When A Movie Hits You
Ever watch a movie and it just hits you in a way you were not expecting? A movie so good it kind of takes your breath away? A movie, that when the end credits start to roll, you get this flood of emotions that you just have to sit with. You are dumbfounded by this visceral emotional reaction that you have to just sit with it and try and understand it? Maybe the “trying to understand it” is more of a personal thing. Here I am, trying to process my very intense emotional response to the Ingmar Bergman’s movie, Through A Glass Darkly, (1961).
I am familiar with Ingmar Bergman as a director. One of my favorite movies of all time is The Seventh Seal, (1957). I have also seen Wild Strawberries, (1957). I was going to watch one of these two again, but I decided to just pick a different one. An observation I have from this time period in cinema is there are a lot of movies about women and being institutionalized or treated for mental illnesses. The Snake Pit from 1948 staring Oliva de Havilland and The Three Faces of Eve from 1957 staring Joanne Woodward are two off the top of my head.
In Through A Glass Darkly, the main charter, Karin, is vacationing on a remote Island with her husband, 17 year old brother and her father. She was just released from a mental hospital a month prior. As the story progresses it appears that she suffers from schizophrenia. She hears voices calling her to a room in the attic in the house they are staying at. She says the voices call her to a room where they wait for someone or something to arrive. No one has said who or what this is, but she guesses its God.
She is aware of her condition and talks to her family about it but it’s her younger brother who she really confides in. She ends up having a serious episode while she and her husband are out on a boat trip to the mainland. She is alone with her brother, and this is where she goes into the details of experiences. She ends up having an intense episode where the voices in her head convince her to seduce her brother. Karin ends up falling asleep and he stays with her until her husband and father come back. It’s at this point where she talks with her dad. She explains she does not want to live in these two worlds any longer and no longer wants treatment. Instead, she wants to be committed.
They all go back to the house to pack her things and get her ready to be taken to the hospital. Karin ends up disappearing and the father hears a voice coming from the attack. He follows it, along with his son in law and discover Karin in this room, talking to the wall. She is talking about being ready to see who enters the door. You see a closet door start to open. Once the door is open, she starts to scream. She is terrified. Her husband runs to get a sedative shot and her father tries to calm her down. She runs out the room and starts to head down the stairs, but her brother blocks her. Between the three of them, they hold her down so her husband can administer the sedative.
As the sedative starts to work, she becomes more aware of herself and starts to talk about what she saw and experienced during this latest episode. When the door opened, she was expecting to see God. Instead, it was a bunch of spiders. The spiders tried to enter her body and she was trying to fight them off. She came to the realization that God was a false narrative. That all her faith in this narrative was for nothing.
This got me thinking about my own experience with religion. I spent Kindergarten through the 8th grade at a catholic school. I had nuns for teachers, went to church once a week in school on top of every Sunday with my mom and sisters. (My dad only attended on maybe two or three holidays a year. He was Lutheran but did not attend any services within the denomination.)
For high school, I decided I wanted to go to a public school, in the inner city. This meant that if I wanted to get confirmed I would have to take some classes. I had no desire to get confirmed. I went to one class and decided it was a hard pass. The reason was I never felt truly accepted at the school and with my peers. I honestly saw through all the BS at a young age. I remember being taught about the dinosaurs and asking if they existed when there were no people how did God create the word in 7 days? The answer I got was that days were not measured the same as they are today. Yeah, as a second grader, I wasn’t buying this.
As I went on through the years I asked more questions, of priests, nuns, principals and challenged everything. I was always met with exasperated sighs and told that is why I needed to have faith and that my lack of faith was the issue. We never once learned about black history or Martin Luther King Junior so I made sure to do every report I could on him. I was not one to conform to what everyone else was doing. I didn’t like the popular music of the time, nor the way people dressed. I was expected to just go along with what everyone else was doing and that meant accepting what was being told to me.
This movie hit me deep because like the main character, I wanted to believe in something that would make me feel accepted. I wanted to believe that I wasn’t different than anyone else. I wanted there to be an easy answer as to why I was the way I was. I wanted to just believe in something, and it would immediately take away the pain I felt living in the world. I believed so much and when it didn’t pan out, I felt so let down. Just like the main character in this movie. She wanted to believe so much that god was going to take her, protect her, cure her.
I realized a long time ago that I was never going to find acceptance in one religion, and I am okay with that now. What this movie made me realize more than I wanted to admit is that my experiences in the catholic church and at a catholic school were traumatic in a way I can only see now as an adult. I knew as a kid that something did not feel good about being in that environment, but I could not pinpoint it. Looking back, I realize that as a curious child, my inquiries and curiosity was often met with anger and disgust. I saw through the manipulation tactics being used to control the outward appearances people in power wanted to paint. This became evident when the priest that I always had issues with had multiple, credible, allegations of sexual abuse of minors brought against him. I never felt like I fit in because I could not be controlled by their fear mongering. Make no mistake, I still suffer from the false guilt narrative that the church manufactures but at least I can now identify it when it creeps in. I saw Karin want to believe in this god so much to save her, but it was in her psychotic break she realized it was all a wild fantasy. When she accepted that, she was able to get help and grow as a person. This is what was so relatable to me.
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