by Lance Lee
Bergman handles his Act 2 development powerfully. Things begin badly at the bishop’s palace with a clash at dinner between the bishop’s mother, Blenda, and Emilie over the traditional habits of the household. Blenda will not surrender her control over how things have been, while Emilie forbids her to interfere with her children. There is no milk of human kindness at the bishop’s, no Christian sweetness or charity: power over others is nakedly at stake. Edvard tries to mediate but clearly intends that in time things shall go on as they have in the palace: not he or his family but Emilie and the children must change and conform. Alexander curses under his breath as he says grace. In their room Alexander and Fanny are blunt: “I don’t want to live here,” Alexander says, and Fanny: “I think we’ve got a horrid stepfather.”9 Fanny even has a foreboding in this room, which belonged to the bishop’s first, dead children.
FANNY
One day when it’s getting dark and I come into this room there will be two pale little girls dressed in black in front of the doll’s house and they’ll say in a whisper they’ve come to play with me.10
Actually, she and Alexander will be seen in a ghostly fashion by the bishop, with Emilie standing guard over them in the climax as Isak whisks away the actual children in the chest downstairs.
The children are not reassured by Emilie; in fact, next we see Helena talking over the phone with Isak, concerned about their well-being. She is worried and wants Isak to keep an eye on them; no one has heard from them in some time. Maj comes in equally worried about Gustav Adolf. At the same time, Justine comes into the children’s locked room and provokes Alexander with her version of the accidental tragedy of the bishop’s first family. Now Alexander spins his tale of how the bishop locked up his family and starved them and how they consequently drowned in their effort to escape. One of the drowned girls, he says, told him this story.
Alexander’s story rings so true about the character of Edvard that Justine is not dismissive but horrified. Alexander, challenged by Fanny, quotes his Uncle Isak’s reference to Hamlet about man: “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio …”11 He admits he doesn’t understand all the implications of these words, but will once he’s grown. In the meantime he has justified the use of his imagination to reflect a reality so wide only the imagination begins to let us grasp it: a grown-up, which he is not, must use full creative capacity to respond to experience. Experience is what we have in the third area Winnicott identifies between the “me” and “not me,” that area where we play, experience one another and culture, express our creativity, find our true self, and in drama encounter antagonists who for their own reasons try to stop the creative growth of heroes and heroines.
The story shifts again to Helena, who now engages Oscar in conversation. He too is worried about the children as Emilie arrives. Justine has carried Alexander’s tale to the bishop, who summons the child. Alexander is frank: “I think the bishop hates Alexander. That’s what I think.”12 Edvard insists he loves him and that it hurts to have to punish Alexander, but Alexander must learn to tell the truth. Even after Alexander caves in to the bishop’s manipulation, Edvard insists on punishment, for “the punishment is to teach you a love of the truth.”13 He recites the various punishments available and canes Alexander. The boy is again threatened with the cane when he refuses to beg forgiveness, again caves in to the older man and begs forgiveness, yet still is locked in the attic.
Emilie bares her heart to Helena as this transpires at home. She had yearned for a purer life and “thirsted for the truth”14 but now lives in dread and terror of the bishop. She is afraid to act because the law would be on his side. She is trapped, hates him viscerally, and dreads the collision between him and Alexander we have just seen happen. “We must find a solution,” whispers Helena.15 Emilie leaves and, once home, must force her way into the attic to save and embrace the shattered Alexander.
Act 1 feels relaxed in contrast to the drive of Act 2. But at this point the development has made clear the nature of Emilie’s error. She has found a lie, not the truth, while Alexander has paid the price of her error more deeply than herself, for he is a child with only a child’s resources, however imaginative. Love has been exposed as hate; truth, an immersion in falsity; forgiveness, condemnation in the bishop’s world. Edvard may be a religious figure but stands for all the ideologues who have tormented our last 150 years with their doublespeak and tyranny and caused the deaths of countless millions in the historical world. Edvard Vergerus resonates with those figures of terror, none of whom presented themselves as bad: quite the contrary, they claimed the future and the right, as he does in Fanny and Alexander.
Here there is a telling consonance with the reason Aristotle rated tragedy over, say, history: history deals with confused, actual events, whereas tragedy imagines an event that stands for all. Read: drama imagines the essence of reality.
The Handling of the Crisis
Failure of the False Solution
What is the crisis? The crisis is not just a technical term connoting the failure of the concluding Act 1 resolve, accurate as such a statement may be. The crisis is the heroine and hero’s failure to resolve their quest/journey, at once the culmination of the phase in which they pursue error and the moment where they both recognize and feel fully, and so make us feel fully, the consequence of their specific mistake.
That is what stares out at us with Alexander in Emilie’s arms in the attic. That moment is so clear in meaning no dialogue is necessary. Both have failed, Emilie in her choice of the bishop’s world as embodying the truth and Alexander in his mode of imaginative resistance. But if the bishop’s world and values do not satisfy Emilie’s quest for truth and purity, what will? We see how the climax must bring the answer to this question, must consummate the protagonists’ journey one way or the other, in the terms given by the specific story imagined. After the attic scene, we know that whatever Emilie finds will not be anything offered by the bishop. We know from her meeting with Helena that it must involve a turn to the Ekdahls again. But first Emilie must emancipate herself and Alexander from the bishop. How is not apparent, but no climactic resolution was possible until this moment of failure was found and experienced, as that failure points toward and gives the specific context of meaning for the climactic action.
Emilie and Alexander’s solution, moreover, must include a life that is true for their community. When Emilie went to the bishop’s, she changed communities but did so for herself. Her choice to do so again also has profound social implications, then, as she turns now to the Ekdahls whose possession of the truth she rejected initially. Confirming their truth as hers also moves past the selfish solution that must always fail. So the crisis is not some technical need to maintain interest by preventing, through conflict, an easy resolution of the conflict that fans expect for some climactic chase sequence or its equivalent. The crisis reflects the essential purpose of drama to point through error toward whatever a given story will assert is “right” through the outcome of its climax. The crisis points up a given story’s moral universe for the hero and heroine and their community in which they find that right.
Think how the crisis is handled in Kieslowski and Piesiewicz’s Blue. Julie confronts Olivier and is forced to realize that her resolve of not being involved at all with life, announced at the end of Act 1, cannot be maintained. In High Noon Kane must begin the long walk toward the final shoot-out in total isolation, all efforts to depend on others to do the right thing having come to nothing. Princess Leia makes Luke and Han Solo in Lucas’s Star Wars realize they have not escaped the Death Star but been allowed to leave so they can be tracked, while Luke is distraught over Obi-Wan’s death: he had joined forces decisively with him at the turning point of Act 1. The corrupt police find Book and Rachel in Witness, ending their safety and Book’s attempt to find a solution of his own for his problems which he initiated by his flight at the end of Act 1. Leon discovers John is not guilty in the crisis in Lantana, and that consequently his w
hole manner of approaching and understanding both Val’s disappearance and his own life stand on equally false ground.
Julie searches out her dead husband’s mistress as a first step in the End; Amy runs back to town in High Noon when she hears the first shots, while Helen controls herself and departs. Luke prepares for the climactic confrontation with the Death Star with the other rebel pilots; and Book begins a confrontation with Schaeffer and his men, while sending Samuel to get help from the Amish. Leon makes a last false step with Nick, then finally listens through to Sonja’s tape. In each case the solution they begin to find through the crisis points the protagonists both toward a redefined sense of their community and toward the true solution of their problems.
As we look back over the second act of Fanny and Alexander, we see how tightly written it is, how clearly the past has connected with the present, and how powerfully the need to find the truth has connected with the communal life that goes with it. But while in the crisis we can only feel the depth of defeat. It is that feeling which motivates the action needed climactically.
Edvard makes the implications of Emilie and Alexander’s defeat in the crisis abundantly clear. “Get it into your head once and for all that you must obey me, you must submit,” he tells Emilie.16 She must obey his “office.” He adds: “… the slightest attempt on your part to rebel or get in touch with the outside world will affect your children’s well-being.” “Reality,” he finishes, “is hell.” He will confine her to her room. He is a man whose “slavery is his freedom.” He may love Emilie more than anyone else, but her defiance is a form of insanity, much as defiance of the Communist regime in the USSR often landed one in a mental asylum. “All that must be suppressed…. (Emilie screams. Edvard strikes her across the mouth).”17 The doublespeak and the power drive are transparent, and her despair. Equally clear is the extent to which Edvard’s dumbness is willed.
A tyrant in the Campbellian sense makes himself by damming up the cosmic/Winnicottian creative flow of the universe/self and attributing his act to necessity, as Edvard does to Emilie. He is clearly a fallen hero in every sense. Normally we do not see villains’ history in drama, only the effect of their fall which has typed them. But with Edvard we can see he is akin to a hero within his false modus vivendi at the start of a story who refuses as the story develops to leave that falseness behind, instead trying to impose it on others. He clots time: he stops others’ creative response to reality, stifles their volition, and subsumes their moral agency within his own closure of their volition. Emilie understands this well,
EMILIE
I curse you. I curse the child I am carrying. I shall tear it out with my own hands and crush it as one crushes a poisonous animal. Every day, every hour I shall wish you dead. …18
The End—Act 3
The Discovery of the True Solution and the Heroic Deed
Now we see that the true solution to the hero’s problem must be one that works for himself and his community. Edvard has made clear escape alone is not sufficient; he must be dealt with decisively, and a true reckoning made with Emilie and Alexander’s Ekdahl connection.
Nonetheless, the physical safety of Emilie and her children are the prerequisite for the larger solution, as now Isak decisively enters the story. Bergman laid the groundwork for Isak’s intervention with Helena in Act 2, and in Act 3 Bergman develops him first as the Jewish “usurer,” the man with money for the “distressed” Christian, Edvard. Thus Isak is able to enter the bishop’s household under the guise of interest in a chest he had once declined. Edvard’s sister, Henrietta, treats him with contempt but seeks out her brother. As she leaves, Isak spirits the children with Emilie’s connivance into the chest. A cooked element intrudes heavily here, capable of multiple interpretations: the bishop, suspecting a plot, opens the chest, and sees nothing. He rushes upstairs, only to find the children asleep on the floor, although Emilie prevents his touching them. They are apparitions. Isak succeeds in getting the real children to his home. Is it the bishop’s guilt that blinds him or magic?
At Isak’s, Alexander encounters a breathing mummy, has a run-in with a puppet “God” manipulated by Isak’s nephew Aron, and meets his father who advises him to be charitable toward people. But Alexander regards his father as a weakling and reproaches him for not telling God on Edvard, which Oscar can’t do because there is no God, Alexander adds half in anger, half mockingly. Then Alexander encounters Ismael, Isak’s androgynous younger nephew.
Here Bergman develops the traditional otherness of the Jew in European society, given life in Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice and continuing now, as the repetitive spates of synagogue burning and defacements in France and Germany attest. That Isak is Helena’s lover and a welcome member of the Ekdahl world is remarkable because so unlikely, but that world is actually an idealization of a tolerant reality on a par with its dark underside symbolized in the bishop’s palace. Isak as a representative of all that is “other” in traditional society, ideal or darkly imagined, goes past the financial ability usually associated negatively with Jews to all the other qualities not open to the more respectable world, even one as tolerant as the Ekdahls’. Ismael embodies this aspect of otherness at the heart of Isak’s realm, and it is through Ismael that the young hero manifests his true powers. He is the avenue to the unconscious realm, that reality which is not logical, not temporal in a linear sense, not Newtonian, a realm where far and near are the same, and “you” and “me” lose their polarity.
Alexander encounters this immediately with Ismael when asked to write his own name. Instead, he writes Ismael’s.
ISMAEL
… Perhaps we have no limits, perhaps we flow into each other, stream through each other…. You bear terrible thoughts; it is almost painful to be near you.19
Ismael explains, “The truth about the world is the truth about God.”20 God just happens to be asleep and having nightmares. In other words, God is at once creative and destructive; these are different expressions of God’s single being. Ismael won’t let go of a now frightened Alexander, exploring instead the child’s imagination in the service of his hatred of the bishop. What does Ismael-Alexander see?
Earlier, Carl and Gustav Adolf met with Edvard to try and ransom Emilie: they failed, and Edvard even has Emilie ask them to return her children. We know she hates and dreads the bishop and can only imagine what he has threatened her with to make her behave this way. But that night she gives Edvard a heavy sleeping potion and tells him she is going to leave. She hears him say,
EDVARD
You once said you were always changing masks, so that finally you didn’t know who you were. (Pause) I have only one mask. But it is branded into my flesh.…21
His dumbness is congenital and recognized as such. Emilie easily eludes his drugged grasp. What Alexander sees follows his mother’s departure. He sees the monstrous Elsa catch fire from the light Edvard moves closer to her on her night table, walk aflame into the hallway, summon Edvard with her cries, and then in his drugged helplessness envelop him in the fiery embrace of her great body.
Has Alexander killed the bishop, willing this fatal sequence of events? Later, the police superintendent’s summary makes clear Edvard’s death can be seen without reference to the imagination. You can take your choice as a viewer, a subtle piece of writing, while the fidelity of the magic to the truth, as touched on earlier, is transparent. This death is The Heroic Deed and culminates The Discovery of the True Solution. They are coterminous, the end of The Discovery of the True Solution coinciding with the carrying out of The Heroic Deed. Edvard put himself in opposition to Emilie and Alexander, creativity, and love: these can only move forward if he is removed. Alexander kills him.
The pattern of action in Act 3 both discovers the true solution for the hero and heroine’s problems and makes possible its achievement on an entirely personal plane of action. This is the true reason two deeds are given, Alexander’s magical and Emilie’s accidentally realistic one.
Edv
ard’s death restores the possibility of the cosmic, Campbellian creative flow, and the psychic, Winnicottian creative response to experience. Edvard makes sure we get both connections, with Emilie.
EDVARD
I have heard that the cosmos is expanding. The celestial bodies are hurtling away from each other at dizzy speed. The universe is exploding and we live at the very moment of explosion.22
Then follows his comment about the fixity of his mask. He has tried to stop the universe in himself. Alexander and Emilie’s triumph at once solves their current need to deal with the bishop and the problem lingering from the past, Emilie’s need to find a true life and Alexander’s an understanding of the power of the imagination to alter reality.
Now Emilie realizes the very fluidity of reality that oppressed her is its true nature. Reality is a constant becoming, an unfolding of life in a space-time continuum, an action that never reaches ultimate resolution and clarity except in drama which claims to be reality.
Character, Suffering, and Expiation
Suffering
Suffering exists in drama as a precondition for the reality the dramatic metaphor asserts it is and substitutes for “everyday” reality. We may live through protracted periods of pointless suffering in the latter, but in drama The Discovery of the True Solution flows from suffering. Both realities join in understanding that suffering is the road to divinity, though few screenplays or dramas or lives take us there.