Bergman's "The Virgin Spring"

Ingmar Bergman’s The Virgin Spring (1960) is a graphic telling of a 14th-century Swedish ballad. As do many Bergman films, this one revolves around the issue of faith. This film has long periods of silence and long-held shots. To say that the acting is powerful would be an understatement. Töre is played by Max von Sydow, who often appears to stand-in for Bergman himself.

(Warning: this post gives every spoiler away. Do not read it if you want to be 'surprised' by the plot of the movie. I do not find the story as interesting as Bergman's telling of it, so I give away the whole story here.)

The story is set in medieval Sweden. We are first introduced to Ingeri, a dark-haired, grimy, heavily pregnant young woman. Coming forward from deep in the shadows, she reaches toward the sunlight coming through a shaft in the roof and intones, “Come, Odin! Come!” It is clear that Ingeri is consumed by hatred and a desire for revenge, although we do not yet know why. We next meet landowners Töre and Märeta praying their morning prayers before a crucifix. There is a little talk about the laziness of their innocent teenage daughter, Karin, and it is implied that they have had, and lost, other children, leaving blond overindulged Karin as the light of their lives. (In Sven Nyqvist’s masterful cinematography, she does indeed seem to be a point of illumination.) She is sent to bring candles for the Virgin to the local Church, with foster sister Ingeri as a companion. Karin chides her mother Märeta for her over-concern, and gets her way by wearing some of her best finery. Karin clearly has her father Töre wrapped around her finger, managing to elicit smiles from the usually stern and duty bound man.

Karin and Ingeri set off, and a few encounters and a brief conversation finally reveal the source of Ingeri’s anger: Karin is a beloved blond maiden who talked and danced the previous night with the man who impregnated (and abandoned) Ingeri. When Ingeri taunts Karin, “You won’t be able to say no when a man wants you…What would you do if a man decided to take you in the fields?” Karin lifts her chin high and says, “That will not happen. I would rather be killed.” Spying a cawing raven, looking over the darkness of the approaching forest, and noticing the pagan talismans of the man who helps Karin across the river, Ingeri does not continue on their journey, eventually running away into the forest separately.

Now alone, Karin meets two herdsmen and a young boy. As she is late to the Church and has already missed matins, she offers to share her food with them, and the four enjoy a repast in a clearing. When she recognizes their sheep as stolen, Karin begins to flee, only to be captured and brutally raped by both men as both the boy and Ingeri - from a distance with rock in hand - watch. (Warning: this is one of the most graphic portrayals of rape in film – the story inspired Wes Craven’s horror movie The Last House on the Left.) Karin gets up, stumbling, only to be hit on the head by a staff and killed by one of the men. Quickly they undress her, take her clothes, rummage through the rest of her stuff, throwing the candles for the Virgin upon the ground, and run off, telling the young boy to stay there. Looking at her lifeless, mostly naked body, he throws some dirt on her as Ingeri continues to watch.

Eventually, the three make their way to a house: Töre stands in the door like a totem, looking for his daughter as the sun is falling. Not knowing who they are, he feeds his guests, offers them a place to spend the night, and suggests that he may have work for them on his farm. Later that night, Märeta is awoken by the boy’s screams and goes to check on them. One of the men offers her Karin’s bloodstained finery – he hopes to sell it to her. She presents it to her husband. He walks outside where he meets Ingeri, who tells him all about his guests’ actions, and confesses that, motivated by jealousy, she did nothing while Karin was raped and killed. He tells her to prepare a hot bath, and in one of the most striking visual scenes of the movie, wrestles against a lone, young birch tree on a hill, trying to bring it down. He beats himself with its branches, dons a leather cloak and pants, and with the butcher’s knife, stabs the two men to death. His wife tries to protect the boy, but he picks the boy up and flings him against the wall, killing him too.

Led by Ingeri, Töre and Märeta and their farmworkers find Karin’s body. Töre turns away, falls to his knees, opens his hands and says, “You saw it. God, You saw it. The innocent child’s death and my revenge. You allowed it. I don’t understand you. I don’t understand you. Yet now I beg your forgiveness. I know no other way to be reconciled with my own hands. I know no other way to live.” His head and hands fall, and recognizing his own need for repentance for his blood-stained acts, he says, “I will build a Church for You here.” He and his wife go to move their daughter’s body, and from where her head was suddenly flows a spring of water. Ingeri gathers this water in her hands and pours it over her face, a symbolic baptism.

Early in the film, one of the servants chides baby chicks for nearly being trampled underfoot, telling them, “God could trample them to death. So you poor thing, live your wretched life the way God allows all of us to live.” Indeed, all life belonging to God is one of the central tenets of this film. How could God allow a middle-aged couple to be robbed of their only remaining biological child? How could God allow this brutality to be visited upon a woman, much less a maiden bringing candles for His own Mother? How can these human beings – the herdsmen and Töre – engage in such evil acts, and how could others – the boy and Ingeri – just crouch and watch? How does one keep faith in the face of such acts? Bergman’s answer, through Töre, is simple yet complex: “I know no other way to live.” The cynic can say, "well, he just needs to find atheism" (and Bergman did find agnosticism). But the son of a Lutheran pastor would have well known Psalm 139:

O LORD, you have searched me
and you know me.

You know when I sit and when I rise;
you perceive my thoughts from afar.

You discern my going out and my lying down;
you are familiar with all my ways.

Before a word is on my tongue
you know it completely, O LORD.

You hem me in—behind and before;
you have laid your hand upon me.

Such knowledge is too wonderful for me,
too lofty for me to attain.

Where can I go from your Spirit?
Where can I flee from your presence?

All I ever wanted to know about Hell, I learned from Vincent Price

“You are about to enter Hell, Bartolome - Hell!...The nether world, the infernal region, the abode of the damned...The place of torment. Pandemonium, Abbadon, Tophet, Gehenna, Narraka...the Pit!...And the Pendulum. The razor-edge of destiny.”

My mother, no fan of modern horror movies, has always been a Vincent Price horror movie fan. Thus, Roger Corman’s 1961 film "The Pit and the Pendulum" was taped from late night Houston t.v. and watched and re-watched in my house whenever we wanted to see a “scary movie.” (Even scarier were the commercials for the Time Life series of books on the paranormal, with images of specters floating down hallways and demons in the woods, all of which could have been mine to learn about if I would have called and ordered the first in the series.)

“The Pit and the Pendulum” is a child’s nightmare of a movie, filled with the forbidden and the horrifying – and without supernatural elements. Incest, torture, insanity, being buried alive, a huge castle with hidden passageways, and obviously, a pit and a pendulum. The plot, which bears little resemblance to Poe’s original story, is about a young man, Bartolome, who comes to the Medina castle to find out how his sister Elizabeth, wife of Nicholas Medina, died. Nicholas is played by the incomparable Vincent Price, complete with grief-stricken face, bulging eyeballs, looks of despair, and even a fainting spell. We eventually learn that Nicholas’ father was the local inquisitor who conducted his torture sessions in the basement and who tortured and killed his wife and brother on suspicion that they were having an affair, while his son watched. Prior to her death, Elizabeth (Barbara Steele) had become increasingly fascinated with these torture devices, and it was believed that the “ghosts” killed her. But Nicholas is haunted by his beloved Elizabeth, and begins to believe that she was buried alive. In one of the most indelible images in the movie, they open her casket to find a decaying face frozen in a scream.

Of course, there is the plot twist: there is no supernatural explanation for the death of Elizabeth, as she did not die in this gruesome manner. She was having an affair with the doctor, staged her own death and is now trying to drive her husband crazy so she can run off with the doctor free and clear. “Nicholas…Nicholas…” she keeps calling to him*, luring him down into the basement, where she hopes he will die of fright. Right when it seems that he has cracked up and died, he turns the tables on Elizabeth and the doctor and assumes the persona of his inquisitor father, torturing his wife and friend. Unluckily for him, Elizabeth’s brother is the one who gets tied to the pendulum torture device. Nicholas’ sister comes to Bartolome’s rescue, and Nicholas ends up dead at the bottom of the pit, an evil grin on his face. But if that isn’t enough, the final scene is of the basement torture chamber being locked up, while Elizabeth is frozen inside the iron maiden.

As already stated, there are no supernatural aspects in this movie. It is all the more terrifying because of that – it is about a descent into insanity and evil, based on the wickedness of others and their ability to deceive. It’s one of the scariest things in the world – that people are not as you thought them to be. (One of my childhood nightmares was that people would shape-shift in the dark, that they could become other people or creatures in a room with no light, and then attack me.)

But even that as not as frightening as how delighted Price – as Nicholas – becomes when he is freed into pure evil. It’s not just a twist on the old saying that bad ‘guys’ have more fun; it’s this passion to act in a newfound way, free of concern and responsibility. It’s appropriate that he cannot recognize anyone as they are. He is oblivious in his desire to complete all his wicked aims. Hell becomes the scariest place possible.


*The way Price calls after her, “Elizabeth? Elizabeth?” reminded my sister and me of the way Macho Man Randy Savage called after Miss Elizabeth, for ‘80s WWF fans.

Why so far from my call for help, from my cries of anguish?

Psalm 5: 2-3
Hear my words, O Lord;
listen to my sighing.
Hear my cry for help,
my King, my God!

We are in a Swedish manor at the turn of the 20th century. Clocks decorated with gilded cherubs are placed on tables and mantles in rooms decorated in white, black, and scarlet red. They mark the time of the life we have on earth, the time we have to endure suffering. We hear the first words: "It is early Monday morning, and I am in pain." They are spoken by Agnes (Harriet Andersson), one of three sisters. Her sisters have gathered in their family home to keep vigil, for Agnes is dying.

Roger Ebert has called Ingmar Bergman's Cries and Whispers (1973) a film whose subject is pain. The deep red has a meaning, for red is the color of the membrane of the soul: "red represents for me the interior of the soul. When I was a child, I imagined the soul to be a dragon, a shadow floating in the air like blue smoke - a huge winged creature, half bird, half fish. But inside the dragon, everything was red." What isn't red in this film is the white of purity and resurrection, or the black of death.

Psalm 13: 2
How long, Lord? Will You utterly forget me?
How long will You hide Your face from me?

"It is a monumental tissue of lies."

This family has been internally ripped apart by events that are never mentioned. Instead of love, they bear hate for each other. As a child, Agnes' own mother would never look at her without scolding her, and once when Agnes goes to comfort her mother, she recognizes suffering, ennui, and longing. Besides Agnes, only the maid Anna (Kari Sylwan) has the capacity for love. But Anna too has suffered lost; her daughter died, and an empty crib is placed next to the table where Anna each morning prays a simple prayer to God for her daughter. Anna is the suffering mother who loses one child and will lose another (Agnes) that she has nurtured.

Psalm 7: 15-17
Sinners conceive iniquity;
pregnant with mischief,
they give birth to failure.
They open a hole and dig it deep,
but fall into the pit they have dug.
Their mischief comes back upon themselves;
their violence falls on their own heads.

"It's so strange how we don't reach each other, we only make small talk."

Maria (Liv Ullman) is the sister who is the beautiful hypocrite. She wears the color red - not of life, but of seduction. When she attempts to seduce the doctor (Erland Josephson), he points out every line on her face. Her hypocrisy is in the corner of her eyes. Her lies rest in the curve of her mouth. Her thoughtlessness is in the frown of her forehead. Her sins have been carved into her face; her beauty is only an illusion. The cruelty that is visible in her features matches that of a woman who is horrified at the selfishness of her cuckolded husband when he attempts to kill himself. Falling to the floor, he asks for her help and she refuses. It is no surprise that she cannot sustain herself through the night's vigil for Agnes.

Karin to Maria: "Do you realize I hate you? And how foolish I find your insipid smiles and your idiotic flirtatiousness? I know of what you're made - your empty caresses and false laughter."

Psalm 25: 16-18
Look upon me, have pity on me,
for I am alone and afflicted.
Relieve the troubles of my heart;
bring me out of my distress.
Put an end to my affliction and suffering;
take away all my sins.

"I don't want you to be kind to me."

Karin (Ingrid Thulin) is the sister tied down in self-loathing, rendered mute by her pain. Married to an indifferent man, she is willing to stab and cut at her own body in order to feel. Persons who self-mutilate do so to give physical expression to emotional pain, to see a physical manifestation of their internal aching. But Karin doesn't cut her leg or arm, she wounds the parts of her body that in women is hidden - her life-giving parts. To mutilate herself in this way is to hate life and humanity, to refuse to take part in the human story through her own addition to it. She smears the blood from this deep cut across her mouth, the mouth that contains the breath of life, the betrayer's kiss, the sign of affection towards others. And then she smiles triumphantly at her husband.

When Maria and Karin are able to speak to each other for the first time, they touch and caress each other’s hands and faces. They are like two giddy schoolgirls, learning the art of affection and friendship for the first time. But in the end it is artifice and parody, for they are committed to their own individual loneliness.

Karin: "You touched me, don't you remember that?" Maria: "I don't recall each stupid act."

Psalm 32: 11-14
My life is worn out by sorrow,
my years by sighing.
My strength fails in affliction;
my bones are consumed.
To all my foes I am a thing of scorn,
to my neighbors, a dread sight,
a horror to my friends.
When they see me in the street,
they quickly shy away.
I am forgotten, out of mind like the dead;
I am like a shattered dish.
I hear the whispers of the crowd;
terrors are all around me.

"Can't anyone help me?"

Agnes is the sacrificial lamb. What internal rot is consuming her with pain? Her skin is pale, her eyes are sunken. She sweats and spreads her arms across the white sheets, Christ-like. Her sisters abandon her: they turn away from her cries and leave Anna to hold her in loving and motherly arms, like the Virgin holding Christ. Agnes screams and screams. She convulses and dies.

Bergman gets in his dig at organized religion through the lack of comfort the pastor provides. What formulaic prayers can explain the significance of the suffering Agnes has endured? "He found you worthy of bearing a long and tortuous agony. You submitted to it patiently...in the certain knowledge that your sins would be forgiven through the death on the Cross of your Lord, Jesus Christ. Plead with him that he may make sense and meaning of our lives." He turns to the sisters and confesses, "Agnes' faith was stronger than mine." For faith involves acceptance of suffering, enduring it without questions of how or why. Pain is in the order of things in this world, and we cannot use a false countenance to hide from it like Maria does, or use it as an excuse for self-pity and withholding of love towards others like Karin does. Instead, we must accept it as Anna does, a woman who can go from offering prayers to her beloved dead child to eating an apple.

Psalm 102: 4-8, 10
For my days vanish like smoke;
my bones burn away as in a furnace.
I am withered, dried up like grass,
too wasted to eat my food.
From my loud groaning
I become just skin and bones.
I am like a desert owl,
like an owl among the ruins.
I lie awake and moan,
like a lone sparrow on the roof.
I eat ashes like bread,
mingle my drink with tears.

In a strange stage between death and the beyond, in Anna's dream, Agnes cries tears again. She calls for her sisters: "Can't you hold my hands and warm me? It's so empty all around me. Stay with me." Karin refuses: "I won't accept involvement with your death. Perhaps if I cared, but I don't care." Maria allows the dead Agnes to embrace her, but then screams and shoves her away: "No, I am alive!" Both Karin and Maria tell Anna not to go near Agnes' corpse, but Anna embraces her on the bed.

Psalm 116: 7-9
Return, my soul, to your rest;
the Lord has been good to you.
For my soul has been freed from death,
my eyes from tears, my feet from stumbling.
I shall walk before the Lord
in the land of the living.

After Agnes' funeral, the sisters and their husbands prepare to leave the manor. The home will be sold, the items divided, and Anna is out of work. They do allow her to have some memento of Agnes' and Anna chooses Agnes' diary. Anna reads from it and we see the three sisters, dressed in white, walking among trees in autumn. Here, all Agnes' aches and pains are gone. She is talking and laughing with her sisters, the sisters who will abandon her at the hour of her death, for they have no love in their hearts to share with her, no interest in relieving her suffering. And yet she holds no ill will towards them, or towards a God who would have her endure such suffering.

Psalm 139: 5
Behind and before You encircle me
and rest Your hand upon me.

"I felt the presence of their bodies, the warmth of their hands. Come what may, this is happiness...here for a moment, I can experience perfection. And I feel profoundly grateful for my life, which gives me so much."

Ingmar Bergman (b. 1918) was the son of a Lutheran pastor. Following a strict (to say the least - as a child he was severely punished by his father for minor transgressions ) upbringing that no doubt shaped his attitude towards religion in his mature life, he began his career as a theatre and film director and did make several films with religious themes; The Seventh Seal (1957), The Virgin Spring (1960), Through a Glass Darkly (1961), and Winter Light (1963) are the most famous of his films with religious subjects. While filming Winter Light he claimed to have realized he had lost his faith in God at the age of 8, and after a series of nervous breakdowns, his next films beginning with Persona (1965), focused on issues of identity and self, alienation and betrayal, where individuals in intimate relationships go at each other with sharpened blades. As one film critic summarized this stage of his career, Bergman had figured out how to turn his own personal anguish into cinematic art. Although he was now an agnostic and once called Protestantism "a wretched kettle of fish," he nevertheless, in what Pauline Kael called "cinema of the inner life," addressed issues of the human condition that are relevant to religion. Painting is Gauguin's Christ in the Garden of Olives (1889)

Fairy Tales and a Film Favorite

“Love can make man a beast. Love can beautify ugliness.”

The genesis of many of our popular Western European fairy tales is in the Middle Ages (the first written versions can usually be found in the Renaissance). The motifs of a young woman on a journey, step-parents who are neglectful or lustful, in-laws who are spiteful and vengeful, and dreamy Prince Charmings partly developed out of a time when young children often experienced the death of a parent and the guardianship of a step parent or other family members and of arranged marriages, a time when young girls could be sent far away from their homes, placed in the world of their future groom, and could only hope that he would love them enough to walk through fire and fight dragons and be so entranced by his bride’s charms that he would not abandon her (for war or other conquests). Dreams of true love and partnership in a world of chance and fortune. On another level, fairy tales appeal to our desire for the fantastical and supernatural in our world. If one is not too jaded, if one has the simplicity of a child, "once upon a time" becomes possible in the present.

Folklorists can characterize all fairy tales into several basic types and themes that recur across locations and cultures. I will not get into fairy tales, categories, and archetypes here; all I’ll say is that I once read a book of folk stories from Central European gypsies and it was fascinating how frequently the devil appeared in these stories to steal children and young women. Hmm.

[First rant: A relative did not want his children exposed to fairy tales, because of the ‘absence’ of God in them (and the magic and witches). Of course, almost all the characters in a good fairy tale are forced to make moral choices between good and evil. Passivity, in a fairy tale, will get you stuck in slumber for a hundred years or trapped in a tower. “Proper” moral choices are awarded with supernatural favors (be it through fairies or magical animals). This did not mean that it occurs in a ‘God-less world.’ Now if one wants to argue about tales that take place in a God-less world, one can look at the Harry Potter series.]

Children like real (play) terror; they like to be scared while in safe confines. Give me the old Disney movies, when the Queen of Hearts (Alice in Wonderland, 1950) is so loony that there’s real bite in her “off with their heads!” – the incompetence of her silly card soldiers is the salvation of her prisoners - or the glimmeringly evil and vamping Wicked Queen in Snow White (1939). Maleficent (The Sleeping Beauty, 1959) generated nightmares for years – she just looked like pure evil even before turning into a fire-breathing dragon (insert my sister’s predictable comment: “It’s the ram’s horns! Gosh, you’re SO STUPID!”). She talked about the “powers of hell,” and to this day I can barely listen to Maleficent’s theme music even though in the original ballet it’s the music for the harmless pas de deux of Puss N’Boots and the White Cat and has no malevolent overtones.

Disney fairy tale films really lost their energy, however. In The Little Mermaid (1989), the story is re-imagined for our mermaid, Ariel, to survive and be reunited with the prince. Like Hans Christian Andersen, I much prefer – and did even then – our scantily clad swimmer with dreams of human love committing suicide in the end. A bit morbid perhaps, but it taught a vital 19^th century social lesson about the importance of class distinction. Besides, I’m unsure what kind of positive message can be gleaned from the story of a creature who sells her soul (oops, her voice) to an enemy who wants to enslave her people in exchange for physical transformation, and ends up getting both her voice back and the cute boy in the end. Girls should do ABSOLUTELY ANYTHING for love: don’t stop at physical mutilation and cooperation in the subjugation of others when a dreamy prince is the end goal. There’s a reason why the original fairy tale ends the way it did.

[Second rant: Even as a 10-year-old, I recognized that The Little Mermaid and other Disney fairy tale fare were overt attempts of indoctrination into white patriarchy and the notion of ‘love’ as female submission, and I wasn’t buying it. In the Hughes Brothers’ American Pimp (1999), while the pimps are talking about physically and emotionally abusing their prostitutes, the women are expressing hopes that the pimp will fall in love with them and be with them forever. This notion of female romantic love, torn asunder from the social constructs that once necessitated it, now work their seductive and oppressive powers on women in a society divorced from a male obligation to women that used to be compulsory. Men always want it both ways. Down with matrimony!]

In Peau d’Ane (Donkey Skin, 1970) directed by Jacques Demy, a king (Jean Marais) decides he must marry his own daughter (Catherine Deneuve), for he has promised his now-deceased wife (and mother of that daughter) that he will marry the most beautiful woman in the kingdom (shades of St. Dymphna). The Princess is quite willing to go along with this: “All little girls, asked who they want to marry when they grow up, say 'I want to marry daddy.' “ The Princess is put on the correct moral path by her fairy godmother, who tells her to delay this fate by requesting dresses the color of the weather. And the dresses that the costume designer creates are really the only magical part of this fairy tale adaptation. The music by Michel Legrand is horrible, the supposedly surrealist artistic schemes are awful. But I may be allergic to Demy’s films, as I nearly prayed for deafness when watching The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964). And BTW, Donkey Skin is a real fairy tale collected in Charles Perrault’s volume of fairy tales (1697). The donkey excretes gold and jewels for the kingdom before the Princess takes his hide (having requested it from her father) and then hides under it and flees the country, only to be found by a prince, and so on. I eagerly await Disney’s sanitized version of this one.

In Disney’s Beauty and the Beast (1991), the beast is as cuddly as a teddy bear, the kind of sentient animal you can take to bed without fear of ravishment, and little girls I babysat for did. Unfortunately, the drama of the fairy tale is thrown off by both the Beast’s cuddliness (see below) and the sub-story of Belle’s desire for female empowerment (grrrl power), when all she can possibly become is lady of the manor. She is supposed to civilize the beast within a man so she can then be a loving wife to him, not conquer the world by being literate and well-read. But she’s reading nothing but stories about sword fights and princes, so she’s not even the latter.

Beauty and the Beast (first written down in the 18^th century) is about woman’s attraction to male virility, Samson and Delilah redefined, from sexualized woman to male redemption through female beauty. The beast represents both what is untamed and what is highly potent. The story is the conquering of the adolescent girl’s fear of the wedding chamber – doing it at her father’s request and for the survival of the family - and her hopes to transform a prospective groom into faithful and loving partner. As with so many other fairy tales, it’s partly about sex. [Another example of the beauty and the beast tale on film is King Kong (1933); a work as different as Raging Bull (1980) also utilizes it.]

"There is no master here but you."

Jean Cocteau’s La Belle et la Bête (1946) is the best fairy tale on film I have seen. With Henri Alekan as cinematographer, Christian Bérard as production “illustrator,” and Georges Auric as composer, not including the luminaries hanging around the set, it’s a major collaboration among prominent French artists of the first half of the 20^th century. (There’s also an entire side-story of how difficult it was to make this film in post-War France.) Depending on one’s mood and experience, it’s a tale about personal transformation through beauty, the power of love and mercy, the thrall of sexual potency, the acceptance of death, or an S&M flick heavy on the subtlety. Is it Symbolist? Is it Freudian?

Cocteau’s La Belle et la Bête is filled with double meanings. Beauty (Josette Day) lives with her sisters (two harpies who make her do all the housework), a ne’er do well brother, and an aging father. Her brother’s friend, Avenant (Jean Marais, who also plays the Beast and Prince Ardent), is in love with her but she rejects him because she must care for her family. Her father gets lost in the forest and finds himself at the Beast’s castle. His fatal error is to pick one of the roses in the beast’s garden, and so the story continues….

The first half-hour of the film comes straight out of a Vermeer exhibition. It is only once Beauty decides to spare her father’s life by mounting Magnificent, a huge white horse, and saying the magic words, “Go where I want to go. Go, go, go!” that the magic takes over. The scenes of her arrival in the castle, her movement in her slow motion and her steady glide through a corridor, are pure fantasy. Her door, her mirror, and other inanimate objects talk to her, and her bed cover invites her to enter – every little girl’s dream room, and every adult’s nightmare of being constantly watched. Real arms hold the candelabra, real faces are along the mantel, watching. The forest outside encroaches into her room, untamed nature waiting for both her dominance and her surrender. When she must leave him to see her dying father, she cries tears that turn into diamonds on her cheek, and her grand jewels turn to rope in the hands of her greedy sisters. She has become part of a different world, one of transformation.

The Beast (Jean Marais) is a predecessor of the Wolfman and Chewbacca, awkwardly wearing clothes meant for an 18^th century lord. With fur smoking from the conquest of a kill, he asks Beauty not to look at him. She does so anyway, and her eyes have the same gleam as Deneuve’s housewife by night/masochistic prostitute by day character does in Buñuel’s Belle du Jour (1967) when looking into a keyhole, watching a fellow prostitute with her client, turning towards the camera to say “that’s disgusting!” and then going right back to voyeur behavior. She is attracted to that which repulses her. (It’s probably no coincidence that the room that holds the Beast’s earthly treasures is called “Diana’s Pavilion,” and anyone who enters without the golden key is killed.) Beauty redeems him through mercy and love and his own longing to be civilized through nothing more than the presence of her beauty. (There is an apocryphal story that Marlene Dietrich, when first watching the film, screamed “Give me back my Beast!” during the scene following transformation.)

And yet even the ending is open to several interpretations: Beauty admits to having loved her suitor Avenant, and the two lovers fly through the air and seem to ascentdto the kingdom of Prince Ardent. There are moments that look like Rubens’ Assumption of the Virgin (1626). Has this really been about Beauty’s acceptance of death, her conquering the fears of going into the unknown that exists beyond the grave? Is the rejected and suffering Beast a Christ figure? Cocteau’s film successfully operates on all these levels, with so much imagination and belief in magic added.

[Final note: Philip Glass wrote an opera to this film that is synched to the film track on the most recent DVD release of this film.]

Paintings are Edward Burne-Jones Sleeping Princess (1880) from Briar Rose, Gustave Moreau Orpheus (1865) and Odilon Redon Orpheus (1903); I don't like much of the artwork from fairy tales, so I've included Symbolist works instead. Some days the art I choose is directly related to the subject, sometimes not.

Women and the Curse of the Fall

A rambling meditation on women and men

Your urge shall be for your husband, and he shall be your master. – Genesis 3:16

In Genesis, Woman exists before Eve. Woman is the partner of man, his complementary help-mate. In the second account of creation she is formed from the side of Adam; who was Adam before? Rashi wrote that Adam was androgynous before the creation of woman - God created Adam in His image, incorporating the masculine and feminine. In the Bereshit Rabbah commentary, woman is attached to Adam, but in such a way that he cannot see her and be made whole until she is separated from him, and can see his mirror image. Once he sees her, Adam calls her "woman, for she was taken out of man." It is only after the Fall that Adam re-names the woman Eve, "because she would become the mother of all the living." Woman: identified as part of the man who makes him whole, his inspiration and helper; Eve: identified through procreative ability, bound to longing for and submissiveness to her husband. The latter is God's curse for women.

[Note: I much prefer reading midrash for notes on women than that of the Church Fathers. At least when reading writings in the Jewish tradition, I can easily dismiss the misogyny. When misogyny is found in the writings of saints in one's own Church, I want to hurl objects.]

Women have struggled with the tension, as Croce writes of, "sexual complicity in conflict with individual freedom.” Perhaps this is why I have always thought of male and female celibacy so differently. For men, celibacy is discipline, restraint, and bearing the burden of lack of biological progeny. For women, celibacy is freedom, a return to Eden, unburdened of the longing for a man. In the consecrated life, it's also the gift of Christ as spouse, so that the admonishments of Colossians 3:18, Ephesians 5:21-32, and 1 Peter 3:1 no longer seem overwhelmingly cumbersome.

Every man has a Don Quixote in him. Every man wants an inspiration. For the Don it was Dulcinea, a woman he sought in many guises. I myself think that the same is true in life, that everything a man does, he does for his ideal woman. You live only one life and you believe in something and I believe in a little thing like that. It has worked so far. It will last me. - George Balanchine, 1965.

It has always fascinated me that some men long for the original woman, the woman separated from his side. We can enter into the dangerous territory of men who place women on pedestals, and the virgin/whore complex, and yet there is something elemental and primitive about a man's longing for his muse. In the literature of every age, there are mortal men who desire and aspire to conquer women or women-like creatures. While there are several meanings to this including their unattainability (tied to the taming of nature), there is also the longing for the help-mate and inspiration. The desire to proclaim the words of Adam to the chosen woman, "this now is bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh." The love for the Blessed Virgin in plastic art and hymns is tied to this - she who is Woman in John's Gospel and Vision.

I want to see the world through you; for then I shall not be seeing the world but only you, you, you! I have never seen you without thinking that I should like to pray to you. I have never heard you without thinking that I should like to believe in you. I have never longed for you without thinking that I should like to suffer for you. I have never desired you without thinking that I should be allowed to kneel before you. - Rainer Maria Rilke to Lou Andreas-Salomé, found in Holthusen’s Portrait of Rilke: An Illustrated Biography (1971). Andreas-Salomé, by the way, was a muse for Nietzsche, Rilke, and Freud.

But how does a woman carry on the life of the muse, without being overcome by the longing 'to be weighed down by the man's body' as Kundera writes? How does she not turn into a Medea? There is the awful example of Auguste Rodin and Camille Claudel, lovers for ten years. There are also the attenuated careers of women like Clara Schumann and Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel. However, they were artists in their own right. [See Kavaler-Adler’s The Creative Mystique: From Red Shoes Frenzy to Love and Creativity (1996) for a full run-down on object relations psychotherapy to understand the sense of self and separation from the male ego that must occur for women artists to gain control of their lives according to this theory.] What is the average woman to do? How is she to be Woman to a man?

[Note: Camille Claudel (1988) directed by Bruno Nuytten, with Isabelle Adjani and Gérard Depardieu is a fine film. However, there are two significant disappointments with this film: the failure to address the influence of Claudel on Rodin’s artwork, which according to some critics, may have been profound., and the psychology behind Claudel’s breakdown – this is beyond a woman who is angered that her lover continues to have other affairs.]

Aimai-je un rêve? - Mallarmé, L'après-midi d'un faune

In Hitchcock's Vertigo (1958), James Stewart seeks to re-create a lost-love (played by Kim Novak). In so doing, questions arise as to how much we ever know and love our beloved. Do we subtly train our lovers to be who we want them to be, do we make them into figments of our imagination who we love only as projections of ourselves? Were Adam and woman originally a complete and complementary projection of each other?

Now Jocasta kneels on the floor at the foot of the bed and then she rises with her leg close to her breast and to her head, and her foot way beyond her head, her body in a deep contraction. I call this the vaginal cry; it is the cry from her vagina. It is either the cry for her lover, her husband, or the cry for her children. - Martha Graham on her dance Night Journey, in her autobiography Blood Memory (1991)

The cry for the lover, the need for a man (even if that man happens to be one's believed-to-be-dead son, taken as lover and husband). Can women escape the curse of Genesis, other than through the consecrated life? In the third episode of Bergman's Scenes from a Marriage (1973), after Johan (Erland Josephson) has told his wife Marianne (Liv Ullman) that he is having an affair and is leaving her that very morning to be with his mistress, after the outbursts and crying, she calmly helps him pack his things. She reminds him that he forgets his toothbrush. This is one of the oldest questions of woman to man: how can you live without me? We are symbiotically joined, how can you turn away?

Give me children or I shall die. - Genesis 30:1

Rachel's cry to Jacob earns her a rebuke, for should she not know that woman has a purpose other than procreation and that children are only God's to provide? The meaning of barrenness is only understood through the light of the New Testament's Virgin and Church. And yet women are still confined by the Fall into their role as Eve, with their procreative abilities paramount in importance.

Leila (1996), directed by Dariush Mehruji, is an Iranian film set in modern day Tehran (so husband and wife do not physically touch, and she is dressed in a black chador throughout). Leila (Leila Hatami) and Reza (Ali Mosaffa) are a married couple, happy and in love. But after a year of trying for children, they discover that Leila is infertile. Thus begins the dilemma: should Reza, an only son, take a second wife (this is Iran and Islamic culture, after all) in order to have a son of his own for the family? Reza's mother (Jamileh Sheikhi) batters her daughter-in-law with fears that Reza will come to not love his own wife if he does not have a son of his own. Reza attempts to re-assure Leila, "All I want is your happiness." Nevertheless, Leila decides to encourage Reza to take a second wife. As he interviews women that a matchmaker has set up for him, she takes strolls in a park or along the sidewalk alone, made unimportant by her infertility. After meeting each prospective bride, Reza picks Leila up and they joke about the qualities that the woman had until one day Reza expresses his approval for a woman he has interviewed. They marry, and as Leila listens in the darkened guest bedroom as her husband and his new bride walk up the stairs of their house (the new bride's dress percussively hitting each step, like the pounding of Leila's fearful heart in her own ears), to the room where their marriage will be consummated, she bolts and leaves. She cannot share him afterall, and cannot sit in silence with the person who she has become: a shadow of her husband.

On the face of it, this is a feminist movie about the denigration of women into child-bearing vessels. However, it is also about two people who are totally in love, and yet, as Jane Shapiro names it, practice "intimate terrorism." They are so concerned with the other that they become passive aggressive. They dare not speak completely truthfully. Yes, Leila's mother-in-law is practically a Gorgon Greek chorus standing in for Iranian society, but the heartbreak of Reza and Leila is in how they subtly turn on each other. She fears losing him, she longs for him, and he fears disappointing her. A woman locked in the curse of the Fall.

300, briefly

Forewarning: Pseudo-Iamblichus honors me and other bloggers for our meditations on Roman Catholic life, art, and practice, and this is what I’m posting today. Alas, I can’t pretend to talk about Catholicism all day - count me in with the great sinners that make up the Catholic Church and need it so desperately. And do not take this post to mean that Christ in my life hasn't taught me better, I'm just still human.

Why is this brief? Because there isn’t much to write about the movie 300 (directed by Zack Snyder from the graphic novel by Frank Miller). It’s bad. Sparta, as portrayed here, has no redeeming values. Everyone speaks in platitudes, the voice-over narration is beyond silly (in that meant to be weighty manner), the effects themselves are straight out of a comic book. While other people like this style of filmmaking (video-game style), I don’t. If I want to see a cartoon, I’ll go watch a cartoon. I’m also about sick of the ochre-tinged lighting that is meant to signify “the ancient world” (spoken with a booming voice). The grotesque characters aren’t even creatively so: I saw the fat man from Hellraiser, the evil warrior from Kickboxer (Van Damme warmed my young heart nearly two decades ago in that movie), and Chunk from The Goonies (who later dons a cap to look like a gnome). None of these characters are actually scary, just really silly. One thing I had never seen before: a hallucinating satyr, and I really would have been fine having never seen it. Xerxes is beyond hilarious in both look and voice. Gosh, this was a bad movie, except for one thing….

This has to be the most homoerotic (for men) movie released in wide distribution in a LONG time. My gosh, men in nothing but thongs and capes, moving in slow motion. Men with really defined musculature disposing of bodies wearing nothing but boots and leather straps. Men’s six-packs, men sweaty, men naked, men's backs, men’s thighs…this is not a movie I should have been watching during Lent (or perhaps, any other season if I want to be a good Christian). And I got to see it on IMAX (this movie would have been completely unacceptable in any other format). I had to take my coat off, and even though it was cold in the theatre, there were times when I could have used one of those fans that spray water to cool down. If I ever bought this movie, it’s the type I’d hide under my bed. Because it’s that bad, and oh, that good. If you’re a woman or a gay man, and someone who temporarily sets aside the sinfulness of lusting and sexual objectification of others, this is a must-see movie. And on the biggest screen you can find.

Deception

Betrayal (1978), written by Harold Pinter, directed by Rick Snyder for Steppenwolf Theatre. Jerry (Ian Barford), Robert (Tracy Letts), Emma (Amy Morton) in March 13, 2007 performance

Briefly, The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984), written by Milan Kundera

[Note to those who are students in Chicago: Many Chicago theatres offer great student deals – subscriptions for half-price and the like. They are much nicer than the Lyric Opera and the Chicago Symphony in trying to make performances affordable for students in advance of the day itself. Steppenwolf offers a student subscription of 5 plays for only $20 each play.]

Betrayal is a play about a love triangle. The plot: Emma has a seven-year affair with Jerry, the best friend of her husband Robert. Time moves backward, so we see the results of the affair before seeing its evolution and beginnings. It takes us out of the emotions as the characters are experiencing them, as we know that all their dreaminess at the beginning is going to end in disillusionment. The language is acerbic, the kind of language that only works in a theatre (one of the major problems with the movie version of Closer was that it was impossible to imagine that sort of speech away from a stage.) The performances were good, though I wish that they had dropped the English accents (the play is set in London) as they came off stilted in a way that wasn’t just British stiff upper-lip.

[Note: the play is also a bit dated, and not just in clothing and hairstyles. Set from 1968-1977, it’s now impossible to believe that a couple would have an affair for seven years including setting up a “second home” for their liaisons, but claim to not want to split up their respective homes because it would be so devastating for their children. Nowadays they would have just gotten divorced from their spouses around two years in, gotten married, and been some semblance of a big happy family. Honesty and personal fulfillment are more important than obligation and responsibility, or so it goes now.]

The play focuses on lying and hypocrisy: when Emma tells Jerry that she and Robert are separating (two years after their own affair has ended) and she has told Robert about the affair, they are both horrified that Robert himself has been cheating on Emma for years and Jerry is angry that Robert has not told him that he’s known about Jerry’s affair with Emma. (As stated earlier, because time is backwards, this occurs at the beginning of the play so all the interactions between these characters going back over the years are seen through the filter of what is to come.) The female perspective – why Emma has an affair with Jerry for years – is missing. However, it is entirely credible, given Jerry and Robert’s interaction, that what Robert is saying is true: “I never told you I knew [about Jerry and Emma's affair], because you’re my best friend and I probably prefer you to her anyway.” Ouch.

We’re also unsure why Jerry and Emma ever started their affair. The usual “thrill” of an affair is the risk of getting caught. But Emma is caught five years in, and continues on for another two years anyway. Is the betrayal itself exciting, in a passive-aggressive manner?

Betrayal is really about deception. All three characters do what deceivers do: to deceive is to construct a reality of one’s own making. In The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Tomas and Sabina do likewise. They betray and deceive, in order to be lighter than the air, because such decisions ultimately do not matter (contrasted with the idea of eternal return). But it is also unbearable that these choices are insignificant, that lives could be insignificant. The worlds they make, which they think make them float, in fact burden others, force others into the same silence.

The world of deception is ultimately a world of self-imposed silence. It mimics the world of the flood, when God silenced humanity for its transgressions, except it is self-inflicted. It is to be in prison, where the only language one knows, and the only world one can construct, is limited by one’s own darkened imagination. It is a curse to be unable to communicate with others: “And now you will be silent and not able to speak until the day this happens, because you did not believe my words, which will come true at their proper time" (Luke 1:20). To lack language that speaks to others is to relive the curse of Genesis 3:14-19: “He laid His hands upon him and diminished him” (from B. Sanhedrin 38b), and to be unable to stand and tremble before God. (I need to blog about standing before God soon; wait for it.) Indeed, God is to be praised for “He has preserved our lives, and kept our feet from slipping (Psalm 66:9). And so the Psalmist prays, “Set me free from my prison, that I may praise Your name” (Psalm 142:7).

The illustration is Arthur Rackham's Alice and the Pack of Cards (1907) and I like it - I'm not suggesting that Alice in Wonderland is a story of childhood self-deception. Just like I'm classifying this performance as a movie though it was a play.

Brokenness and Love

“I’m going to love you, like nobody’s loved you, come rain or come shine”

Leaving Las Vegas (1995) directed by Mike Figgis, starring Nicholas Cage and Elisabeth Shue

I have watched Ingmar Bergman’s Persona (1966) three times over the past two months; I’ve watched Cries and Whispers (1972) three times in the past six (the latter requires longer intervals between viewings) and I’m becoming a Bergman believer. In five of the films he made between 1966 and 1972, including the two already mentioned – I’ve not yet seen The Rite (1968) or The Touch (1971) – the characters are utterly brutal to themselves and each other. Only Alma (Liv Ullman) in The Hour of the Wolf (1968) and Agnes (Kari Sylwan) in Cries and Whispers are largely unscathed, enclosed by a certain innocence and simplicity; of course, that is not all that goes on in these films and as overwhelming cinematic art, they are required viewing.

Note: Make sure you turn up the volume in Cries and Whispers to be able to hear the whispers. They will leave you feeling haunted.

However, it is Lent, and watching Persona this weekend (viewing Bergman should indeed count as a sacrifice – these films are not for the emotionally faint of heart) and communicating with a new friend, I began to see how much the characters in these films are in despair over their own brokenness and fragility, those that aren’t already engaged in self-evisceration are out-ed as hypocrites and cruelly torn apart. The doctor (Erland Josephson) points out everything that is physically and spiritually wrong with the thoughtless Maria (Liv Ullman) while making her look at herself in the mirror in Cries and Whispers. Andreas (Max von Sydow) calls Anna (Liv Ullman) on every self-delusion she has had about her first marriage in The Passion of Anna (1969). The characters look deep inside and see nothing but overwhelming ugliness that leads to emotional violence towards themselves and others. Considering this theme in Bergman’s movies from this period, I started thinking about one of my favorite movies, Leaving Las Vegas, and how the theme is nearly the exact opposite.

Note Two: Ben (Nicholas Cage) is actually far healthier looking and more lucid than a typical person dying of complications from alcoholism would be. Likewise Sera (Elisabeth Shue) probably is a bit too put together and lives quite nicely for someone who’s supposed to be a street hooker. And this is a fictional movie, so no point in discussing the likelihood of the scenario.

I first saw Leaving Las Vegas when it came out (a suggestion: don’t ever go see a movie about prostitution and alcoholism with one’s mother). I was sixteen at the time and in a certain Spanish mysticism phase: St. John of the Cross’ ‘desire nothing,’ ‘love makes equality and similitude,’ and, ‘Faith is not knowledge which enters by any of the senses, but is only the consent given by the soul to that which enters through the hearing.’ In this film, I saw two people, an alcoholic and a prostitute, sinners extraordinaire by any measure, encounter each other and see not brokenness and sin, but a human person to love. In their acknowledged fragility, in some ways they are spiritual planes higher than those modern marriages with pre-nuptial agreements that put under a microscope another person’s possible failings – tough luck, people are going to fail you in this world and all you have are faith, hope, and love. They demonstrate nearly divine mercy towards each other – Ben calls Sera his angel, though that may also be the alcohol talking – for the next few days/weeks until Ben successfully drinks himself to death. Some, from movie critics to my own sister, have called it “the most depressing movie ever made.” Funny, I think it’s one of the most life-affirming movies I’ve ever seen. It's supposedly a tragic love story, but I find it quite beautiful and hopeful although neither of the characters is in any way redeemed by the end.

Note Three: this film can be truly depressing if one has personally known someone who is afflicted by the disease of alcoholism. When writing this, I do not mean to imply that alcoholism or a life of prostitution are not terrible things, but that that is not what I take away from this film. Nor am I making light of the fact that the author of the novel, John O'Brien, committed suicide before the film was complete.

When discussing this film with others, I’m always surprised to encounter this reaction: “Well, if they really loved each other they would have actually helped each other,” as if being the one last person someone has to just hold on to isn’t help and mercy and charity are overrated. In this line of thinking, anything less than Sera forcing Ben to stop drinking and Ben helping Sera out of the cycle of prostitution is not really love, but enabling. But what a weak vision that focuses exclusively on sins and sets up people to fail! Ben won’t stop drinking: to paraphrase he is drinking as a way of killing himself, or killing himself to drink. And no single human person other than Christ can be so much to another that he or she could plug up all the holes and heal what is likely years of sexual and physical abuse from childhood into adulthood to “fix” Sera. Don’t even get me started on the utter ridiculousness of Jerry Maguire’s (Tom Cruise's) line: “You complete me.” Ugh.

Early on, Ben looks Sera straight in the eye and tells her, "You can never ever ask me to stop drinking. Do you understand?" Her response: "I do, I really do." Wretched sinner, meet wretched sinner. We all have our vices, our sins that we just can't give up, to which we can only say "have mercy on me." Neither Ben nor Sera makes a serious attempt to alter the other and there’s real compassion in that – at the time when they do start to focus on each failings and sins, things fall spectacularly apart. These are two utterly lonely people who know they’ve managed to dig themselves deep into a hole and have nothing worth offering to anyone except kindness and mercy, an I’m here for you. Nothing like the title of a play that’s been running in Chicago for the past several years: I Love You, You’re Perfect, Now Change! They don’t seek perfection in the other in an exchange of emotional goods. They simply want to exist for the other person in whatever time they have together, to be side by side. That, to me, is true love, caritas. It desires nothing, doesn’t demand or impose change, but is simply an offering, I give to you, can you accept it? Christ on the Cross is, of course, a prisoner of love, giving until it hurts and far beyond.

Since I like to force my friends to watch/listen/read what I’ve found valuable, I once made a devoutly Christian friend watch this movie with me. At the end, she said that she found the last scene, when Ben and Sera make love for the first (and last) time, morally wrong. Yes, extramarital sex is wrong. But this is a man in the last few moments of his life whose body is wracked with tremors. The woman who loves him and has taken part of his sufferings for the past several weeks comforts him in these dying moments with an act of physical intimacy. Go get the scarlet cloth and sewing shears! Prepare the stake! Sera grants Ben communion with one last person before he leaves the earth. How awful is that? It’s only awful if your version of God is one who is just waiting to getcha and make you pay for that one last sin after so many accumulated in your lifetime, one who hasn’t already borne the sins of the whole world in an act of love.

The God of Bergman (one of the reasons he eventually began to alternate between atheism and agnosticism) and of people who find Leaving Las Vegas to be a moral and spiritual failure of a film seems to me NOT to be the vision of the Ancient of Days of Daniel or Revelation that causes one to fall to hands and knees in fear and awe, but some wild-eyed, crazed god as painted in Goya’s Saturn Devouring One of His Sons. A god who hungrily devours humanity in its weakness, who sees us in our brokenness and desires to tear us limb from limb for his own sport. I’ve never seen Satan in Goya’s Saturn as other’s have, perhaps because I think we are utterly clueless as to the what/why of Satan’s desires.

Perhaps I consider Leaving Las Vegas a life-affirming film because in the end, Sera chooses to give whatever she can to Ben even if she doesn’t know how long or how capable he is of accepting her gift. Not many of us would ever be capable of that, and perhaps only a woman as broken in so many ways as Sera is could do so, though what is probably crucial in her gift is that she knows she’s broken, and most of the rest of us would never chalk up to that. In Ben’s acceptance, he affirms her own humanity and grants her participation in what it means to be a person and not a sexual object. But maybe my interpretation is skewed since I’m also someone who hears the voice of God as lover in the lyrics of “Come Rain or Come Shine,” (music by Harold Arlen, lyrics by Johnny Mercer, 1946).

I’m gonna love you like nobody’s loved you, come rain or come shine
High as a mountain and deep as a river, come rain or come shine
I guess when you met me, it was just one of those things
But don’t ever bet me, cause I’m gonna be true if you let me

You’re gonna love me like nobody’s loved me, come rain or come shine
Happy together, unhappy together and won’t it be fine?
Days may be cloudy or sunny
We’re in or we’re out of the money

But I’m with you always, I’m with you rain or shine

"Apocalypto" movie review

I apologize for the delay in posting – the dissertation writing is in full swing, and my focus has necessarily been on that.

To tide us over, I will place a movie review here: I saw “Apocalypto” last night. First thing to note: this movie is not as gory or reveling in violence as some reviewers led me to believe. It’s less gory (if that’s the right word) than “The Passion of the Christ,” and scenes of violence are pretty rapidly cut away from and in a civilization without gunpowder, realistic in bloodiness. Second, notice that I did not describe this movie as Gibson’s “Apocalypto.” Certainly, Gibson is a filmmaker with a distinct vision, a penchant for all things over-the-top, and certain motifs re-appear in his movies. But I deliberately wanted to watch and review this movie on its own merits, without interference from both the positive and detracting elements of Gibson’s work.

Besides the rather lofty title and the quote at the beginning of the movie, "A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within", “Apocalypto” reminded me of legends and myths about heroes and “villains” acting for basic human motivations: love of family, community, sacrifice, vengeance, survival, even deep-rooted male anxieties about sexual and physical impotence. The villains in this movie are not, to me, villains in the sense of overwhelming evil other than a clearly pathologically evil character; rather, they have their own motivations of survival and sacrifice. And rape, killing, and capture of people in other villages, including the captives being sold into slavery or sent for sacrifice, have occurred in almost every civilization. Side note: I think every reviewer who describes the scenes of cruelty depicted as “unimaginable” needs to pick up a history book and read it.

Continuing on, it reminded me of a story that could be told and passed down in an oral tradition, and it is a shot in such a way that it carries the same sense of sustained action, drive, and savage beauty as many of those old legends do. Even the third act story-line “he kept running, and running, and running…” has that feel. There are no long lingering shots of the actors’ faces where either hero or enemy has an introspective mental break to ponder the nature of the world and his own place and actions within it and whether or not he is following the straight moral path – such moments, heavily laden with 20^th century psychology and development of the person as individual, are part of the reason I hated both the warrior-epic films “Troy” and “Kingdom of Heaven,” I realized after watching this movie. Such moments are simply out of time and place in these stories, and Gibson got it right to not include them.

There are moments of spectacular beauty in the filming of this: to see meso-American cities, industry, dress, and temples in a theatrical production is a real treat. The camera angles, the scenes running through the jungle, the closeness to nature of the villagers well-captured at the beginning of the movie, are stunning. And it’s no small feat to make characters come alive when the actors are unknowns speaking a completely unfamiliar language. Some scenes of survival are over-the-top, but for me these worked to viscerally connect the sense of fear, danger, and pain, to the story of the hero itself.

Now to the real point: what is this movie about? (I’m ignoring the question of whether a movie needs to be about anything.) For myself, the greatness of the movie lies in the fact that it does not tell us what it is about, and I think the answers to that question will be numerous and tell one more about the person answering the question than about the movie itself. Unlike “Syriana,” a dreadful film I watched earlier in the day that tried to be about 8 different subjects and failed spectacularly at every one, by engaging in nothing more than great visuals and great storytelling involving basic human needs and wants, Gibson allows the images we see to be collected into themes about whatever we conclude. For one of my companions, the movie was about the superiority of the communal life and closeness to nature of the villages over industry, similar to one of the themes in “The Lord of the Rings.” There’s a wonderful moment at the temple that shows corruption at the top: the priest and what I assume to be the king exchange a glance during a solar eclipse that let’s the audience know that the people below are being duped into believing that the gods have been appeased and their suffering will end – the cynicism of the authorities contrasted with the purity of belief of the villagers. For another, it was about the sacrifice of men in war: how we see their lives as expendable at the same time as we regard them as salvation. Others will see in this movie a meditation on the nature of our fallen world and its undercurrents of evil and holiness; there are scenes that could be baptism/re-birth. I’ve read one review stating the movie was a criticism of our (or Hollywood’s) fetishism of tribal culture by portraying the savagery that was endemic to it and using the palpable relief the audience feels at the first sign of the “white man” near the end (a civilization in need of spiritual saving in the form of Christianity?). I’ve also read another review stating that the point of the movie was that a civilization that becomes swallowed up in fear is a dying civilization.

This movie doesn’t tell us what it means, and yet the movie can’t help but make one think. Here, for me, lies the real genius of the movie: by placing this story of survival in a culture so unfamiliar with language and customs we don’t understand and can’t relate to, and pounding us with scenes of visceral impact, we, the audience, can’t help but fill in the blanks of what is happening, because we do understand at the basic human level much of what is going on. What that means is entirely personal, as I’m sure it is for Gibson himself.

Tales of Vengeance, Movie Review

“Anger is like a drug – you could live off of it if you had to.”

In three films by Korean director Chan-wook Park, the subject of vengeance is tackled. Park never questions why his characters would want it, but focuses on how they go about it, and especially the repercussions of doing so. What happens when vengeance is all one has to live for?

These movies have sometimes been called Shakespearean for their twisting plots and their violence. The cinematography is astounding in all 3 films. The camera is often placed with the actor looking straight ahead, en face. Nothing is concealed, but none of the characters are particularly emotive except at certain desperate moments. Scenes outside the main characters’ small apartments tend to be wide angle shots, where the character is part of the rest of humanity that is going about its (hopefully) non-bloodthirsty existence. And there is little dialogue in any of the movies, so problems of translation and reading subtitles are not taxing.

Warning: All three films contain scenes of incredible violence with lots of bloodletting, including extremities being cut off. Oldboy has graphic scenes of teeth being removed during torture. These movies are not for those who become faint at the sight of blood on screen.

Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance (2002): We meet a young man who is deaf and mute (Ha-kyun Shin). His sister, who supported him for years, is sick and needs a kidney transplant. He goes on the black market to try to procure a kidney for her, but in the process loses his own and the money to pay for her surgery. To make matters worse, he is then fired from his factory job. With the encouragement of his girlfriend, an anti-industrialist revolutionary, he kidnaps his employer’s (Kang-ho Song) child to be able to get the ransom that will pay for his sister’s surgery. Through many twists and turns, by the end of the movie all these characters will be dead and only one death will have been accidental.

The emotional tone of this movie is set at the beginning: Ryu has a radio station read a letter he has written to his sister, describing how he would do anything for her and she for him. She listens to it, leaning her head on his shoulder. There are striking images of his deafness: he can’t hear what she hears, like the couple in the apartment above them loudly making love, or the boys next door loudly masturbating. Their lives will spiral out of control, and the twists are a bit too hard to believe. All the characters in these movies seem just a bit too smart, too quick on the trail of their vengeance.

Oldboy (2004): We are confronted with the image of a drunken lout (Min-sik Choi) holding balloons for his daughter’s birthday party but forced to wait in a police station after getting in an argument. He walks outside, and is kidnapped. For the next 15 years, he is held in a tiny room, receiving food and care (while drugged) with a t.v. as his only companion. He swears his revenge. Upon his release (with money and expensive clothes), he makes his way to a restaurant where he devours a live squid. When he says, “I want something alive,” we understand that he wants to fill up the emptiness, the death of his life. The girl on the other side of the bar (Ji-tae Yu), for unclear reasons, takes him home with her. He wants sex, she refuses, at least for the time being. Jointly, they set out to find who held him prisoner for 15 years and why. He can recall the taste of the potstickers he was fed, leading to visits to restaurants all over Seoul. Ultimately, he finds his captors, and the person who wanted his captivity. The punishment turns out NOT to be the lost 15 years, but something so sickening in its emotional and psychological implications that he cuts his own hand off in shame and pleading. And the crime he is being punished for? As a teenager, he saw two people doing something they shouldn’t have been doing; he gossiped about it, leading to an awful act that has led his tormentor to seek vengeance for the past 20 years.

Lady Vengeance (2005): A woman (Yeong-Ae Lee), imprisoned for 13 years for a crime she did not commit (the kidnapping and killing of a child) is released, and seeks vengeance on the man guilty of the crime (he set her up by kidnapping her own child). Along the way, she reunites with her Australian-raised daughter, but cannot be a mother until her bloodthirst is satisfied. She finds the man, tortures him, and then gathers his child victims’ parents together for some vigilante justice.

There’s a great contrast in this movie: the main character has an angelic face and became incredibly skilled in prison at making and decorating cakes. One of the final moments of the film, when the parents gather and eat one of her cakes (easy symbolism to see) justifies that talent.

There is precious little moralizing in any of these movies; things that are clearly wrong, incest and child-killing, are wrong and that’s that. However, murder (or would it be killing?) is justified, and there is no moral question posed by the movie of whether the various characters deserve the blood of their opponents to a life-draining degree. There is no “turn the other cheek” to be found here. Instead, the focus is on the emotional plane where vengeance lives, how it guides the behaviors and interactions with the people they confront. Does one have something to live for after being sated with vengeance? What is there in life to live for? The films don’t try to answer such questions; it seems enough to acknowledge that these emotional states exist, and their portrayals in these films are among the greatest I’ve ever seen in cinema.