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First of all, Sarris and Raphaelson both employ the epithet "Freudian" with a certain condescension, as if major reinterpretations of Freud- whether formulated by avowedly neo-Freudian critics such as Lacan, Leclaire, and Lyotard, or by phenomenological critics such as Bachelard, Merleau-Ponty, and Ricoeur- had never been published.3 Secondly, even if we do grant the unstated premise that to exploit the dramatic potential of the dream is automatically to invoke criticism in terms of Freudian "pretensions," there is still the problem of accurately assessing Bergman's own notion of just what role dramatized dreams can play in a narrative film.

For now we see through a glass, darkly: but then face to face; now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.

-I Cor., 13.12

The following article is a review of Ingmar Bergman's The Serpent's Egg. It is, however, divided into two distinct sections, and it is not until the second that I begin to discuss The Serpent's Egg itself. What I have always found particularly impressive in Bergman's art is both the provocative complexity of his thinking and the seemingly endless variations which he is able to play upon his principal character configurations and upon his central metaphors. I think that Bergman's films provide their own aesthetic and intellectual context- the context in which they can most easily be understood and appreciated- and what I have done is, simply, try to place The Serpent's Egg in that context. For that reason, I have begun this article with brief discussions of two films which immediately precede The Serpent's Egg- Scenes from a Marriage and Face to Face (the omission of The Magic Flute being purely an expedient).

I

The climactic dream sequence in Face to Face was generally treated by reviewers as a pretentious and sophomoric exercise in obsolete textbook Freudianism. Andrew Sarris (who is more a fan of Bergman's earlier films than of his more recent expressionistic experiments) concluded his review by noting that "All his life, Bergman has been ridiculing Freudianism, and now he emerges as the most explicit Freudian in the cinema."1 Film Comment's Samson Raphaelson discussed the dreams of the film's main character, a psychiatrist named Jenny, in conjunction with her childhood and adult sexual confessions, but then went on to describe the dreams themselves as "the dullest accumulation of quasi-Freudian platitudes, the kind of infantile whining Jenny must have heard countless times in her practice."2

The problem no doubt revolves largely around the rhetorical uses to which the epithet "Freudian" is being put here, especially as Raphaelson makes it seem so compatible with the particle "quasi-." Admittedly, elementary Freudian conf igurations have entered into our standard register of symbols, signs, and arche-types, and it is easy to identify the kind of banality to which Sarris and Raphaelson have alluded and to which Freudian attitudinizing is in fact liable. I believe that the problem here is twofold. First of all, Sarris and Raphaelson both employ the epithet "Freudian" with a certain condescension, as if major reinterpretations of Freud- whether formulated by avowedly neo-Freudian critics such as Lacan, Leclaire, and Lyotard, or by phenomenological critics such as Bachelard, Merleau-Ponty, and Ricoeur- had never been published.3 Secondly, even if we do grant the unstated premise that to exploit the dramatic potential of the dream is automatically to invoke criticism in terms of Freudian "pretensions," there is still the problem of accurately assessing Bergman's own notion of just what role dramatized dreams can play in a narrative film. I think that Bergman says very much about this issue in his Preface to the published screenplay of Face to Face,^ and there are two reasons why I proceed on the assumption that it is legitimate to look at that Preface at greater length than might otherwise be called for in an essay whose stated purpose is to evaluate an entirely different film. First, the idea of the dream, refined significantly from the more or less purely expressionistic conception of Cries and Whispers and developed further in Face to Face's admixture of naturalistic drama and oneiric climax, plays an immensely important part in the conception of The Serpent's Egg; second, criticism such as that which Sarris and Raphaelson level at Face to Face seems to have resulted largely from a misreading of that same Preface.

Conceived as an open letter to his cast and crew, Bergman's Preface seems at first glance bemused and clinically detached. He admits that his design for his principal character- a female psychiatrist whose "shockingly quick breakdown and agonizing rebirth" he intends to describe- has been adopted from the neurotic tribulations of another person, in whom, Bergman says, his own "torment" acquired a "name and address"; he then calls upon his company of "goodlooking and talented actors" to stage this pirated "anxiety" for him, so that he might "begin investigating more methodically." While such language does in fact suggest a kind of clinical self-satisfaction, it nevertheless seems to me that Bergman's ostensibly expository Preface contains its own expressive strategies and constitutes an accurate expression of the metaphor which governs the film Face to Face itself. Let's look, for example, at one of the most pertinent (and oft-cited) passages in this open letter. Bergman explains that, while the first half of the film will be "almost pedantically realistic," the second half will be "elusive, intangible: the 'dreams' are more real than the reality." He then goes on to talk about the relationship between dreams and narrative art:

I am extremely suspicious of dreams, apparitions, and visions, both in literature and in films and plays. Perhaps it's because mental excesses of this sort smack too much of being "arranged."

So when, despite my reluctance and suspicion, I go to depict a series of dreams, which moreover are not my own, I like to think of these dreams as an extension of reality. This is therefore a series of real events which strike the leading character during an important moment of her life.

What is particularly important here is Bergman's paradoxical definition of "real," and I think that the terms of this paradox can be clarified if we compare two remarkably similar scenes from two very different films- one from Scenes from a Marriage, the other from Face to Face. Ultimately, this comparison should also help us to arrive at a more precise understanding of what Bergman takes to be the relationship between "reality" and the "dream" in narrative art.

Bergman, I think, uses the term "real" in a sense which is essentially metaphorical (rather than, as both his expository writings seem to indicate and as his critics are wont to assume, in a strictly literal sense), and this seems clear even in the basically "naturalistic" narrative of Scenes from a Marriage, which is about two people (named Johan and Marianne) whose marital and material security has prevented each from knowing the other or himself. With the break-up of the marriage, however, each is stripped of his security: he can no longer find comfort in his inclination to turn outward, towards things, and he is thus exposed to the troubling insights of self-consciousness. Scenes from a Marriage thus becomes the chronicle of a journey towards self-consciousness. As I have tried to explain more fully elsewhere,5 both Johan and Marianne must attain self-knowledge individually, especially as this process is for Bergman an explicitly sexual process. The common denominator in Scenes from a Marriage and Face to Face is, however, the central figure of a woman; let's examine a scene from the first film, therefore, in which Bergman suggests that it is maternity-accompanied by a certitude which can never accompany fatherhood- that privileges the woman to arrive at her special mode of self-knowledge.6

Marianne is telling Johan how she "feels" after an abortion; she tells him that she cannot explain her guilt, but says that it is something which she simply "feels." More important than any "guilt," however, is the "feeling" itself, because it is the very feeling which allows Marianne to perceive herself in the "real" world that she shares with her husband and children: "It's a feeling," she says. "It's as if I no longer felt I was real. You're not real either. Nor are the children. Then along comes this baby. That's real." For Bergman, self-knowledge is ultimately a knowledge of the relationships which one has with the others who share his "real" world. He suggests, however, that the nature of her sexuality- including the special self-knowledge which is afforded her by the certitude of maternity- privileges the woman's consciousness to perceive itself "directly," without having to see itself as the attribute of a bodily existence which it shares with the world of objects, and which she can confirm only through sexual contact with another being who is also couched in a body. It is those bodies and those objects which no longer seem "real" to Marianne.7

This kind of unmediated apprehension of the self is a mode of self-knowledge in which the purely subjective "I" that stands back from the self, looking at it as if it were an object such as a table or even a body, has disappeared: once detached, that "I" has now become one with the self that it is trying to apprehend, seeing it, as it were, "from within." In Face to Face, Jenny, too, is a woman who gradually frees herself from the clinical detachment of her own "I." "Jenny," Bergman writes, "has always been firmly convinced that ... a table is a table, and, not least, that a human being is a human being." Again, Bergman's expository language clarifies his central metaphor: as clinician, Jenny apprehends a "human being" not only as she apprehends a table, but as she apprehends herself- as the attribute of a bodily existence which she, too, shares with the world of objects. Even in looking at herself Jenny adopts the posture of the detached "I," and I suspect that a thorough gloss of Bergman's films would show that his various clinicians- Isak Borg in Wild Strawberries, the Vergerus figures in both The Face and The Serpent's Egg- stand for precisely this kind of detached apprehension not only of the self, but of the other as well.

Even more importantly, as neo-Freudian critics have stressed, this process by which the detached "I" comes to apprehend itself "directly" is precisely the process which Freud described in the mechanism of the dream: in the midst of dreaming, one does not recognize oneself as the dreamer of one's dream- as the mind which is spinning the tale of the dream; like the "I" which has become "one" with the self which it is trying to apprehend, dreamer and dream become one. I think that the dream sequences in Face to Face are intended to furnish a metaphor for this unity of knowing subject and knowable self (the transformation of Jenny from neurotic clinician into the central character in dreams which dramatize without mediation the daughterly, wifely, and maternal- that is, sexual- dimensions of her personality), as well as a working definition of what Bergman means by becoming "real." At one point in Face to Face, for example, Tomas, Jenny's would-be lover, tells her that he, too, wishes to become "real." When she asks him to explain, he responds with an image which reflects his homoeroticism, but which also expresses, almost as perfectly as the film's title, the idea of the "I" that is at one with itself: "To hear a human voice," he says, "and be sure it comes from someone who is made just like I am. To touch a pair of lips and in the same thousandth of a second know that this is a pair of lips."

II

The dream sequence in The Serpent's Egg comes nearly at the end of the film, and in keeping with a film which has as one of its key themes a paradoxical definition of "reality," the dream is announced by no cinematic or narrative convention.8 In the moment that he discovers his sister-in-law dead in her bed, Abel Rosenberg is startled by a camera flash which has come from the other side of one of the many mirrors in the room. He begins smashing the mirrors, and behind each, he discovers a hidden movie camera. Passing through one of these looking-glasses, beyond the camera, Abel discovers a series of sterile, labyrinthine corridors. He is suddenly attacked by a shadowy figure whose face we never clearly see. They struggle and Abel prevails: he pins his attacker down so that the unseen head, hanging over the black pit of an elevator shaft, is crushed by the descending elevator. Blood spurts out onto Abel's face and he screams. There is now a cut, and we see Abel again- clean and as neatly dressed as we have seen him so far. Confronting one of the scientists with whom he works in the archives of a 350-year-old hospital, Abel demands the keys to the building. They, too, begin struggling, the old man finally declaring that, in the person of Adolf Hitler, a "savior is born" in Munich. Again, Abel prevails, and another series of corridors leads him to a small metal door, beyond which he discovers Dr. Hans Vergerus, who shows him films of psychological experiments performed on willing people who "will do anything for a little money and a good square meal." Announcing that the police, summoned by Abel, are on the way to confiscate his films, Vergerus takes a cyanide capsule and watches himself die in a mirror. The scene ends with the protracted sound of the police banging at the door, and the dream is over when Abel wakens in a hospital bed.

The largest metaphor in The Serpent's Egg is the metaphor of the narrative film itself as a dream- the complete inversion of two levels of "reality." The film opens, for example, with a shot of people's expressionless faces, as they move in slow-motion, like the figures in the boat in the dream at the end of The Shame; the shot is intercut with the opening credits. The film ends with explicit suddenness, accompanied by the metallic sound of a shutter gate dropping; the screen cuts sharply to black, and there are no closing credits. Throughout the film, there is also a vapor drifting up from the ground, whether it be the cold mist that rises perpetually from the cobblestones or the cigarette smoke which lingers in every cabaret and every bedroom. The narrator identifies this vapor as fear: "Fear," he says, "rises like vapor from the asphalt; it can be sensed like a pungent smell. Everyone bears it with him like a nerve poison- a slow-working poison that is felt only as a quicker or slower pulse or a spasm of nausea." Fear becomes the film's principal theme, the vaporous "slow-working poison" its principal image: Abel is drinking himself to death; Manuela, his sister-in-law, is dying from a fever which she cannot identify or cure; Vergerus swallows a cyanide capsule and watches it work its outward effects on his body.

What Bergman says about the atmosphere of Cries and Whispers- another film enveloped in a dream, the dreamer herself being eaten away from within by cancer- is perhaps his clearest statement about this thematic coupling of fear and the dream: "Nothing fixed," he says of the "completed whole," "nothing really tangible other than for the moment, and then only an illusory moment. A dream, a longing, or perhaps an expectation, a fear in which that to be feared is never put into words."9 The problem of the dream is thus the problem of time. Like the "moments" which constitute a memory, the moments which "pass" in a dream exist in a specious present. "There are," as Bertrand Russell puts it, "two sources of our belief in time; the first is the perception of change within one specious present, the other is memory. When you look at your watch, you can see the second hand moving, but only memory tells you that the minute hand and hour hand have moved."10 For the dreaming consciousness, time subsists only in a present moment, and this homogeneous moment can be called "present" only because, upon analytical reflection, the mind thinks of it as one in a succession of moments that also includes past and future; upon such reflection, however, the past becomes an illusion of memory, the future an illusory hypothesis conceived to complement the past.

The nature of film itself, of course, enlists memory in creating just such an illusion of movement in time, and Bergman thus characterizes his dream-like Berlin as a timeless region: "A pack of cigarettes costs thirteen million marks," says the narrator as the film opens, "and ordinary people have largely lost faith in both the present and the future." Abel's heavy drinking makes it impossible for him to provide the police with times and dates for his activities, and Police Inspector Bauer is upset because the railroads no longer publish timetables: "Imagine a Germany without timetables," he mutters in Abel's face. The worst thing of all, says Manuela, is "the fact that people have no future. It's not just you and I," she tells Abel, "who haven't much to look forward to. Everyone has lost his future."

Bergman labels his Berlin "a city on the brink of history," and Hitlerism is, of course, the disease which is eating away at the body politic. The Serpent's Egg seems to wince occasionally on account of incipient politicalism, which is not, as his critics frequently remind us, Bergman's strongest intellectual suit. If Bergman means to say simply that we must think of the Nazi years as a "nightmare," Hitler a demon hatched from "the serpent's egg" to take upon himself the guilt and fears of the world in what T. S. Eliot has called the apocalyptic "years of l'entre deux guerres," then we would have to assume that his aestheticism and his tax troubles have gotten the better of his sense of history and his human sympathy. But it is far more accurate- and far more reasonable- to read Bergman's decision to situate The Serpent's Egg in Berlin during these years as a gesture of historical displacement, much like those he has made before, both in naturalistic films like The Seventh Seal and Smiles of a Summer Night and in expressionistic pieces like The Face and Cries and Whispers. Such displacement is a function and privilege of art, and not of politics and history, both of which must assume that the passage of events in time is real and can be analyzed as such ; displacement deals not with the causal time-order of "real" events themselves, but rather with the way in which consciousness elaborates these events in its own forms of rhetoric. Freud, says Lacan, reminds us that "the dream has the structure of a sentence," and Lacan adds that such rhetorical strategies as metaphor, allegory, metonymy, and synechdoche- the "semantic condensations" which make possible narrative art- are evident in the way in which "the subject modulates his oneiric discourse."11

For the artist, then, the homogeneous moment which is the film itself- the moment of dreaming which exists outside time- can preclude any sense of the passage of "real" time or history; the "duration" of the film is thus assimilated by and shares the interior time structure according to which the imagination works rhetorical displacements upon the material of consciousness itself.12 "Temporality," says Mikel Dufrenne,

is the being of a subject. In the end, the subject, who is defined by temporality as a relationship of the self with itself, constitutes an organic totality. Being a self means dividing oneself in order to be united and to form a whole. The meaning of the time proper to living beings differs from the meaning of clock time, which is borrowed from physics. Clock time arises out of objective time, whereas the time proper to the living being expresses the interiority of life and what Kant calls its internal finality .... [T] he aesthetic object also involves such internal finality. It is itself living" not only because it enters into history through the historicity of judgments of taste but also because it is animated by a sort of internal movement.13

From the onset of Abel's dream to the slamming down of the shutter gate, The Serpent's Egg culminates in a cinematic and theatrical development of the theme of time. The scientist Vergerus, for example, claims to understand his place in the course of history, predicting that, as a "faltering step" in a "necessary and logical development," his experiments will be of future use to medical science ("We are ahead of our time," he tells Abel), and his final soliloquy takes the form of a prophetic discourse: "In a moment," he begins. "In a few years' time .... In a day or two .... In ten years, not more . . . ." Bergman, however, is careful to undermine the overstated irony of Vergerus' prophecies by blinding him to the present moment itself; in this moment, Vergerus announces the imminence of his own death, and it is as if his capacity for evaluating the course of history derives from a temperamental detachment which is only intensified by the imminence of death. He predicts that, "in a day or two," an "incredible scatterbrain named Adolf Hitler" will lead a revolt in Munich: "It will be a colossal fiasco," he predicts confidently, and Hitler, he concludes, "will be swept away like a withered leaf the day the storm breaks." When Abel wakes up in the hospital, only a few moments of screen-time later, Bauer assures him that everything he has gone through is "just a lot of muddled dreams"; then, in words which explicitly echo those of Vergerus, he tells Abel about the Munich Putsch: "In fact, the whole thing was a colossal fiasco." Hitler's beer-hall Putsch is in fact the historical moment to which the entire film has been pointing with unabashed ominous- ness, and it has come and gone while our point-of-view character has been sleeping in a dream- filled sleep. At film's end, Abel, the dreamer whom we recognize at the center of this self-enclosed dream, escapes into the crowd of dream-figures who have been walking the labyrinthine streets, and is never seen again.

Admittedly, I have devoted more discussion to the oneiric premise which underlies Bergman's dream play than to its dramatic content. Perhaps I should begin by noting that, after The Touch, Cries and Whispers, Scenes from a Marriage, and Face to Face, Bergman has again constructed in The Serpent's Egg a film which revolves around a male protagonist. Abel Rosenberg eventually comes to live with his sister-in-law. Not unexpectedly, their relationship succumbs to a powerful sexual undertow which is, of course, neither technically "incestuous" nor immoral, since Abel's brother has already committed suicide; but it develops along intensely neurotic lines nevertheless, and their inability to consummate it- that is, Abel's inability to consummate it, despite Manuela's growing desire to do so- is no doubt the thematic key to their dramatic personalities.

Actually, this character configuration is a venation on a theme which Bergman has played many times before: the woman has become both lover (or would-be lover) and mother-figure, the male both would-be lover and child-figure. Manuela feels compelled to take care of Abel as she had once taken care of his brother, and it is her guilt over her first failure which causes her to insist that they succor one another as if she and Abel, too, were lovers. "You're responsible for someone, and you fail in your duty," she confesses to a priest, "and there you stand, emptyhanded and ashamed." Abel, too, suffers from a sense of guilt on account of his brother, but the paradoxical complexity of his guilt makes him a figure emblematic not simply of Abel, but of Cain as well: he is, it would seem, both the surviving brother whom not even death will release from guilt and, ironically, the victimized brother as well- emotionally murdered by the kind of guilt which is shared only by survivors and which can be relieved only by the kind of annihilation which he wills for himself at film's end.

What all this guilt frustrates is ultimately sexual impulse and sexual self-knowledge, which is for Bergman, as I have tried to indicate, the most authentically human means of contact with the other and with oneself. Again, the central female figure in Scenes from a Marriage offers a good comparison by which to clarify the character psychology with which Bergman has endowed the female figure in The Serpent's Egg. During her pregnancy, as we have seen, Marianne was able to perceive herself directly- as the subject of her own sexual powers. At first, she was able to isolate herself from the "real" world; she could feel that she was no longer "real," and she could "forget" herself. Ultimately, Marianne experiences "brief moments of insight" in which she can "forget about myself, even though I don't efface myself," and in which the paradox of self-knowledge is resolved. This ultimate understanding discloses to her the whole of her own sexuality- a whole- ness which she has not yet experienced (at least as something which she possesses as a subject). Pregnancy has precipitated a certain degree of self-consciousness, but the break with her husband has caused her to reject the specifically sexual aspect of her woman's role. Self-consciousness has exposed her to her loneliness, intensified her guilt, and caused her to become primarily maternal in her relationships with men. Her current lover, she tells Johan, is "a bit childish"; a few moments earlier, in talking to the man on the telephone, she had warned him, "Try for once to behave like a grown-up man," and she had informed him that Johan was "sleeping like a little child." Later, she explains her guilt as resulting from the belief that she has failed Johan: "I'm nearly always thinking of you," she admits, "and wondering if you're all right .... Sometimes I feel quite desparate and think: / must look after Johan. He's my responsibility. It's up to me to see that Johan is all right."

Unlike The Serpent's Egg, Scenes from a Marriage ends, however, on a note of healthy resolution, as each partner finally accepts his own sexuality by acknowledging the sexuality of the other. In The Serpent's Egg, Bergman has placed a male at the center of the film, and the issue of the male's sexual self-knowledge thus becomes the film's principal (if not overriding) thematic issue. If the woman's special mode of self-knowledge is a privilege which derives from a sexuality culminating in the certitude of maternity, then the problem of the male's self-knowledge results from the complementary problem- the incontrovertible uncertainty of fatherhood. "[T] here is a father," writes Paul Ricoeur in a neoFreudian gloss on Hegel, "because there is a family, and not the reverse .... [T] he father can be recognized only as the spouse of the spouse."14

The problem, of course, is not simply fatherhood itself, but rather fatherhood as the sign of the male's sexual equality- of his possession of his own sexual powers, of his equal participation in sexual experience, and of his equal access to self-knowledge. Bergman begins by following Strindberg in arguing that it is the irrefragable certitude of maternity which demands an acknowledgment of the woman's sexuality by the male which she need not reciprocate. In a film like Scenes from a Marriage, Bergman is concerned to describe the way in which an authentic sexual relationship can elicit the woman's acknowledgment, and it is Abel and Manuela's abject failure in consummating such a relationship which dictates the tragic end of The Serpent's Egg. When Manuela's solicitousness takes on maternal overtones, Abel's sense of frustration and guilt only intensifies. She unwittingly forces upon him the role of a "child"- an impassive alcoholic whose incessant drinking is an opiate against the knowledge of guilt and whose acceptance of his child's role provides an excuse for both guilt and cowardice. Abel finally wrenches himself free of Manuela's embrace and admits that he cannot be her lover, both because her maternal supplications have begun to suffocate him and, paradoxically, because he prefers the security which his child's role affords him. In order to retain the security of this role, Abel cannot afford to exercise his sexuality, and by refusing to affirm it himself, he refuses to accept Manuela 's acknowledgment of his sexuality: as we have seen, this abrogation of sexual selfacceptance is for Bergman the forfeiture of self-consciousness itself. Abel thus succumbs to the dream-world in which he has found himself by choosing self-annihilation, refusing to wake and recognize himself as the dreamer responsible for the dream that he has been dreaming.

Authentic knowledge, as the phenomenologists tell us, requires that one be conscious of the fact that he is conscious of his self: even the dreamer must know himself as the one responsible for his dreams of guilt and fear. The film's key male figures, Abel Rosenberg and Hans Vergerus, represent opposite ends of any epistemológica! spectrum which is implied in The Serpent's Egg, and neither is able to approximate self-knowledge. Abel, as we have seen, prefers the kind of self-effacement for which the dream state is the primordial metaphor, while Vergerus prefers to watch the effects of self-extinction as they work on the object of his body. Except for the nightmares which he induces others to act out for him so that he may commit them to celluloid, Vergerus has no dreams of guilt and fear, and that is why he can purvey terror so confidently. For Vergerus, who looks into a mirror and watches the cyanide work on his own body, fear and death are necessary for the recovery of time and history: the scientist measures such phenomena as guilt and the fear of death according to the way they affect the body; then, by measuring the resulting "changes" in the organism, he assumes confidently the passage of time and the necessity of the future. The difference between Vergerus' clandestine scientific films and the filmed dream which is The Serpent's Egg itself is the difference, as Jorge Luis Borges is always telling us, between looking at oneself in the mirror and actually passing through the mirror itself. To pass through the mirror, as Bachelard puts it, is to create a world in which, as in the dream, the "real" world has been completely assimilated into the "irreal" world of the imagination. When Bergman makes Abel Rosenberg's dream coextensive with the film which he himself has imagined, then he has assimilated the "real" world of his film- pre-Hitlerian Berlin in the 1920's- into the metaphor which he has created for it, and The Serpent's Egg, in the truest Borgian sense of the word, is thus a work of "fantasy." "One must," says Borges,

reveal this fantasy transformed into an inescapable reality of the mind: one must show an individual passed through a mirror, one who preseveres in his illusory country (where there are shapes and colors, but all controlled by immobile silence), one who feels the shame of being nothing more than a shadow whom the nights obliterate and the glimmering lights allow to exist.15

Much like the art of Borges, Bergman's art is the transformation of reality into just such "an inescapable reality of the mind"- a fan- tasizing of the nature of consciousness itself, experienced as one experiences a dream, as if it could not be distinguished from reality, and as if it were thus reality itself.