15. Sexuality in Film: Reconsiderations after Seeing Cries and Whispers

DAVID R. SLAVITT

THE POIGNANT situation in which films are goaded on to new heights—or _JL depths—of candor and boldness by obvious external forces, mostly the competition from television and its old movies at no cost to viewers, while the Supreme Court backs and fills and invokes capricious and restrictive “local standards,” is fascinating, particularly since the whole point of the MPAA rating system was to fight local censors and vigilantes of the public morals. That rating system had grievous faults, but it worked a lot better than what we seem to have now. Until the recent decision, nobody fought very hard about an R film. Carnal Knowledge with its R rating was subsequently declared obscene by the Supreme Court of the State of Georgia.

Both the decision of the Georgia court and the preceding enabling decision of the United States Supreme Court are unfortunate, but neither is surprising. In fact, what they do is to fulfil in the courts and in our society at large an old Arabic belief—that any man who gazes into a vagina will go blind. All those triple-feature, 16mm split-beaver festivals have brought us to this regrettable condition.

It would be easy to blame the courts, and they are indeed entitled to their fair share of contempt and blame. But films, which is to say filmmakers and film audiences, have earned their share as well. (Eve stopped here, and have reread the foregoing sentence several times, surprised at myself; it sounds like the beginning of a tirade against filth and dirt from one of those Citizens for Decent Literature screwballs. From me? I wrote that?)

Yes. And the reason is that the skin flick misses the point. It does not arouse interest or attention, or, after a while, anything else. I once watched six hours of skin flicks, four at a time, projected in a huge, meaty montage on the wall of a church basement as a desensitizing experiment in a sexuality workshop I was writing about, and it was desensitizing. The trouble with Last Tango in Paris is related, I think, to the skin flick’s trouble, and to the troubles of a good many contemporary novels: the study of sexuality in isolation is a strategic and procedural disaster. Two people in a room who don’t know anything about each other and don’t want to know, and Bertolucci wants us to care about them? Why should we care more than they do themselves? Why should we invest a feeling of connection they are unwilling to show to one another?

I don’t mean to suggest that Last Tango in Paris is a skin flick, even though the box office prices try to make that dubious claim. It is a serious film, but wrong. The measure of its error is probably Ingmar Bergman’s Cries and Whispers, which is also the best film I’ve seen in a couple of years. The issues it raises, moreover, are of greatest importance in any number of ways—from the legal and public to the personal and intimate. Questions of public morality finally touch, or at least ought to touch, upon questions of private morality. Mostly, of course, they don’t, because any given person is likely to be himself confused about what he thinks and feels (and thinks he ought to feel) about his own sexual behavior, and a consensus of confusion is not likely to be very much clearer than any of the contributing individual muddles. Cries and Whispers is, among other things, a compassionate recognition of the difficulties any human being is bound to have in working out, not anything so grand as a consistent position or a coherent view, but, more modestly, a way of living, of staggering through.

Intelligently, and in great contrast with Bertolucci’s pseudo-scientific atomism, Bergman gives us two sisters, Karin and Maria, who have come to their old family mansion for a death watch as their sister Agnes dwindles and dies, and he sets up between them a statement of rich simplicity about the relation between sensuality and authenticity. It is a paradigm of relational ethics in its clarity, and not only does it work in the film, it may also be true generally—that sexuality is an appetite without ethical concerns; that Maria’s sexuality necessarily involves her treating other people as objects, lying to them as often as with them; and that Karin’s unwillingness to say things she does not mean or to hear them said to her necessarily involves her withdrawal from the sexual arena.

The situation is nothing less than tragic, in that two competing and contradictory virtues are brought together by the death of the sister, and therefore they not only confront one another, but do so in the presence of—and in the light of—mortality. An eternal triangle, then, of love, truth, and death, and yet to describe the film this way is partly to betray it, for the arid geometry of meanings arises from acutely observed subtleties of flesh. Anyone who has seen the film will remember the mouths of the three women, as eloquent in repose as when they move in speech: the wet, full lips of Liv Ullmann (Maria), almost always slightly parted and frequently curved about an index finger or the ball of a thumb; the dry, fevered lips, cracked and swollen, of Harriet Andersson (Agnes) ; the severe, carefully painted, too precisely outlined lips of Ingrid Thulin (Karin). In a film full of tight head shots, in which faces virtually bulge from the screen and are held to long dissolves into flat red, such details burn themselves into the retinas in such a way as to overpower not only the desire but almost the capacity to make the abstract connections. The impact is like a blow that dulls sensation, and only in the tingle of the mind and nerves after the initial trauma has been survived do the connections and the relationships construct themselves for us.

There are, in fact, two sets of questions. The one has to do with the tension between Karin and Maria, between authenticity and sexuality. The other, related but independent, has to do with faith and sophistication, the simple faith of the servant, Anna, who can pray for the angels to protect the soul of her dead daughter (and then, wonderfully, munch an apple with a gusto that is somehow touching), and the sophistication of the parson who comes to pray over Agnes after her death, and constructs one of those conditional prayers (“If there is a God, and if he speaks our language . . .”) more disturbing than comforting. These two polarities cross at Agnes, who is in pain, who suffers, gets a little better, suffers again in a scene of terrible power, and then dies. But they also connect intellectually, in that sophistication and faith are suggested as competing and contradictory virtues in a tension analogous to that between love and truth.

Again, I find myself displeased with the tone of such a formulation, which seems altogether too remote. Cries and Whispers is a movie of great immediacy, and the connections are entirely implicit. They are, indeed, even personal. Most of the time, biographical criticism of films is impossible because of the collective process of a movie’s happening. Bergman’s situation is different, because he has his repertory company of actors and his secure relationship with Svensk Film-industri. He is, moreover, the producer as well as the director, and he wrote the screenplay. It is not wholly irrelevant, then, to cite a couple of sentences from Bergman’s introduction to Four Screenplays of Ingmar Bergman (Simon and Schuster, 1960) : “A child who is born and brought up in a vicarage acquires an early familiarity with life and death behind the scenes. Father performed funerals, marriages, baptisms, gave advice and prepared sermons. The devil was an early acquaintance, and in the child’s mind there was a need to personify him. This is where my magic lantern came in. It consisted of a small metal box with a carbide lamp—I can still remember the smell of the hot metal—and colored glass slides: Red Riding Hood and the Wolf, and all the others. And the Wolf was the Devil, without horns but with a tail and a gaping red mouth, strangely real yet incomprehensible, a picture of wickedness and temptation on the flowered wall of the nursery.”

More than ten years have passed since Bergman wrote that, and he does not need devils so much any more. The cries and whispers are painful and nervous enough without devils, for we can torment ourselves. The magic lantern remains, however, and appears in Cries and Whispers in a scene remembered from childhood, an occasion that should have been one of connection and instead was one of deep isolation. But the point is not to dissect each scene. I am only trying to suggest that the materials of the film are not so awesome and majuscule as they must seem in analysis, but altogether concrete, private, and fleshly.

The motion of the film is in fact quite simple, a process of accretion in which the sequences function like stanzas in a poem, establishing connections forward and back of increasing complexity and strength. The method is much more flexible and much richer in possibility than are the conventions of straightforward narrative. The disciplines are, if anything, even more strict, and the economies are entirely amazing. There is some narrative movement, of course. Agnes dies. Maria talks with Karin and tries to establish some degree of closeness, tries to touch her shoulder, touch her cheek, but Karin recoils from the touch and from the act of faith such a touching would, for her, require. There is a show of hostility on Karin’s part, and Maria is rebuffed, but finally there is a moment of meeting, a peculiar scene of the two heads in a tight frame, talking intimately, touching, communing. We have no idea what they are talking about and it does not matter. On the sound track, there is only a passage of a Bach sonata for unaccompanied cello (the cello is the one stringed instrument with the range of the human voice). The conclusion of this line, and very nearly the conclusion of the film, involves the betrayal of that communion by Maria, exactly as Karin expected. It meant nothing, or almost nothing, was not what Maria truly felt but only what she might have liked to feel. Or, if Maria did feel anything, loyalty, commitment, fidelity had no part in the feeling. And these were the very qualities which Karin demanded and failed to find, not only in Maria, but in her own husband, and, presumably, in anyone.

There are defects on both sides. Maria is anatomized for us by David, the doctor, a man with whom she once had an affair, as the two of them stand looking into a mirror and he describes to her the changes he sees—the way the eyes which used to look straight forward now glance sideways in calculation and circumspection, the way the line of the mouth has hardened, the way the almost invisible furrows of the brow and the wrinkles around the eyes show selfishness and сunning. And we have seen Maria’s character in its effect on her husband, Joakim who, after the discovery of her infidelity, goes into his study and plunges a knife into his belly in an attempt to kill himself—which fails, and he cries out to her, “Help me, help me,” wonderfully unclear about whether the help he wants is in living or dying. (In any event, she turns away from him.)

If Maria’s sensuality without sincerity wounds others, Karin’s insistence on authenticity and fidelity to the exclusion of sexuality is self-wounding. In a sequence which is by now famous, Karin acts out in the most literal way possible the metaphor about someone being wounded in their sex, inserting a jagged shard of a wine glass into herself, enduring the pain, and then, in the bedroom, smearing the blood of the wound across her face, noting the look of horror on her fastidious husband’s face, and—terribly, honestly—smiling at him.

The death of Agnes is the occasion for the moment of connection between the two sisters. Agnes, herself, is not established as having any kind of connection with men. She has not been married and, apparently, has contrived to avoid the entire dilemma of love and truth. Or it may be that the dilemma simply no longer applies and that as she confronts the prospect of dying she has begun the process of retreat common among terminally sick people, a withdrawal from the connections with other people. She does a watercolor of a rose and she makes entries in her diary, but if she has memories of the kind of turbulence that is playing about her in the lives of her sisters, they do not surface. Indeed, the movie ends with Anna, the servant, reading from the diary, a recollection of a day outdoors, almost certainly one of Agnes’s last days of health and happiness. She sees the scene incorrectly, rejoicing in a community and a harmony which we know to have been most seriously flawed. It is an irony of considerable proportion, for she speaks with the authority of the dead, and the scene on the screen is in fact harmonious and joyful, with the three sisters dressed in white and sitting on a swing that Anna moves back and forth. And for that moment it perhaps was true: they were happy.

We can remember back to Karin’s self-mutilation and her words, definite, clear, and underscored three times: “It is nothing but a tissue of lies. It is all a tissue of lies. A tissue of lies.” And we can recognize that this, too, is a lie, but a helpful, a necessary lie. A kind of dream, perhaps? But we must be careful, assaying various kinds of reality. There is a truth in dreams, in fantasies, and even in superstitions. Without any difference whatever, Bergman veers off into alternative realities of such kinds, and while he makes clear that he is maneuvering, he does not assign any label to these divergent experiences, allowing us as much mystery as the characters themselves may experience. The two characterizing sequences, for example, the moment in which Maria’s husband stabs himself and the moment in which Karin wounds herself, are each introduced by a narrator, intruding his voice and putting the events upon the screen at some intellectual distance. Other sequences are introduced or concluded with those long freezes and then slow fades into red. One such sequence is the very peculiar calling out of the dead Agnes for comfort, for someone to keep her company for a little as she faces the vast emptiness and loneliness of death. Agnes calls out and Anna, the servant, comes to the bedroom in which she is laid out. The deceased asks for Karin, whom Anna calls —but Karin refuses to have anything to do with Agnes, explaining, quite correctly if coldly, that she has her own life to lead. Agnes then sends for Maria, who comes in and is moved by her dead sister’s plea, approaches the bed, touches the body, nearly kisses it, and then recoils. The corpse clings to her, its arm around her neck. She struggles and as she backs away, the corpse drags itself after her, falling out of bed. Finally Anna herself gets into bed with the dead woman and cradles her in a composition that recalls an earlier frame when she comforted Agnes, and perhaps the Pietà as well.

The succession of the three visitors to the corpse has a folktale quality, and is perhaps Anna’s vision of what is happening and how she fits, or ought to fit, into the complicated constellation. It is a puzzling sequence in some ways, and one might like to avoid it, for its meaning is perhaps darker than anything else in the film. If Anna’s vision is in some way correct, and if her private truth laps against the truths of the two sisters, then one must conclude that the balance between love and truth is not only important in and of itself, but also critical for the soul, which is what the psyche used to be before therapists cannibalized the word.

All these connections are waiting to be made, to be explored in any light and in any person’s vision. That Ingmar Bergman has made such a statement is not surprising. Fellini’s attack is in many ways comparable, even though the style and the vision are quite different. But compared with these meditative, bold, intelligent, and humane enterprises, the exclusions of Bertolucci seem absurd and diminished. There is no challenge in isolating sexuality, in cutting away the heart and the mind to leave only the quivering genitals. Hard-core porn does that, and because it cannot afford to do anything more, it bores us. Otherwise, if it admitted characters of some complexity or some intelligence, we should very quickly become interested in other aspects of the lives proposed for our consideration—and then it wouldn’t be hard-core.

What is remarkable is not the torrent of sex films of the past five years or so. Fashions in film establish themselves in the wake of any single success and there are inevitable imitations and embroideries. And the coincidence of the Court’s move toward liberality (now, apparently, reversed) with the success of I Am Curious—Yellow was irresistible. What is striking, however, is the foolishness and the cowardice of all those movies. By reducing people to masturbatory fantasies, by retreating from any contamination with the complexities and ambiguities of living, the makers of all those movies about stewardesses and cheerleaders and swingers have (ho-ho) muffed a great opportunity. The reaction, and the present situation, may be deplorable, but they are all too understandable.

What is most regrettable is that sexuality is not only fascinating but actually interesting. There are intelligent and profound statements to be made about human sexuality. Cries and Whispers is one such statement. But the mindless assertions on display in theaters in the combat zones and the tenderloins provide a better case for the moralists than they deserve—or at least they provide the appearance of a case. In fact the discriminating principle is not sexuality at all; but there is no way in a democracy to apply the appropriate standard, which is one of intelligence and taste. Stupid sex, like stupid violence, offends us. Stupidity is offensive. Stupidity is dangerous, harmful to the morals of tender minds, inimical to the public good in all ways. But there is just no way to suppress it— certainly not so long as it remains in the majority, on the bench, in the studios, in theater audiences, and among the public at large.