The Silence (1963)

R.  And it might be the movie most deserving of the R-rating.  I'm officially in what I'm calling "Bergman's Pervy Period."  Maybe I'm just getting tired in my Bergman retrospective, but if it was any other director, I might be accusing him of being "shocking-for-shocking-sake."  I know.  It's incredibly disrespectful to treat one of cinema's greatest auteurs as someone hacky.  But I can't help it.  It feels like he's going out of his way to be as sexual as possible, even in scenes that are hurt from nudity and sexuality.  The movie also touches on incest.  Also, this is one of those movies where I have to disclaim, "A kid was in this scene.  Is this necessary?"

DIRECTOR:  Ingmar Bergman

You are going to read a stressed out blog from a guy who did this to himself.  I put off The SIlence blog for a minute because I thought I'd find time to sneak this in some other time.  But then I watched another movie.  Then I got two more letter of recommendation requests.  Then it's the church festival this weekend.  Couple with that the fact that I have five kids, walk four miles a day, and read a bunch and am working on lesson plans for the new school year and I'm officially behind on this one.

This is the Bergman that I'm afraid to touch.  I've not been wholly afraid to go after some of the greats on this blog.  For example, I actively don't like David Lynch.  I'm sorry to all of the cinemaphiles out there and the family of David Lynch for my disrespect for someone I acknowledge was significantly smarter than I am.  I don't care for Lynch.  I can't say the same is true for Bergman.  I actually adore a handful of Bergman movies.  I really like a lot of other Bergman movies.  But sometimes...just sometimes, I really don't like other Bergman movies.  Some people may say that's down to taste.  Maybe that's true honesty.  But I know that the movies that I tend not to like are the ones that some people consider sacrosanct to having taste.  I honestly don't like The Silence.

Here's something that I have to be very clear on.  I like the idea of The Silence.  There's a floor plan behind The SIlence that I'm all about.  I love the idea of two sisters traveling to a country where language has to be interpreted entirely by context mirroring the silence between the family.  I love the idea of a kid has to explore a strange world and cannot rely on language to connect with people while his family is falling apart.  That's some gorgeous stuff.  But I've learned that Bergman is a dirty old man.  He was also a dirty young man.  It's kind of that same problem I have with binging all of the Woody Allen movies.  When you talk about sexual deviancy enough with the assumption that these moments are universal when they, in fact, may be quite subjective, it's hard to think that you have more than one idea going on.

Now, I've learned from experience on this blog that I sometimes need to read some stuff about the movie if I feel like I'm not getting too much about it.  I read some film criticism about The Silence because I knew that there was a dimension that I had only a loose grasp on.  The thing about all critical thinking is that it is valid as long as it can be defended.  But part of my role as someone who is entering into the discourse is to either agree or disagree with the discourse.  Now, I'm going to say that my dumb brain who can't wait to write about The Fantastic Four: First Steps disagrees with a lot of the discourse.  Not to bring up Woody again, but Woody Allen claims that both women play two sides of the same person.  From a humanities teacher, that's a great read.  If a student wrote that paper for me, I'd be excited to read it.  That being said, I don't agree with that at all.

See, masters' classes love jumping to Freud when it comes to reading anything.  The sheer amount of citation that was tied to Freud in grad school was staggering.  Here's where I kind of floundered (despite doing super well in grad school, if I may say so myself).  I don't ever agree with Freud.  I was always so bummed when we fell down the rabbit hole with philosophers who used Freud as a foundation for theory because I disagreed with Freud himself.  That's kind of me disagreeing with Allen.  I like the notion that the two women represented the same woman as an experiment.  But a lot of the text actively fights against that read.  

Part of my frustration with that read is the use of Johan as the avatar for the audience.  Ester and Anna spend much of the movie in building tension leading to a climax where the two emotionally vomit all of their anger at each other.  Now, Johan spends more time with Ester because Anna is out finding her sexuality with strangers.  Again, I think that Bergman is trying too hard with this one, but you are completely allowed to disagree with me.  Anyway, Ester is kind to Johan, building into the notion that Ester and Anna are two sides to the same person.  But Johan is affected by the conflict between Ester and Anna.  The scene reads far more as "Mommy and Daddy are fighting" more than sometimes Johan dislikes his mother.  It's when Ester acts as a mother that Johan withdraws within himself and hurts Ester.  I mean, sure, there's a read that says that Johan doesn't like that part of Mommy.  But Ester is far more maternal to Johan than Anna.  

Again, you can absolutely read into the story that maybe Johan views that part of his mother as the side that tries to hard.  But in contrast, when Anna is all sexed up and being cruel to Ester, it's not like Johan runs to Anna in those scenes.  If anything, the few times that we see Johan viewing Anna as a loving mother is when she's tempering her anger and acting more like Ester.  So the notion that these two women could be two sides of the same person almost ignores the fact that there is a child in the center of this story.  This is a child going through it.  He's not a great kid.  There's something very upsetting about a kid walking up and down hallways of a hotel pointing a six-shooter at janitors without a smile on his face that almost telegraphs that he's alone in this world.  Also, there's a reference to the fact that he has a dad...somewhere out there.  It's just a lot.

So what is it?  I hate giving surface level reads on here.  And if I was talking to my students, I would demand that they take a bigger swing than what I'm offering here.  I think the title The Silence is the point of the movie.  They are vacationing / on sabbatical in this coded Eastern European wartorn country, there a silence and a violence that these people cannot understand.  The two / three of them also have a violence and a silence between them.  While they learn something about themselves in this silence, they also have an impossible job trying to communicate their learned experiences with one another.  The reason that I am so annoyed by Anna's sexual awakening is that the epiphany that she has can be anything.  The fact that it is sexual seems lazy at this point.  She could, if going for a deviant discovery, hate her kid.  I mean, Kate Chopin did it with The Awakening if we want to go on the nose for the whole thing.

So, yeah, there's a read out there that's probably better than mine.  But I also don't hate my read on this one.  I am bored with Bergman constantly thinking that sex is the only thing that people need to discover in their characters.  It might be why I like The Seventh Seal so much.  But The Silence is yet another movie that isn't for me.