From the Life of the Marionettes (1980)

Rated R.  One of my big arguments that I made during this blog is that every director has their sexual sadist movie.  While I haven't gotten through all of Bergman yet, I have to believe that this is Bergman's.  In terms of questionable content, this movie hits it all.  Rape, nudity, necrophelia, language, dated stereotypes of homosexuals, violence, gore.  It's almost like he's trying to hit every button on this one.  I really wonder what Swedish culture is like considering that apparently, this was a TV movie.

DIRECTOR: Ingmar Bergman

I already buried the lede.  (Okay, that's not the proper use of that phrase, but I really wanted to write "bury the lede.") I had the epiphany that all the greats have their weird sexual sadist movie.  There needed to be an over-the-top rape murder movie in the ouvre.  I don't know what it is.  The Archers had Peeping Tom.  Hitchcock had Frenzy (and technically Psycho,  but that feels tame compared to Frenzy.)  Bogdanovich had Targets.  Edgar Wright has ​Last Night in Soho.  This is Ingmar Bergman's sexual sadist movie.  And for a sadism film, it isn't bad.  But also, why does every white male director feel the need to tell the story of a white man on the fringes of society who feels the need to commit unspeakable crimes?  

The crazy part is that one of the things that got me into cinema and taking directors seriously were sadism films.  They were Jonathan Demme's Silence of the Lambs and David Fincher's Se7en.  These are really screwed up movies, but they also pushed the limits of what cinema could be.  Maybe that's what the call is.  I mean, if I had to take what I think about white male storytelling, I think that there's something gross in all of us that makes us want to tell messed up stories.  I want to distance the comparison from someone like Fincher, who feels quite comfortable in the darker storytelling places.  I want to talk about the first set of examples.  I have a feeling that these directors are trying to step out of their comfort zones by making these kinds of movies.  

It's not like From the Life of the Marionettes is anti-Bergman.  It very much is a Bergman movie.  Do I think it really reminds me a lot of Targets?  Sure.  I can't possibly imagine that Bergman is knocking off Bogdanovich. After all, Bogdanovich is a director that stands on the shoulders of geniuses.  It's weird to think of that going the other way around.  But Marionettes is very Bergman while being something different from what we've seen before.  There seems to be an effort into going as dark as he can go.  It's not like Bergman has ever been afraid to go dark with his storytelling.  I even commented that Saraband seemed to be going dark simply for the sake of going dark.  But there's a conscious effort to go as blue as can be.  The movie itself starts with the topless sex worker fighting for her life against the protagonist of the film.  It lingers on her nudity.  The movie then goes to explain the ways that Peter Egermann sexually defiled her body.  I'm dipping my toe into something a little murky here, so I'm going to just address the question head on.  There's something in our history of storytelling when it comes to sexual sin and sex crimes.  It's a gross area where arguments can be made on either side whether or not the story needs to be told at all.  On the positive side, talking about such things brings about a dialogue.  After all, cultural puritanism nerfs real storytelling.  But on the other side, making entertainment out of rape and murder is pretty gross in itself.  This is the natural extension about the true crime obsession that many of us have.  Bergman is a heck of a storyteller and he does impressive things with Marionettes.  But I also get the vibe that maybe he's not exploring this thought too closely. 

It's the issue I had with Poor Things.  I know that I was the only dude on the planet who didn't care for Poor Things.  My frustration lied in the irony between the message of the film and the entertainment value of the film.  As the quickest summary ever, Poor Thing rallies against the sexual exploitation of women while basically sexually exploiting Emma Stone for the entire film.  Bergman actually has something fairly interesting to say with Marionettes and --good on him! --he's talking about the failures of the mental health industry in 1980.  But to do so, he really lets us linger with a ton of sexual imagery when, in all reality, we don't need to.  There are a litany of reasons why Peter Egermann murders Katarina Krafft at the beginning of the movie.  The bulk of the movie is devoted in showing all of the warning signs that led to this man killing this sex worker.  A lot of them come from the fact that people don't take Peter's warning signs seriously enough.  It never really lets Peter off the hook morally for his crimes, but instead accuses more than simply the murderer for the death of Katarina.  But one thing that the movie doesn't really do is say that Peter was in a sex mania that made him do this.  Yet, Bergman keeps on showing naked women performing sexual acts and lingers on that image.  These are images that are juxtaposed to violent images.  There's a sequence where we see Peter Egermann's dream where he slaughters his wife as she's nude in this white space.   We're meant to find these moments disturbing.  But Bergman keeps showing all of these sex acts without the context of violence almost as a form of titillation.  It's an odd decision.

I'm trying to approach Bergman from another position.  I've rallied that Bergman keeps making movies about casual adultery because he's letting himself off the hook for his own infidelities. I'm writing from another position because I want to be more challenged by Bergman.  Maybe he is doing what I've accused him of doing.  After all, it's a one-to-one thing.  But more than that, I don't know if he's saying that adultery should have less of a stigma so much as he's commenting that people are inherently terrible to each other.  There's something incredibly damning about the way that Bergman's characters all treat each other. I've watched a lot of stories where the central motif is love. Even in this movie where the husband and wife treat each other with utter contempt, Katarina Egermann swears that she's obsessed with Peter.  Yet, none of this obsession with Peter leads her to treating him like a spouse should.  Katarina Egermann almost prides herself on her ability to push his buttons.  She cheats on him and, even if she holds back, she doesn't do things to fix Peter's descent into madness.  (I'd like to really stress, almost all of this is Peter.  It's more of a matter that Bergman lets us know how we got to this point as opposed to laying blame on Katarina Egermann alone.) 

It's funny.  When I hadn't watched any Bergman, I always thought of Bergman as a director who had a pretty bleak look at humanity.  I thought of the images of The Seventh Seal and said, "Yeah, people are terrible to each other" without having seen those images in context to the rest of the film.  Then I watched Bergman and said, "Well, this guy has a problem with adultery being such a stigma.  He probably believes if everyone was cooler with adultery, the world would be a happier place."  But now that I've seen a lot of Bergman, I might be back to the notion that the world is a terrible place.  It's kind of that whole thing with the idea nihilism.  While nihilism tends to have a negative connotation (the notion that life has no meaning tends to lead people to think that anything is permissible under nihilism), there is the concept of positive nihilism (the idea that, because life has no meaning, it is up to humanity to give life meaning through a good lifestyle.) There might be something to that with Bergman.  If the world is full of terrible and selfish people, maybe it is the person who abandons his own selfish attitudes and learns to forgive himself and others that the truly heroic act is found.  It's a stretch.  But I also need to stretch myself if I'm watching a billion Bergman movies.  (Note: I just found out that we're going to Sweden this summer, so I want to have them all written up before that point.)

I'm going to close up by saying that this is a spiritual sequel to Targets.  Targets spends a little time with the notion of murder and a lot of time with the psychology / psychopathy of murder.  While we're looking at Peter Egermann's murder, Bergman is also pointing a light all all the elements that brings about murderers.  We're a factory that pumps out people like Peter Egermann.  And we're all so selfish that we see ourselves as the victims of Peter's choices.  In a way, the movie has a lot in common with Fritz Lang's M, looking at the fallout from a murder.  While I'm going to give the movie a positive review, mainly because it's interesting and well done, it's ultimately an unnecessary movie.  For all of Bergman's brilliance, there are so many times that the movie feels indulgent and missing the point in its very existence.