by Lance Lee
Alexander already sees something of the price exercising his imagination will exact with Edvard. His being forced to accede to the bishop’s will over the traveling circus story is a harbinger of the far more traumatic scene later over Alexander’s story about the death of the bishop’s first family. Alexander’s secure world has been torn apart. It is his mother’s doing; what can he do? Nothing, at first.
Emilie, however, sees something of the true reality she is going to encounter at the bishop’s. Following her marital announcement she visits the bishop’s palace and meets his repressive, repugnant family, including the monstrous Elsa. The palace is a bleak, stark contrast to the lush, red-hued Ekdahl comfort and furnishings. Moreover, Edvard wants Emilie to come with nothing from her and the children’s past, a demand Emilie happily consents to, caught up in her dream of a pure life, but which she withholds for now from committing the children to. They, she explains, must make such a choice themselves. She imagines that choice will be only a matter of time. She openly yearns for Edvard’s God, whom he explains is a God of love, unlikely as that already sounds. “He” is a challenge she desires, however, for her God has been “fluid and boundless and intangible, both in his cruelty and his tenderness. I am an actress; I am used to wearing masks. My God wears a thousand masks.”7
As Edvard leads his new little family off from the Ekdahls as Helena and the others watch, Helena observes with a sense of foreboding, “I think we’ll have Emilie back. Quite soon.”8
Just as the heroine and hero complied with falseness in the Past and in the Beginning, in the false modus vivendi at the start of the action, they again comply with error at the end of Act 1. They will their mistakes, support and defend them. However, growth enters into this new error, which is made in response to a fuller awareness of the nature of the conflict in which the they are caught. But just as the immediate action has destroyed the initial false modus vivendi, which cannot bear the pressure of events released by the inciting event in Awakening, so will this new pursuit of error be subjected to destructive testing in the Middle, or Act 2.
What we see here is the destructive side of the creative response to reality in action. That destructiveness is the chisel taken to the stone of experience from which the final statue emerges. Michelangelo’s famous view that he sought to release the form already within the stone applies with validity here: the proposed solution of the hero and heroine is an attempt to get to the truth that will finally end conflict. That can only be found through constant “revision,” to use a writing term. All writers know what that means in terms of deletion, addition, and cutting and pasting.
Of course the hero and heroine do not realize they have chosen error: learning that is what the ensuing action makes possible, the realization of which is the precondition of finding the solution that is true. Act 2 development is particularly difficult for writers because of this paradoxical use of error to develop a true understanding of the conflict and find its true solution.
All we have said concerning a false modus vivendi applies also to Edvard. He has been a widower for years and craved Emilie yet thought she was out of his reach, married and successful. He has coped by becoming a hypocrite, something Alexander sees but which neither Edvard nor Emilie recognizes. Instead, in the palace whose bleakness as thoroughly echoes his character as the lavishness of the Ekdahls’ home echoes theirs, he wishes Emilie and Alexander to comply with his arrested life. He in turn, in Act 2, will go through the pattern of development Emilie and Alexander suffer through in Act I because of their resistance.
Necessary and Probable, and Other Matters
I have said stories that earn our highest praise hit us as necessary and probable without qualification, and certainly Fanny and Alexander aspires to that level. In life much is unnecessary and improbable, although paradoxically probability and necessity give imagined stories a sense of ultrareality. The only caveat necessary for Fanny and Alexander regards the use of magic.
The world and relationships of the Ekdahls are compellingly detailed. Their moral laxness is startling yet clearly supported by the convincing characterizations of figures like Gustav Adolf and Maj. Placing the family in an entertainment context makes the laxness of standards seem less remarkable, although that plays to a popular prejudice not always true. But nothing in the Ekdahl world jars: Emilie’s putting up with an impotent husband seems a cross to bear, while the film script’s published version indicating multiple fathers of her children is left out of the film to avoid distraction. Emilie turning to Edvard after Oscar’s death for both spiritual and physical solace makes perfect sense: that she makes an error does not undercut the probability of her behavior, while he, as we saw, has long yearned for her. He presents himself to her as tragically romantic through the loss of his earlier family, free of Oscar’s impotence, and as the spiritual guide for whom Emilie has hungered. He seems solicitous. There is an inevitability about their connection, while Emilie’s later recoil as she sees the truth is just as probable and necessary.
This convincing necessary and probable behavior holds up for the other characters too. Alexander is on a necessary collision course with Edvard, whom he sees through from the start. That collision is vividly dramatized when they collide over his story to Justine. Isak is a natural figure for Helena to turn to in the Middle, given their past connection and because he has access to the bishop, always apparently in need of money. Isak’s otherness in the form of his Jewishness lets Bergman use him as a counterweight to the bishop. Emilie’s climactic dosing of the bishop with a sleeping potion is just as probable and necessary if she is to leave. Almost all of the details of the film measure up to a necessary and probable standard without special allowances.
With one apparent exception: the use of magic. Magic is established as a feature of the Ekdahl world from the moment Alexander sees a statue move. We are in the realm of magic realism, Bergman style, as with Like Water for Chocolate. Unlike the latter, Bergman is at pains to give a realistic explanation for events that parallels the magical. Although it seems Alexander’s wishes for the bishop’s death magically are made real through the medium of Ismael, a realistic thread is offered also in which the bishop dies because, in his semistupor from Emilie’s sleeping draught, he can’t extricate himself from his burning sister. We can easily see the moving statue as an extension of Alexander’s fantasy life. Only he sees the dead bishop at the end, accompanying his father: both can be seen as visualizations of his own inner split. Only when Helena also sees and talks to Oscar do we go beyond Alexander’s imagination into what appears to be a convention in which magic is acceptable and established through Alexander at the start. We accept its presence as the established reality of the film’s reality, but to that extent we are removed from our normal, taken-for-granted reality.
With that exception for the present, the fact that the screenplay so powerfully supports our perception of its actions as necessary and probable goes a long way toward persuading us, first through feeling and later through reflection, that it is true and real—as we come to feel Hamlet is true and real, or The Godfather, however much a product of the imagination, however far removed from a precise historical-biographical existence. In Hamlet we accept the ghost: Oscar has his stroke playing the ghost in Fanny and Alexander. We are not being asked to make anymore of a leap than we are in the single greatest piece of drama in the canon.
Truth, we have repeatedly seen, is not just a quality of fact but of imagination. Bergman imagines with telling effect.
The Cooked and the Raw, Smart and Dumb
Emilie is a smart character: she renounces the Ekdahl world for the bishop’s in the name of truth and reality. Then, chastened by experience, she sees the Ekdahls’ values come far closer to the truth than any religion or ism ever can with a truncated version of reality. Alexander is handled in a primarily dumb way, however, although Emilie draws him into the pattern of her experiences. His growth pattern reveals ever more deeply what makes him tick and the power o
f his imagination, although he too is chastened by experience with the bishop. He does not go through his mother’s swings in evaluating reality, always prizing his Ekdahl world and imagination. Inevitably Edvard comes into fatal conflict with Emilie and Alexander, for Edvard as the opposing force is also dumb, a man who strives to hold on to his view of reality and force it on the others at all costs because of his own need to deceive himself.
All the characters as the film goes through its initial phases seem dumb, however. The burden of Arresting Life for the hero is the empowerment of the past that the false modus vivendi at the start of the action allows a screenwriter to dramatize through the initial conflicts, the phase of Complying with the False. Smartness in character as well as plot depends on the response to the Awakening when the inciting event forces the past into present awareness and consequently forces the protagonists to face the falseness of their lives. Thereafter smart and dumb characters diverge. Moreover, the plot develops inevitably in a smart way, even for a dumb character, as it moves through the inevitable transformations in the action that lead one way or another to the resolution of past and present conflict. Thus, after the Awakening phase both smart and dumb refer meaningfully only to character development.
Noteworthily, nearly everyone else in the screenplay is handled in a dumb manner: Carl and Lydia, Helena, Isak, Gustav Adolf, Alma, Edvard’s family, Aron, and Ismael. The only exceptions are Maj and Gustav Adolf’s daughter, who in the end wish to leave. Isak does not change in the sense of transform like a smart character in rescuing the children; he only reveals the extent of his resourcefulness and commitment to the Ekdahls. Why are these characters handled in this way in Fanny and Alexander? Because they represent meanings for Bergman between which the hero and heroine oscillate. In successful writing like Fanny and Alexander, they do not seem abstract embodiments but people convincing in themselves, fully rounded at least, developing in a dumb manner at best.
Conventionally, “raw” and “Bergman” seem synonyms. But this ignores his comedies and careful use of cooked effects. Magic in Fanny and Alexander is transparently a cooked effect. Remember, these terms refer to approaches to handling emotion, not the absence of emotion or its too great presence, which is reflected in the heavy. Alexander frequently manifests emotion through cooked means, whether in the moving statue or through the stories he tells, which reflect his unhappiness with life, like being sold to the circus, or show his inherent creativity, as in the magic lantern show in Act 1, or express the extent of his hatred of the bishop, as in the story to Justine. Even more vivid is Alexander’s destructive rage against the bishop that Ismael at his Uncle Isak’s lets Alexander see and vent as imagined events that yet cause the death of the bishop in a brilliant conjoining of fact and “fiction,” for the bishop truly dies. It is just this consonance of reality and imagination that makes “magic” so telling in Fanny and Alexander. The view given earlier that the use of magic leads to a reservation in our sense of how thoroughly Fanny and Alexander seems necessary and probable now needs to be rejected. Bergman’s use of magic expresses the inner reality of the characters concerned in the realm of “playing,” i.e., of the screenplaying which has our entire attention. It expresses how, in a basic Kantian and psychological manner, reality is always a construct rising from a stream of raw data that would overwhelm and disorient us unless structured for perception to begin with. Magic, then, expresses our relation to reality, however odd that sounds to our material, scientific minds: we make up reality, which is a constant stream in the space-time continuum of our experience, a steady becoming only prejudice makes us take for granted as something “solid” and “fixed.”
Thinking, then, about the use of cooked behavior for Alexander reveals how Bergman’s use of magic brings reality more intensely before our eyes through a character with whom we identify. That character makes a full use of our own faculties through his own power of imagination.
Alexander is involved in raw behavior only in extremis: at his father’s death, which terrifies him, and with Edvard, with whom he never has a casual run-in, whether over the traveling circus story or when he faces the bishop over his tale concerning his first family. That confrontation is as direct and raw as anything Sophocles ever wrote, as Edvard forces Alexander to recant and then ask forgiveness before he beats and locks him in the dark attic. What is particularly insulting to us in this behavior is Edvard’s hostility to the imagination, to creativity, because it is through our creative response to reality that we find the truth. We don’t know if Alexander’s tale about the death of the bishop’s first family is true factually; we do know it is true spiritually.
The Meaning of Structure
We are too used to separating structure and meaning analytically. A story has a theme, we say, and a structure, Acts 1–3, through which it is more or less well expressed. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Structure and meaning are just different ways of speaking of our unitary experience of a screenplay through our identification with the protagonists. Structure is the expression of meaning: meaning is what is communicated by structure. In good writing everything tends to bear, we say, but in great writing everything bears absolutely, or as much as that is possible where human effort is involved. By Act 3, in effective drama, this relationship between structure and meaning becomes transparent.
Look again at Act 1. We see a lush, lax artistic and professional world but understand all is not well as we learn of Oscar’s sexual failings and see the unhappiness of Carl and Lydia and fissure between Alexander and Maj. The Ekdahl glow is deceptive. Oscar’s death splits the surface open: this kind of life is wanting is clearly communicated by Emilie’s grief and turn to Edvard, even as the main body of Ekdahls persevere in their now challenged lifestyle.
In other words, the events are organized to communicate swiftly a set of meanings, just as less conventionally we could say the meanings are swiftly communicated in a sequence of events chosen for their thematic nature. So it is no surprise to see Emilie with the bishop; on the face of it, anyone she chose at this point would represent something other than the Ekdahl world and its values. It takes little to see he embodies opposite values of the Ekdahls’ as he makes Emilie renounce everything from her previous life. What else can Alexander do but curse? The little family group walking away from the Ekdahl home at the end of Act 1 clearly points up the meaning of the action: now we will see if the bishop’s world/values can survive the testing to follow. Our Act 2 expectation is of a clash of meanings to be tested, i.e., subjected to the destructive aspect of creativity as part of the effort to make the bishop’s values real.
How will Alexander and Emilie cope now? We don’t know, we’re in suspense. Suspense in writing of this quality means suspense over meaning. Whatever is done we know will have different meanings, some good and desirable, some bad and undesirable. Urgent writing creates its own moral universe, and when that writing seems necessary and probable we identify wholly with that universe. The meanings that emerge and are defined from the conflict are defining for us through our identification with the heroine or hero. Those meanings are pointedly dramatized in Fanny and Alexander. In fact, as we reach the crisis with its rejection (failure) of the bishop’s world, we understand that not just a place is being rejected, but an entire attitude toward and evaluation of human behavior. The crisis doesn’t just point up the behavior involved in the conflict: it points to that behavior’s meaning.
Structure is simultaneously this combination of events following a cause-and-effect chain we experience as more or less necessary and probable, and a set of ever more defined meanings. All action in good writing carries this kind of symbolic weight. The choices loom much more strongly at the end of Act 1 than at its beginning when they were merely incipient, and what marks the transition from Act 1 to 2 is this simultaneous sense of the action shifting decisively and the meaning of the action moving toward a new sense of definition at odds with the false modus vivendi we experience at a story’s start.
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The hero’s journey falls within and communicates this structural drive. The initial action shows in what story-specific sense a compliance with a false past is involved, and to what extent that is based on an arrested life. Until Oscar’s death, Fanny and Alexander concentrates on using structure to get this part of the journey out in the specific terms of Emilie and Alexander’s lives. Once Awakening sets in with Oscar’s death, structure and meaning move for Emilie and Alexander within the substance defined for their particular journey. The meanings expressed in structure are the meanings evolving from that journey’s quest: for Emilie, it is the true way of living.
Confused Growth—and the Pursuit of Error clearly orients Fanny and Alexander toward the contest of meanings in the bishop’s palace. We have a good idea of what that contest must involve, meaning in what direction the story must now move, although no sense of how the contest will end. Yet Emilie undertakes this pursuit of error as part of her quest for a true life. This is the only way the truth can be found. All our attention now flows with her toward finding the truth, which is where she has identified her true self is also to be found and, implicitly, Alexander’s.
The Middle—Act 2
Confused Growth—and the Pursuit of Error, continued
The colloquial history of stage and film productions is full of stories of writers harassed by actors, directors, and producers to get the Middle of the story right, or else. “Or else” in film usually means bringing in another writer: in theatre, an out-of-town hotel window may simply be opened as an option for a playwright, to drive home the necessity of his going back to his room and trying yet again. It never does good to get too reverential about these matters, to forget, if you will, Shakespeare’s inky hands. We shouldn’t forget the way the mundane and inspired must work together, even if we end thinking a genius has been at work. Act 2 development is so hard because the imagination must pursue more deeply the line of action with its inherent and explicit meanings pointed to at the end of Act 1 and, as we saw, manage growth through error.
