Fanny and Alexander as "Squash": Chapter 5 Part 6 of

THE BIG PICTURE: A POST-JUNGIAN MAP OF GLOBAL CINEMA

by James Whitlark, Ph.D.

Fanny and Alexander (1982)

In a Cahiers du Cinéma article, Jean-Pierre Oudart contends that, because American democracy and capitalism theoretically permit each person to occupy any social position, its movies focus on competition for “place” in a particular society or family. More perceptively, he sees the European paradigm as “the impossibility of communicating,” often focusing on an isolated child with whom the audience identifies (Oudart 276-86).

This contrast might be reinterpreted as two approaches to cinematic potential. At least during the studio years, American movies tended to reduce the almost limitless options of the medium until they fit (or more precisely, seemed to fit) the capacities of the average ticket buyer. Thus, the Hollywood stereotype focused typically on two or three characters jockeying for love and a feeling of belonging. Inversely, the European theme of incomprehensibility arose from the medium’s being slightly less simplified. Aware that their product would confuse audiences, European art-filmmakers consciously or unconsciously used that confusion as the subject, thereby focusing on a consciousness-expanding complexity.

Ingmar Bergman’s most popular entry into the United States market, Fanny and Alexander (El Bloy Til List), not only combines both approaches but also comes as close to a “squash” as does Kwaidan. Bergman’s film concerns a ten-year-old enduring an existence plagued with ghosts, magic, and ineffable events. It also has a fairly clear contest between the boy and his narrow, uncomprehending, episcopal stepfather, who may end as a portion of the boy’s mind—according to Bergman, possibly the condition of the whole film: “When, not very often, he [Alexander] occasionally thinks back on his three experiences [with the supernatural], he still cannot make up his mind whether to make light of them or whether to regard them as crucial. At all events, reflections are futile and are not seen on film, so the two remaining experiences will be related just as they passed through Alexander’s consciousness” (Bergman 1982, 190). Bergman implies that since film cannot ultimately distinguish between dream and actuality (a distinction idealist philosophers find equally unclear in life itself), cinema should simply present transcendent experiences without commenting on their objective reality. This is his final approach to religious imagery.

His earlier works are more agonized and even more ambivalent, such as Virgin Spring, a mixture of the liberal Christianity of his co-writer Ulla Isaksson, Norse paganism, and Bergman’s famous anguish over the difficulty of communicating with God. Concerning a slightly later work Winter Light, he says it marked his loss of concern about God, yet, as with many of his scripts, he placed next to the date the letters S. D. G. (i.e., Soli Deo Gloria—To God Alone the Glory). Later, in Fanny and Alexander, he accepts religion, the paranormal, and so on, as parts of the human mind. He does not speculate about their ultimate meaning. It is enough that Alexander believes himself guilty of the bishop’s death and later hears the latter’s ghost threaten to haunt him forever.

Bergman’s recording the preternatural element of the mind is almost a return to his childhood, in the home of his minister father. Of his own youthful guilt, credulity, and imagination, he notes: “I was extremely religious. Religious, really, in a very primitive and magic way, as children very often are. . . . The education in my generation was built on a terrible basis: a bad conscience. . . . .But then I think I started to construct my own religion. . . ” (Bergman 1983, 55). In Fanny and Alexander, a major competition is between the child’s private religion, based on imaginative or mystical experience, and the bishop’s, founded on the contraries good and evil. Both characters desperately crave someone to share it—a major theme of this film and Bergman’s others as well. Concerning the long communion scene beginning Winter Light, for instance, he explained: “Through communion, we can accept the appalling fact of total aloneness” (Gado 293). In other words, humanity desires communion with God, because communications between people are so imperfect. In the script of Fanny and Alexander, Emilie complains that God wears a thousand masks and she desperately wants to penetrate to His true face (Gado 101).

This theme of failed communication underlies the particularly elusive presentation of bifurcations, commencing with the English title (so different from the original). At first thought, since Fanny constitutes little more than an occasional confidant for Alexander, the movie’s translated name seems as pointless as if Shakespeare had called his Danish tragedy Horatio and Hamlet. The English title of Bergman’s film, however, underscores Alexander’s quest for someone with whom he can share his pain and perplexity. His first words are a cry for Fanny, immediately supplemented with shouts for mother and grandmother. In terms of his need, they are interchangeable—and absent. On one occasion, Fanny shares with him a ghostly visitation, and on others she sympathizes with his sufferings, but she appears on screen far less than he.

The published script hints at a neat dichotomy: Alexander adulterously sired by a young actor, Fanny (also adulterously) by the bishop—symbolizing the two sides of Bergman’s own childhood, art and religion. In the actual movie, however, Fanny is not precisely Alexander’s complement, but part of a flawed relationship. The children’s predecessors, the bishop’s dead offspring, were found holding each other so tightly that their arms had to be sawed away, a macabre caricature of the way people grasp for one another. The movie abounds with other examples, including: the bishop’s imprisoning Emile, Alexander and Fanny; Gustav’s driving his mistress away by trying too hard to care for her; and Oscar’s unwillingness to relinquish his family even after his death. Bergman portrays an array of squalid couplings, flawed marriages, and clinging friendships. Through a series of ironic analogies, the first part of the film comments on the communication problems besetting these impaired pairings—opposites unable to come together let alone squash into unity.

Crèche and Cross

According to the screenplay, the movie begins on Christmas Eve with The Play about the Joyful Birth of Christ. Alexander’s and Fanny’s supposed father Oscar (who has actually sired neither), appropriately enacts the role of Joseph. Unlike the Biblical Joseph, however, Oscar’s sexual restraint (or impotence) contributes to no world redemption, but only a lack of union between husband and wife. Consequently, hungering for closeness, she foolishly marries the bishop.

Gado observes about Bergman’s previous work The Seventh Seal, it was inspired by a religious painting, which represented his favorite contraries: “the severity of God the Father's rule and the mercy of the Virgin Mother” (Gado 198). Comparably, Fanny and Alexander opens with that all-embracing feminine mercy, exemplified by grandmother Helena’s mansion festooned with the rich syncretism of Christmas: pagan yuletree, Catholic St. Nicholas become a Santa Claus, and so on. The Ekdahl family is particularly ecumenical, entertaining Helena’s long-time lover Isak, who appears at the Christmas party in a Jewish prayer cap. Amid the Christmas decorations (such as a crèche shown repeatedly) are the family’s opulent relics of pagan religion and culture. The script describes two of these as a Venus de Milo that comes to life and a painting of Helena (during her acting career) playing the virgin sacrifice Iphigenia. The atmosphere is permissive. One of its many embodiments is aunt Alma (etymologically, “soul”). She allows her husband to celebrate the holiday in bed with a maid.

In contrast, the bishop’s household is austere and cruel. He asks the children to renounce those very toys and other luxuries they have just received. Unlike the mere playacting commemorated in the pictured sacrifice of Helena as Iphigenia, a painting of the sacrifice of Isaac hangs near the bishop’s desk, establishing his actual attitude toward the young, that they must be subordinated utterly to the Word of God. Presumably, he identifies with Christ. At least, Ishmael says that the bishop is dreaming of himself as a crucified Jesus, asking why he is forsaken. The bishop wakes from that dream to an agonized death, directly or indirectly resulting from his trying to follow what he perhaps believes to be God’s Will.
The contrast between crèche and cross, however, is complicated by uncertainties about the bishop’s motivation. Is he a fanatic, a hypocrite, or a combination of the two? At one point, he says that his wife has many masks but he only one. He wonders what (if anything) would remain if he removed it.

To be, and not to be

Oscar dies while acting the Ghost in Hamlet. He goes from player spirit to apparition. In Oscar’s last moments on stage, the actor portraying the Danish prince cowers on the ground weeping. Alexander imitates this as Oscar lies dying. His wife then marries a lover, whom the son resents (as in Hamlet). Emilie tells Alexander, “Don’t act Hamlet....” But the boy is not the only would-be Danish prince. His uncle Carl speaks of himself as a royal heir denied his heritage. Isak describes a poison spreading through life—an image Hamlet repeatedly used with allusions to Original Sin. In Hamlet, the appearance of a spirit raises religious questions (Catholic belief in purgatorial ghosts vs. Protestant disbelief in them). In Bergman’s script, Fanny dogmatizes: “There are no ghosts but there are apparitions. Everybody knows that. It’s even in the Bible”(Bergman 1982, 120). Nonetheless, the closest affinity is between the movie’s anomie and one of Hamlet ’s most quoted sentences:

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy (I. 5. 166-167)

If the world transcends philosophy, the principal of mutual exclusivity embodied in Hamlet’s “To be, or not to be” may not be valid. Opposites may both be true simultaneously and constitute one unity. This idea is expounded first by Isak, then by his eccentric progeny, and finally in a long quotation from Strindberg’s A Dream Play.

A Universal “Squash”

Helena tells the ghost of her son: “Reality has been broken ever since [your death], and oddly enough it feels better that way.… I just don’t care if nothing makes sense.” In other words, the film not only is a multi-level, metaphysical integration of many aspects of existence but it explicitly validates living intuitively according to the unconscious. Also preparatory to accepting the unconscious as humanity’s essential self and unifier, Alexander (in the published script) recalls a Kabbalistic remark by Isak: “Man may seem little and insignificant but he bears chasms, heavens, and eternities within him” (Bergman 1982,122). In its Kabbalistic context, this means that as an image of God, humanity is a microcosm or meeting point of all diversities.
In varying degrees, these mystical allusions (including one to free masonry during the funeral) point toward the climactic mystery, but the most definitive step into it occurs when Isak cries aloud, raises his hands, and the children are simultaneously in a box downstairs and in the nursery. The presence of the ghost could be hallucination, but the children could not have escaped without Isak’s miracle, so it is much harder to explain away. He brings them to a home decorated with oriental puppets and other exotica, including a mummy that breathes and glows in the dark. These mysteries lump together to exemplify what transcends reason.

In the script, Isak tells a Kabbalistic parable: people go about their daily concerns oblivious to an undercurrent of reality, a refreshing stream flowing from prayers, shouts of despair and hope, to “a particular god” or “the void”—as if these opposite addressees of prayer were indistinguishable (Bergman 1982, 172). That night, Alexander wakes (if waking differs from sleeping) to see a giant puppet proclaiming itself to be God (suggesting, perhaps that deities are creations—puppets— of humanity). The puppet’s voice, actually that of Isak’s nephew, Aaron, proclaims the identity of matter and spirit: “God is the world and the world is God.” After putting aside the puppet, Aaron explains that this radical monism was taught him by Isak, who believes: “there are swarms of ghosts, spirits, phantoms, souls, poltergeists, demons, angels, and devils. He says that the smallest pebble has a life of its own....Everything is alive. Everything is God or God’s thoughts.” If everything is God, then the antithetical statements humanity creates God and God creates humanity are synonymous: Creator and Created are One, as in non-dualist Hinduism. Isak seems to imply that if one can accept the existence of supernatural phenomena, then belief in this philosophical/religious Idealism follows. Certainly, the movie abounds in the supernatural, above all the following scene.

Alexander meets Isak’s nephew, the insane sorcerer Ishmael. The most noticeable aspect of this conjurer is his androgyny (a union of opposites). Considering the lingering kiss Aaron gives him, Ishmael at first appears merely homosexual. His stroking Alexander and talking of merging with him would thus be pederasty, disguised in occult talk of their being the same person. Evidence, nonetheless, supports the reality of Ishmael’s preternatural claims. Alexander tries to write his own name but the two are in such rapport that he writes Ishmael’s instead. Then, the minds of the two join in a mental journey. They see (and perhaps even cause) the bishop’s sister (dying of venereal disease) to catch on fire and burn the bishop to death.

Naturally, this anomalous situation leaves Alexander with vague guilt. The bishop’s ghost later knocks him down and threatens to haunt him perpetually. In psychological terms, Alexander has acquired a part of himself modeled on the Bishop, a part in conflict with the rest of his mind. The hypnotic cure would be a squash of the two. Is that what Helena does for him when he runs to her for reassurance. She consoles him by reading the famous preface of Strindberg’s A Dream Play: “Anything can happen, all is possible and probable. Time and space do not exist. On an insignificant foundation of reality, imagination spins out and weaves new patterns.. . .” In the original Strindbergian context, these lines declare all people to be “characters [who] divide, double, multiply, evanesce, solidify, diffuse, clarify” within the mind of a dreamer. The antitheses (divide/double, evanesce/solidify, diffuse/clarify) have no more (or less) reality than a dream. Thus, the opposition between boy and bishop is also a dream. Helena is thus providing metaphors appropriate for a “squash.”

Much of the film prepares for this integration through self-reflective exploration of drama as embodying the limitless possibilities of the imagination to remake reality. At the film’s beginning, Alexander first appears framed by a cardboard stage. Helena later tells her dead son, “Everything is acting.” Not just because he is a child but also because he comes from this theatrical milieu, Alexander seems to the bishop to be someone who “cannot distinguish lies from truth.” But is there any difference between imagining and being? In the script, Filip Landahl “declares that the theater is just as good a church as the cathedral and that all actors and bishops and musicians and vicars and painters and curates are one single clergy, whose duty it is, each in his own church, to serve the living God” (Bergman 1982, 102-03). In terms of the Strindbergian ending of Fanny and Alexander, the seeming antinomy actor/clergy is an identity, as are all opposites. In this monism, Bergman could be reconciled with his clergyman father as well as with another of his career-long combatants—his Father in Heaven. He (and the audience) should dream the drama to its strongly suggested conclusion.

Continue to THE BIG PICTURE Chapter 6 Part 1

OPEN THE JOURNAL OF HUMAN THRESHOLD SYSTEMS MAIN PAGE IN A NEW WIHNDOW