : “Who can doubt that  a man who has nothing to fear but the law, and no hope of life beyond the grave, will do anything he can to evade his country’s laws by craft or to break them by violence in order to gratify his own personal greed?”

More’s traveller tells him how Christianity is making headway on the island of Utopia – a very different scenario to the one envisioned on Summerisle!

The founder of Utopia (the king Utopus) was a visionary invader with a keen understanding of the importance of the potency of topography of the island. Indeed, when he conquered the country it was not at that stage an island at all. He “promptly cut a channel fifteen miles wide where their land joined the continent, and thus caused the sea to flow around the country”. In doing this he began the work of building a society that Raphael deems to be ideal:  “Utopus…brought its rude, uncouth inhabitants to such a high level of culture and humanity that they now excel in that regard almost every other people”.

If Utopia is a fantasy of benevolent empire – building at the beginning of the age of exploration, The Wicker Man is an atavistic horror story for the post-industrial, post-colonial age. Both islands reject the evils of their respective epochs although More’s island does not test the limits of its alternative to its epoch as radically as does The Wicker Man.

So at this point:

The island of Utopia teaches; that of The Wicker Man terrifies.

The island of The Tempest restores, that of Shutter Island tells us there is no hope of restoration.

The islands of The Odyssey fill us with joy!

Love and Madness

Ingmar Bergman, Through a Glass Darkly, St Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians, Sarabande to Suite No 2 for Cello in D Minor by J S  Bach

Love and Madness

For days, I was puzzled by the conclusion to Through a Glass, Darkly. It seemed like a scene cut from a different film altogether. What was a scene about love doing in a film about madness?

At the end of the movie, 17-year old Minus is in utter despair. He has been rejected by his father (David), has had an (off screen) sexual encounter with his sister (Karin) who, soon after, descends into abject madness and is taken away to a mental home. He turns to his father and says: “I can’t live in this world.” His father responds: “Yes you can but you must have something to hold on to”. The father, a popular but self-loathing and therefore failed writer, outlines proof for the existence of God in the world.

This proof is the existence of love between people – “the highest and the lowest, the most absurd and the most sublime – all kinds of love…Suddenly the emptiness turns into abundance – and hopelessness into life. It’s like a reprieve, Minus……from a sentence of death”

Minus’ despair seems to be lifted – he goes out for a run while his father prepares dinner.  This is a puzzling conclusion because the film up to that point had been a descent into madness, self-loathing and human failure.

The love between Karin and her husband (Martin) was shown to be one-sided and utterly fatuous.

The love between David and his two children was inadequate;  he is represented as a dissatisfied and absent father whose children crave affection he is always too busy to give them.

The love between Karin and Minus seems excessively incestuous.

So, until the final scene of the movie the most powerful force in the characters’ lives is madness; not love. 

This is why I’m puzzled: a theological/enthusiastic conclusion to a pathological/nihilistic film is a very curious construction indeed.

Of course, Bergman took his title from Chapter 13 verse 12 of St Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians:

“For now we see as through a glass, darkly; but then face to face. Now I know in part; but then shall I know even as I also am known”

In this letter St Paul writes about the importance of charity/love. Even if I have all the advantages and gifts under the sun - eloquence, faith, knowledge, generosity, prophecy -  without charity “I am nothing” – love is the highest good.

The rest of the letter is much more prescriptive about love than Bergman’s David.

While David says that “all kids of love” are evidence of the existence of God, St Paul’s letter seeks to limit love to that existing between a married man and woman: He prohibits ‘fornication’ and praises marriage “It is better to marry than to burn”(7.9), he outlines the spiritual duties of virgins and the carnal ones of married women, declares the ownership of the husband’s body by the wife and vice versa, and marks the delineation of the sex-divinity hierarchy (woman ruled by man ruled by God) and sets down a range of other rules including the declaration that it is a ‘shame’ for a man to have long hair but that it’s fitting for a woman to have it.

If anything St Paul’s first letter makes the love-less-ness of the characters’ relationships in Through a Glass, Darkly even more obvious – they are woefully inadequate exponents of St Paul’s practices.

Perhaps that’s the point: Bergman’s film is a world abandoned by God, moreover it is a world where God has no relevance until it is far too late; indeed in this world even if the characters had turned to one another and expressed and practised their love for one another earlier on it would still have made no difference to Karin’s insanity, the failure of their marriage, David’s lost opportunities with his children and so on.

If there is God or Love in this film it is hidden away. Thus the title of the film: the characters see “as through a glass ,darkly”. Is this likely to change? Not on the evidence of the final scene. The calm, sunset-saturated seascape of the last scene is also, a very un-Bergman – like image. The sea is heavily represented in this film – just like in many other films by this director. The sea is a symbol of the powerful forces – death, insanity, the unconscious – that warp, distort, haunt and ruin the surface planes (his characters’ hopes, best selves, happiness) of his movies. 

In this film, particularly, the characters’ vulnerability to the powerful destructive forces of their own nature is seen not through a glass, darkly, but very clearly. Suitably, the sea is, if not outright stormy, portentous throughout the film; typical Bergman.

But as, I said, the sea in the closing scene of Through a Glass, Darkly is not typical Bergman. It is a calm sea. It and its sunset are framed by the crosses of the sash window against which stand the father and son in abjection. This scene is to my mind, deathly, west-facing, soporific and achingly sad -  a visual representation of every lost opportunity, every failure, every inadequacy illuminated in the fading, disappearing light of God.

Although this sea-/sky-scape is calm, flat and golden-hued (the film is, of course, in black and white; I'm using my imagination) it is for all that, more sinister than any storm.

It is death itself! Devouring, jealous, laughing.

A demented Swedish Golgotha.

The film begins with the Sarabande to Suite No 2 for Cello in D Minor by Bach. In its tone and tempo it suggests grief and claustrophobia. In its pitch it suggests that hidden, dark, unconscious and pathological forces are in command.

For me, Bach's piece is of the same flesh as this movie. In contrast, St Paul's Letter to the Corinthians is a much more unnatural grafting.

The effect of this grafting on Corinthians 1 is revealing. This letter is often filleted and served up as a series of platitudes at wedding ceremonies. Bergman emphasises the harrowing failure of love, his characters are stillborn, never rising out of the  benighted state of seeing "as through a glass, darkly". Actually seeing St Paul's letter through the glass, darkly of Through a Glass, Darkly emphasises the dark side of love.

What is left when, if like Bergman's characters, we recognise that we will rarely, if ever live up to the demands of Love as elevated by St Paul?

This is what we are left with:  Love is not a pretty thing. It is difficult, painful, haunting, belated, partial and obscure.

Love is madness.

So, this is an honest film. If I ever get married again I'll insist on having it played in the church.

Ironically Bergman dedicated this movie to his fourth wife – it is only surprising to me that their marriage actually lasted another 5 years after the release of this film!