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Schemes from a Marriage by Janet Karsten Lawson Janet Karsten Larson teaches English at Rutgers University in Newark, New Jersey and is an Editor-at-Large of the Century. This article appeared in the Christian Century June 1, 1977, p. 534. Copyright by the Christian Century Foundation and used by permission. Current articles and subscription information can be found at www.christiancentury.org. This material was prepared for Religion Online by Ted & Winnie Brock. The
film, Scene’s from a Marriage, leaves unexamined the questions of how to
redeem community in the larger society; it seems to have gone irrevocably to
the devil as it has become technically more nearly perfect. Text: Ingmar Bergman’s film Scenes from a
Marriage tells, like the Lenten season, a serialized story culminating in
violence, dawning in a quiet denouement of fragile new life. Made originally
for Swedish television, the film came to American public networks in the uncut
version this year. Shown in six segments
-- in Chicago, just late enough to catch after the week’s Wednesday evening
church service -- Scenes happened to follow the rhythm of Lent. What
could its gospel story have said to Johan and Marianne in their passion
narrative? Even several weeks after the TV showing, faithful Bergmanians I know
are still haunted by this most disturbing, complex film. A work in the personalist Bergman line of
Cries and Whispers and Face to Face, Scenes from a Marriage has
been dismissed by some as a middle-class indulgence, like those voyeuristic
encounter groups on late-night TV, sponsored by local churches as the groovy
alternative to the stained-glass Meditation for Living. Yet Scenes is
not just an exercise in simulated sensitivity to the imaginary pains of the
affluent. It is thick with personal and political implications, a scarifying
image of life in the ‘70s and beyond to which Christians will be ministering.
At a time when the churches are tooling up their ministries with bureaucratic,
corporate, and new-therapeutic technologies, Bergman’s arresting film compels
us to re-examine, especially, the techniques we use in service of that
ministry. I What “happens” in Scenes from a
Marriage? In the first scene Johan (Erland Josephson), a 42-year-old
associate professor at the Psychotechnical Institute, and Marianne (Liv
Ullmann), a 35-year-old lawyer, display to a Swedish magazine interviewer their
ideal marriage, a second one for her: at a dinner party shortly after, before
their eyes quarreling dinner guests play out the vicious rituals of a hellish
marriage. This scene, “Innocence and Panic,” ends with a painful blending of
both emotions evoked by Marianne’s revealed pregnancy, their tenuous decision
to have the child, and then her inexplicable abortion. “The Art of Sweeping
Under the Rug,” scene two, portrays daily life and working environments,
erupting in smoothed-over anxieties. In scene three, “Paula,” Johan suddenly
announces that he is leaving Marianne; her elaborate defenses are brutally
shattered. Six months pass; in the fourth scene both characters go through “The
Vale of Tears” -- a ragged meeting between them, set off balance by his growing
sense of failure and by her uncertain recovery. In the fifth, climaxing scene, “The
Illiterates” meet in Johan’s sterile office late at night to sign the divorce
papers, but after making love they break out into a fight that ends in bloody
exhaustion. Much later the sixth scene takes place: Marianne’s meeting with her
now-widowed mother and later her touching rendezvous with Johan “In the Middle
of the Night in a Dark House Somewhere in the World.” Both characters, now
remarried to others, show signs of new maturity and freedom. By some miraculous
dynamic of health in the nature of things -- is it grace? -- “two new people
begin to emerge from all this devastation,” as Bergman writes in the preface to
the published script. The fragile “happy ending” such as it is
-- can be anticipated all along: it is there in the characters’ engaging
qualities, survival instincts, continual relapses into intimacy, evident
fondness for each other, and -- it must be admitted -- their visual
attractiveness (Liv more than Erland, needless to say). Inevitably the camera
effects a kind of cinematic exculpation: Liv Ullmann’s delighted smile can
cover a multitude of sins. Interestingly, the character of Marianne is much
less attractive on the pages of the script than the Marianne we both saw and
heard on the screen: much more selfish, demanding, even cruel. II What is Scenes from a Marriage about?
The title suggests the film’s fragmentary character, and that in turn suggests
one of the film’s main themes: the failure of technique to redeem lives from
chaos. Johan tells the interviewer in the first scene: “I think you must have a
kind of technique to be able to live and be content with your life.” Through
all the “scenes” what we see and hear is a moving mosaic of many scenarios,
schemes used and discarded by both central characters as they try to explain
the causes of their misery and the forms of their salvation. Technique -- process, treatment, “schooling” -- is modern industrial
society’s typical way of tackling its problems, as Ivan Illich and others have
lamented, only to create monstrosities of modern life together. In some rather
surprising ways, Scenes from a Marriage is about the need for
“deschooling” marriage and people’s souls. In the compass of two lives,
Bergman’s film shows us what the 19th century belief in progress through
technology and treatment -- vastly expanding in the 20th -- has brought in
“interpersonal relationships.” The major shift of setting from the first
scene to the last tells us much about what their society and “home” mean for
this conventional Swedish couple. In the first scene they pose with their
daughters for the public photograph, on a sofa described in the script as
“round and curved and Victorian and upholstered in green; it has friendly arms,
soft cushions, and carved legs; it is a monstrosity of coziness. As that weighty piece of Freudian
furniture goes, so go some of the inhibitions, illusions of the past, and
family dependencies of which both characters must disburden themselves. The
cozy monstrosity is also, of course, the scheme of their marriage as a place of
refuge from the impersonal, warlike society in which they carry on their
ambitious professional lives, earning the salaries that buy conspicuous
affluence. In the last scene we understand that with
their new spouses they have some of this expensive protection still. But now
free of the old marriage and its gadgetry, they can “relate” as persons at
last. Clinging to each other and a blanket after Marianne’s nightmare in the
last moments of the film -- as on a spar in a tempest -- Johan and Marianne
find some home-meaning “In the Middle of the Night in a Dark House Somewhere in
the World.” The Victorian monster is gone; yet the two remain, reminding one of
Matthew Arnold’s lovers in the last stanza of his 1867 poem “Dover Beach”: Ah, love, let
us be true The “cult of personal relations,” as
historian Christopher Lasch has observed, intensifies as the belief in
political answers withers away. Scenes implicitly portrays this cultural
pattern: the wide-scale personal withdrawal after the respective political
optimisms of the ‘50s and ‘60s. (Bergman’s own despair of politics dates back
to his disillusionment as a young man during the last days of Hitler’s
Germany.) In Matthew Arnold’s poem of farewell to Victorian social and
religious faith, at least his lovers have their love. (In those last seven and
a half lines, however, one may hear even love’s “melancholy, long withdrawing
roar.”) Bergman’s lovers a century later have
their love only in the most precarious way. And they are cursed by something
Arnold’s lovers are yet spared: Johan and Marianne become their own illiterate
armies clashing by night. (Is “fight training” what they really need?)
However muted and ultracivilized, their society’s “confused alarms of struggle
and flight” invade the micro-society, their most intimate space. Given the
penetrating destructiveness of postindustrial society, neither the tight circle
of personal relations (Marianne’s theme) nor the private region of the inner
life (Johan’s) can protect them. Nor can they escape, in the midst of their
comforts, the harrowing human condition. Where alarms of mass confusion threaten
the public life, schemes are called for. Two decades after “Dover Beach,” the
Fabian Socialists in England were busily, busily building on the ruins with
education, sociological research and reform. One hundred years after Arnold,
Bergman has set his film in Sweden, the ordered, superefficient society of the
future where “everything has been neatly arranged, all cracks have been stopped
up, it has all gone like clockwork,” as Johan laments about his marriage. “We
have died from lack of oxygen. Not that in any ideological way Scenes
from a Marriage is exclusively about the soul of man under socialism. (I
suspect a slightly more efficient state capitalism would do quite as well.) The
parental state, extending the smothering accomplished by Johan’s possessive
parents, does to him what the parental corporation does to people we know, or
the public schools to children, or the machinery of welfare to modern-day
paupers. It is an agent of impotence, as Illich has argued, and as power of
person is lost, relationships of all kinds become trivialized. As Bergman puts
it, such a social order is based on humilia’ tion. In their admirably regulated
form of social life. Marianne comes to discover an implied brutality. And she
dreams of amputation; her daughter, of war. If this is so, the cure for impotence is
not more faith in mere mechanism -- in her case, schemes from the consciousness
movement for reprocessing the self. It is not self-help and healthy habits that
endanger, but the development in our time of autosalvation, with its reach that
never exceeds its grasp? We are inundated these days with best-selling
testimonials to the self-reflexive cure, as though the personal journey alone
can sustain the creature’s meaning. Although at times Scenes seems to be
administering the physic of the consciousness movement in rather heavy doses,
the film is too complex to be dismissed as a celebration of “How to Save Your
Own Life” in the mode of Erica Jong, Jerry Rubin or Gail Sheehy. Autosalvation
may appear to elude the larger oppressive technologies of “the system,” one’s
parental programming, and other “schooling” schemes. But in fact the private
processing of the self can reiterate this style of manipulation on the small
scale. And personal technologies break no private faith with the public belief
in technique to solve our problems, a belief that curiously persists despite
our underlying despair of the social chaos. And if the method is faulty, so is
the message. As Christopher Lasch also points out, new therapies’ solutions are
tautological, self-defeating to the extent that they advise people “not to make
too large an investment in love and friendship, to avoid excessive independence
on others, and to live for the moment -- the very conditions that created the
crisis of personal relations in the first place” (New York Review of Books [September
30, 1976]). To those who take their moral imperatives
from the consciousness movement and find their highest wisdom in its
survivalist precepts, this film speaks a warning word. Without a coherent set
of values that transcends the personal bog, how can even the best-informed
choose well among the array of available techniques for self-improvement? More
to the point of Christian ministry, how can private technologists so busily
exerting themselves in the cause of their own freedom hear the word that they
are gifted, redeemed, chosen? Bergman’s ailing people strive to treat
themselves in the silence of that word. III Johan’s urbane little lecture to the
interviewer in scene one shows at the outset the fatal confusion of techniques
without values. “Are you afraid of the future?” she asks. Johan:
If I stopped to think I’d be petrified with fear. Or so I imagine. So I
don’t think. I’m fond of this cozy old sofa and that oil lamp. They give me an
illusion of security which is so fragile that it’s almost comic. I like Bach’s
“St. Matthew Passion” though I’m not religious, because it gives me feelings of
piety and belonging. Our families see a lot of each other and I depend very
much on this contact, as it reminds me of my childhood when I felt I was
protected. I like what Marianne said about fellow-feeling. It’s good for a
conscience which worries on quite the wrong occasions. I think you must have a
kind of technique to be able to live and be content with your life. In tact,
you have to practice quite hard not giving a damn about anything. The people I
admire most are those who can take life as a joke. I can’t. I have too little
sense of humor for a feat like that. You won’t print this, will you? Some of the schemes that string together
the people in this marriage are classic: the poetry of religion in place of
religious passion, childish family-feeling, sympathy as an antidote to guilt,
mockery to subdue the soul’s hunger pains. Unfortunately for Johan, he does think.
His articulate awareness of his situation is, the sine qua non of
all other techniques, and both partners have it in abundance. They have both
been, moreover, “so goddamn well-behaved and sensible and balanced and
cautious,” as he says of himself. And yet: “I don’t know.” That is the parallel
theme. “I don’t know anything.” Besides these age-old schemes and scores
of their moment-to-moment rationalizations, there are certain formulas
appropriate to each character, and both exhibit the withdrawal symptoms of the
‘70s. For Johan it is the cynical rejection of politics and the attempt to
embrace meaninglessness (the other side of his sentimentality). For Marianne it
is personal survival, couched in some of the language of women’s
liberation. But there is grace as well as work-righteousness of technique: his
saving grace is the occasional insight that he needs something to believe in;
hers is insight in redeeming moments of fellow-feeling. These laws and graces are thoroughly
discussed in the film, for Scenes from a Marriage is almost all talk:
language is the primary means these characters have for establishing order. But
it is always breaking down, as the dialogue rushes and jerks along from one
formulation of ‘the problem, “the truth,” and ‘the solution” to another. That
onrushing reality of contradictory, transient talk -- coupled with relentless camera closeups and the film’s minimal
formal elements -- eliminates aesthetic distance. As a result we are plunged
into the immediate necessities of inventing order, as Marianne and Johan seem
to improvise their lives. It is time to look more closely at the ways they do
so. IV “The world is going to the devil and I
claim the right to mind my own business,” Johan declares to the interviewer.
“It makes me sick to think of these new salvation gospels. Whoever controls the
computers will win the game” Johan prefers “the unpopular view of live and let
live.” Hell he describes as “a place where no one believes in solutions any
more” -- despite, perhaps because of, computer power. After he has left
Marianne he revisits her, boasting of a newfound freedom inside himself, away
from the politics that failed: “Do you know what my security looks like?” he
asks her. “I think this way; loneliness is absolute. . . . You can invent
fellowship on different levels, but it will still only be a fiction about
religion, politics, love, art, and so on.” For several years he has tried one
common cure for emptiness: an affair with a younger woman, He tells Marianne he
is “learning to accept with a certain satisfaction how pointless it all is.” While it is Marianne who is most directly
influenced by the consciousness movement and the belief in technique, Johan is
implicated in two ways. His professional work seems to involve him in the use
of technology for effecting behavioristic solutions to personality problems.
Thus he talks about feeling in a clinical way, with the impersonality of his
lab reports. His projects at the institute have no personal meaning, and they
are useless in helping him with his own problems. Johan is implicated in the consciousness
movement in a more philosophical sense than Marianne. Appropriately older than
she, he is a person who stands in a de profundis tradition that
stretches back through Sartre and Camus to the Preacher of Ecclesiastes. He
learns that his existential awareness does not give him self-transcendence and
that his personal choices do not define his humanity -- his alternatives in
this society seem so meaningless. He strikes one as Victorian in some of his
attitudes and needs, modern in his attempt and failure to imagine Sisyphus
happy. His angst prevents him from buying into self-discovery gospels,
and his agnosticism from accepting conventional religious solutions. Like
Matthew Arnold’s generation he seems stranded between two faiths, one dead or
dying, the other powerless to be born. Like the modern psychiatrist Dysart in
Peter Shaffer’s play Equus, he cannot take the leap of faith “on to a
whole new track of being” he suspects is there. When Marianne reacts skeptically to
Johan’s nihilist manifesto, he retreats characteristically: “It’s nothing but
words. You put it into words so as to placate the great emptiness.” But beneath
his formulations of an antiformula stretches the wasteland of his pain. His
emptiness hurts, he tells Marianne in the next breath, echoing Sartre: “You’d
think it might . . . give you mental nausea. But my emptiness hurts physically.
It stings like a burn,” Nonetheless, he continues to rant against “a lot of
loose talk nowadays” that he sees as faddish idealism. Instead of Paula’s
“astonishing” political faith. Johan tries to embrace a political faithlessness
that suits his own personal ennui, itself a kind of debilitated laissez-faire
of the spirit which nonetheless fails to sustain him through all his other
adulteries. Once an ardent political activist,
Marianne is now in law (a career imposed by her parents), but she is not
pleading the cause of the oppressed as she had once dreamed. As a divorce
lawyer, she plays the social role of mopping up the messes rather than working
for creative social change so that relationships might be more humane and
lasting. Though kind, intelligent and well intentioned, Marianne in this work
is the public facilitator of the transience from which she personally suffers. Talking with the interviewer about love,
Marianne rejects the formula of I Corinthians 13 as an impossible ideal --
useful only as an impressive “set piece to be read out at weddings and other
solemn occasions. . . . Instead, she has adjusted “love” to a workable formula
in the modern situation: I think it’s
enough if you’re kind to the person you’re living with. Affection is also a
good thing. Comradeship and tolerance and a sense of humor. Moderate ambitions
for one another. If you supply those ingredients, then . . .
love’s not so important [emphasis added]. Marianne and Johan have all these things;
yet their marriage falls apart. The lawyer talks the talk of the new
minimalism, and like Johan’s pared. down formula for the Lone Self, it is an
aesthetically shapely scheme which may suffice the eye but does not save the
soul. Marianne’s scheme offers no comfort in her remorse over the abortion, no
compensatory wisdom for Johan as his career fails him. And how can that ideal
marriage contract’s list account for the pain and danger of Mrs. Jacobi, a
late-middle-aged client who comes to Marianne’s office for a divorce in order
to take a step toward recovering her sense of living? In this chilling
encounter, Mrs. Jacobi explains haltingly that she and her husband are
“hindering each other in a -- fatal way.” Even her five senses are failing her:
“Music, scents, people’s faces and voices. Everything’s getting meaner and
grayer, with no dignity.” Much later, when Marianne is undergoing
psychoanalysis and is “trying hard to learn how to talk” about herself, she
discovers the Mrs. Jacobi in Marianne and writes in her diary: In the snug little world
where Johan and I have lived so unconsciously, taking everything for granted,
there is a cruelty and brutality implied which frightens me more when I think
back on it. Outward security demands a high price: the acceptance of a
continuous destruction of the personality. (I think this applies especially to women;
men have somewhat wider margins.) This, too, is formula -- note the
professional tone in a personal journal -- but in insight it represents an
advance on the old Marianne. In earlier scenes she, too, tries common
cures for marital ennui: the fantasy of having a baby, dreams of exotic
vacations. And she clings to the marriage in a neurotic way. In the third
scene, when Johan announces that he is leaving her, she pleads with him over
and over again: “I think we could repair our marriage. I think we could find a
new form for our life together.” But to find a new form does not necessarily
escape the tyranny of technique. Johan finds so irritating the fact that she is
the sort of perfectionist who would want to go over their former life
with a fine-tooth comb to dig up all routine and negligence . . . talk over the
past . . . find where we’ve gone wrong.” Throughout this scene all the
inevitable rituals of their life together still go on: they must discuss what
Johan should wear on his trip with Paula, what to do about the car, the
plumber, the dentist, father’s birthday -- what to tell the cleaning woman.
Just as in all their married life, these rituals on the night and morning of
his impending departure are Marianne’s desperate remedies to placate the great
emptiness. “It’s all so unreal.” she tells him, dazed, but her efficient
marital formulas cannot prevent his escape out of all this clockwork marriage. V Bergman is fascinated by what he calls
“the analyzing and clarifying process of the psyche.” The major movement of
this film is Marianne’s growth toward self-discovery and freedom from demanding
relationships with others. Part of what that freedom requires is the dismissal
of religion, which in her experience had been a vicious mechanism for
destroying the person. Her childhood attempts at self-assertion, she writes in
the diary, were deformed with injections
of a poison which is one hundred percent effective: bad conscience. First
towards Mother, then towards those around me, and, last but not least, towards
Jesus and God. I see in a flash what kind of person I would have been had I not
allowed myself to be brainwashed. The problem in this film in which it is
so difficult to determine the truth of utterances is that Marianne is
oversimplifying, countering their technique with one of her own. Like
Jerry Rubin in his book Growing (Up) at Thirty-Seven, she harps on her
conditioning as though growing up were mainly a matter of inventing
counterpropaganda to the lies her parents told her. In the violent drunk scene,
Marianne’s scenario of outraged victim -- “fighting against hopeless odds all
the time” -- is played out in a grotesque way; she uses it as an excuse for
vicious and childish attacks on Johan, verbally kicking him when he is already
down. Her other extreme on the religion
question is another form of dependence. During this scene she admits to Johan,
I even turned religious for a time and prayed to God to let me have you back.”
One is reminded of Ibsen’s innocent Hedvig, who said her prayers only at night
because “in the morning it’s light and there’s nothing to fear.” Or more to the
point here, one is reminded of Johan’s attraction for the St. Matthew
Passion. These people’s deities reflect their society’s utilitarian ethic.
Like the pornographic technology Marianne turns to briefly to ease her sexual
tensions when Johan is gone, these clockwork gods can be discarded and replaced
with other techniques for self-pleasuring. Either they can be discarded
or they must be, as pleasurable or painful. They do not transcend.
Interestingly, “bad conscience” continues to humiliate, intruding into their
conversations long after it has been officially banished with
counterpropaganda. Much of Marianne’s recovery is based on
helpful feminist and psychoanalytic interpretations of what is wrong with the
conventional female model. Marianne was brought up to be agreeable; she
realizes that her compliance has been dishonest and cowardly, an escape from
the pains of creating the self. So the female eunuch strikes out: she
transforms Johan’s old study into a room of her own, buys smart clothes that
she likes herself in, discovers more joy of sex (without that “rubbish” about
the body’s sanctity), refuses to play old roles, learns to express anger,
teaches her daughters to be “honest” though they are spoiled and wayward, draws
up her own divorce papers, remarries for ambition and sex, and learns to relish
casual relationships with men. It is a veritable catalogue of liberationist
cliches. We are not necessarily directed toward
damning Marianne for any of this: on the contrary, we admire her freer manner,
her joy in living. But the bind is still there: she knows that none of these
schemes guarantees her happiness. To Bergman’s credit his film is much more
than a cinematic manifesto for women’s liberation or an advertisement for the
new therapies that might have helped to make it all possible. And one sign that
Bergman’s Scenes is not Gail Sheehy’s Passages is that his
characters are always sagely advising each other not to overexcite themselves,
to cope, not to panic. But of course they do panic; there are, after all, so
many good reasons to. When Johan, for example, pleads that they
not sign the divorce papers but try instead to live together again, Marianne --
determined to be free of him forever -- breaks out indignantly: “I don’t want
you to entreat me. I’m not certain that I’m not certain that I could cope. That
would be the worst thing that could happen” But love and pain are valuable, many-hued
emotions; to determine mainly to “cope” with them can be to deplete one’s own
resources of sympathy and tenderness for another. As Lasch has observed
elsewhere in his critique of Sheehy’s book, negotiating the crises and
“passages” of one’s life simply by shedding old selves, not panicking, and
taking on new interests denies the human need to grow to maturity through
continuity with one’s old selves and the people of the past. Coping, moreover,
has political implications: it is the scheme of an outrageous society for
anesthetizing its citizens. Marianne advises her clients to cope with
life-in-death, not to rage against the dying of the light. VI Johan bitterly satirizes the liberation
psychology Marianne espouses. But just as her salvation gospels cannot be
entirely dismissed, his critique of her cannot be written off merely as rooted
in his personal bitterness and his misogynist jealousy of her “boundless female
strength,” There is something smug in her existence on a “special plane
reserved for women with a privileged emotional life and a happier, more mundane
adjustment to the mysteries of life.” But it is primarily Marianne who presents
us with the limitations of what he calls the “new women’s gospel.” In her boozy rage in scene five she
parodies herself, showing us the antisocial and self-righteous side of the
personal liberation theme: Do you suppose that I’ve
gone through all I have, and come out on the other side and starred a life of
my own which every day I’m thankful
for, just to take charge of you and see that you don’t go to the dogs because
you’re so weak and full of self-pity? . . . I’ve hardened myself. We can understand this woman’s need to
break free of the demands of others who have hampered her self-development. At
the same time, her hard words suggest that she has not been able to break
utterly free: ‘‘If you knew’’ she goes on, “how many times I’ve dreamt I
battered you to death, that I murdered you, that I stabbed you, that I kicked
you. If you only knew what a goddamn relief it is to say all this to you at
last.’’ In a lower pitch, now patronizing Johan,
Marianne lectures him to free himself from the past and make a fresh start as
she has. She claims she lives a ‘‘much more honest life now than I’ve ever
done.” She does; but Johan asks: “And happier?” In her diary Marianne had
written of reawakening the capacity for joy. “All that talk about happiness is
nonsense,” she retorts. “My greatest happiness is to eat a good dinner.” In Marianne’s rage we see the tremendous
toll her oppression as a woman has taken. “You’re being utterly grotesque,”
Johan justly observes. “So what. That’s how I’ve become,” Marianne flings his
charge back, but the
difference between not grotesqueness and yours is that I don’t give in. I
intend to keep on, you see. I intend to live in reality just as it is. For if
there’s one thing I like more than anything else on earth, it’s to live. . .
. Marianne’s instinct for self-preservation
has helped set her free of many old self-destructive patterns, but in another
sense she seems grimly bound to her new agenda. Her fierce words seem to
declare the doom of joy. Yet there is another Marianne that likes
people, ‘‘fine words and diplomacy.” In the first scene she quietly announces:
“I believe in fellow-feeling. . . . If everyone learned to care about each
other right from childhood, the world would be a different place, I’m certain
of that.” Johan generally denounces this sort of thing as naïve and
impractical, but he comes to admit that he simply lacks the imagination for
sympathy. Throughout the film vacillating between
the legalistic and the spontaneous, Marianne seems to place the finer human
qualities outside the realm of formula. Fidelity, for instance, can never be
‘‘a compulsion or a resolution. . . .
Either it’s there or it isn’t” If in John Updike’s recent fiction
adultery is presented as a “grace,” it is fidelity that has that inexplicable
quality for Marianne -- it is all gift,
not calculated as her sex life by the brink has been with Johan. (Faithfulness
is also ephemeral, however; and the irony of their final relapse into fidelity
is that their last scene together must be snatched on an illicit weekend when
their spouses are out of town.) Tired of roles, she wishes more than once “that
we could be simpler and gentler with each other,” a wish that comes true in the
final episode. VII In the sixth scene Johan and Marianne
have gained some self-understanding and acceptance. Each offers a little
summary, each a kind of resignation. He tells her that he has “found my right
proportions. And that I’ve accepted my limitations with a certain humility” He
is still a “middle-aged boy who never wants to grow up”: he yearns for
mothering. But he listens better, and can give comfort. And he has given up
trying to be an existential hero. In the second scene he had announced his
refusal “to live under the eye of eternity” But by the film’s end he has
overcome the hubris of that technique for coping: Because I refuse to
accept the complete meaninglessness behind the complete awareness. . . . Over
and over again I try to cheer myself up by saying that life has the value you
ascribe to it. But that sort of talk is no help to me. I want something to long
for. I want something to believe in. Marianne announces a freedom from
dependence on her new husband: ‘‘I live with him. That’s fine. I live with you.
That’s fine. If I meet some other man who attracts me I can live with him too.”
To guide her protean life style this appealing modern woman relies on common
sense, feeling, and experience: “They cooperate.” It is a pat,
well-ordered scheme that suffices perhaps for much of her workaday living. But
it lacks a reference point outside the self, as life is improvised in the here
and now to fill her emotional needs under no eye of eternity. Objectivity
dissolves: if she does not feel a problem, it isn’t there. This is a dangerous
road, as her nightmare’s images show her: she has voluntarily amputated the
hands that might hold on to some saving certainty. The irony of Johan’s and Marianne’s greatly
expanded awareness is that they “don’t know what to do.” In scene five Johan
had lamented, We’re taught everything
about the body and about agriculture in Madagascar and about the square root of
pi, or whatever the hell it’s called, but not a word about the soul. . . .
We’re left without a chance, ignorant and remorseful among the ruins of our
ambitions. Johan declares them both “emotional
illiterates.” More accurately, their illiteracy is spiritual, and their kind of
omniscience brings a peculiarly modern anguish to the problematic knowledge of
good and evil. “With that cold light over all my endeavors,” psychologist Johan
comes to recognize, it is impossible to live. In the final episode he expresses the
irreducible sadness underlying the feats of consciousness-raising we have
witnessed through five scenes from this marriage: “Think of all the wisdom and
awareness that we’ve arrived at through tears and misery. It’s magnificent.
Fantastic. We’ve discovered ourselves. . . . Analysis is total, knowledge is
boundless. but I can’t stand it.” Suddenly sad, Marianne murmurs: I know what
you mean. Even in this touching moment, irony cuts in: inevitably she takes one
more little turn in the spiral of knowledge. At the end of a film which has been so
much “loose talk” that mistook itself for reasonable explanations, they find
some relief in silence. “Just think if everything is too late,” Marianne says
to Johan. “We mustn’t say things like that. Only think them,” he replies.
Gentler now, they have given up preaching: there is too much they can’t put
into words, indeed had better not: “But if we harp on it too much,” says
Jolian, “love will give out.’’ Bergman’s final scene affirms the
existence of qualities and experiences that break through the processed self
with surprises of joy and terror. In the middle of the night Marianne awakes
from a scarifying nightmare in which she has no hands, only “a couple of stumps
that end at the elbows.’’ She tells Johan she is “slithering in soft sand. I
can’t get hold of you. You’re all standing up there on the road and I can’t
reach you.” He comforts her and after a pause she
asks: “Do you think were living in utter confusion? . . That we realize that
we’re slipping downhill. And that we don’t know what to do.” ‘‘Yes, I think so,
he replies. Makers and doers in all things else, they feel helpless before the
mystery of their own lives. ‘‘Think how we exert ourselves all the time,” Marianne
muses. ‘‘Have we missed something important? He poses a counterquestion: “What
would that be?’’ She can name only the epiphanies of insight that bind her
briefly to other people, even strangers: MARIANNE Sometimes I
know exactly how you’re feeling and thinking. And then I feel a great
tenderness for you and forget about myself, even though I don’t efface myself.
Do you understand what I mean? JOHAN I
understand what you mean. Not the analytical understanding but the
knowledge of the heart makes it possible for Johan and Marianne to do what her
parents could never manage: they have touched one another’s souls. Each has
found a way of understanding and accepting the saving grace of the other,
Johan’s refusal to celebrate meaninglessness and Marianne’s belief in
fellow-feeling. Reversing the words of the first scene’s title, Bergman has
moved his principal characters from panic to a kind of knowing innocence. VIII Scene’s from a
Marriage leaves
unexamined the questions of how to redeem community in the larger society; it
seems, as Johan says, to have gone irrevocably to the devil as it has become
technically more nearly perfect. This film, writes America reviewer
Richard Blake, “makes one wonder about the future of the soul” (August 10,
1974). What could the care of the church have to offer them -- a prophetic word
about the strains of their affluence, a comforting word about the God who
suffers with them, a liberating word that sets all our deeds and plans under
the eye of the eternal and incarnate Lord? Discipleship, not just self-control;
koinonia. not only “personal relations”; the vision of a new heaven and a new
earth, not just strategies for survival day by day. And for that matter
counseling, too -- with methods that incarnate these values, not counteract
them. But would they hear suds gospel tidings,
helpless though they know they are? As it is, at the end one can only wonder
what will become of Marianne’s complacent soul without the influence of Johan’s
angst, his incessant questioning of their routine and the chaos beneath
it. And what will become of his ailing soul without Marianne’s instinct for
health? Marriage is a scheme for bringing together these spiritual illiterates
who need each other with their very earthly and imperfect love. In many of its
forms it is not a scheme that works very smoothly in these times, but one
cannot help hoping that somewhere in the world, Bergman’s matched sufferers can
find a breathing space to try again, in a sevenths scene from their remarriage.
And one must imagine them happy. |