Stay Together for the Kids

The art of staging an argument seems to require a deep lived-in comprehension and understanding of the act itself. I’ve never been in an argument in my entire life, I’ve never even disagreed with a single other person in this world, so I wouldn’t know. From what I’ve gathered from motion pictures, they start strong and heavy, often with a confession of infidelity, then calm down (eye of the storm, don't be fooled) momentarily, only to be resurrected by a laugh or a goading smile, sometimes sex happens because I hear that this type of sex is really superior to sex during peacetime, and things get swept under the rug until the next one. I remember going to the local “independent” theater to see Richard Linklater’s Before Midnight, where Ethan Hawke and Julie Deply have a showstopper spat that lasts about fifteen minutes. I was packed in a small uncomfortable room, knee to knee, with a horde of giggling septuagenarians. It wasn't the worst experience I had at that now defunct theater, that award belongs to Blue is The Warmest Color, though my friend Jesse's one-liners (said loud enough for the packed theater to hear) will always be the stuff of legend as far as I'm concerned. 

If an effective movie feud indicates experience in the matters of marital discord, then Ingmar Bergman must have gotten unprecedented access to bedrooms and living rooms all over Sweden, studying and taking notes on the nuances of escalating matrimonial acrimony. The director's boots on the ground research made for some raw histrionic pandemonium. For evidence, look no further than Scenes From a Marriage, his first foray into television where he observed a professedly healthy marriage on the spritz in six uplifting episodes. Not to take sides, but I’m throwing my hat in Marriane’s ring (Liv Ullmann, one of the greatest?). She’s a divorce lawyer with two kids, married to Johan (a psychology professor and “poet”) and enjoying domestic tranquility, a la ships passing in the night. As is often the case, she spends much of her time cooking, parenting, wrangling and planning her life away. It’s a thankless role but apparently only one of two functioning adults has to do it.

As anyone with any knowledge of Bergman could predict, this facade will dissipate and explode (the old Hitchcockian bomb beneath the seat), revealing a much uglier reality beneath the surface. This happens during the episode entitled “Paula” which is preceded by the episode entitled “The Art of Sweeping Things Under the Rug.” Paula is the name of Johan’s mistress (bet you didn’t see that coming), a 23 year old coworker who he almost instantly dismisses as a mistake and ridicules her looks, because his loyalty knows no bounds. He dumps this information on Marrianne the night before running off, leaving her and their children for six months with little correspondence. One of Johan’s fight tactics is to tell his wife how she “must be thinking” building his own mythos to avoid her interjecting anything that might penetrate him. He also loves to play the victim, in this case the victim of domestic placidity (remind anyone of a 2025 critical golden calf?) and even eludes to his decision to leave as a potential suicide deterent. Take it from me, anyone who dangles the potential of offing themselves as a reason to excuse poor behavior should be met with the prompt retort, “prove it bitch!.”

“I’m trying not to feel guilty, that would just be an act.” So says Johan to a cordial Marriane, who insists that she is willing to carry on once Johan gets this fling out of his system. Once he breaks the news that he’s bailing for eight months, making damn sure to rub salt in the wound by telling her he’s been wanting out of this "hermetically sealed existence" for four years, he finally breaks her. He then rages out when she asks how he will afford child support, assuring her he sold assets and will furthermore “vanish” and “dematerialize.” “It feels good to act like a cad,” says the cad himself following a desperate attempt to hurt her, seemingly because her calm reaction elicits shame. His bitterness towards the pageantry of marriage, and all of the immured sacrifices that go with it, don’t feel especially revelatory given his supercilious demeanor, a truly fragile little boy enamored by a new body and the promise of a life without parental responsibilities. Nevertheless, it’s another showcase for the director’s trademark inhospitable miserabilism, the indisputable champion of inflicting his own personal trauma’s and fatalistic worldview, often self-inflicted pain enabled by critically acclaimed hubris, unto arthouses all over the world with nearly unmatched success and acclaim. 

I’d bet money that this movie, which turns uglier in subsequent chapters, inspired Lars Von Trier’s Antichrist, the aforementioned Before Midnight, and many other explorations of curdled marital bliss. None of them felt more bleak and unrelenting than this however, no matter how hard they try (genital mutilations included). Bergman and his four marriages reign supreme. I watched it alone and found myself deeply uncomfortable, worse than my aforementioned date with 20 plus salt and peppers waiting for Dame Judi Dench or Colin Firth to ease the tension. I’m not sure which chapter was more horrific; The Veil of Tears, The Illiterates, or the concluding In the Middle of the Night in a Dark House Somewhere in the World.

Tears features Johan’s brief return/visit home, where she baits him with news of potential remarriage and he pathetically and shamelessly tries to fuck. The hints of sexual abuse abound, she repeatedly says stop as they tangle on the floor, Johan so obviously looking to get his rocks off and leave while she’s testing the waters to see if any hint of a decent man remains. She reads her therapy notes to him after practically begging him to relent and to think of the pain it causes to her to cling to hope in a hopeless situation. Her notes, read aloud with stills of Ullmann from birth to present, allude to a stifled life of conditioning and repression. She bemoans that they never broke free from their families to create something worthwhile on their own terms, playing a role that would prove futile in the shadow of Johan’s insatiable selfishness, only to cut to her ex husband zonked.

The Illiterates observes the two in Johan’s cramped and chilly office finalizing their divorce. Here they get drunk, have ill-advised sex, argue (the first time she seems released from the role of polite yeasayer), with him beating her mindlessly/homicidally and holding her hostage. He’s finally shed his sheepskin, and I found myself hoping in vain that she’s finally free of his hegemony. However, the final chapter finds them once again falling into each other’s arms, like dogs returning to their vomit, fighting and repeating their cycle of fortified misery, calling to mind another voyeuristic spectacle of gross codependency; Michael Shanks Together. In that film, lovers Millie and Tim (real life spouses Dave Franco and Alison Brie) drink from a mysterious pool of still water while taking refuge from a storm in a submerged cave resulting in their bodies literally growing together. Here, they find that they are physiologically bound, any attempt to walk away results in an invisible force dragging them back together. Horror is hip right now because it seems the only consistently profitable spectacle (I’m convinced media overlords are in full control now; i.e. Turnstile and the rise of hardcore which like horror is comparably cheap to produce and lures in curious toe dipping spectators seeking the thrill of danger), and specifically body horror in which physical deformities spell out real life anxieties and shine a light on our quotidian struggles. I didn’t need to define this sub-sub-genre for you as it’s all the rage following the success of The Substance (that greedy leech, Ryan Murphy is apparently making a miniseries cashing in on the fad). The term Cronenbergian is being tossed around like the Vulgar Auteurisms of the early 2010s. It’s odd witnessing it (body horror) let loose into the normie public; I’ve heard it no less than three times in less than a year out in the wild. Shanks and company have some fun spelling out their titular metaphor, and it’s less dour than I expected, but it’s too long and loses its charm before its CG finale arrives. Millie and Tim’s gooey fusion, like Marrianne and Johan’s, consummates their prison of relationship addiction. 

*Sven Nykvist's grainy elegance reminded me of Sean Price William's cinematography in Nathan Silver's sublime Between the Temples, perhaps the antithesis to fatalist relationship dramas.