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!