Psychoanalysis of the Dark Side of Self: Persona by Ingmar Bergman
“Persona” (1966) is a film directed by Ingmar Bergman whose genre is drama and mystery. It is a masterpiece that I could never believe that was made in the 60s. Persona tells the story of a woman who falls silent and a nurse who accompanies her. Elisabeth Vogler, the most popular theater actress of the period, suddenly stops silently during an important play. And she never talks again. Doctors say it’s not caused by anything physical or psychological, there are no medical problems. Later, on the doctor’s recommendation, the woman is sent to an out of sight summerhouse with her accompanying nurse, Alma. The rest of the movie involves their time there. Alma speaks to Elisabeth as they spend time together, but Elisabeth remains silent. Alma eventually reveals all her secrets to Elisabeth, who she thinks is a good person. And, Alma finds that her own personality is embedded in Elisabeth’s personality.
The movie progresses through two important characters. One of these two characters is Elisabeth, the theater actress, who is suddenly silent, and the other is her attendant nurse Alma. And the script has an interesting background story. Director Bergman has an inner ear infection. Therefore, severe dizziness begins. Then his doctor ties him to the bed and leaves a black spot on the ceiling to stop his pain and dizziness. Bergman is constantly looking at that point to soothe dizziness. And then that point continues to spin, and as Bergman looks there, two faces appear in his head. Bergman tells this story like this, “It is a tremendously irrational process that appears different every time. The core of the films, the originally explosive material, creates the film; the final film can consist of perhaps apparently strangely unimportant impulses. The idea for Persona, for example, came from a picture. One day I suddenly saw in front of me two women sitting next to each other and comparing hands with one another. I thought to myself that one of them is mute and the other one speaks. This little thought returned time and again and I wondered: why did it return, why did it repeat itself? It was as if it returned so that I would start to work on it. And then you realize that there is something behind this picture, it is as if it was on a door. And if you open the door carefully, there is a long corridor that becomes broader and broader and you suddenly see scenes that act themselves out and people who start to speak and situations that start to develop themselves on both sides. But I think this is true of all artisticness. Film may be specially visual. For me, it goes on to develop itself in rhythm and in light. If I return to the picture in Persona, light broke down through the hats and over the girls’ faces. The sun was strong in this picture. It’s very strange, but the light is an integrated part of my first experience. It is often awfully concrete pictures and some sort of acoustic sensation. Other ideas can grow out of a dream or a piece of music, a few strokes of a piece of music.”(1) So the two main characters and the story in the movie are coming from here. The things that make up the film are angle, shot, light, etc. But in reality, Bergman uses the photograph in his mind to create another work of art. He turns the shadows, female silhouettes, and thoughts he sees into a movie. He creates something new using these materials. This is recreating reality.
The movie starts with short and fast images. The opening sequence is overly disturbing. There are scenes such as nail striking, spider, sacrificed sheep. At the end of these images, we see a child lying in the morgue. The boy then gets up and we see two female pictures projected onto the wall. First, we see the women through the eyes of the child and then the child looking at the pictures. Then this opening sequence ends with a telephone sound and complexity. In the scene where the boy is lying in the morgue, we see him trying to cover up his body. But the child cannot completely cover up his body. This means that no matter how hard he tries to cover up reality, he will not be able to.
At the beginning of the movie, we see one of the main characters, the theater actress Elizabeth, silent during the play. Then we go directly to the scene where she woke up in the hospital. The doctor is looking for the reason, as the theater actress Elisabeth is suddenly silent. But she says that this is not a physical or psychological thing, it is a hysterical reaction. And she can drop it the same way as she dropped all roles whenever he wanted. As a matter of fact, a message is given here that this silence is temporary and something under its control. And this scene in which is the doctor speaks is very important because there is a message actually. The doctor says that she can move to the summer house with the nurse Alma, and get a little away from everything. She says that she understands her very well and there is a gap between the person she is with others and the person she is alone with. She says that everything she says and does is actually a lie. She says she cannot commit suicide and escape, but she can avoid lying without keeping quiet and moving. And so, she can find herself in this silence. Thus, she talks about being unable to pretend or wear a mask anymore. She says that everything she hides will surely come to light. When the time is right, she can quit it just like she quit his role in the theater. Here we can actually understand that Elisabeth was silent because she escaped reality, herself. Meaning that Elisabeth tries to away from the self, so from Alma. There are not two characters in the movie actually because Elisabeth is Alma’s persona.
Before moving to the summerhouse, there is one more important scene. A letter comes to Elisabeth and there is a picture in there which includes Elisabeth’s child. Alma reads the letter to Elisabeth and gets emotional, but Elisabeth tears the photograph without any emotional reaction. Alma and Elisabeth are the same person. Alma is the self, and Elisabeth is the persona. The reason for Elisabeth’s silence is that she can no longer stand the facts. Tearing up to the photo of his child is actually a reaction. Elisabeth tears the photograph because she knows that the self, Alma, doesn’t want the child. We will learn the story of Alma and her child in more detail in the following scenes. Also, when Elisabeth is alone in the hospital room, she sees the Buddhist priest being cremated on TV. She scared a lot because of the persona face to face with the realities of the outside world.
Then Alma and Elisabeth move to the summerhouse. The next part of the movie consists of a monologue. Alma talks about herself more closely in hopes of breaking Elisabeth’s silence. She shares all her intimacy. She is actually trying to build trust here. She expects Elisabeth to trust and speak as well, as she shares and trusts herself. Alma tells Elizabeth about her intimacy. She shares her cheating story, abortion story, and group sex experiences with him. Elisabeth always listens to her and gives sympathetic reactions. For this reason, while watching, we think that there is actually no contrast between them and they get along well. But in one scene, Alma reads Elisabeth’s letter and actually learns Elisabeth’s true thoughts. He makes sarcastic comments about the personal things that Alma told him, and Alma’s confidence is broken at that point. Elisabeth wrote things like, I think it is fun to listen to her and even started falling for me. Elisabeth is not humble at all and displays a narcissistic attitude. Also, Elisabeth says in the letter, “She complains that her notions about life fail to accord with her actions.” (Bergman, 1966, 0:43:12) Alma notices that something is wrong in this scene. Here we can clearly see that persona and self are opposed to each other. Here, I want to mention Jung’s idea. He says that “a person can meet the demands of outer necessity in an ideal way only if he is also adapted to his own inner world, that is, if he is in harmony with himself.”(Jung, 1948, p.39) These two characters, persona and self, actually have trouble because they don’t match. These two concepts start to conflict. The persona tries to create a person who wants to be and loses the self. Self-criticism is not possible at this point. So this letter scene becomes the breaking moment for Alma. She does not feel the same emotions against Elizabeth anymore and her silence is making her crazy. Alma experiences identification at that moment. Even though Alma thinks she’s the same as Elizabeth, she realizes that it isn’t. She destroys the “ideal self” which is she created. This causes her to worry because it has lost her reality. Also, this loss of reality makes it even more aggressive. In one scene, Alma tries to throw hot oil on Elizabeth’s face because her silence and somehow causing her to lose reality is getting her out of control.
Also, we can analyze one more place where the persona and the self are in conflict. According to Jung, there are 4 archetypes that influencing present behavior. These archetypes are the self, the persona, the shadow, and the anima/animus. The two of them are important for the movie: the self and persona, obviously. Persona is the part of us that we show to the outside world, away from ourselves. It hides our true selves, which Jung describes as the archetype of “conformity”. And this is actually a different person our inner self which is presented to others. And another one the self is the thing that we all-purpose to achieve. That is your harmony with you and your true self. Let’s see how we see in the movie that these two definitions don’t overlap. In the scene where Alma and Elisabeth meet for the first time at the hospital at the very beginning of the film, Alma talks about two things while introducing herself. She says that, “I am 25 years old and I am engaged”. Here she says she’s actually engaged, happily and internalizing it. But when they go to the summer house, she cries in the scene where she tells about her personal life, cheating, and having an abortion, against Elisabeth. So we can analyze that there is a profound difference between the self he presented to him when he first met Elisabeth and who he actually had.
After these breaking moments and aware of the conflict between them we see that the two characters are starting to intertwine. A man comes to the summer house and looks at Alma and calls out Elizabeth, my wife. Alma says she’s not Elisabeth or his wife. The man says I know everything I talked to your doctor, the little boy, and I miss you. Alma stops for a few seconds. She is surprised and realized that she is sick. This is when Alma realizes that she is actually the same person like Elizabeth. We see that Alma, after being reunited with her husband, again has a few explosion moments because she still feels regret about infidelity and abortion. She blames herself for this in the scene where they lie in bed with her husband. She notices and reacts to what she is falsely projecting. Here actually aggression arises because Alma’s id and superego are opposed. The pleasure was actually important to her while cheating on her husband and in the group sex experience. So her id was active. She had no moral concern. But when the facts came out, when confronted, her superego kicked in. She faced the moral and ideal aspects of her personality. At this point, she took control of her sexual urges and started conscience. She felt guilty and her inferiority feelings surfaced.
After this awareness, a conversation, catharsis, occurs between Alma and Elisabeth. Alma has figured out everything that has happened from the beginning and sits down to tell all the facts on Elisabeth’s face. Elisabeth is then hiding the photograph of the child she had torn up in the letter at the beginning of the film. Alma gets to the point by saying that we should talk about it. Elisabeth remains silent and Alma begins to explain what she has done. She mentions that she met someone at a party one day. And the guy said that she is a great artist and a beautiful woman but lacked a motherly role. Elisabeth thinks about it and worries about it, then lets her husband get her pregnant. But Elisabeth is not ready for this yet. She is afraid of pain, death, and deformity of her body. But she continues to show out the role of a young mother. She tries to get rid of the baby but can’t do it. She hates the baby day by day and prays for the baby to be stillborn. But the child is born healthy. She finds a nursing mother to take care of her. But the child is very dependent on the mother. Despite the boy’s affection and innocence, Elisabeth finds him very repulsive and continues to hate him. In this scene, Alma and Elisabeth are dressed exactly the same and look very alike. And this scene is shot with exactly the same dialogues from one of Alma’s points of view and the one from Elisabeth’s. And we watch these scenes over and over. After watching this double scene, we see two faces intertwined on the screen. These are the faces of Alma and Elisabeth. The shading and the light in the movie are so good we see it as one face. Even in the same story, with different perspectives and narratives, these can actually be very different. After this moment of catharsis, Alma shouts, I’m not like you. I am Alma, not Elisabeth Vogler. Whatever you do, you won’t be able to reach me, I won’t be like you. And after that, she punches the table and slaps Elisabeth’s face. This is another moment of aggression to overcome his anxiety.
Now Alma realizes why Elisabeth is silent and that she is her persona. Alma sees the hospital scene at the beginning of the movie in her dream. Elisabeth stands up from the bed and lays her head on Alma’s shoulder. She tells Elisabeth to listen to her and repeat. Afterward, they say “anything” a few times. Then Alma sees herself and Elisabeth looking side by side in the mirror, they look very alike. Then she wakes up later. She tidies up the summerhouse and prepares to leave. Just before he leaves, she stops and looks in the mirror. The scene where Elisabeth and Alma looked sideways in the mirror reappears in the movie. Elisabeth’s face then blurs and disappears. There is no longer a corrupt persona, Elisabeth. Alma has come back to herself, liberated from the deceitful veil and unconscious impulses of the persona. She is now individualized. Alma leaves the summer house on the bus and we see the scene she acts her role again which we saw at the beginning of the movie. The important play in which Elisabeth suddenly fell silent comes to the screen again. Now Alma and Elisabeth are one. Alma’s persona was broken, and she was in silence but now they are back to normal. Then, we see the boy lying in the morgue in the opening sequence of the movie again. I mentioned at first that the boy was looking at a projected image of two female faces intertwined. Again, that scene is shown, but this time there is only one woman on the screen. This child is actually the child Elisabeth doesn’t want. When he looked at the screen during the opening sequence, he saw his mother and her persona, Alma and Elisabeth. But now he sees a single female face because Alma is now an individualized and healed woman with a proper persona.
Alma had a breaking moment, she moved away from the person she presented to society. After that, she wanted to be the real, not the good or perfect one. Actually, we all show completely different masks to the outside world. I guess the important thing here is not to get too far from our self. To be able to say stop when we realize we are hurting ourselves because none of us are actually just the masks that we show. We all have desires and mistakes. In this movie, we saw that what will happen when there is no harmony between the self and persona. The false self is just our defense mechanism, the true self is the part of us that is hidden from the experiences it has acquired, the reality. And the closer we bring our false self to ourselves, then we can actually become one. Then there can be individualization. Because, “The human is not just a brain or any other part of it, the human being is a whole, and when she loses any of these parts, her sense of existence will decrease.” (Lehrer, 2007, p.31).
References
Lehrer, J. (2007). Proust Bir Sinirbilimciydi. Boğaziçi University Press, p.31.
Otis, L. (2002) Literature and Science in the Nineteenth Century, Oxford: Offord University Press, p. 358–63.
Retrieved from the site on January 17, 2021
