Through A Glass Darkly

Last night I started Ingmar Bergman's Silence of God trilogy with the film Through A Glass Darkly. I got it from Netflix (along with the next film, Winter Light) back in November or December. I kept putting off watching them because they are black and white, Swedish films with subtitles. Having familiarized myself with Bergman in the past by watching two of his more famous works, The Seventh Seal and Wild Strawberries, I knew I would need to be able to completely concentrate on watching the movie and reading the dialogue.

The Seventh Seal was intriguing, and very dark, and I kind of hated it, even though I didn't hate the experience of watching it. Wild Strawberries was much more enjoyable. For some reason, I like to watch people evaluate their lives and am always curious to see how artists depict what they, through the characters, find most valuable.

Art that struggles with the concept of God is also endlessly intriguing to me, which is why I added the Silence of God trilogy to my queue. Through A Glass Darkly was quite good. Short, at only ninety minutes, and encapsulated within a twenty-four hour period, there are just four characters, and the movie is basically all about them reacting to each other's reactions to Karin, a woman who is beginning an "incurable" descent into mental illness. The other three characters are her unimpeachable husband; somewhat absentee, novelist father; and sexually and artistically frustrated younger brother. After an intense day during which Karin finally decides to give into her darkness and has a vision of God as a spider that unsuccessfully attempts to penetrate her, she gets flown off to the hospital. But her father and brother stay behind and discuss finding something in the world to hold on to, and hoping that love is the true nature of God.

I suppose the spider, to me, represents all of the difficult questions associated with disillisionment about God, the feelings of helplessness when such terrible things are going on in the world, the self-hatred we feel when we allow our own inappropriate thoughts and feelings to overwhelm us. Had Karin allowed the spider to penetrate her, would she have fallen further into this fear and anger? Or would she have had to accept the duality of God (or as I see it, the duality of humanity, which we have assigned to God)? She was so blissful in her hallucination up to that point, wanting to leave reality behind, wanting to be allowed to see God. I like that the movie ends on a relatively positive note, a breakthrough between father and son, and the only idea of God that I really think should be adhered to--love. The world is full of grace, and as Studs Terkel would say, hope dies last. Unfortunately, we only get to see or access the smallest ideas of what God could be.

Anyway, I might try to watch Winter Light tonight. Depends how tired I feel after work today.