A Perspective: The Possibilities of Love

Hiram 2022-04-20 09:02:49

Perspectives required for the film-seeing process: Bergman is often misunderstood as a pessimistic director. He said he was revealing "the possibility of love". It would be better to watch this movie with a sense of "where is the possibility". The change in the couple's attitude towards love is also noteworthy. Flip Radio said the film was "the linguistics of emotional kidnapping." 1. Both naive and apprehensive hold a naive but self-mature belief that lowering expectations will bring happiness. "There is no need for pain, things are always resolved this way." This actually leads to the accumulation of contradictions. "Personally, I think you just have to be nice to the people you live with... Humor, camaraderie, tolerance, and reasonable expectations. As long as there are these, love is not necessary.", should not "be Troubled by unrealistic emotional needs." They held the idea of ​​maturity and ignored each other's and their own real emotional needs. A husband needs his wife to have the same detached and trivial vision as he does in order to alleviate the loneliness and emptiness in his life. Wife needs company, shared responsibility, care. (The husband takes a non-interfering attitude towards his wife's desire to have children, but repeatedly declares that he is not responsible in a euphemistic way. This is a kind of emotional kidnapping of "don't ask me about raising children, it's up to you to decide" .) At this point they still believed that they "loved each other in a broken way". The husband said that he "has no imagination", which means that he has no expectations, and his friend said that "people without imagination are better liars", which means that such people are better at using expectations to manipulate others. Birth and death have strong symbolic meanings in Bergman's films, implying a kind of repentance, re-examining life and love sincerely. The birth of a child is more for the caregiver to experience the joy of true love in himself, rather than some kind of "love" for others as a stopgap measure. The heroine of the film said: "I have a feeling that everything else in the world is fake, you and me, and the children, only this child in the womb is real. I feel joy for him, this feeling Very true. We are poor, self-indulgent cowards, ashamed of ourselves. And there is no care, love, and joy in our world. We can have this baby. I'm happy, daydreaming about it all day. This It's my real feeling. Now I'm mature enough to be a mother." This place shows that the heroine has realized that the order of their relationship now is problematic, not true. But the husband still faced the problem in an evasive way. 2. Cleaning up the dust under the blanket "Dust under the blanket" symbolises the problems that have been accumulating in disregard. The heroine talks to a female client whose children are all grown up but who is going to divorce because she "can't stand a marriage without love". The heroine was deeply shocked and asked her own confusion "Does love exist?" The female client pointed out "I said to myself that I have the ability to love. But love is trapped in a bottle. My life has killed all opportunities. ." The solution to a loveless marriage is to "cut each other out" and start a new life. This actually coincides with the overall understanding of their lives when their husbands cheated. Some clock symbols slowly appear in the play: the husband's watch is always stopped, and the alarm clock at the bedside is always "inaccurate", implying the collapse of the life order of the two. The dialogue between the two is full of emotional kidnapping. "You can't ask for eternal intimacy, it's easy to get bored." (You shouldn't ask for these, you shouldn't be dissatisfied, it's a sign of immaturity,) "This is a big problem. I love you so much, you know? I Afraid of losing you. I don't always say nice things, even though I know it's good. I'm not very smart about that. But I'll change. You're so kind to me. I love you, really love you. "(That's because I love you I'm like this, I'll change my question, but shouldn't you also feel like you're not doing enough.) "I'll remember, but I have to go now." (No Accept emotional kidnapping) 3.Paula This section is an explosion of contradictions. Husband cheated on Paula and wanted to walk away. With submission and consideration, the wife tries to make the husband feel guilty and hope he doesn't leave. The husband sees through and does not accept this emotional kidnapping. In the end, the wife pleaded hard, but to no avail, the husband left. In fact, the husband has cheated for a long time, but the husband has been acting as usual, and the wife has not been aware of it. Husband said "you've never been very observant" (not aware of my emotional needs). Here, the husband's way of dealing with the accumulated problems in his life is to walk away, put it aside completely, and start a new life. "Going to Paris" is also full of romanticism in the Western context, pointing to an imagination of "having the courage to pursue a new life", so that "life will become better". 4. The valley of tears was deep. Facing the conflict with Paula and the setbacks in his career, her husband entered a state of complete nihilism. Stop believing in love. "But the emptiness inside is more of a physical pain to me, and my whole body is burning with pain. Or like you cry when you were a child, the whole body is in pain." The husband is good at using a set of theoretical The rhetoric to find a reason for one's own pain, thereby "resisting the nothingness in the heart", this rhetoric is exactly the theory of nihilism (the inevitability of human loneliness, people should not expect anything at all). It embodies Nietzsche's revelation that "man would rather wish for nothing than to wish for nothing." The husband returns to meet his wife, seeking solace and sex. What the wife wants is to start living together again. They kept kidnapping each other to achieve their goals, and ultimately failed. When a wife reads her diary for her husband, she reflects on her own emotional kidnapping as docile (“I never think about what I like, but I always think about what other people think I like, this is not generosity, even in the past I think so. It's really just cowardice. What's more, it's all rooted in my indifference to myself."), reflecting on the past two people's avoidance of problems and a series of self-deception ("I live with Joann together. In the little happiness, we are indifferent to everything. It is just a hidden cruelty and coldness. Every time I think about it, I am always more shocked. Modifying our stable relationship requires a heavy price. That is the gradual development of your humanity. Corrosion."), the final solution was proposed to give the audience a glimmer of hope: "I'm sure we're doomed. Because I only need a little sincere analysis, we were both lovingly attached to each other. The fault was our fault. Never break away from the shackles of family. Never create an ideal life worth living." The wife hopes to "convince" her husband to start over by sharing the diary, but when the wife puts down the diary, she finds that the husband is actually asleep. This plot shows that the husband is really not interested in starting over, he no longer believes in love and just wants comfort and sex. (Here I am reminded of what Nietzsche said, "As soon as we notice that someone forces himself to be absorbed in our dealings and conversations, we have valid evidence that he does not love us, or no longer loves us.") Even if the goals of the two have not been achieved, and no problems have been solved, I still think that Bergman has carried out a certain degree of concealment here, and also gave a partial solution. He used his wife's diary to reveal the things that had obscured love: emotional kidnapping, avoiding problems, ignoring the emotional needs of the other person and himself, and naively thinking that as long as you accept the existence of problems and lower your expectations, you can be happy, resulting in the accumulation of contradictions. Avoiding, ignoring and lowering expectations are basically passive responses to the conflict. The wife's writing of "not creating an ideal life worthy of our living" reveals what they should have been actively trying to achieve, "creating something worthy of our living" life” is the truly active and creative thing. Here Bergman should want to emphasize the huge difference between passive coping and active construction. 5. The blind two went to the male protagonist's office to sign the divorce agreement. The male protagonist is middle-aged at this time, and his career and emotions have suffered setbacks, his ambitions have been wiped out, and he has accepted the mediocre reality. However, the heroine "found herself", became more and more confident, and even devoted herself to political movements, and had the next marriage partner. At the beginning of the film, the images of the husband and wife in the interview happen to be interchanged, which is an interesting symmetry. At first, the heroine wanted to sign the agreement as soon as possible, but the hero wanted to reunite and return to the family. However, the purpose of the two kept changing during the process, and their quarrel was very "blind". The only thing that hasn't changed is that both of them are kidnapping each other and trying to make the other submit to them. For example, the wife said, "It's because I care so much about how you feel that our emotions are cracked. If I hadn't let myself be held back by guilt, I would have known we were all wrong." They started talking again The problem of discord in sex life reveals that the indifference and resistance that the wife showed during sex life is actually a kind of revenge and "balance" for her dissatisfaction with other aspects of her husband, a kind of "think about why you I lack passion" emotional kidnapping. The husband has always occupied the commanding heights of reason in words, so the wife had to use this non-verbal way to "balance". The two quarreled fiercely, and the husband pushed the problem back to his wife, "You have a hard-to-change character." "There is a pure feeling between people. It has nothing to do with rational perception or sexual desire. From your point of view, it's almost impossible." 6. In the middle of the night, in a dark room in the world, after the two formed new families, they became lovers again and went to a friend's country villa for a tryst. At this point, the two have become accustomed to cheating in their respective emotional lives. The heroine has completely entered a kind of individualism, "find herself", full of confidence, devoted to politics, and no longer has "unrealistic emotional needs" and no longer needs love. "Sometimes I feel sad because I've never fallen in love with someone, and I don't think anyone has ever loved me." The male protagonist completely accepted the mediocre reality and became meek and humble. At this time, the male protagonist returned to the attitude of the interview at the beginning, believing that "pure feelings" cannot be achieved by people, and happiness can only be achieved by lowering expectations. "I know how I feel, I love you in a selfish way, and I also feel that you love me, in your cumbersome, tangled way. We both love each other deeply, in that vulgar, mutilated way way. And you are so greedy for happiness. But look at me now, in the middle of the night, there is no pretense. In a darkroom somewhere in this world, sitting under your shoulders and snuggling with you, and you holding me . . . I don't know what my love is like, and I can't describe it. Sometimes I don't feel my love." But this seemingly tender last verse does not mean that the two have found happiness. Married Life was a 1973 film, and Bergman made its sequel, Sarah Bond, in 2003.

(I will come back to write with more insights in the future, and there are still many confusions. The answers unearthed from this film are still weak.)

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Extended Reading

Scenes from a Marriage quotes

  • Johan: You need to put a lot of effort into not caring.

  • Marianne: We're pitiful, self-indulgent cowards that can't connect with reality and are ashamed of ourselves.