Bergman's Persona
What happens when you stop playing roles
When I first saw Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958) in my early 20’s, it felt like a grand revelation. The idea that the pinnacle of feminine desirability was an invented woman — and that a real woman, in order to be loved, might change her clothes and her hair in order to become the closest possible facsimile of this invented woman — hit me like a proverbial brick back then, even though typing it out now it seems like something obvious and a little trite, something discussed to death. All the language and symbols around Vertigo became instantly meaningful to me, the grey suit and the green car, the snippets of Tristan and Isolde audible in the soundtrack. For me it was the movie for a while. I wasn’t alone. In the decades since, a thousand wannabe Hitchcocks have inserted sly references to it (or blatant ripoffs) in their own films, and to my discredit, these nods always make me take their work a little more seriously.
So it’s strange that until last night I had never seen Ingmar Bergman’s Persona (1966), which, though it does not reference Vertigo1 feels a little like that movie’s European sister — stranger, more dreamlike, more empathetic, and more disturbing. Vertigo has its two women, Madeleine and Judy: one of them is mysterious, remote, and tragic; the other earthy, pragmatic, and sexual. Their analogues in Persona are Elisabet and Alma. Both films find the identity of the more “real,” earthbound woman threatened by and subsumed into her mysterious counterpart, to both thrilling and horrifying effect.
The main difference, however, is that Persona’s women are both “real” women, whose perceptions and feelings are not always clear but are certainly urgent. Vertigo needed Madeleine to be a fiction, with only the barest sketch of an inner life; Persona’s Elisabet contains multitudes.
Persona opens with a shocking and violent montage that announces the film as Experimental — we see blood running from a slaughtered lamb, and a nail driven through a human palm. The primary effect, intended or not, is probably to weed out any unserious viewers in the audience and dispel any notion that this is a “woman’s movie.” The body of the film itself is very different from this opening shock.
We learn about Elisabet (played by Liv Ullmann, whose performance I admired in Scenes from a Marriage): she is a successful actress, with a husband and a young child. One night, during a performance of Electra, she suddenly falls silent, and now refuses to speak. When we meet her in the hospital, she looks stricken and will not move from her bed. The doctors have been unable to find anything wrong with her, and it’s generally accepted that her silence is an act of will rather than an ailment. A young nurse, Alma, is brought in to care for Elisabet full-time. Alma (Bibi Andersson) is sunny, cheerful, intimidated, and honored by her task. She shows Elisabet a letter from her husband and a photo of her son, both of whom miss her terribly; Elisabet’s response is to tear the photo in two.
It’s decided that the two women should go to a secluded seaside house, where the peaceful environs might allow Elisabet to recover. At first, everything is idyllic. The women read, take walks by the water, and are affectionate and companionable with each other. Alma dotes on the silent Elisabet and fills the time by talking to her about her life, happy to have found such a warm and patient listener. One night, she confesses her greatest secret: that she and another woman had sex on a beach with two anonymous boys, and that it was the most erotic experience of her life. She never told her fiancée, and when she discovered she was pregnant, she had an abortion. Elisabet listens silently, curiously, seeming to welcome the confession without disgust or judgment. Alma is relieved to have unburdened herself.
But then, things turn. Alma reads some of Elisabet’s private correspondence and discovers that she has included her secret in a letter to her doctor. Not only that, but she writes about Alma in a somewhat condescending tone, and mentions that it’s been fun to study her. Alma feels used and betrayed.
In the second half of the film, we see Alma’s identity and sanity in a state of slow dissolution. She feels an overwhelming desire to harm Elisabet, threatening to throw boiling water on her and making her step on broken glass. She becomes obsessed with forcing Elisabet to speak. And it begins to seem as though she is becoming Elisabet, or perhaps that Elisabet is consuming her or speaking through her, with her own identity as Alma helpless in the face of such a powerful silence.
I have not read any of the voluminous criticism of Persona beyond what’s on Wikipedia and went in mostly cold (aside from the multiple Persona-themed fashion magazine spreads I’ve encountered over the years — like Vertigo, Persona is most definitely a look). I can only relate here what I took from it.
In many stories by and about women, we understand that the desire for a loving, intimate friendship with another woman is as powerful a romantic fantasy as the desire for a male lover (see: Sex and the City, a million thinkpieces about Ferrante, etc). In fiction, these friendships often have sexual or violent undercurrents, and there’s something unstable and dangerous about them. And when that intimacy is combined with the kind of performativity associated with the feminine, we come to the forbidden idea that by changing hair or clothes one might become the woman one romanticizes.
Another common feature is the presence of a kind of drive towards self-erasure — the idea that a woman might find her conventional role so stifling or overwhelming that one day, she simply refuses to be. Ferrante’s “brilliant friend” Lila talks about “dissolving boundaries” and one day vanishes without a trace; Rachel Cusk’s narrator in Outline famously self-erases; Freud’s hysterical case studies “Dora” and “Anna O” lose their ability to speak. Early on in Persona another character, an older nurse, suggests that Elisabet has simply found a way to avoid performing any more roles — and indicates that she understands the desire to retire from that pursuit. The nurses seem to agree that her silence is not an affliction, but a refusal, and a person’s refusal to play a role is always destabilizing.
The most important role refused by Elisabet is that of motherhood and caretaking. This is alluded to near the beginning when she tears up a photo of her son, but it is followed by the fateful letter (when Alma can no longer see her as meek and benevolent) and later by a fascinating scene featuring the appearance of Elisabet’s abandoned husband at the cottage.
Alma does not find Elisabet’s refusals disturbing as long as she stays inside a different role: that of a compliant patient and accepting listener. When she ceases to adequately fill that role — by revealing in her letter that her intelligence and judgment are very much still active — Alma’s reaction is intense and violent. Only when Alma is able to stage something like a countervailing shameful “confession” from the still-silent woman to match her own story about the beach — an “admission” that she never wanted to be a mother and does not love her son — is she able to free herself.
I was reminded of a section in Sheila Heti’s Motherhood where the narrator, childless, encounters a pregnant friend, also an artist, who is vocally distressed by the potential harm to her ability to be creative. “Stop making things,” the pregnant woman tells her friend, upset by the thought that she is losing something her childless friend gets to retain. Heti is disturbed by the encounter, and her (male) partner tells her that this is something women do: they subconsciously wish harm upon the women who don’t suffer under the same constraints they do.
My overwhelming reaction in the second half of Persona was to marvel that Elisabet inspires Alma’s torment, hatred, and violence simply by refusing — refusing to speak, and to be mother, wife, or friend. I saw her as an innocent, a case study in how dangerous it is not to comply with the idea of oneself that exists in the minds of others. But it appears that Bergman didn’t see it that way; his view of Elisabet was that she was a monster.2 And, indeed, there are scenes in which her suggested monstrousness — specifically vampirism — comes to the fore.
Persona is beautiful, provocative, disturbing, and exciting and it’s a vast oversight on my part not to have seen it before now. I think it will be informing my thinking and sensibilities for a long time.
I don’t know if Bergman admired Vertigo or saw himself as being in conversation with it.
I’m getting this from a quote on Wikipedia.