whatever happened to elisabet vogler?
by Douglas Messerli
Ingmar
Bergman (writer and director) Persona /
1966
At first these seem only to involve a few
criticisms from her boyfriend, Karl-Henrik, who accuses her of lack of
ambition. Although she’s a bit unsure of what he means, we cannot help but
perceive, in her desire to serve both her career like the elderly retired
nurses who live on site and her future husband, that she clearly has no deep
aspirations. It’s only gradually, particularly in her long recounting of a
sexual incident with another woman and two adolescent boys who have strayed
from home to watch the women bathing in the nude upon the beach, that we begin
to perceive that she is perhaps a far more complex being. She reveals that the
sexual incident was the most fulfilling sexual encounter that she has ever had,
and that the foursome with the two young boys resulted in her becoming
pregnant, ending in an abortion, performed by a friend of Karl-Hendrik’s.
Suddenly, perhaps for the first time, she regrets both her lying to her fiancée
and the fact of the abortion.
First of all, no matter how normal the mind
appears to be, the soul can never be fulfilled by its sometimes cruel analysis
and pretense. If the soul is totally honest, but mind is forever evaluating and
judging what it perceives. After writing a letter to the doctor, which Elisabet
forgets (perhaps purposefully) to seal, Alma cannot resist opening it on her
way to the post, finding that the actress is “studying” her as if she might be
the subject for a latter enactment of life.
Bergman, the director, proffers all the
usual explanations: she has been traumatized by past history, represented by a
photograph of a young boy and his family being arrested by the Nazis in World
War II; she is suffering from the shock of the new inhumane treatments of
humans in the Viet Nam War, which is symbolized by the self-immolation of a
Buddhist Monk on her television set; she has become disgusted by her “acting”
out life as opposed to actually living and experiencing it.
Given her own guilt over having
successfully “erased” her own would-be child, Alma projects (played out in the
script twice, the first with the camera tracing the reactions of the accused,
the second focusing on the accuser) a scenario that argues Elisabet, told by a
friend that she was missing the qualities of a good mother, determines to
become pregnant, only to be immediately terrified by everything that comes with
it: the changes the body, the fear of pain, and the possibilities of death, not
to say anything about how it might change her independently active life. In
Alma’s telling, Elisabet grows to hate her son even before he is born, and
turns the new baby over to her husband and nanny for its upbringing. Much as in
Bergman’s later film, Autumn Sonata,
the lonely child only grows to love and idealize his mother further in her
absence, the fact of which only further fuels Elisabet’s hate. For Alma, the
final self-imposed silence is an attempt to block out all those who might love
and wish to communicate with the great diva.
The intelligent viewer recognizes,
perhaps, that the young nurse who imagined herself as able to “become”
Elisabeth, is perhaps a version of Elisabet’s earlier self, and that their
encounter in a time out of time, has allowed the tortured actress to restore
some of her own past.
If we never discover precisely what
actually happened to Elisabet Vogler, we can certainly imagine it through
Bergman’s complex depiction of the slings and arrows, large and small, that
gradually destroy the heart, that lead to the hateful revenge of an Electra who
can no longer abide the beating of the human heart. Whatever happened to
Elisabet Vogler, we can hope has finally been resolved by the film’s last
frame, which takes the finally unburdened soul into its future possibilities.
Los Angles, September 21, 2015
"First of all, no matter how normal the mind appears to be, the soul can never be fulfilled by its sometimes cruel analysis and pretense. If the soul is totally honest, but mind is forever evaluating and judging what it perceives."
ReplyDeleteWonderful, profound thoughts, Doug. Great critique of Bergman's experimental masterpiece.