Through A Glass Darkly

(Såsom i en spegel) 1961- Ingrid Bergman

For now, we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known. - Apostle Paul

It wouldn’t be a Bergman film without a powerful challenge to religion, and it is no different from Bergman’s 1961 film Through A Glass Darkly. The title in English comes from the Bible itself while the Swedish translation is In A Mirror which echoes the film’s resounding themes as well, but in this case, I prefer the English translation.

The story takes place on a family island in Sweden. Karin (Harriet Andersson) returns home after a stay in a mental hospital where she hopes to recover from her Schizophrenia. On the island she is joined by her younger sexually frustrated brother, Minus who is played by Lars Passgård, her husband the ever talented Max von Sydow (one of my top 10 favorite male actors) who plays Martin, a loyal but cautious doctor whose perceptions of reality fall the closest to earth, and Karin’s estranged father David (Gunnar Björnstrand) who returns home after completing a novel and a near death experience. 

I am very opposed to romanticizing mental illness and dismissing it as a connection to spirituality or on the other hand, witchcraft. Women have often been portrayed as conduits for something other than our reality and this can either be angelic or demonic depending almost entirely on our perspective or the perspective of the narrative. However, I wanted to suspend my opinions in order to engage with what Bergman is trying to tell me. 

One could argue that the main storyline is Karin’s since she has the most on-screen time but I actually find the main drama to be focused on the father figure, Martin. We are told in the film that he has abandoned his children after the death of his wife who also shares the same schizophrenic condition as Karin. After the wife’s death, Martin quickly became successful with his novel which may or may not have been written from his experience with his wife. When he returns home he makes it clear that he will be leaving after a month despite a forgotten promise to his children who are dismayed. 

If schizophrenia is genetic then the family talent for storytelling is as well. When Martin enters the house at dinner to have a very well acted cathartic cry which I immediately could resonate with as reality. Minus has created a play in order to show his father his own standing as a creative individual. The play within a play has been done by Bergman before and is most well known for its symbolic representation in Hamlet. David is clearly aware of this and takes the short play as a personal affront. 

Minus tells the story of an artist who feels that his own life is his work of art and creating representations of his life cheapens the meaning. The Artist is taken by the feminine beauty of a princess who died early in childbirth and is forced to witness her husband she left behind slowly forget her and move on to other pleasures. She acknowledges the artist who can penetrate a mystic veil in order to talk to her despite her being dead and unseen to those who are not sensitive enough. The ghost invites him to join her in death and share eternity with her, the Artist agrees to do as she wishes and thus solidifying his life as a work of art. At the time of importance the Artist second guesses himself. A series of questions he asks seem realistic to those who consider suicide as an option. What awaits me apart from the cold embrace of eternity? What is there to do but exist, surely it is better to have something to do than nothing, and what if there is nothing? The princess waits and then closes the door, oblivion and whatever promises it has is closed to him forever.  The Artist feels no remorse and instead decides to make a tribute to the princess but decides to give himself a more heroic ending, thus displaying himself as the ultimate hypocrite.

Minus knows this either instinctively or consciously and it perfectly sums up the internal dilemma of David. He laments that he has sacrificed his family for his own success and admits to Martin that he did want to document the descent into madness of Karin for his own profit. He asks Martin if he ever wishes that Karin was dead and explains that Martin’s suffering is pointless. Martin is repulsed by David’s honesty and directness and argues that his principles as a husband and father are missing. If Martin regrets marrying Karin he does not admit it to anyone other than himself but admits that he knows that his job as Karin’s only anchor to the world and the seriousness of how his actions will affect his wife. A crushing weight to bear, and we are curious to hear how he will respond to David’s question. We do not feel that he is being as emotionally open as he could be, but his company is perhaps not the place to be so open. We see that things are not easy for David, along with his wife’s sudden and dramatic shifts in the mood she has also lost her sexual drive and David is severely frustrated. We see the love that is there for Karin in these moments and the rejection from Karin is painful to the audience to see. 

Martin has recently experienced a near-death event on his way to commit suicide. He said he felt empty with no expectations on his way to meet his own end but a chance meeting with death through a car accident left him with a new found love for his family. I like this story and I like that it comes after Minus’ play. It hints that Martin has already met with the woman in the castle and decided to live because what his experience imparted was not a chance to profit but instead a chance to love those who love him. I like that it wraps up that story and validates Martin who later laments in a real connecting moment with Karin that he is forced to live in reality, but it is the most alive and human we have seen him through the whole film.

Karin’s story is separate from her fathers. With Karen and her illness, she is drawn between two realities. Karin knows she cannot live in both and feels compelled to choose between the two. From the beginning, we see that she is leaning toward the unknown because of its perceived connection to God. I wondered originally how Bergman would portray her madness and was relieved to see that he makes it painfully clear that Karin is mad and not to romanticize the illness as a storytelling device which was my biggest problem with Dryer’s Ordet. 

However, I want to believe that Bergman is capable of telling a bigger story here without sacrificing the illness and its negative effects on the members of the family. I am a supporter of the divine in every day and like Agent Mulder, I always want to believe that there is something greater than us at play, but for most of the movie I had a hard time convincing myself that there was a legitimate spiritual connection. Karin’s character is playful but gentle and has no vices except for her illness which begins showing a more menacing turn when voices which lead to the eventual seduction of her younger brother.

After she submits to her illness and decides to return to the hospital but the illness is not done with her yet. She hears voices telling her that the moment she has been waiting for is almost at hand. God is approaching and she must be ready to join him through the wallpaper. I wondered how much influence Bergman had taken from The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman because Through a Glass Darkly has visual similarities that I thought would be great to be captured while I was reading Gilman’s short story. A shot of light dancing on the repeated motif wallpaper was a powerful artistic portrayal of Karin’s own mind. 

At the pinnacle of Karin’s story, we have two separate things happening. In the attic, we hear an overpowering noise of the ambulance helicopter approaching. The wind knocks the windows and the blinds open and a small hidden door that is covered in wallpaper to make it undetectable. The camera stays on Karin’s face and we watch her make her decision to which reality she wants to live in. She approaches the door but then is frozen in horror. After catching herself she begins to scream in terror and becomes like a wild animal. It takes both her father and her husband to restrain her until she is given a sedative. Harriet Andersson displays powerful acting during this scene where she had to drop her social inhibitions. 

When she is calm she tells us why she did what she did. She says that when the door opened she looked for God to come through but instead of what she imagined to be God, a black spider emerged toward her. The spider came towards her and tried to enter inside of her. She recoiled in terror and the spider god turned away from her and left. I was a little disappointed that Bergman chose to use the Spider to represent something awful and horrifying since in many other cultures, including the Native Americans, have a much healthier approach to the mythos of the Spider from one of fear to another of building dreams and wisdom, but that’s just me. 

In either case, it seems to prove the point of the title. We see through a glass darkly every day of our lives. What we see of each other is distorted by our own lives, ideas, thoughts, and beliefs. We can only see part of the vision, and we elaborate on our own to what that might mean. David distorted his love of his family for love of writing about his family, a slightly different reality than the one around him. Karin’s test was if she could love the divine if it did not conform to her own understanding of what God was, and she could not. I think this answered for me the problem that I was having earlier with her divinity versus madness. In a way, Karin’s inability to transcend herself was the reason why her character was caught in her own madness and why other feminine characters with the same controversial situation have had different outcomes. I was grateful again for Bergman’s “reality” of the character’s dilemma and making Karin have an ending that was understandable even if it was not the happy ending that he was toying with.