INGMAR BERGMAN’S ‘SHAME’ “There isn’t much that gets through…”

 © 2019 by James Clark

      With many Bergman films now having thrilled us by their confrontation of distemper and ecstasy, we could conclude that a standoff has reached its outer limits. But we would be far off the mark. Our film today, Shame (1968), has something very new to impart. But it doesn’t come in a straightforward way.

As we’ve often found in these treasures of semi-theatrical drama, the very endings turn out to divulge the marvel, and here again it brings to light our foothold in a slippery terrain. A former musician, Eva, finds herself, with civil war rampant, in a small fishing boat crowded with escapees (including her husband, Jan), where the seas are strewn with corpses. She tells Jan of a dream she’s just had. “I was walking down a very beautiful street. On one side were white houses with flowering arches and pillars. On the other side was a leafy park. Dark green water flowed beneath the trees lining the street. I came to a high wall overgrown with roses. Then an airplane came and set the roses on fire. But it wasn’t all terrible, because it was so beautiful. I looked down into the water and watched the roses burn. I held a baby in my arms. It was our daughter. She snuggled up to me… and I could feel her mouth against my cheek. And the whole time I knew there was something I should remember. Something someone had said. But I’d forgotten what it was…”

Neither ecstasy nor distemper has enveloped her. What that was is the heart of this very strange film—a vision ripping the constraints of not only cinema (the first seconds entail a reel of film shredding), but also theatre and every kind of art. In many ways, this conundrum looks to Bergman’s early film, Sawdust and Tinsel (1953), where physical triumph is a drug and machination and advantage have saturated the landscape. (However, the death march there would be a Rose Bowl Parade beside what’s in store here.) A second ingredient to consider is the aura of goofiness and malignancy being a specialty of the suspense films produced by Alfred Hitchcock. (Hitch, however, would be Violence Lite in light of Shame.) To cast some light upon this virtually incomprehensible phenomenon, we should remember that the term, “shame,” covers many degrees. Mainstream morality is never at a loss to hammer a roster of the “shameful.” Mainstream morality and the reflections of Ingmar Bergman have nothing in common. Maybe someone had suggested to Eva (that name being about the primal) that the crowning shame of world history, a factor reducing social and scientific action to childishness, is the fakery of immortality and its compensatory  assaults in lieu of fully creative power.

Along a trajectory of the pair, in single beds, being woken by an alarm clock—Eva, Hollywood-style (with a Swedish supplement of her nudity), quick to get into action, while Jan remains inert, has trouble finding his slippers and fusses with a wisdom tooth—Jan gives us the other bookend of a dream. He gets going, at last, with, “You know, I had the strangest dream last night.   Know what I dreamed? We were back with the Philharmonic, sitting side-by-side [she being the Concert Master, he being a second fiddle], rehearsing  the 4th Brandenburg Concerto, the largo tempo [slow and dignified style], and everything happening now [the orchestra having been shut down, due to the sporadic deadliness] was behind us. I woke up crying…” Eva’s only response is to wonder if he’s going to shave this morning, in meeting a delivery of two flats of loganberries for the mayor of the town across from the island where now they own and work a small farm. Before they hit the road, Jan has a panic attack. As he huddles by a window, she reasons, “You mustn’t be so sensitive. Try to control yourself. I do.” Tearful Jan replies, “Can’t you ever shut up?” Soon he apologizes, and nothing is right going forward, toward excitements you’ve seen many times before; only, you’ve never seen what this excitement brings your way. On the ferry to the client, they encounter him and his wife, and bourgeois patter clicks in like a nice brunch. “We just went out to check on the summer cottage… We won’t be home today, but Mrs. Almberg should be there… Why don’t we get together for dinner sometime and make some music? I’ve missed our soirees…” Thrilled by the generous transaction by the leading lights’ servant, they visit an antiquarian friend, Fredrick, who also sells wine they can now afford. He’s been drafted and is very unhappy about it; but he counters his anxiety by showing them, “the finest piece I own,” a rococo ceramic music box which his mother left for him. “I’ll never sell it!” Eva and Jan furtively smile at the indulgence, never noticing that the practice of their musical energies have dwindled to music-box proportions. Or, was this regime never more than about correctly following others’ initiatives to secure cozy elegance? While they clamor for wine and chat about civilized overtures, they feel no need (or no hope) to counter the plague of domination on the move. (And yet the essence of music–a carnal action illuminating problematic dynamics and against facile conclusions–invokes a significant rejoinder against the mayhem having its way.) The mayor’s wife had remarked, “My sister was evacuated to a transit camp, and they’re bombed almost daily.” A cut away from the precious music machine reveals a clock face with Hercules struggling to support it. Herculean effort, seemingly not for mortals. Also in view, an old photo of a royal family, prominent by way of mass murder.

The little stopover does allow something else, from out of the forgotten wisdom Eva presumably brushed past, lost forever within her shabby recollection. Fredrick’s homage to his mother’s taste (perhaps deeply felt) does involve, for the wide-awake, the modesty of reaching out to others who may not derive the real deal, but a facsimile from which to be brushed and to constitute a player, of sorts, in the motion of primordial creativity–involving a transaction with the cosmos itself, a transaction of disinterestedness, the antithesis of the savagery having its way and bragging about it. During the early moments of the protagonists’ resembling forgettable movies, Eva nags Jan for failing to repair their radio. Fredrick, asking them, “Do you listen to the radio?” poses an exigency to be fully alert about what the rest of the world is doing. The conscript spoons out, “Yesterday, our side threatened to take the most atrocious measures. And the other side congratulated us on our imminent destruction…” Slipping, it seems, Fredrick calms himself with, “I suspect we needn’t take it too seriously… Taste this [wine]. It’s quite good… Cheers!… When I sit here all alone among my things, I start feeling so miserable. I’m not sure why. [A tug in the dark, like Eva’s forgetfulness.] Maybe because no one would miss me if I were gone.” Jan would have to say, “You’ll be back before you know it.”

Of course, that miasma would presage some kind of downfall. The descent to their disaster here is not at all confined to the register of bemusing coincidence. Back home, there’s an al fresco dinner with that lovely, head-turning wine, comprising new (but dubious) frontiers, ranging from her supposed resolve to take up Italian again (“You have to tell me every night to study”)/ He promising, “I’ll be very strict”); to, “practice our instruments a half hour a day” (Did anyone say, “music?”); to, have a baby (her idea)–in fact three, before she’s 40: “It’s not something one can explain” [another wisp of errant essence, with the addition of his seeing a doctor to discern if during their separation Jan’s promiscuousness may have compromised the plan]. She ramps up   the pressure, by questioning his knowing what love is–“Self-love, you know a lot about that!” He tries, “I’ll be a better man next year, next week! I believe one can change completely if one wants to… I’m not a determinist, you know…” (As she runs amok with the term, she manages to look about 13.) He ends the discussion with, “Let’s not do the dishes, now.” She sails him to bed with the knowing smile, “What should we do instead?” During the chores with the chickens and such, next morning, several deafening air force jets dive close to the yard of invention, and one of the heroes of a parachute drop lends up in a tree close to their property. (Bourgeois plans on hold.)

The fantasy converts have, in the midst of that crude show of shock and awe, commenced to deal with each other and the world on a basis of obliterating every irritant. The sighting of the man in the tree, subsequently dead, elicits sharp opposition. Jan, seeing Eva racing toward the casualty, asks, “Where are you going?” Her response is, “He’ll die hanging there.” He argues, “It could be the enemy…” “You coward!” she cries out, after his holding her back, and her slapping him. “Then go!” he screams; and despite qualms he does want her gone, as she wants him gone. Precious gestures notwithstanding, their patience with each other–requiring sharing of mature objectives–has ended, replaced with sporadic and desperate damage control. Soon he’s fetched his rifle and she, now again an ally (for a bit longer), tells him she’ll phone for an ambulance. Seeing that the invader has died, Jan returns to the house where the skies scream with more planes, more pronounced troubled kinetics. A partisan unit arrives, and the officer asks him if he was the one who shot the sitting duck. (Not then, but soon, Jan becomes a mass murderer.) “I suggest you clear out,” was how the leader of the supposed security force left them. That figure wears a contraption on his head, resembling a helmet of mail, a medieval throwback, bringing the era of jets back to burning witches and invoking Death to give good news, as in Bergman’s film, The Seventh Seal (1957). Also prominent in that film are the crusades and the plague.

Car trouble, on the part of the semi-gentle and inept farmers, lands them in the midst of the forces who wield machinery to deadly  effect. The other parachutists of that day are particularly galvanized by the cheap shot; but they also get down to making the best political (machinational) outcome for the world at large. (The preamble had Jan proposing, “I’ll put it in gear, and you push. It’s downhill, anyway.”) One bright aspect of their capture is the flashing of their headlights about to hit what they think is the open road, after they actually repair the vehicle, but only as the enemy arrives to stop their escape. The play of lights, all-round, affords a topspin from out of an execution. But the process to particularly watch is the instance of ugly mobs appointing themselves to crush their like and the unaffiliated. The commander of the aerial unit uses Jan, and especially photogenic Eva, to dish out special insult to those they, the invaders,  love to hate, and contribute to the sense of impossibility of anyone choosing integrity. Jan and Eva, bereft of creative traction, cannot, unlike protagonists and secondary figures in many other Bergman films, carry us to viable, though outnumbered, illumination. Smallish touches–like that flare of light, and the medieval helmet–dimly guide us. But the heavy lifting must entail an incisive renunciation of the mantra of advantage, by which disinterestedness may come to bear.

The clever jumper has brought along a movie camera to bring about a propaganda coup, whereby irresistible Eva is encouraged to put out inane personal facts to be dubbed over by a seeming cri de coeur against the homeland. The klieg light bathing her in the night catches her blonde presence in such a way that she emits an instance of uncanniness which has force, while being entangled in a cheap fraud. After the soldier/ director has enough fodder to swing the trick, he asks Eva about her “political affiliation,” and learns that she doesn’t have one. “Don’t you care what political regime governs you?” the pushy one asks. Though her discernments are shabby, her vague skepticism from out of the world of music gives her some room to move, if she has initiative beyond wine. As the politician turns to Jan, the latter cries out, “I have a weak heart,” and then faints. This prompts the ugly documenter to order, “Keep rolling! Get him passing out.” (This moment being a couplet with the clever and malevolent actor/ prize fighter slaughtering the ringmaster in Sawdust and Tinsel.) The locals then rebound and run the strangers away. And the patriots catch up with the pacifists regarding the bogus hatred to the home team. (In the interim, that same night on the silver screen, they are wakened by a blazing bombardment all around their supposed sanctuary; and their abortive escape finds them operating on empty. Before the shattering of their sleep, Eva agonizes, “It’s good we don’t have kids…”[vapid Jan smoothing over, “We’ll have kids when peace comes”]. “We’ll never have kids,” she ripostes. The bombs scare them, but (Hollywood-style–Hitchcock’s Tippy always immune to those damn birds) they’re spared to provoke us to imagine what real trouble looks like. Eva initiates an evacuation, while Jan holds his head. (This being a stage before that self-sparing protagonist turns out to be a Psycho, for our edification.) Her move is to head for the seaboard–Jan insisting, “as long as you drive;” but before that Jan proposes killing the chickens during the paucity of food. But neither of them has the nerve to slaughter the hens. On their junket, they see many corpses. Eva stops to regard a dead toddler in a farmyard. At this, she realizes there is no leeway to avoid a steady assault of Byzantine madness. (Its impossibility comprises a clue to a never-ventured range of logic.) Once again, her demand, “Pull yourself together,” hasn’t a hope. The surface of their vehicle has become encrusted with the industrial-level detritus, as if an ancient wreck, an ancient poison. Back in their dining room, Jan remarks, skittishly, “It sounds that they’re at the crossroads…” The complainer complains, “I can’t stand it!” And Eva goes to the window that does not constitute a window of opportunity. He suggests hiding in the basement, and she tells him, “I won’t be trapped like a rat!” (Easier said than done.) After a bomb blows open their door, their barnyard becomes fiery but not fiery enough for their plight. (Jan crazily commences to babble about the provenance of his violin, which he might touch one day, for half an hour. And yet, such a seeming cop-out, regarding a soldier/ artisan–serving in the Russian army against Napoleon and his stunted vision of power–and that soldier’s loss of a leg and return to musical machinery to the point of majesty, may have been the coward’s brush with lucidity. From there, he lobbies for a declaration of love from Eva. Do you care for me a little? She, now fully cynical, replies, with no warmth, “Yes, I care for you a little…” He proceeds to have a cramp in his leg. The busy, but fragmentary, day ends with her command from her bed, “Get over here…”

They’re rounded up at a grocery store. Then, along with other suspected traitors, they’re trucked to an elementary school being used as a detention centre. Along with other “intellectuals” en route, the protagonists nearly disappear in the public hubbub of the event. (Their being loaded into the truck is filmed from an abstract distance.) In their case, we eventually come to realize that the mayor, doubling as the last word for military order in this pocket of stress, would have realized from the first that Eva’s declaration of “longing for liberation” was a crock. But within the sadistic talent pool of amateur or semi-amateur soldiers, intent upon crushing some supposed evil ideology, the opportunity to rough up rather recent and rather odd arrivals gets legs. Those, including the vicar, who were misinformed that the other side (very rich in aircrafts) had won the war, and went on to welcome the neighbors, receive savage beatings. Eva (and Jan), along this current of paranoia, are made to hear her heresies–“We’ve been suppressed for too long, etc.”–and the projectionist relishes spewing “Lights out!” and fondles her breasts in dumping her into a holding room, where a corpse and someone dying from torture are seen. The officer of the division has argued, “How do you explain the fact that paratroopers liquidated every civilian within almost two square miles of you, and spared the two of you?” Her response was, “I don’t understand any of this.” Soon Jan is tossed into the room where she is trying to make some sense of her homeland. (A jailer makes light  of the vicar’s dislocated shoulder. “No tennis for a few weeks.”) Jan’s typical complaints do ring an important bell, namely, Jof, in The Seventh Seal, being beaten up by an ugly mob in the 12th century; and reporting, “They hit me on the head…” Eva notes, “I don’t see anything.” Jof and his wife, Marie, go on to hold the powers of acrobatics and juggling–as hopelessly far from the goons as you can get. And hopelessly far from Jan and Eva. Later, after Jan misbehaves abominably (as we’ll soon set out its timbre), they find themselves in single file on a ridge at twilight, the echo of the Dance of Death, in The Seventh Seal. (The holding room displays multiples of two patterns which the kids had colored-in: a three-leaf clover; and a bull’s-eye.)

Their music associate, the mayor, shows up, in the courtyard, where all the suspects have been herded. He addresses the disappointing by pointing out a figure having been dragged to a stake and covered by a cloth bag. “This man collaborated with the enemies and caused us heavy losses. But the government has pardoned him and commuted his death sentence to life at hard labor. The rest of you will also receive more clemency than you deserve.” The chief, not completely on the same page as the “government,” points his cane, as if effecting a benediction, to indicate those who can go home immediately. He announces, “Some of you will be freed immediately and transported home.” “Transported?” (Just as the execution was to go off unofficially, Eva, now in his office, was to be made a bogus example to dilute the tyrant’s massacre. “I gave orders not to touch you.” Eva replies, “They behaved… almost correctly.”

The mayor, one Jacobi, now  has Eva as his mistress (another event shimmering under the radar). Also down there, Jan has figured that out. Digging potatoes and looking like medieval serfs, they quarrel in such a way you’d think they’d never been exposed to the chance to love music in its dynamics in the form of mortality being also a vital correspondent of the cosmos itself. Jan, fed up with the work, announces he’s going into the house to listen to the radio Jacobi has given them. “You do that,” she sneers. “It’ll be a relief not to see you.” He recalls, “Just the other day you said that it was good we had Jacobi as a friend…” She declares, “I’m going to ask Jacobi to stop coming here. Filip [a friend and source of fresh fish and another loose cannon having put together a gang] says it could make things worse for us.” For the nonce, Jan, implicitly often drunk, goes out of character: “It’s none of Filip’s damn business who comes here!” She, finding transparent his insipid bravado, accuses him of being “such a suck-up” in dealing with both of the men. (Her also being a lover of Filip.) She threatens, “I don’t suck-up!” “Suck-up, suck-up, suck-up,” he disagrees. Eva says, “When peace comes, we’re going our separate ways. It will be heaven to get away from you and your childishness!” He sits down beside her and apologizes. “You say that, but you don’t mean it. The words just fall out of your mouth,” she pursues her hopeful attack. Root-systems shot, if ever they seriously functioned. Hence, Jan’s, “Can we be friends?” And her rush to embrace him. Jacobi knocks (now a daily drug). She opens the door and, to his, “Am I causing trouble?” she assures him, “Not at all.” “Jan!” he yells, “Where the hell are you?” [he had been hiding]. The Big Daddy of the North brings to him the score of Dvorak’s Trio in E flat Major. “An uncle left it to me” [a bid for a placid musicale?] To Eva he gives a ring, “an old family heirloom.” “Eva, talk to me… Don’t be sad,” he pleads. She eventually tolerates his embrace (as with Jan, not long ago), as the trio proceeds to get drunk on something strong. Before Jan collapses on the table, Eva suggests he not come anymore. He tells them, “I happen to like you two… I could have sent you to a labor camp… Jan Rosenberg, are you afraid? Are you an artist or a mouse?” “Oh, I’m a mouse,” he replies, in a non-mouse register. At that, Jacobi smashes his cane on the table. He goes on, unpleasantly, “The sacred freedom of art. The sacred gutlessness of art…” After a long and stressful pause, he goes out to take a piss. Eva reasons, “God, I wish I could sober up!” “We have to get rid of him,” the unimpressive farmer declares. (Soon we’ll see that the mild-mannered hanger-on has a reservoir hitherto hidden. As with his adversaries, Jan proceeds to short-circuit the phenomenon of force.) Before we see Jacobi, we hear him announcing, “The woods are full of people”–people following Filip’s lead. “I’d often wondered what they’d do to me. They have no reason to torture me. I have no secret information… But perhaps they just feel like making me suffer… Don’t worry, I’m just kidding. This part of the island has been pacified” [wiped out by the enemy]. (Fredrick had used a similar pacifier.) With Jan dead to the world, the militant mayor turns, sadly late, to introduce a new incisiveness with Eva. “Can you feel that I’m here? Touch my eyes. Can you feel who I am?” “No,” is her answer; and pragmatic Marie comes by, from the 12th century, by way of, The Seventh Seal. Jacobi keeps trucking, “It’s odd, you see. I’ve only felt close to others a few times… It’s not something you can talk about. There’s nothing to say. Nowhere to hide. No excuses. No evasions…” (An oracle, in the oddest way, within an extended work springing with rare direction.) He concludes with, “Just great guilt, great pain and great fear… Damn, it’s cold!” Prosaic Eva wants to shoo him out. He, though, takes her to the bedroom and gives her his life’s savings. (More instinctive discernment appears in his feeling the change in the weather hurting his lame leg. Power of a different species.) In face of Eva’s adamant hostility he perseveres with stories of his grandson and the death of his mother–each vignette endeavoring to open a new world. “There isn’t much that gets through…”

The preamble of his familiar lovemaking with her in the greenhouse posits a maelstrom of nonsense in both of them. He divulges that he accepted his leadership because he was afraid of going to the front. She jangles drunkenly, “I’ll never be unfaithful to Jan. Sometimes it frightens me to think about it. So I don’t.” Jan wakes up and drinks more firewater. He rushes to the bedroom, sees the wad of money and puts it in his back pocket. (A Hitchcock touch, for a shredding purchase upon the cosmos per se. Implying a whole different [mundane, advantage-drunkenness] direction of cogency.) He holds his head. He calls out, “Eva!” Church bells ring. He sees them emerging from the tryst. He experiences a silvery atmosphere, recalling Alma’s intensities, in Sawdust and Tinsel. He cringes in the dark stairwell. Eva fetches Jacobi’s cane, and then he leaves. She sees Jan crying, and tells him, “Cry if you think it will help.” As she prepares a pot of tea, that throng noted in the woods materializes as Filip’s rebels apprehending Jacobi and demanding all of his money to finance a stand against the expensive armament of a superior (and yet pathetic) force. Filip and Jacobi enter the house (at which Jan retreats to a nook). Jacobi explains, “Filip says I can buy my freedom because their organization needs cash. So, I’m asking you, dear Eva. Lend me the money I gave you.” “Jan has it,” she tells him, from out of a precinct of careless contempt. Jan, now with a coward’s advantage, declares, “I don’t know anything about money…” Eva, in shock, sees a hard setback, in the making for many years. Thus ensues a futile search, the removal of her recent present, and Filip’s commanding Jan (all now in the yard) to shoot Jacobi. The troopers proceed to trash the house in the mode of a tornado (depths going nowhere), the end of the farmers’ supposed haven in the wake of a feeble grasp of music. Jan cradles his violin of a noble craftsman, while soldiers slaughter the chickens. The house is firebombed. On the first wave of his molten assignment he aims the handgun, and then throws the weapon to the ground. But the juggernaut of humiliation clicks in and he discharges several volleys into a Jacobi who screams and crawls under a wagon where the execution continues. Eva leans upon what’s left of a wall.

The soldiers leave and the soldiering of Jan and Eva crashes into the realm of metaphor. Eva asks where he hid it. Jan tells her it was in his back pocket. (Amateurs? Hollywood? Too much, to continue in that vein?) Next morning they leave their retreat and stage a retreat to death. Still unconvinced that Jan wasn’t a pushover, she demands, “Why didn’t you hand over the money?” His shot is, “They’d have shot him anyway.” Her feeble, “That’s not true,” is followed by a roar of crying. “Stop it! he commands. Then he smashes her face, sending her to the ground. (An itinerant not wise enough to beware of a killer, as in Sawdust and Tinsel.) Now it is she who covers her face with her hands. Along a war-blasted road, he pushing their effects in a wagon, Jan marches jauntily and menacingly. She is slouched over and far behind him. She falls down, being heavily disoriented. He doesn’t miss a beat. (Killing becomes him.) She catches up. At a charred farm, someone shoots in their direction, in fact an adolescent in uniform who has deserted in seeing his war not ending happily–that latter term seeming hard to place for a youngster with a mind of his own. Jan claims to be peaceful. Eva asks, “Are you hungry? We’ll give you food…” He’s in another greenhouse–another point of transport, another coincidence stemming from a Mad Hatter. She asks, “Did you hurt your hand?”/ “A dog bit me” [He’s lucky]. “Shall I have a look? I’ll bandage it up… I’ll get you something to eat…” He’s not hungry–the atmosphere sucking up all taste. Jan, quickly getting past the boy’s name (Johan; music), wants the location of “Hammass” (where a boat, for hire, plies). Over tea, they learn that the boy hasn’t slept for days. His alert having flagged in the vicinity of Eva, Jan strikes like a rattler. Now holding the gun, he hunts the stranger along the coastal path, as if the kid were a rabbit. And, with Eva onscreen, the fatal shots come very easily to the killer. Her eyes are beyond horror.  They trudge to the port and they coincide with the Dance of Death on a ridge not without powerful beauty they can’t read. Jan’s shapeless (Death) cap goes medieval. The prime of the neighborhood has convened. On embarkation, fine hors d’oeuvres are distributed. Jan seems to be seasick. and thereby he doesn’t share the rowing. But he hops to it in using an oar to push away the hundreds of corpses in the still water, comprising another link of lostness. In the same vein of this vision of absolute dead-end, the skipper quietly steps overboard, joining the drowned. Trouble in Paradise. Jan covers his face. There is beauty in the texture of the harsh sea. And then Eva musters her feel-good poem, with its forgotten theme.

That tincture of another direction holds for us a new twist, in lieu of very poor sports: one is obliged to generously shore up and celebrate little, and maybe big, overtures.