INGMAR BERGMAN’S ‘THE DEVIL’S EYE’ “We must get to the root of the evil…”

 © 2021 by James Clark

      Early on, in my tenure with Wonders in the Dark, I delighted in the films of Jacques Demy. In those days, I guess I was easier to please. In time, I realized that only two of his films transcended sentimental melodrama. Strangely enough, the two I came to embrace were his first two. The first, Lola (1961), had deftly threaded the needle of wit, disappointment and gallantry. The second, Bay of Angels (1963), pertaining to gambling on the roulette wheel, is a diamond-hard saga of a woman, Jackie, plunging into seducing the universe itself. How, then, did Demy become a student of ontological reflection, only to quickly abandon it? His paradigm, filmmaker, Ingmar Bergman, was made of stronger stuff.

Jackie, being not only a pariah but a poet, can (somewhat) bring to the table much of the emotion of what is lacking in civilization as we have come to know it. “We’ll live the high life.” (That latter phrase, many years later, becoming a title of a film by Claire Denis, another—more tenacious player—in the orbit of Bergman.) “Happiness makes me versatile… No! Voluble…” (Both terms having their value.) “The mystery of numbers… I often wonder whether God rules over numbers… The first time I entered a casino I felt as if I were in a church… He got custody of the baby… Lucky Strike… This display of flabby flesh makes me sick… Why deny this passion.?”

“Versatile”/ “Voluble.” The latter term can mean, “rolling effectively,” clearly the sense of a mystery which Jackie clings to as her only purchase upon planet Earth. Her disinterestedness, however, has sadly underestimated threading a needle of wit and gallantry. Going the extra mile, and then some, we have, first of all, however, the makings of confusion in the form of satire toward Christian  foibles. We are nonplussed by an apparition purporting to be the Devil, dressed as a contemporary corporate leader, spending much of his time admiring his face in a mirror. Make no mistake, this presentation is a challenge to discover those who are alert enough to see something discreet, very rare and crucial. Bergman’s film, The Devil’s Eye (1960), is a filmic treatise of the phenomena of bathos and pathos, and its stairway to the elements. Let’s see if this daunting puzzle can open your eyes.

 

 

He doesn’t go out of his way to provide an engaging introduction. In fact, the precinct is  perfumed with the spleen and resentment of old ladies. Two of the key advisers to the CEO are garbed as to the effeminate style of the Age of Enlightenment, The Age of Reason, current in the eighteenth century. But the overriding stance is one of shallow cowardice, a hell having endured for a long time—in fact, since the dawning of humans. The so-called Devil, as the episode dawns, involves the old-ladies’ game of needing to see some dirt upon the wonders of mutual affection, particularly, involving a pact of chastity before their marriage. (One of the pedant pansies, hoping to find a cure for the leader’s indisposition as to advantage, emotes, “We must get to the root of the evil.”) This hobgoblin nonsense transmutes to the business of two employees of a large firm seeking to make a coup upon a naïve, disorganized holder of a treasure, presumably just the trick to get the workplace back to boffo.

Hanging on to the vexation of the madness of eternal life, the business venture—after a display of the principal, Don Juan, no less, needing something to brighten up the boredom of the headquarters, namely, daring one of a swarm of hotties without heat plunging a dagger into his heart that does not deliver—he and his sidekick, Pablo, reach the supposed sucker by way of a dried-up well. Instantly, like a blue-chip of lore, they establish a bullish atmosphere with the target’s father, a clergyman, by Pablo’s skills in auto repairs. (A significant stain, though, has already occurred, within the intercourse at the office. Don Juan, grossly overestimating his range, declares that a death blow remains, “the only pleasure” his body has not yet tasted.)

Don Juan may regard this junket as routine, but his associate has the humbleness to recognize a wonder. “Look, Master! Trees. Flowers. And clouds. Grass, water, birds…” (Don Juan becomes distracted by an apparition of a priest. [“I’m supposed  to ensure your safety, my little ones.  Pablo catches a figment of this madness. “No fun with the ladies! I won’t tolerate it. My sense of humor is also limited. ”]) Pulling away, however, from a lifetime of fear, he  vows, “I’ll find some clever way to fool you.” (At the moment when Pablo learned of this windfall-travel, he, far more expressive than his boss, yelled, “I’ll enjoy it like a fool enjoys his own inners… I’m going to taste life, smack it between my lips. I’ll devour as much as I can…”)

   After the rescue of the vicar’s car, the latter declares, “That’s how it always is… My life is just a series of fortunate accidents.” On to the vicarage, where the strangers meet the fortunate one’s wife, being a strong contrast—a semi-invalid and poet. Don Juan, feeling anxious about the intrusion and eager to get down to business with the capital, remarks, “I understand it’s not a good time…”/ “On the contrary,” she insists, “I was dying of boredom. You’ve saved me. At least for tonight… My poor husband is overjoyed. He worries that our lives here are boring and dull.” Though she promptly dismisses the poetry as “just to pass the time,” and, in response to the polite guest that he’d like to hear some of her works, she forcefully and laughingly tells Don Juan, “No, you definitely won’t” [hear my poems]. (At this point, Renata, the poetic odd one out,  soon to show us her poetry in action within the short time we have, would seem to be a mere hobbyist. She’ll soon, though, give us quite a surprise, an enactment leading a charge of brilliant pathos, where nearly always the effort crashes to bathos. Bergman again, opening our eyes and our hearts.)

While Don Juan is accompanied by the vicar to Natan Britt-Marie (the name wobbling close to Satan)—she the one being primed to lose the business of power—Pablo, the real enthusiast, to Don Juan’s cheap mystique, begins to savor the poetry of life. His lingering with Renata is readily accomplished, true to a desperation in both of them which the drift of a paradoxical love has granted to them. She returns to her novel about a musician (vaguely like Jackie’s  “Voluble”, only to realize that Pablo, after some goofy nonsense by the vicar in the living room) had made a U-turn back to her fortification. In fact he jumps fully dressed, including his overcoat, into her bed, like a wild and wise pet. She is not completely cogent in her disarray. (“My reputation…the scandal and what the servants would say.” But then she looks around and rushes to the bed, regaining her hidden strengths. “This is my bed, and I won’t leave it because a clod of a man hops into it.”)  Pablo begins to reach over to her neck. (An arrangement of them in bed: a shadow in between; Pablo at right; and her vigorously rushing, once again, out of the bed.) Standing behind her at her dresser, he remarks, “Let’s postpone what we intend to do, for a while, Renata. It’ll increase our pleasure. No, don’t say a word. I know everything. I can read it in your eyes. Your wisdom, your stormy character, your femininity, your tenderness, your frail health… Everything forbids you to let yourself go in an inevitable embrace.” /She derides, “Really?”/ “Everything forbids you, I say! But there is a dark spot in your spirit, Renata. A dark spot of uncontrollable sensuality, pent up for too long. It’s only in your dreams that you give it free rein and give in to pleasure.”/ More goading and also hoping, from her. “You’re certain of that?”/ He tells her, despite being a focus of gentle fun, “Hold out a little longer, Renata…” (He’s holding her around her shoulders.) “Just a short while. Where was I?”/ She prompts, “In my dreams…”/ “That’s it… You’ll enjoy limitless pleasure…until it reaches the point of pain and shame…”/ She ridicules his desperation. “Where do you get all this from?”/ He settles down with, “A thing or two has stuck throughout the years [often overkill]. But inspiration is always the most important. And now my soul is so inspired I can barely stand up straight.” In a voice-over she tells him, “You’re tired.”/ “Yes, I’m tired. The blood in my legs is boiling and my stomach is full of butterflies.” (She is both delighted and fearful.) “No,” she says; and turns her back and marches along a corridor.

    We’ll take some license with the narrative here, insomuch as following up the complete romance of Pablo and Renata right now. This film being a treasure of sensibility, there are powers needing full range now, in order to fully discharge forces coming later. The visitors are welcome to stay the night. And when the meal is ended the night begins its magic. It nearly, however, began with a crash, due to Renata’s annoyance about Don Juan’s story involving a “thrilling experience.” She sneers, “Experience? What’s that? I don’t know, anyway.” (She, not being an enthusiast of a “good read.”) And she begins to cry. Her husband’s, “Don’t be sad,” makes things worse. She tells him, “You don’t understand. God, how silly. It’s laughable. No, nobody can help me. It’s just a stupid farce, anyway…” And she goes to her bedroom. After turning out his lamp, the vicar prays, “Help me figure out my wife… Give me the vision. Teach me to understand the dark hearts of men and their hidden sufferings. Take away my childish simplicity and give me new perspective that is crisp and clear, and yet loving…” At this point, what do we have is Renata entering the suppliant’s bedroom. “I just came in,” she tells him. / “For what?”/ “Nothing… To look at you.” He welcomes her to sit down on the bed. She asks, “Would you be sad if I died?” After his shock, she perseveres, “Answer my question….”/ “I would be stricken in mourning,” doesn’t satisfy her a bit. He argues, “That’s a strange question… Because I love you, of course!”/ “But I’m a nuisance to you and Britt-Marie.” She goes on to maintain that “nuisance” has not been understood. (Her priorities pose a snag.) He tells her, “I fervently want to understand you.”/ She feels it’s like  the theatre. “You see me in one role, and that’s me. And others see me in other roles and think that’s me…” Panning closer, she says, “Nobody sees me” [which is tantamount to saying she is suffocating from a surrounding deadness]. He tells her, “You have to be honest… Honesty is the best policy…” Her expression elicits from him, “Did I say something wrong?”/ “No, you’re absolutely right. Good-night, dear. Sleep well on those big ears, and awaken tomorrow to your beautiful world and all the nice people and all your experiences.” The vicar, somewhat feeling insulted, says, “Good night, then.” (Close-up to Renata.) “What would you do if I cheated on you?”/ “What?”/ “Cheated.”/ “What?”/ “Went to bed with another man…”/ “You sure have some ideas…”/ “What would you do?”/ “What would I do?” ‘the fortunate man’ hits a wall. “I don’t know.” She needs to hear it all: “Would you throw me out?”/ “What terrible questions, Renata… I don’t understand.”/ “Would you still love me?”/ “I have to love you no matter what happens. Love doesn’t cease. It remains steadfast, no matter how life plays out…”/ “She tells him, “I feal like screaming… No! I don’t!” She kisses him, a gentle kiss. “Good night, my husband. I apologize for frightening you. I won’t do it again.” He tells her, “I wish something would touch your heart so you could feel compassion…” (Cut to Renata, sadly. )/ “You think that would be good?”/ He tells her, “I don’t know… I’ll think about it. Good night, Renata. And God bless you…”

    Pablo had entered her room a long time before. She pretends for a few minutes to be annoyed. (Of course, she’s already thinking of the endgame.) He tells her, “Our moment is here. We’ve waited long enough.” She, the metaphysical poet, rubs it in, “You can talk, but when it comes to love, you’re probably as much a fraud as any other man…” (Kudos to a husband, for the long haul.) Pablo tells her—with his own metaphysic, his own surreal nightmare—“I’m a man of passion, Renata.” She throws her book and her glasses at him. “Shut up, go away… Stop tormenting me with stupid little tricks.” She falls back into the bed. He gently approaches. “For [seemingly] 300 years, I’ve sat in hell, longing for a woman [who is truly unique]. Believe it or not—heaven, hell. It’s all lies. It doesn’t matter. You’re not risking anything. But it just might happen that you’ll experience something you’ll never forget.”/ “Experience,” she threatens. He tells her, “A dream, Renata!”/ She also uses that lost cause. “Yes, it’s a dream… The only problem is that I can’t convince myself it’s mine…”/ He tells her, “Pretend, Renata!” She tells him, “I’m too old…”/ “Can’t you fake it?”/ “No, I’ve done that all along.” (This launch has sputtered badly. The wit and crazy joy of the first meeting has crumbled to mechanism. Another word for that breakdown is bathos, superficial heartiness. The superb tonality has a stunning way to the truth.) He kneels to her in her bed. “I’m no great villain. I’m just a poor condemned man without hope or pleasure. But then I was granted earthly life for one day and one night.” Just as he had come to being convinced that the great night would not happen, he refers, bitterly, his history of mistreating his mother, a crime justly punished here. “She showed me great tenderness.” What could have been another crime of bathos, becomes a disclosure of the fleeting of passion, the fleeting of life. At this moment, pathos shines. While Renata’s appreciation may not entirely transcend resentment, pedantry and advantage, the  night does become truly magical! She thrills, “You’re not ashamed to appeal to my maternal side? You’ve managed to do something rare. You’ve touched my heart.”/ “That’s a kind thing to say,” Pablo responds. / The not quite disinterested poet tells the perhaps even better poet, “You’ve given me an experience… You’ve earned a reward.”

    Our best reward is yet to come. The abridged lovers are now steps beyond Renata’s room. He kneels and embraces her body. On the dark stairway, the vicar, seated on a stair, begins to understand “new perspective.” Pablo and Renata stand together. His bid for the briefest of alliances takes the mundane form of wanting to go out to dig up the half-finished garden. “It’ll be wonderful to freeze. And then for breakfast. I’ll have some of those large, tart, apples down by the gate. After that, I’ll return to hell, Renata. But grateful. Do you understand?” Somehow, it badly loses traction. Renata and Pablo were touched; but not transformed. There is no fruit to savor. Renata turns back to her bedroom. The vicar calls out to her. She, from out of her literary imperative, soothes out, “He touched my heart.” (Two rapid cuts.) She could not be described as lost for words. “But it wasn’t the most difficult…” He asks, “Then what was?”/ “That I thought of you the whole time.” Bathos, I’m afraid; but allowing the pathos to shine evenly brighter. An anxious caregiver asks, “What happens now?” She persists, “I felt sympathy for you… I don’t know… Nothing…”/ He asks, “So you’ll stay with me?”/ “Where would I go?” He asks, “Do you think we can make a fresh start?”/ “No, I don’t think so” [her heretofore rebellion seeming devastating]./ “Do you think we can change?”/ She invites the possibility, “We can try,” that being her first dash of pure disinterestedness since the first brave and gleaming meeting. Disinterestedness could find, far from a perfect match, the sharing of pathos. On that basis, he can ask her, “Go lie down, Renata. You’ll catch cold.” A pensive Renata slowly goes to bed.

Threaded through this narrative, we have the nominal principal, Don Juan, along lines of amorous property. There is, I think you’ll agree, that this second invasion functions more of a supplement to the drama which we have just studied. As such, the hopes of the coup pertaining to Britt-Marie will not bring into play as extensive an action as the drama with Pablo and Renata and the vicar, and its touching the depths of a cosmos—neither Devil nor God.

    Britt-Marie is first found to be vigorously at work on preparing a dream house for her husband-to-be, on the site of the fringes of the manse. Don Juan, having a very restricted range of time to perform a complicated action, quickly learns that the prey prides herself in taking chances, unlike her (supposedly) frozen parents.  That was, then, presumably, the heart of the matter. (Her fiancé is a technocrat of soil and livestock, also a brilliant handyman. His name, Jonas, however, seems to crowd where infinite range had been expected.) Along with her competitive zeal against Jonas to accomplish the remake and expect a very large family, she quickly sign’s on to the advantages of cheekiness, flamboyant skepticism. One of the items of candid speech taking the floor concerns his reverie about her womb, which annoys her. He describes her—“Blue eyes, light hair, a graceful nose and mouth for kissing, caressing hands firm breasts, round hips and a womb made for love.” Her idea of shaking things up was to tally the numbers of those she has kissed. “Of course, who do you think I am?”[a stiff like my parents]./ “May I kiss you?”[the big bad wolf, asks]./ “Gladly. You’re a real Don Juan, you.” She: “That was really innocent. Now I’m going to kiss you!” (Here one of the harpsichord ripples that signal danger. Often in tandem with a black cat.) “I’m planning on reaching 50 before I’m married… When I saw your lips, I wanted to kiss them to see how it felt…” Entrenched by her cozy circumstances, she’s intent to run amok. The mystique of eternity being questioned with impunity. The stranger remarks, “You play a dangerous game, don’t you think?”/ “Yes, dear God, life would be boring if you didn’t lie from time to time.” (In the background there’s a stain on the wall.) She brags, “The strange thing is that people believe what you say…I don’t know, perhaps it’s sinful to play. But it’s so tempting…They almost beg for it.”

From out of the vicarage, not merely “sinful…jaywalking”; but holding in vomit at the mere traces of the powers that be. “They almost beg for it.” The businessman, inured to a long deadness of dogma, has no vocabulary to tangle with these whisps of rebellion. She elucidates, somewhat: “I understand that you and Jonas live by principles. And that principles are holier than life itself.” She dilutes her antipathy, by way of, “That was both crude and foolish.” Don Juan, not wanting to expose his obsolescence, pipes up, “Quite the opposite. I sympathize with you.” Reading his phony position (“I don’t think so.”/ “Sure I do. Lack of principles has been my principle! Betrayal of morality, vice my virtue, debauchery my abstinence and godlessness my religion… ” A hard sell, and no dice. Britt-Marie had dismissed principles of abstract ideas. She clearly leaves room for principles of guts, particularly his facile weakness. “So when all’s said and done, we’re pretty similar, you and I,” the moment lacks validity. Her standpoint, lacking precision, she falls prey to doubt in the medium of pressure.

    The sophomoric rampage looks pretty sick in face of Pablo, Renata and the vicar. Britt-Marie wanted some rare action. She couldn’t see herself being a pariah and recluse. She lacked the time her parents were about to engage, with no certainties. The sequel carries many disappointments. Disappointments of bathos. And the faintest hopes of pathos. As the clash drags along, Britt-Marie tells Don Juan, “Yes, I was scared,” she explains her dash across the room, her superficial harmonies becoming bogus. “But not of you” [but herself]./ “You’re no ordinary man. You can wound me deeply.” (The irony here being that the smoothy is very much an ordinary man, a presumptuous servant of presumptuous ancient weaklings.) “It’s surprising that deep down in my heart I long for that wound.” Don Juan, hoping for chicanery, opens a door to cheapen the transaction. “Your so-called love is only a young woman’s boundless self-love. Your conceit, your reticence, all your meddlesome, so-called sense, appears in the guise of a make-believe love.” More cynicism and bombast, on the subjects of God; his having seen love up-close, “making life bearable for the rest of us wretches who fumble in the darkness; I don’t know anything about it. I’ve chosen a different path, a path called contempt and indifference.”

Being thus gullible, Britt-Marie, allowing herself to be impressed by such trendy tripe, becomes a mock-up of the norm, a domestic saint. During a dinner for the cosmopolitans, she becomes ashamed of Jonas’ lack of finesse (enthusing about a litter of piglets), that finesse being the hallmark we dare not fail, the palace of  bathos. Jonas, himself was swallowed by a bigger force, his slide rule at the ready, as our era’s phones. During the production of this essay, I happened to witness on-line an early test concerning the engines of  a trip to the moon. Despite a lot of smoke and noise, what was to be several minutes became several seconds. The voice-over treated it as deriving many valuable measurements. Only the day after, was there mention that it was a bust. The trial had to be fabulous. The whole planet is in on being fabulous. But bathos is not pathos.) While the farmer leaves in a huff, causing Britt-Marie to cry, the dandy wows the desert course with a tale about an attack. (Only Renata walks out.)

After that, Don Juan visits the girl who suddenly found pigs beneath her. The moonlight in the window allows him to perform an eclipse of the sleeping youngster’s body. When she presently wakes up, there is a kiss so intense as to cut her lip. More of the same, she tells him, “Do with me as you please… I can’t bear your suffering, which I do not understand.” (Britt-Marie’s lack of self-confidence requires some rumination. Her skepticism, though childish, included a baseline of much being corrupt. Her wanting to have it both ways, also involved the makings [at a weak volume] of fruitful paradox. But the ingredient of the stranger’s “worldly-wise” had secured her as a “significant other,” more significant than her own strengths.) As such, Britt-Marie, lying in her bed continues, “It burns and torments me more than anything I’ve ever experienced. But I’m no longer scared of you. You can’t touch my love for Jonas… I beg you to free me from your suffering… I don’t love you. I don’t desire your body. You’re frightening and incomprehensible. The wound you give me, will only hurt me and you.”

   Let’s listen to them as the clock runs out. He tells her, “Can’t you see I’m humiliating myself?” (No money, no honey.) He, too, looks to a singularity. But singularities don’t sprout on trees. She replies, “You say that you love me, and I believe it to be true, but it doesn’t matter.”/ “I don’t understand,” the crack shot insists. (Aren’t we on the same page? We’re on the same page of futility.) Britt-Marie explains, “Yesterday, I was a young girl who liked to play”—serious play, who liked to push others around. “I thought your fierceness and cool demeanor was exciting. I wanted you to hurt me.” (No pain, no gain.) “I might have been scared, but not much… You’re suffering burned me. Suddenly, I wanted to hold you and give you everything I could. But it was a lie… But last night made me an adult.” (If only saying the word could bring that off!) As for the cool, he tells us that, “the cold and calculating of heaven’s goodness” had caused a blessing. Both of them mired in bathos.

In the aftermath of the junket’s failure, there are no less than three failures of bathos: an old ladies gossip about Britt-Marie’s’ wedding night; Don Juan’s yell, “I remain one who despises both God and Satan”; and an ending, with she and he looking out to a pretty moon.

How far can the gift of pathos reach, for Renata and Pablo and the vicar. Farther than Jackie, that’s for sure!