Mirror

Infrequently and unexpectedly, art can surprise us. It can feel a bit like catching a glimpse of oneself and one’s surroundings in a mirror you didn’t realize was there. Recently, I had this experience while watching Ingmar Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage. The succinct title reflects the film’s unmerciful directness. Separated into six episodes and almost exclusively featuring two lead characters, Johan and Marianne, the film surveys a marriage by making us privy to the critical turning points in the narrative arc.

Scenes from a Marriage offers at least two insights. The first is specific to the subject matter of the film (marriage) and the second is a broader point about the way Christians encounter art.

Let’s start with marriage. When the film begins, Johan and Marianne are presented as a picturesque married couple and the envy of their friends. This presentation appears to reflect what both characters believe about themselves--their circumstances are ideal: they are an upper-middle class couple, youthful, attractive, interesting and successful. This seeming perfection sets the stage for the central conflict.

As Johan and Marianne discuss their relationship throughout the film, Johan believes their marriage is possible because they possess the ideal circumstances. Marianne believes they share the same “language” and that this shared language enables their marriage. These beliefs become irrelevant when Johan begins an affair with another woman.

What interests me most about the narrative to this point is that most marriages are sustained and many fail out of these beliefs. Nearly as soon as Johan and Marianne articulate their assumptions things fall apart.

Love is conspicuously absent. Most of us believe in the power of love which is a kind of emotional-romantic attraction to or infatuation with the other. It’s exciting, but less exciting is the kind of love that actually holds marriages together. The latter love involves things like self-sacrifice and compassion. Many people get married out of the former rather than the latter, their partner posses an attractive inventory of circumstances and goods. Or like Marianne, they believe they share something special and exclusive with their partner. Each assumption is based on a sort of idealism, material in the former case and romantic in the latter. This film offers a rebuke to anyone who believes that their material comfort or romantic idealism will serve as the lasting foundation of marriage.

What makes this film instructive for Christians (and for all, really) is that Bergman offers an unmediated view of the couple’s split and each individual’s search for self-fulfillment. Johan and Marianne turn out to be ugly people with a huge predilection for selfishness, adultery and violence. It would be easy to judge them if you thought you were a much better person. Bergman offers no judgment. He simply shows us how rotten human beings can be to one another, especially when real motivations revolve around their self-procured and perceived happiness.

This illumination opens to a larger point I would like to make, not about Christians and marriage, but about Christians and the arts. One of the ways Christians can engage the arts is by taking the time to seriously consider work that may or may not be complementary to their faith. In doing so we may find there are works like Bergman’s that remind us of our own insufficiencies and false gods. Regardless of the intent of the author, and Bergman would certainly have disagreed with the conclusions I drew, we might find that modern art is very much aware of our contemporary spiritual poverty and personal insecurity.

This is why contemporary art has something to tell us about ourselves. It is the art of the society and culture in which we live. Both are contexts to which we are often more beholden than we would like admit and we ignore this at our own peril. In this regard, the force of the Christian narrative in our lives is largely a counter cultural one. Sometimes contemporary art with all its capacity for dissonance and the grotesque is the smelling salt we need to bring us to our senses. Bergman’s film is not a Christian one in terms of the answers it offers but I think we can consider it so in terms of the unflinching look it offers of something we call sin. When we are honest with ourselves, this unflinching look isn't simply an interesting story told by a gifted film director. It is our mirror image we come to confess each Sunday.

--Daniel

Daniel Clemens is a painter and writer participating in our seven-week study, In The Living Room