In Dreams
3.
She and Her
In a recent re-watching of Ingrid Bergman’s Persona, I was struck by how much my experience belied its director’s reputation for (and my memory of Persona’s connection to) heavy, ponderous topics. In actuality, the movie is not only light, quick and various, but also extremely — and at times unexpectedly — subversive. Here (NSFW), for instance, is a particularly mischievous (and often-censored) still from the film’s famous prologue.
And here, in a much better example (also NSFW), is the famous “beach” monologue that Alma presents to Elisabet after they have settled into the administrator’s cottage:
In the same way that the opening scene of Hitchcock’s Psycho still contains the whiff of scandal, with its casual depiction of an afternoon rendezvous, Alma’s scene still shocks after fifty years, with its frank discussion of sex, abortion, and infidelity. In fact, such is its force that, as Ebert reports, moviegoers frequently misrecall the story that Alma recounts as an actual set of events depicted by the film.
As with both Vertigo and Mulholland Dr., the tone of Persona is haunting and possesses an ethereal, unreal quality. It is also evocatively shot, and full of memorable images:
The image of two women’s faces, one in profile, is a recurring visual motif in Persona, and it is one that Lynch borrows from directly:
As with Vertigo, there is, additionally, substantial narrative overlap between the two films, as Robert from The Film Experience notes astutely:
Both are about two women living together under unusual circumstances, one sick, the other a caregiver. In both cases, at least one of the women is an actress. Both films show a general degredation (sic) of these women’s relationships…Persona begins with actress Elizabeth Vogler (Liv Ullmann) experiencing a sudden fit of despair and going voluntarily mute. In the hospital, she’s paired with nurse Alma (Bibi Andersson) and the two are sent off to a seaside cottage where they develop an ambiguously intimate relationship… Eventually the film begins to flip on it’s head, revealing its own artificiality, and it becomes impossible to know who is who, and what role they’re playing. Mulholland Drive opens with aspiring actress Betty’s discovery of accident victim amnesiac Rita hiding out in her apartment. Soon, between line readings and Betty’s audtions, the two lady sleuths are investigating Rita’s life and identity and eventually becoming lovers (or have they always been?). Eventually the film begins to flip on it’s head, revealing it’s own artificiality, and it becomes impossible to know who is who, and what role they’re playing.
Add to this list another essential similarity at play: the arc of the characters of Alma and of Betty/Diane. Alma’s evolution is conventionally summarized as a slow merging with Elizabet’s personality, but I believe that what actually happens is much more subtle than this. A fuller description of her arc would emphasize radical and fundamental changes in her persona rather than simply find a slow consuming of her will by Elizabet’s. It is true that, early in the film, Alma suggests to the hospital administrator that Elizabet be paired with a more experienced nurse because she worries that she, Alma, will not have the mental fortitude to engage her willful patient. It is also true that such concern turns out to be prescient, since, as Robert notes, “the silent, passive judgement of Elizabeth begins to turn Alma into an aggressor.”
Like Mulholland Dr., and Vertigo both, Persona is the story of a betrayal, and an investigation into a power dynamic. Roughly midway through the film, Alma opens one of Elizabet’s letters without permission and discovers that her mute companion, with whom she has shared intimate personal detail, has secretly been judging her all along.
Elizabet’s letter, with its aristocratic, clinically condescending take on Alma’s desires, also exposes a class tension between the two women that had not yet emerged obviously into their interpersonal dynamic.
Ebert reads Alma’s subsequent, violent reaction to the betrayal as a straightforward professional failure:
In the sunny courtyard of the cottage, she picks up the pieces of a broken glass, and then deliberately leaves a shard where Elizabeth might walk. Elizabeth cuts her foot, but this is essentially a victory for the actress, who has forced the nurse to abandon the discipline of her profession and reveal weakness.
I’m not sure, however, that Elizabet’s ‘victory’ is so clear-cut. Yes, Alma’s fear is realized, and yes she does abandon her professional discipline by surrendering to a desire toward cruelty. But Elizabet also reveals weakness of her own in this moment, with an involuntary exclamation upon stepping on the broken glass, thereby breaking her own vow of silence — and thus her own code of discipline. In fact, watching the scene in its entirety, it is actually very difficult to reduce into simple terms who its “winner” and “loser” are:
This pattern recurs and deepens throughout the film: Alma, filled with anger, confronts Elizabet over the betrayal, demands that her patient speak, and even threatens to pour boiling water on her. Elizabet replies with her first words of the film, nearly an hour into its running time:
This scene doesn’t end with obvious winners or losers, either. Both Bibi Andersson and Liv Ullmann offer masterly, subtle performances throughout Persona, but this scene in particular is a deeply nuanced exploration of the two women’s relationship. Watch it again; look at their faces. Observe what their expressions communicate, and try to keep track of who is “winning” or “losing” at various moment in their fight — and at what cost.
Ebert notes that Bergman had once told him that “the human face is the great subject of the cinema. Everything is there.” If that sentiment is true for any film, it is inarguably true for this one.
The contours of the women’s power dynamic become more fluid over the course of the movie, as do their identities. It is not clear who is wounded most when Mr. Vogler mistakes Alma for his wife and begins, absurdly, to make love to her in front of Elizabet after coercing Alma to ‘admit’ that she is the mother of Elizabet’s child. And the closing interview between Alma and Elizabet, shot in full first with focus on Elizabet and then in full to observe Alma’s face as she issues her monologue, is a torrent of judgment and reaction.
Alma’s speech exposes personal horror in Elizabet’s life, which provides subtext for her earlier mockery of her less sophisticated caretaker, and seems to upend the earlier balance of power between the two women for good as Alma decisively rejects Elizabet (“No! I’m not like you!”). But then, the film presents a sudden image of the two women’s faces merged together:
Although it is a composite of two attractive faces, there is something deeply unsettling, even uncanny, about this image. This is particularly true for viewers of Persona who have spent an entire film in the company of the women whose faces compose it, and who also encounter this image greeted with horror movie strings. Ebert, again, notes that
Andersson told me she and Ullmann had no idea Bergman was going to do this, and when she first saw the film she found it disturbing and frightening.
Extending this, Wheeler Winston Dixon cites Bergman as recalling that, for
the famous split-face image in Persona, in which Nurse Alma’s face melts into Elisabet Vogler’s, both actresses, viewing the rushes, failed to recognize themselves in the artificially congruent image, concentrating instead on the image of the “other.”
We set the [projector] running, and Liv said: “Oh look, what a horrible picture of Bibi.” And Bibi said: “No, it’s not me, it’s you!” . . . Everyone has a better and worse side, and the picture is a combination of Bibi and Liv’s less attractive sides. At first they were so scared they didn’t even recognize their own faces.
As mentioned, Alma’s arc shares similarities with that of Betty / Diane in Mulholland Dr. Both blonde characters begin in optimistic roles, taking care of a detached, silent (or nearly silent) brunette women whose personality is also cypheric and distant. Each ‘caretaker’ in the pairing, however, has also changed irreversibly by the end of the film, and ends up cynical, accusatory, and consumed by her own failures. Those failures also, significantly, are connected to a failure of interpersonal connection between the ‘caretaker’ characters on the one hand, and the women that they are caring for on the other. Part of what makes the concluding act of Mulholland Dr. so powerful, for instance, is its exposures of the collapsing Diane-Camilla relationship, the dynamics that underpin this, and the shadows that this failure casts, both forward and backward:
Lloyd Michaels connects Alma’s arc to horror fiction, noting (in a summary also partly descriptive of Betty/Diane) that
Alma’s dedication to caring for others, her breakdown into madness and violence, and her attraction to mirrors may also conjure up the mythic figure of Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde.
As Michaels notes, other horror references undergird Alma’s transformation. “Unbearable pain, and nausea,” she declaims in the nightmarish dream sequence that nearly closes Persona, just before she draws her own blood with her fingernails and beats Elizabet for vampirically feeding on her.
An audience to Persona might conclude from this scene that it was, at last, watching the story of Alma’s personality gradually, but inexorably, being consumed by the silent, more dominant Elizabet (a transition that would be lightly echoed in the power dynamic that emerges to view in the final third of Mulholland Dr.). However, just as it is too simplistic to conclude decisively which of the two women emerges victoriously from their various confrontations, so too is it difficult to describe the progress of their relationship in terms that do not feel reductionist. It is probably most accurate to say that Persona is, in part, an extended investigation into the complex interweaving of several different kinds of identity.
Begman’s original title for Persona, “A Sonata for Two Women,” is reflective of this idea, and of fluid interplay between actresses, parts, and identity.
I believe that Steve Vineburg is close to the truth when he observes that
The mystery at the heart of Persona is the mystery of identity, articulated by Bergman and his two actresses chiefly in two ways. The first is this mirror exercise, in which we cannot say for sure which of the two women is the initiator and which is the responding mirror. The other is the metamorphosis, a process whereby an actor undergoes a dramatic mutation of some kind.
The motif of blended identities, to return to the earlier summary from The Film Experience, is one that recurs throughout Persona. Many images in the film, to include many of those included above, play on the fact that Bibi Andersson and Liv Ullmann physically resemble one another. As Michaels notes, one of the points of inspiration for the film was
a chance view of a photograph of Bibi Andersson and Liv Ullmann, who had recently become close friends; Bergman noticed the strong resemblance between the two actresses and began conceiving of a film starring them both, “a sonata for two instruments,” as he would later describe it.
The idea of blending the two women’s images and identities is one that the director returns to repeatedly.
Notions of identity and its boundaries also explicitly emerge from the text of the film.
In this context, it is worth returning to Alma’s ‘beach’ monologue:
Alma’s story is introduced (and, therefore, framed) by her recollection of youth as a lone girl among seven brothers, who always wanted a sister: a familial peer (or double) that shared her gender identity. It is into that context that the story of Katarina emerges, and this begins with an image of the two female neighbors sunbathing next to each other, naked.
(Well, nearly naked, anyway. The women are recollected as lying next to each other wearing nothing but straw hats. Those hats are a detail that Bergman returns to in another beach scene, later in Persona.)
The duo of Alma and Katarina are joined, in Alma’s memory, by another double, of opposite gender: two boys who appear near the two women on the beach and who stare at them before being initiated into erotic coupling by Katarina. Alma’s description of events here, with its focus on Katarina’s initiative and physicality and its flurry of pronouns and action between three, then four, participants, is also partly a story about identities blending. Blink, for instance, and you’ll miss the only time that either boy is named (‘Peter,’ who is the less ‘brave’ of the two interlopers). When, after Alma recalls her return home to Karl-Henrick, followed by their coupling and her subsequent abortion, she is moved to tears by her own guilt, but also utters a strange, revealing phrase about the entire experience:
Susan Sontag finds the notion of doubles and doubling to be essential to Persona and its conception of identity.
…The construction of Persona is best described in terms of the form: variations on a theme. The theme is that of doubling, and the variations are those that follow from its leading possibilities — duplication, inversion, reciprocal exchange, repetition.
This is the context in which she reads the “interview” scene near the end of the movie as well.
Perhaps the most striking episode, in which the formal and psychological resonances of the double theme are played out most starkly, is the monologue in which Alma describes Elizabeth’s relation to her son. This is repeated twice in its entirety, the first time showing Elizabeth’s face as she listens, the second time Alma’s face as she speaks. The sequence closes spectacularly, terrifyingly with the appearance of a double or composite face, half Elizabeth’s and half Alma’s.
This is certainly true for this scene specifically, though blurred identities, doppelgangers, and repetition — all encompassed in Sontag’s taxonomy — are also elements in Persona more generally.
Each of these three items are also touchstones of Mulholland Dr. (and of Vertigo as well: think of the repeated falls from heights, for instance, or the Madeline/Judy split, or other similar items). Most overtly, the plot of Lynch’s film circles explicitly around questions of identity: who is ‘Rita’ the amnesiac, and what is her story? This question (which motivates most of the first two-thirds of the film) is never resolved, but by the time that the movie has concluded, its entire notion of who is who has become unstable. In fact, Alma’s remark in Persona, about being ‘one and the same person at the very same time,’ is almost a statement of intent for the de-centered way in which identity is eventually represented in Mulholland Dr.
Echoes and reflections are also deeply integrated into the fabric of the film as well. This idea of doubles, which also connects to the plot of Mulholland Dr., pops up in unexpected places.
Some doubles are textual. As Zina Giannopoulou observes, it is possible to find a surprising amount of subtext for the Betty/Diane-Rita/Camilla relationship in the content of the script that Betty reads for her audition, given its handling of overlapping ideas, such as murder, looming consequences, sexual passion, betrayal of trust, and hatreds both internally and externally fixated.
The relationship between two principal (and similar) female characters is, to some degree, the core of both films, and another point of similarity between Persona and Mulholland Dr. is the romantic/erotic tension that exists between each pairing in each film.
I probably risk some laughter by pointing out that your author is not much of an authority on the subject, and therefore endeavors to tread lightly here, but I did find Gwendolyn Audrey Foster’s essay on lesbian subtext in Bergman’s film to be both thoughtful and illustrative. Following another critic, Robin Wood, Foster highlights the importance of Bergman’s decision to have Elizabet fall mute during a production of Electra, for instance, given Freudian implications of that play. Citing Wood (whom she, admittedly, finds a bit overstated), she notes that it is possible to read Elizabet as having thus rejected the Freudian ‘symbolic order’ and to have retreated instead into a more liberated, ‘performative’ space with Alma, despite the eventual disintegration of their tumultuous relationship.
Astutely, Foster observes that male-female sex in Persona is unfailingly associated with pain, though it often contains a surreptitious, same-sex performative aspect as well; conversely, “homosexual sex is associated with fear of and fascination at the merging of identity” instead. Foster therefore finds the real erotic energy of the beach monologue to be between Katarina and Alma (and, telescoping outwards, between Alma and Elizabet, who is Alma’s audience). In this reading, the surreal sequence where Mr. Vogler appears suddenly and makes love to Alma might be notable not just because it is the only direct depiction of male-female sex in the film, but also because it both represents a literal transfer of identity, and also takes place in the presence of Elizabet (who is, bizarrely, the object of Vogler’s address).
Much of the reading above also describes Mulholland Dr., which also presents male-female relationships as sources of pain, exploitation, and humiliation (think of the performances that Diane encounters at Adam’s mansion at the end of the film, the different performance that Betty is encouraged to give during her audition, or the very different performance that Adam encounters at his own home earlier in the storyline). Conversely, the relationship that emerges over the course of the film between Diane and Rita is largely characterized by its tenderness and sincerity.
That all said, I would amend slightly the reading of the relationship between Elizabet and Alma above to note that it is also characterized by a deep, painful intensity. So it also goes in Mulholland Dr. Though the Betty-Rita relationship does not (and cannot) collapse in the way that the less explicitly sexual Elizabet-Alma relationship gradually does, the dissolving romance between Diane and Camilla presented at the end of the film is equally rocky. Significantly, Diane seems to accept, however reluctantly, the relationship between Adam and Camilla, but expresses wounded shock at the gratuitous same-sex kiss between Camilla and the unnamed blonde woman at Adam’s dinner party. Both at that party, and on Adam’s film set, Camilla seems to delight in forcing Diane to watch her kiss other people.
Although their contexts are very different, the dinner party and on-set scenes are similar to the scene with Mr. Vogler in Persona insofar as both contain performative acts. Alma wants the unattainable Elizabet to observe, and to be alienated by, her strange liaison with Mr. Vogler; Camilla seems instead to want to rub Diane’s face in the fact of her displacement.
There are enough nods to noirs and their conventions in Mulholland Dr. to fill a separate essay, but part of the film’s genius is to find seeds of the femme fatale archetype in Elizabet’s willfulness, allure, emotional remove, and cruelty towards the more naive Alma.
Elizabet finds a double analogue in Lynch’s film, in the characters of Camilla and Rita, and although Camilla’s passionate relationship with and subsequent betrayal of Diane is textbook noir, it is Laura Elena Harring’s other role that is more explicitly connected to genre conventions.
In Mulholland Dr., Rita discovers her name on a poster for Gilda, the titular character to which, played by Rita Hayworth, is among the most famous femme fatales in movie history, and features a marquee performance from an actress who was famous for playing the type. Rita’s amnesia and the film’s allusions to her shadowy, troubled past filled with danger are nods to the genre, but these also work to help subsume several of the questions about identity into the film’s plot. Like Betty, we also seek resolution on who Rita is, and what her backstory might be.
Persona, I think, is after something slightly different: it is interested in how identity relates to experiences of reality, particularly as these are mediated. As Egil Törnqvist observes, the interplay between objectivity and subjectivity is characteristic of many of Bergman’s films, and subjective experience is definitely a topic that Persona investigates in variant and in intriguing ways; its extended riffing on conceptions of identity can be seen as largely in the service of this notion.
Mulholland Dr. is also very interested in this idea as well, though in a slightly different fashion.
Another connection between the films discussed so far is a motif of drapery. As noted, Vertigo makes very prominent use of curtains in its evocative motel scene.
Curtains are, however, also a dominant motif in Persona as well.
Both are influences on Mulholland Dr., which also prominently features curtains in several scenes.
Mulholland Dr., however, is even more deeply connected to a fourth film, which includes a storyline that contains a particularly famous set of curtains. In fact, all of Lynch’s films may enjoy their deepest connection with this film, which is worth an extended comparison.
First, however, an interlude.
[Part 4]
