INGMAR BERGMAN’S ‘FACE TO FACE’ “I just don’t understand……”

 © 2020 by James Clark

      At the mid-point of filmmaker Ingmar Bergman’s career (by then widely recognized to be superlative), he paused in his formidable march of theatrical dramas to do something else. First we’ll pin-point the change. Then we’ll try to understand what it means.

In the midst of his trilogy of assault and carnage, Bergman shot off (in nine days) his rendition of playwright, Eugene Ionesco’s classic of Theatre of the Absurd, namely, Rhinoceros (1960). Bergman named his film, The Rite (1969), whereby hitherto mainstream rationalists disappear in favor of crashing into the inscrutable. There a micro-second of the uncanny becomes haunting, more remarkable, to all the repositories of civilization as it has come to pass. A second form of this breakaway, namely, The Touch (1971), sets up a dead leady (and her flashbacks, and perhaps her granddaughter) as the wisest soul around. Having the right touch, eclipsing a long and lacking romance between two so-called “rebels,” and eclipsing world history itself.

Our film today, Face to Face (1976), could very well comprise an addition to that strange duet noted above, perhaps because, in spite of their audacity, more audacity has to be shown. Here the lion’s share of the film is a protagonist’s dream. That her cogitations go nowhere decisive reverts to the “lover’s” in The Touch and the judge in The Rite. But the protagonist’s dream has become so lengthy because she has a particularly intense undertaking to challenge the rule of pedantry. And in that undertaking, she has come, face to face, not with mere dialogue and dramatic action but with philosophy, wherein the whole universe  is the show.

There is a plethora of familiar features attending to the outset of Face to Face. We can note them; but the clutter of this overture implies something more. Jenny, our protagonist, has a wedding ring exactly like the dead lady in The Touch. Plunges of a sea, maintain for the credits, a cue to dynamics you should not take lightly. A stark asylum anticipates, In the Presence of a Clown (1997).  Our central character has a home with a stain-glass window, which recalls the shocks of The Passion of Anna (1969). The motif is beige; her wardrobe is even more fixed in beige, as with Marianne, the bourgeois disappointment, in Scenes from a Marriage. Jenny phones to her grandmother, on the subject of a radical renovation: “It’s completely empty.”

  

Only when Jenny gets down to her job as a mental health expert does the heart of the matter catch fire. Alone with an argumentative young client in a solitary grey cell, who, that day, refuses to speak, our protagonist gets, surely not for the first time, a hint that scientific pedantry has lost its way. “Wouldn’t you feel better if you showered and got dressed?” The girl being incarcerated ignores the psychiatrist from another world. “Let’s open the curtains,” the real estate maven suggests. As she rushes past the patient in a blur of a wintry lab coat, in order to let some sun do some good, we have onscreen the doubting minority, skeptical that Jenny is what she needs. “We should air out the room.” Panning back from the grey fabric on the wall, we see the client having placed a finger into a corner of her mouth. Perhaps a taunt. But perhaps a form of therapy, inasmuch as the preceding film, The Touch, introduces fingers being in creative action, marginalized and being the better for it. (That the girl, Maria, is sweating profusely, forges a connection with the sweaty judge and amateur metaphysician, in The Rite. That her name links to the alert young girl, Marie, in The Touch, also convenes a rejoinder.) She holds both hands together. A slight smile crosses Maria’s face. She slowly strokes her hands. Once again the agitated lamplighter eclipses the enigma, in the course of eliciting a conversation. That motion had created a very brief ripple of action, far too slight to make an impact. Maria is fully onscreen, while Jenny is seen partially and from behind. “Last time we met, we had a good conversation,” (perhaps only from the doctor’s point of view). Maria resumes touching her mouth with her fingers. She looks at Jenny with disdain. “What’s happened now?” Eyes closed, the girl caresses her breasts. “Hey,” the erudite calls out. “You know that I know you’re putting on an act. What good will it do you?” The “actor” slowly reaches out a hand to Jenny’s face. “Poor Jenny,” the psychiatrist is mocked, for having tried to reach her on her pedantic terms. (Hostilities biting deep.) The healer flashes past the sick, her lab coat becoming an aspect of a militant, military engagement. Maria does what she can, by way of the fingers playing upon and within her mouth.

    We’ve seen a retreating psychiatrist in a grey, solitary cell, during the scramble that was, In the Presence of a Clown. Here, it’s far more complicated. Though her first scene, and many to follow, have been shot through with Theatre of the Absurd, we’re in for quite a treat of braving and confounding the expectations of her upbringing. There is a tuning device, coming to bear right after the shambles with Maria, by which to maintain a singularity about this saga. Jenny is not only temporarily without a house, but also temporarily  without a husband (being on a several months project in Chicago, in his capacity of being a major Swedish psychiatrist) and without her adolescent daughter, spending the summer with “horse camp.” As such, we see her beginning her tenure at her grandparents’ flat (a flat like nothing ever seen before). The structure, clearly having once been a church, had been installed with a design thrust beyond the palatial. The stonework (having predated the neoclassical entryway by many centuries), reaches for about two hundred feet, whereby frescoes, mosaics and other friezes produce nocturnal apparitions of mysterious and breathtaking allure. Stain glass windows of arresting and profound power also function within the genius of ancient hearts. And no one notices, despite Jenny’s having lived there from the age of 9, due to her parents’ death in a car crash, and despite the many decades of ownership of the tenants. It is lost as if in a hidden crypt, like the wooden Madonna in the crypt in the small church, in The Touch. Pedantry lushes—cemented in their gobbling for smarts, homage, and, for especially, safety. (As she approaches her once and now temporary home, an ambiguous church bell peals.)

Inside, it is largely about the family saga, of toeing the line and cash flow, tracing back to Plato. As to her excellent career, she reports, “Well, you know me. I’m comfortable wherever I am.” Grandma shifts to, “How are things?” Jenny chirps, “Things are great.”/ “Is something wrong between you and Erik?” the family navigator demands to know. Her granddaughter’s line gets smashed by the oldster’s far-seeing  lighthouse. (Jenny’s temp stint is odd, despite the dislocation. Maybe she’s not the indispensable team player.) Grandma persists, “Something’s wrong anyway…” This elicits from the doctor, “I just feel a little out of sorts. I don’t think I’ve recovered from the flu this spring. I need to start taking vitamins.” (Karin, the catastrophic protagonist in The Touch, also swears, to no avail, to vitamins.) Thus ensues a fitful night. Her having to visit the bedroom of Grandpa, where his daily obsession of looking over family photos constitutes a homage to solid solvency, rubs her the wrong way, although she has no trouble masking it.

    In her bedroom, the sound of a loud clock reminds her of her real work. Drifting to sleep, she dreams of a figure—another family intensity, but not in favor with the family. That such an eccentric, in a dark blue tone, haunts her, means a lot. The apparition delivers a sense of disappointment and anger, and she cringes. It now stands in near darkness, the face dissolving to an ivory presence. (The skills of cinematographer, Sven Nykvist, are never more thrilling than in this film.) The figure begins to tremble. Jenny screams. The spectre shows black woolen gloves. The unhappy granddaughter sits up, bringing the mundane back to prominence. She puts on a white dressing gown which recalls her lab coat and the embarrassments with Maria, another intractable engagement.

Face to Face has just given us an installment of challenging dreams. Recall that the Bergman film, Dreams (1955), subtly nudges us into surrealist, interpersonal complication. Here, however, that early, gentle suggestiveness has been visited by the radical pressure of that later surrealist, nihilist subset, Theatre of the Absurd. In order for our protagonist to do her utmost, she is about to enter a very long dream situation, more than eighty-per cent of the action here.

    The rest of real time segues to the sustained reverie of Jenney’s showdown with a life-changing, most controversial, procedure. As such, her first full day, as residing with the grandparents, is her taking up an invitation to a cocktail party, at the centre of which a hostess is happily beside herself with a clutch of smug gays, having mastered one kind of life-change, but not the life-change she has in mind. The host’s husband, another psychiatrist, and a no show for the party, had, at the mental hospital where Penny was covering, for the chief, no less, had needled the newcomer, “I seriously don’t think we can cure a single person. I think a few of them will be cured regardless of our efforts.” Jenny, falling for the jaded practitioner’s small smarts, smiles, but feels a validity she doesn’t like. For what it’s worth, Jenny declares, “Maria is a very gifted person, bright, sensitive, emotionally mature. One other seemingly emotionally mature player (at the party), is a man described by the hostess, as a traveler “to developing countries,” and teacher to girls about contraceptives. Moreover, “He’s the sweetest doctor in the word.” Before this not quite ideal couple show what they can, and can’t do, we have the hostess, rich as hell, but displaying her poverty. “I haven’t changed as a person. I know that they are my feelings and experiences. Because there’s no distance between myself and what I’m experiencing…” She laughs it off with, “God, I’m not making any sense!” (Bergman’s irony here having remarkable weight.)

Tomas, the “remarkable” hope, has much to do with Penny’s last stand. He is Maria’s half-sister; but soon we know he hasn’t troubled himself with lucidity at the level the patient has. (His humanitarian interests are shored up by a medical degree and a family estate.) And during her dream, she’ll conclude that his deepest objective is to stay in Jamaica, because, “I’ve heard that you can live incredibly amorally there.”   Penny, too, disappoints at this juncture. She phones her paramour to break a date; and, even more wrong, at the hostesses bedroom where she made the call, she went out on a high balcony where the city, the river and its cast of care became a remarkable, a brief epiphany, which did not touch here.

    Their rendezvous, at a restaurant of his choice, and afterwards, does not “develop” for prime time. Jenny nearly runs away on seeing him outside the door. She’s looking for a change, but she can’t discern what “change” could look like. Two lamps are placed over the blue-chip door, with its austere signal to the right clientele. The spare and the elaborate. And missing a missing link. They might represent mundane Tomas and mundane (but ranging) Jenny. That no meeting of minds occurs constitutes a portal to her reflective pursuit. (On the phone with the boyfriend she had maintained her seemingly advanced smartness. “Jealousy definitely doesn’t suit either of us.” After hanging up she shows her ambivalence by exclaiming, “Oh, dear Lord.”) Another sentry at the façade of the restaurant is a trio of potted plants. They being identical, indicates sterility. He mocks her cowardice, with, “Are you going in or do you plan on clinging to your flight impulse?” After the meal and at his home, she dishes out her own bruising form of pedantry in the service of advantage. (The only problem being, that, while Tomas comes to prove at heart a (clever, suave) mediocrity, Jenny is supposed to be finding a way to transcend what she confusedly intuits to be obsolete.) Tomas would continue (development-style) with, “I’m just wondering if your breasts are beautiful.” The David, in The Touch, moots in a similar way. But there the bourgeoise lady and her husband quickly squelch the poor taste. The crude move here is met with response only too expert in the involvements of pedantry. “To satisfy your curiosity, I can tell you they are very beautiful. That explanation will have to suffice.” Tomas maintains, “Can’t we be friends? Don’t take it that way.” Her retort is, “I just wanted to know how you’ve imagined us getting from here to your bedroom. And I want to know how you’ve planned on overcoming the awkwardness of undressing. I also want to know what amazing techniques you plan on using to satisfy me, and yourself. I want to know what demands you’ll place on my performance. How adventurous and impulsive you’ll allow me to be, so that when I’m overcome by enthusiasm I don’t make you nervous. I also want to know how you’re envisaging  the conclusion of our sexual encounter…” (She goes home by taxi, after mooting a movie someday. He suggests a classical concert.)

    On going in, she sits down at the doorway, morose about how the evening transpired. She didn’t mean to be overbearing and lacking sensuousness. She leans back, knowing she could stage a far better facsimile of her need. Hands on her lap. It’s the middle of the night, and Grandpa, a life-long pedant, thinks that the grandfather clock is not perfectly true. His wife tries to restore some sanity, but he insists, “It stops” (stopping becoming a horror). He clasps his hands and brings them to his mouth. (Maria’s gesture being strangely similar.) He covers his face with both hands. Many fears from him, and assurances from her—“our finances are excellent”—result in her taking him to her bed. “I’ve already slept enough…” On the way, he cries out, “I’m so damned embarrassed.” (He may be referring to a chronic shaking of his hands. Or, he might also have been visited by an embarrassment of challenge which he has quite successfully avoided all his pedantic, domestic life. And he cries uncontrollably.) Jenny, in the shadows, smiles indulgently.

That immediately she’s fretful, signals her long and eventful dream. She’ll dream there the rest of the film. Having just made a mess in the face of a faker, her thoughts run to surviving, if not enjoying, a world of disappointment. Set in Jenny’s stripped-down house, we have Tomas and the simplistic young gay from the party, who sang, “The more we are together, the happier we get.” They proceed to rape our protagonist, while Maria lies unconscious in an adjacent room. (A return to Bergman in the style of Theatre of the Absurd, here far more Genet than Ionesco.) Jenny, shocked, but not that shocked—recalls Thea with the judge, in The Rite—then declares, “I have to get Maria to the hospital.” Tomas, cynically asking, “What have you done to her?” (The question being also Jenny’s self-criticism about a sterile rationality.) The conclusion of this stage of the probe by a desperate researcher, is the young gay complaining, “She’s too tight.” And Tomas mocking her, “I bet you didn’t know that some have to pay to get laid.” (A furor about the ambulance for Maria traces back to The Rite. The reference regarding prostitution recalls, From the Life of the Marionettes. This reprise wants us to recognize that in this film a focus from the past has been stripped down to the exigency of solitary reflection pertaining to a history of carelessness and a sensibility of disinterestedness. Jenny will fail; but her retreat leaves a possibility for others who are stronger, just as the ignored foyer awaits a discoverer.)

    Then she and Tomas attend a classical piano recital, the frequent cuts to close-ups of the connoisseurs, recalling The Magic Flute, produced only a year before our film today. That little bit of harmony being a prelude to Jenny’s massive loss of traction to come. (Grandpa telling his more spry wife, “I struggle walking.”) Then they’re back in Tomas’ house, and she’s attending to the right register. She begins with, “Let’s not talk too much this evening.” She rapidly shatters the concord he had played along with, by telling him, “You don’t understand.” (And reaping his superficiality, “No, not really.”) She adds, cryptically, “There are certain times in life you just have to make it through.” (Eliciting, of course, “What do you mean?”) “It might be hours or maybe just a minute.” On the heels of those mystical endeavors, she U-turns with, “Do you have any good sleeping pills?” And she enthuses, “I’d like most of all a double dose of those sleeping pills. Maybe I’ll sleep twice as well…” She subscribes to sleeping in his bed, without making love. There, she suddenly shows some confusion, but she still has energy to dish out the maxim, “If you force things to be as usual, they’ll be as usual…” (Here one of those plays of broken syntheses [her face reflecting on a polished surface] comes about, to add to the confusion.) After dosing off, she wakes up intent to the incident of her treatment at the empty house. “I was tight. Cramped. Dry.” From out of a guttural howl she begins to laugh. Laughing bitterly, that she, with all her clandestine dynamics, being without the wherewithal to seal the deal. She sits up, her hands, made for making the cosmos dance, cover her face. “I’m sorry. I don’t know. I don’t understand.” She resumes that laughing fit, lasting a long time. She buries her face in the covers. Her hands relax. He tells her, “Try to sit up. Come now. Try.” She repeats, “I just don’t understand.” She  begins to cry. He says, “There, there. I’m here.” She goes into hysterics; a failure she knows she should never plunge so low. (She leans on a plush chair, gasping. She’s situated between a floor lamp and a tiny toy dog. She rubs her face with her hand.) “I want to go home. Call me a taxi. I’ll manage on my own. This will pass…” After another crying fit, he asks, “Should I call for a doctor?”/ “What are you saying?” she replies. “I’m just tired.” He drives her home. She tries to steady herself at a mirror. Her reflection of gloom.

She sleeps for a day and a half; Grandma is not amused. The oldsters are headed for a vacation trip to relatives, and Grandma, troubled at the strange weakness, wonders if Aunt Erika might be helpful. Both women, though, howl at the thought of that figure figuring in their life. She had, however, been the troubling apparition at this film’s outset, where the supposed demon was already exerting a powerful seduction. The hosts’ bon voyage had Jenny telling Grandma, “I can take care of myself. I love taking care of myself when I’m sick.” She phones Tomas, and with a big smile, she tells him, “I just wanted to apologize for behaving so badly. I feel great. Thank you. I thought you could take me to the movies this evening.  (Something very unlike this movie.) Erika’s presence becomes close by. Her austere care, with intense eyes, first of all seem invisible like the foyer, to the movie fan. But the unfinished business catches up with her, and the receiver slips down like a dead weight.) In the library being ignored in favor of family photos, Jenny becomes touched by a sense of the uncanniness of her silence, while the figure now becomes shrouded in shadow. In a profile close-up, she mainly lingers not by directly peering toward  the apparition, but by making her hands a pathway to the beckoning. She manages to brace herself with the furniture and her beige apparel. Soon the ruse flags. Her eyes show fright. She looks around for danger. She peers out the window. She turns around quickly, looking for the palpable she knows she carries. A shadow of her fingers on the wall. Long fingers becoming taught. She finds the back of a wooden chair. She plies along the edge of its leather expanse. She pulls down the blind. She putters with tidying up. (Another dead dialectic: at left, a little landscape; she, now clutching her drugs; and at right a lamp, not in order. Moreover, there had been a match to that décor, in the curtain with its ancient pattern of a medieval town gateway, home of the stellar.) She pours water into a glass. She pours out a number of pills and swallows them. She grabs even more, having difficulty to place them in her mouth. There is a similarity of a naughty, careless child. A rapid slide wherein the delicate and profound textures of many toils rip open to a plummeting capitulation. More water, more sleeping pills. In funneling the remainder, she places her head back, and in that  position she looks to the heavens. Her hands and fingers had soured. She lies back on the bed. She tells herself, “I don’t feel scared. Not lonely. I don’t even feel sad. Actually, it feels nice.” Her hands, calmly on her chest. Her right hand, into the air. She plays that hand and its forefinger slowly upon the wall, tracing the pink patterns on the wallpaper. The finger and the shadow revealing another world belonging to the mundane. (How many times had Jenny been there, or at least close?)

    Jenny, moving along with her deliberations in a blood-red medieval, clerical gown, has somewhat taken up the burden of The Magic Flute and its pedantic, authoritarian priests. How does it differ? She leaves ecstasy in favor of literature. “Once upon a time there was a little girl  who lived in a castle. Every day she’d wander through fine halls … But nowhere could she find somebody to trust.” Grandma’s precepts do not bring assurance. “Why am I so afraid? It’s so hard to breathe, Grandma… Why does it smell so bad here? And it’s terribly hot. Old people smell so bad. I think old people are disgusting. They make it so you can’t breathe. I hate when Grandma puts her hand on my shoulder and wants to kiss me.” She changes that habitual bind and finds some courage in not having committed suicide. That positive step slips into her brain damage from the  crisis. Alive but sustained by tubes in her nose. Absurdist flare-ups being a netherworld of Jenny’s showdown.

Her much appreciated gift here, though, is an Erika, welcoming and lending her scarf in the in the freezing ward. She embraces Jenny and gently touches her forehead. “You’re not afraid of me?” the family horror asks. But back she falls, with a madhouse of patients in Grandma’s flat. One woman complains, “When they put my head back together, they forgot to remove my daily frights.” Jenny tells her, “Come back next month!” Treating Grandpa, she surprisingly shines: “You always need something meaningful between yourself and death.”

Tomas has resurfaced, and he becomes like the gay in, From the Life of the Marionettes, assuring that he and his types are brilliant about emotions. With Jenny embarrassed with her practice—“I’m ashamed, I wish for once in my life, I could find the right words. Just once”—he’s quick to tell her, “That’s right, Jenny, there are patients here that long for the right word. It should be their word and their emotion and not your emotion.” She infers, “I know it’s loneliness. The loneliness of mankind.” This faux pas is given a coda by her husband having jetted from Chicago, and due to go back next day. That tepid techie  begins with, “you have a knack for coming up with surprises.” (A true, though missing, knack, is on tap in Marionettes.) The abstract husband asks, “What do you want me to tell Grandma?”/ “You can tell her the truth,” serves many needs. His, “Take care of yourself,” going out the door, is probably a challenge way over her head. Her being struck by how little love there is in her marriage, becomes reflected in a triad of two opaque hospital windows and her medieval default stance.

    In the maelstrom here, Jenny thinks back to her hardly known parents and their having been not only killed by traffic but, before that, the endless battleground and assault delivered their way as Bohemians in an ultra-bourgeois family. “Everything had to be so proper, correct, precise and hopelessly flawless… Papa, you enjoyed hugging. We were so affectionate! You were sad and nervous… I was just a child. I didn’t understand.” After hammering on the crypt of their bedroom a long time, the passionate strangers that were her parents came forward to add to Jenny’s toil. She meets them with a volley of smashes. “Go away! Go away and never come back. I never want to see your frightened eyes…” Two coffins being hammered shut while we hear them cry, “Help!” (A more subtle form of Theatre of the Absurd.) “We had it good together, Daddy and I!” Then Mom walked by and said, “That’s enough cuddling!” And then Grandma walked by and said, “Your Daddy is nice, but he’s a lazy bum. And Mom agreed with Grandma and together they despised Dad. And they got me on their side. That’s how easy it was. Suddenly, I felt embarrassed when Dad hugged and kissed me. I was so concerned with pleasing Grandma… It was Grandma’s face… and yet it wasn’t hers. She looked like an evil dog getting ready to bite. ‘You can’t wear that dress today. That’s your Sunday dress… Jenny, decent people live in this house… People who have tried to live a life of order and cleanliness.’”/ “Don’t hit me like that! I can’t take it!” While she was reliving that hell, the future medical angel was lunging back and forth. “I know that you love me. I believe you want what’s best for me. I know I have to do as you say.”

Thus, the investigation edges to an adult perspective, particularly a woman of science carrying a mantle derived from tenets holding an unbending stranglehold against the world of emotion. Jenny can rail here about here didactic roots. But can she devise a functionality (not to mention a joyous functionality) as abnormal. “Do you understand? How can you take a child who’s afraid of the dark and lock her in a dark closet? Do you think I’m emotionally crippled for life?” Tomas, that expert as to the untouchable, with his catchphrase, “I’m always fine,” responds with “an invocation for us non-believers: I wish that someone or something may affect me so that I can be real…”/ “What do you mean by ‘real’?”/ “To hear a human voice, and to trust that it came from a human who is made exactly like me. To touch a pair of lips.” On the heels of that questionable discernment, a nurse interrupts this conference. She’s not only surprisingly starlet-like, she’s totally, Hollywood, starlet-like. A comment upon our protagonists’ fibre. The “nurse” brings news that Anna, Jenny’s daughter, is about to show us that if loving coherence is to appear on earth it has to find a way to effectively circumventing nearly everyone on board. Jenny, for all her righteous petitioning, comes to toe the line. That leaves us with a silent invitation to show how it can be done.

Tomas fades into the tropical “real.” And Anna, when hearing her mother say, “I did something stupid a few days ago, I tried to kill myself,” the question the girl poses (with dead eyes) is, “Will you do it again?”/ “How can I be sure?” Jenny had asked of her. “You must try to forgive me… You have to trust what I say.” (That being, on both sides, far down the track in the imperative of empathy.) The adolescent—though in this sustained history of Anna, by works of Bergman, being remarkably perverse and homicidal—performs not so surprisingly. “You never liked me anyway… It’s true… Don’t worry, I can take care of myself.” Anna, the pathological pedant, the maven of “security,” seeing in Grandma a lighthouse.

    Back at Grandma’s house, the family whip has the family doctor convinced that Jenny was suffering from fatigue. (The doctor’s name, Jacobi, has a history in these filmic endeavors as very bad news.) Grandma, remarkably, begins to cry, not you can be sure, on Jenny’s account, but that her long-standing consort, “doesn’t want to get up today. I sense he won’t ever get up again.” Jenny begins to go to see him, but she never completes that meeting, instead standing in the doorway (another overhearing as the one which sealed the dream). Hollywood that won’t let go. Hollywood ambiguity and seduction needing to be treated with great care. He glares at the women. Grandma holds her back. (A crypt that doesn’t quite inspire.) Grandma looks down at the invalid. She strokes his head. Jenny is touched to produce a homage. “I stood at the door for a long time looking at the old couple and their closeness. I watched their slow movements… I saw their dignity, their humility. For a short moment, I realized that love surrounds, even death.” She closes the door, arranges on the phone her return to work and goes out, ignoring the unconditional love surrounding the foyer. The tulip there proceeds to fade. Unconditional alertness was not for Jenny. But fortunately we’ve seen glimpses of progress, which her dream discounts.

Overcoming that retreat is not impossible. We have ways to squelch the obdurate absurd. While overrated skills and overrated charms clutter the land, the skies refuse to compromise. The museum of the skies ensures that someone, sometime, will step forward. Also, an embarkation might choose those loaded hands, igniting chores and igniting cheers. The forum of such resolve might just as well be solitary. Or, it might shine upon the many.