Look on the Dark Side, Mara van der Lugt on Pessimism

 

In the 17th and 18th centuries, a group of Western philosophers came to clashes, on the page at least, over the age-old problem of evil: the question of how a good God could allow the existence of evil and suffering in the world. Philosophers such as Pierre Bayle, Nicolas Malebranche and G W Leibniz, later followed by such pillars of the canon as Voltaire, David Hume and Immanuel Kant, vehemently disagreed not only on how the problem could be solved – if it could be solved at all – but also on how to speak of such dark matters.
 
Some of these arguments of ‘theodicy’ (the attempt to justify creation) may seem antiquarian to modern eyes – but in an age where young people question the morality of bringing new children into the world, they are surprisingly relevant. After all, the issue is not just about God: it is about creation and, more specifically, the extent to which creation can be justified, given the ills or ‘evils’ that are in the world.
 
The question of creation is urgent for us today. Considering the great uncertainties of the climate crisis, is it justified to create new people, not knowing what kind of future lies ahead of them? And if it is justified, is there any point at which it ceases to be? Most people would probably agree that some worlds are imaginable in which creation would be immoral. At what precise point is life too bad, or too uncertain, to pass on?
 
In the early Enlightenment, of course, there were no such concerns for the future of the planet. But there were evils in existence – plenty of them. Crimes, misfortunes, death, disease, earthquakes and the sheer vicissitudes of life. Considering such evils, these philosophers asked, can existence still be justified?
 
This longstanding philosophical debate is where we get the terms ‘optimism’ and ‘pessimism’, which are so much used, and perhaps overused, in our modern culture. ‘Optimism’ was the phrase coined by the Jesuits for philosophers such as Leibniz, with his notion that we live in ‘the best of all possible worlds’ (for surely, if God could have created a better one, he would have done so). ‘Pessimism’ followed not long afterwards to denote philosophers such as Voltaire, whose novel Candide (1759) ridiculed Leibnizian optimism by contrasting it with the many evils in the world. ‘If this is the best of all possible worlds,’ Voltaire’s hero asks, ‘what on earth are the others like?’
 
But really, Voltaire wasn’t much of a pessimist: other philosophers such as Bayle and Hume went much further in their demonstrations of the badness of existence. For Bayle, and for Hume after him, the point is not just that the evils of life outnumber the goods (though they believe this is also the case), but that they outweigh them. A life might consist of an equal number of good moments and bad moments: the problem is that the bad moments tend to have an intensity that upsets the scales. A small period of badness, says Bayle, has the power to ruin a large amount of good, just like a small portion of seawater can salt a barrel of fresh water. Similarly, one hour of deep sorrow contains more evil than there is good in six or seven pleasant days.

 
Against that bleak vision, thinkers such as Leibniz and Jean-Jacques Rousseau emphasised the goods of life, and the power we have to seek out the good in all things, for if we learned to adjust our vision we would see that life is in fact very good: that ‘there is incomparably more good than evil in the life of men, as there are incomparably more houses than prisons,’ Leibniz writes, and that the world ‘will serve us if we use it for our service; we shall be happy in it if we wish to be.’ Just as the pessimists believed the optimists were deceived in their insistence on the goods of life, so too the optimists thought the pessimists’ eyes were skewed towards the bad: each side accused the other of not having the right vision.
 
A large part of the question thus became: what is the right vision?
 
One thing that struck me as I dug deeper into these questions was how concerned both the optimists and the pessimists were with the ethical assumptions underlying the theoretical arguments. On the surface, the question was: can creation be justified? But beneath it, never far removed, lay a deeper question, a question just as ethically and emotionally imbued: how to speak of suffering in a way that offers hope and consolation?
 
There is not just a theoretical, but also a moral objection that each side makes against the other. The great objection that the pessimists lay at the feet of the optimists is that to insist that life is good even in the face of hard, unyielding suffering, or to stipulate that we are in control of our happiness, that we shall be happy ‘if we wish to be’ – that this is to make our suffering worse. It is to add to suffering the responsibility for that suffering; it is to burden the sufferer with a sense of their inadequacy. If life is so good, then the sufferer’s trials must be a case of wrong vision – and indeed the optimists tend to say things just like that. This is why optimism, so say the pessimists, is a cruel philosophy. If it gains us some hope, it fails in consolation.
 
But on their side, the optimists prove to be similarly concerned. Their objection to the pessimists is that, if we insist on the intensity and ubiquity and inescapability of suffering, if we describe it in all its depths and bleakness (as the pessimists indeed are wont to do), this heaps suffering on suffering – and it is this that makes suffering worse, as ‘evils are doubled by being given an attention that ought to be averted from them,’ as Leibniz says.
 
Pessimism, so say the optimists, is itself unconsoling – but more than that, it is unhopeful.
 
The question concerning these philosophers, then, is not just the theoretical one about whether life in general is good or bad, but also a more concrete one: face to face with one who suffers, what can philosophy bring to the table? What can philosophy offer in the way of hope and consolation?
 
Both strands of thought have the same aim, but they plot different routes to get there: the pessimists offer consolation by emphasising our fragility, by recognising that no matter how hard we try, we may fail to achieve happiness, for no fault of our own. Meanwhile, the optimists seek to unfold hope by emphasising our capacity, by insisting that no matter how dark, how bleak our circumstances, we can always change our vision and direction, we can always aim for better.
 
Of course, there is no reason in principle why both roads could not be combined, each to serve as the necessary counterpart for the other, an antidote for the poison each draught may become when served up undiluted. But the fact remains that these earliest optimists and pessimists saw them as opposed – and in fact we do too: we still have the tendency to think in binary terms, as if there is in life a stark choice to be made between optimism and pessimism, or, in Noam Chomsky’s words, for optimism or despair:
 
“We have two choices. We can be pessimistic, give up, and help ensure that the worst will happen. Or we can be optimistic, grasp the opportunities that surely exist, and maybe help make the world a better place. Not much of a choice.”
 
That last example itself makes manifest the coarseness and onesidedness of our use of these terms. Optimism tends to be positively charged, pessimism negatively charged. When we call someone an optimist, it’s usually praise. This is why politicians are particularly keen to insist that they are optimists, or even to speak of a ‘duty of optimism’. Conversely, to call someone a pessimist is usually to deride, denounce, deflate them. ‘Pessimism is for losers,’ as one recent book title has it.
 
But are our choices so dichotomous? If there are shadows on the road of pessimism, there are dangers on the opposite road also. And these are the very dangers that those older pessimists kept warning us against: that if we overemphasise the power we have over our minds, our lives, our destinies, it is all too easy to stumble into cruelty.
 
We need not look very far to see examples of what optimism, in its darkest forms, can become. When a 2008 London tower block named Heygate Estate was sold off to foreign investors, its inhabitants were first evicted then offered mindfulness courses by the local council to deal with their anxiety, so that they were themselves made responsible for their misfortunes. If we are each radically in control of our mental states, what reason is there to ask for social justice? This is the shadow-side that cleaves to the popular narrative that ‘you are responsible for your own happiness’, and is bolstered by the subtle terror of a social media regime that pushes us to broadcast our success and happiness to the world.
 
It is in such cases that the consoling force of pessimism reveals itself: it’s OK to not be OK. Sometimes we fail, sometimes we run up against the hard walls of our own capacities or the world’s boundaries – and it can be consoling to be reminded that our suffering, our fragility, is not our fault. That we suffer despite ourselves. That it can be right to grieve for what we are losing, or are yet to lose, or have already lost.
 
We are so quick to equate pessimism with passivity or fatalism or despair, and to reject it on that basis – for, of course, we do not want a philosophy that tells us to give up. But is that really what pessimism means? As Joshua Foa Dienstag argued in his book Pessimism: Philosophy, Ethic, Spirit (2006), far from leading to passivity, pessimism can be closely linked to a tradition of moral and political activism, as in the case of Albert Camus, whose courage and activism in the Second World War were infused by his pessimistic views.
 
Even the darkest pessimists never said that life would only get worse or can never be better: this is a caricature of pessimism, sketched quickly to dismiss it. Arthur Schopenhauer, the bleakest of them all, did not subscribe to it. On the contrary, he suggested that it is precisely because we cannot control the course of things that we can never know what the future holds: life may become worse or better. ‘The pessimist,’ in Dienstag’s words, ‘expects nothing.’ There is not much hope in this, perhaps, but it is a kind of hope nevertheless. And so too is the faint glimmering that can be found amid the darkest pages of these writers: the quick unquiet intuition that something can be gathered in the black vision; that our eyes may be opened in ways they were not before; that we may see in the darkness.
 
It is why hopeful pessimism may not be a contradiction, but a manifestation of the wild power that is harnessed only when life’s darkest forces are gathered into the strange alchemy of hope.
 
I think about these things in this age marked by ecological depletion and devastation, by floods and fires and heat ceilings that no one had thought possible, by the spectre of the climate crisis that takes shape all around us. This age is marked also by the quiet, or not so quiet, desperation of the young. The same criticisms once waged against the pessimists of yore are now laid at the feet of the despairing young by those techno-optimists and advocates of progress for whom any consideration of the mere possibility of decline is itself a sign of weakness, a lack of imagination, a moral flaw – a failure of vision, most of all. And so they denounce young people’s outcry as pessimism, as fatalism, as ‘mere’ despair. They criticise them for the bleakness of their vision, call their statements exaggerated and the speakers spoiled.
 
It is all too easy to miss the fact that this generation – the first to grow up in a world where a climate emergency is not just on the horizon, but a stark reality – is haunted by a real sense of losing the future, as all the things they have been told give life meaning are rendered either pointless or problematic. Things like: study, get a good job, settle down – but what jobs are still certain? Where will it be safe to settle down? As Greta Thunberg said in Parliament Square in London in 2018: ‘And why should I be studying for a future that soon will be no more, when no one is doing anything whatsoever to save that future?’ Things like: start a family – but if there is no future for one’s children, is it still OK to procreate? Even more trivial things, like developing oneself by travelling, are no longer straightforward: for how important is self-development when weighed against the carbon cost of modern travel?
 

This is a wholesale collapse of meaning that is only now becoming clear to us. There is a very real sense in which young people are experiencing not only the loss of concepts, but the loss of the future itself, as all the usual answers to the question of what makes life worthwhile become increasingly uncertain. They are in that darkness, searching for some kind of hope, some kind of consolation – and what can we offer them? Surely we can do better than give the manifestly inadequate answer (which may also be an outright lie) to assure them that all will be well – since we know there is every chance it won’t be.
 
Any crude statements of optimism would be more than misplaced: it would be the kind of lie that deceives no one, least of all the sharpened moral senses of the young, who see through the empty promises and reassurances of politicians with an anger we know is justified. If we told them that everything will be OK, these are less than empty words: they are a failure to take their experience seriously, and that, as the pessimists would tell us, is the one thing guaranteed to make their suffering worse.
 
But if brute optimism fails – could pessimism do better? I have suggested that pessimism can have value – but could we go further? Could it be, in fact, a virtue?
 
To some, the very notion of a virtue of pessimism may seem absurd. For instance, we may subscribe to Hume’s notion that the mark of any virtue is that it is useful and agreeable, either to the person who possesses it or to others. But surely pessimism is neither useful nor agreeable. It is not useful, the argument goes, because it renders us passive, depresses not only ourselves but ‘our sense of the possible’, as Marilynne Robinson has said of cultural pessimism in particular. And it is not agreeable, since it intensifies our suffering, making us focus on the bad side of life rather than the good (or so arch-optimists such as Leibniz and Rousseau would have it). It is not surprising, then, that certain studies of supposed ‘moral exemplars’ identified positivity, hopefulness and optimism among the characteristics that such exemplars had in common.
 
But then, think of Greta Thunberg. If there is such a thing as a ‘climate virtue’, she would seem to exemplify it – considering the hard personal choices that she has made, the steadfastness of her vision, and the courage with which she holds world leaders to account and takes them to task for their half-heartedness, their unwillingness to commit fully to the cause. If this is not an exercise of virtues, then I don’t know what is – and yet there is nothing positive or optimistic about Thunberg. If there is hope, it’s a dark, bleak hope, full of rage and grief and pain for what is being lost – but infused also with insistence, perdurance, determination. It is clear that this activist, at least, will continue to strive even if her efforts are doomed to fail. This is not optimism: if anything, it is a hopeful pessimism, and I believe it has every right to be called a virtue in our age.
 
Hopeful pessimism breaks through the rusted dichotomy of optimism vs pessimism. It is this attitude, this perspective that is exemplified in Thunberg and other figures who by their example give an affirmative answer to the question posed by Paul Kingsnorth: ‘Is it possible to see the future as dark and darkening further; to reject false hope and desperate pseudo-optimism without collapsing into despair?’
 
The thing to avoid is not so much pessimism, but hopelessness or fatalism or giving up. Even despair need not be completely avoided, since it too can energise and encourage us to strive for change, but we should avoid the kind of despair that causes us to collapse. These things are not the same as pessimism, which is simply the assumption of a dark view of the present as well as the future and does not imply the loss of courage or insistence to strive for better: on the contrary, often these are the very gifts that pessimism can bestow.
 
One can be deeply, darkly pessimistic, one can find oneself in the cold hard clutches of despair, and yet not be depleted of the possibility (and it could just be a possibility) that better may yet arrive. This is a kind of hope that is dearly bought, that does not come lightly but is carved out of a painful vision which may just be the acknowledgment of all the suffering that life can and does hold. If anything, the pessimists have taught me this: that with eyes full of that darkness there can still be this strange shattering openness, like a door cracked open, for the good to make its entry into life. Since all things are uncertain, so too is the future, and so there is always the possibility of change for better as there is for worse.
 
This can itself be a moral stance: one that welcomes the good when it is given and urges it onwards on its journey, but also acknowledges the bad without explaining it away or overburdening the will of those it crushes in its path. Sometimes we are not in power to change the world as we would like to, and acknowledging this can be the greatest effort as well as the greatest consolation, while not taking away the drive to give our best and hardest labours to the cause.
 
As Jonathan Lear has written in his book Radical Hope (2006), one common phenomenon at times of cultural devastation is that old values lose their meaning. If they are to survive the collapse of the moral horizon, they need new meanings, new concepts to breathe life into them. The most difficult thing of all is to negotiate this change, to start inhabiting new virtues while the old are still among us. And this, I believe, is one way in which pessimism might serve us – as a virtue in itself, but also as a way of giving new meaning to virtues that are changing as part of this changing world. To behold with open eyes the reality before us requires courage, and not to turn away from it, forbearance, and yet not to decide that it ends there: this is hope.
 
Hope – not that everything will be all right in the end, but that nothing has ever truly ended; that there is this ‘crack in everything’ of which Leonard Cohen once sang, in the good as well as the bad, so that neither is ever entirely shut away from us. This is not the steadfast conviction that things are bound to get better – not the crude optimism that can no longer be a virtue in a breaking world, and might prove to be our besetting vice. It may be easier to lend our efforts under such a banner of assured success, but this ease is a deceptive one, for while it is possible to be dispirited by passivity or fatalism, it is possible to be depleted by continued disappointment also. What hopeful pessimism asks instead is that we strive for change without certainties, without expecting anything from our efforts other than the knowledge that we have done what we are called upon to do as moral agents in a time of change. This may just be the thinnest hope, the bleakest consolation – but it may also be the very thing that will serve us best in times to come, as a value, and yes, an exercise of moral fervour: a fragile virtue for a fragile age.     
 
Look on the dark  side. By Mara van der Lugt. Aeon  , April 26, 2022.

“We have two choices. We can be pessimistic, give up, and help ensure that the worst

will happen. Or we can be optimistic, grasp the opportunities that surely exist, and maybe help make the world a better place. Not much of a choice.” Noam Chomsky
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In an age marked by such overwhelming cause for concern for the state of the planet and the future of mankind as ours, the word pessimism has received a surprising amount of bad press.
 
Noam Chomsky, in the tellingly titled collection Optimism over Despair, puts the question of optimism and pessimism as something of a forking path: we can either be optimistic about the possibilities for the future, or we can be pessimistic, i.e. desperate, i.e. just “give up”. Similarly, and almost simultaneously, Steven Pinker in his book Enlightenment Now makes his plea for the belief in progress against what he sees as a widespread current of “pessimism”, or a belief in cultural decline. Musing from another angle, Marilynne Robinson strikes out against the “always fashionable” phenomenon of cultural pessimism, which has the “negative consequence of depressing the level of aspiration, the sense of the possible”, or even of “encouraging a kind of somber panic, a collective dream-state in which recourse to terrible remedies is inspired by delusions of mortal threat.” Even the unborn baby in Ian McEwan’s novel Nutshell sagely points out that pessimism is no less than an intellectual weakness, a refusal to see that things have never been better than in modern-day Western society: “Pessimism is too easy…”
 
It is generally a good idea to be at least mildly sceptical when encountering such sweeping statements, such denunciations of what is obviously or evidently a widespread fad­ – and we should be all the more suspicious when no convincing examples are given of a phenomenon of which we are all supposed to be so acutely aware. After all: who, these days, calls themselves a pessimist with any conviction? Where are these black-minded doomsaying pessimist throngs? When was pessimism ever a thing that was “in vogue”? And who says that pessimism is the same thing as believing in decline or resigning in despair?
 
It is in fact much more difficult to find a self-proclaimed pessimist than a self-proclaimed optimist, whether in politics, philosophy, science or everyday life, and the few examples we can find are hardly ever straightforward cases. Thus John Gray, perhaps the philosopher most notorious for his pessimism, will not take on the term without qualification: “I am hopefully pessimistic”, he says on the BBC-programme Desert Island Discs. This caution, this tentative nature of his self-description, and the very adjective he chooses to moderate it, are each telling: they reveal what pessimism is often accused of and has to defend against. But the things we most often associate with pessimism are far removed from what it really is; they are based on a mixture of misgivings, prejudices, and concerns that fail to do it justice. For the truth is that pessimism, or the philosophy properly known as pessimism, was never attractive, never popular, and never, ever easy. The truth is also that pessimism represents a much richer, deeper, and more interesting view on life than the dulled-down version lets us see. Furthermore, not only does this shallow glance on pessimism dull the truth of pessimism, but it does the same for the contrary doctrine known as optimism.
 
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So, what are optimism and pessimism? The standard view is that these terms simply refer to our chosen expectations about the future: an optimist believes things will get better; a pessimist believes things will get worse. Aside from the fact that this definition gets pessimism (as well as optimism) wrong in important ways, the main problem with this representation of both optimism and pessimism is that it sets the latter up for failure. If the two outlooks are supposed to tell us what we can expect, and therefore what we can hope for from the future, then optimism obviously wins, on moral grounds. The intuition is that pessimism leads to despair, which will in turn lead to resignation: to giving up. These, again, are Chomsky’s alternatives: we can choose either optimism or despair (that is: pessimism). If this is indeed the choice before us, then Chomsky is right, and ethics itself moves against pessimism. We ought not to be pessimists if to be a pessimist means giving up on our common future, and on our fellow man.
 
So much for the intuition; now for the facts. Do pessimists actually believe their outlook commits them to resignation? Far from it: in fact, in many cases, the opposite is true. Joshua Foa Dienstag has devoted an entire book to arguing that there is a pessimist tradition of political thought, and that pessimism can be a source of powerful political engagement. How else could we explain the fact that one of pessimism’s pivotal figures, Albert Camus, was also one of the most politically committed philosophers in Western thought?
 
The problem with the common-sense view of pessimism is that it relies on a mistaken conception of what pessimism, in its deepest and most significant manifestations, really is. Far from resting in a belief that things are going to get worse, pessimism in most cases doesn’t have to do with the future at all: rather, it is a philosophy that tries to give a place to the darker side of life, to the reality of evil and pain and suffering in human (as well as animal) existence. Furthermore, insofar as pessimism is oriented on a view towards the future, most philosophical pessimists will tell you that to be a pessimist is not to expect the worst, but rather to expect nothing at all. Pessimism has to do rather with a limitation of what we can possibly know about what life has in store for us. It is, therefore, not at all a positive belief in decline, but rather a negative belief, a refusal to believe that progress is a given. Thus, to those people who would cleverly say “I’m not a pessimist or an optimist: I am a realist”, the pessimists could answer that this is just another way of saying they are a pessimist, in that they suspend judgment on the question of what is or is not going to happen.
 
But this view cast upon the future is only a secondary and derivative part of what philosophical pessimism is at its most ardent and most interesting: an attempt to paint an alternative picture of the reality of human life. This, not the caricature we have become accustomed to, is the beating heart of pessimism. It is also its original conception.
 
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A quick turning back of history’s pages tells us that the terms optimism and pessimism first came into being in the early eighteenth century. This happened in the heat of the philosophical debate on the problem of evil: the question of how an all-good, all-knowing and all-powerful God could permit the many evils and sufferings of existence.
 
Interestingly, both terms were originally pejorative and oppositional in nature: they were coined as ways of putting down the opposing philosophy, and this derogatory nature still clings to them. (To this day, a person can still be discredited by being called a pessimist, or even, in some contexts, an optimist). Optimism was the first to be coined, by the Jesuits, to deride Leibniz’s famous system that we live in “the best of all possible worlds” – and it was the Jesuits too who coined pessimism as a name for the opposing view. But it was Voltaire’s famous Candide, or Optimism that ensured the worldwide success of this term, pessimism following only slowly in its footsteps.
 
Now if we look at what both terms meant philosophically, this was to do with a set of existential questions, such as: Do the goods of existence outweigh its evils? Is life worth living? Would it have been better for some people, or most people, or any people, never to have existed? Very roughly sketched, on the one hand, the “optimists” (such as Leibniz and, most fervently, Alexander Pope), argued that life is on the whole good, that God’s creation is therefore justified, and so the evils of existence don’t form an argument against the goodness, let alone the existence of God. On the other hand, the “pessimists” (such as Voltaire and David Hume) argued that the optimists failed to give sufficient weight to the depth of human misery: not only is it the case that the evils outnumber the goods of life, but the evils carry more weight – they matter more when we make up the balances. One hour of real suffering, said philosopher Pierre Bayle, is enough to tip the scales over five or six comfortable days. Therefore, considering the dreadful potential of human misery, the terrible extremes to which suffering may reach, existence is a wager that ought not to have been made. Better no existence, argued the most dark-minded of these philosophers, than an existence in which suffering could take such horrific forms. And we all know, they hinted, what the implications are for Whoever has created us this way.
 
This, in a nutshell, is the theoretical question of optimism versus pessimism. However, behind the theory there stands a profound ethical impulse, one that is equally active on both sides of the debate.
 
The reason the pessimists object so vehemently to the system of optimism (according to which the parts may suffer but the whole is good) is that it neglects the reality of suffering, or worse, explains it away. For instance, the optimists argue that we suffer because we have sinned, or we suffer because pain is useful to us, or we suffer by our own choice, since we have the power to rise beyond our suffering. The ethical drive of pessimism is that this is no way to speak of human experience: that this implies a failure in compassion for our fellow sufferers, or even that it can serve to make their suffering worse. No consolation could be less welcome than to be told, in your suffering, that you suffer pointlessly; that you suffer through your own doing. This, say the pessimists, is to double suffering with guilt.
 
On the other hand, the optimists too are driven by an ethical motivation, their argument being that pessimists exaggerate human suffering and so it is they who make suffering worse, by adding to the fact of suffering a reflection upon that suffering. The pessimists are now accused not only of ingratitude to their creator, but of moral weakness: here already is the view that there is something desperate and immoral about pessimism; that it is a failure of the will.
 
This moral concern on either side is, on my view, precisely what saves both philosophies: it gives them an integrity that they would lack as merely abstract considerations. It manifests a sense of engagement that takes several forms throughout the tradition, revealing itself fully in the question of how to speak sensitively and considerately of human suffering: how to find a language of compassion and consolation that nevertheless does justice to the breadth of our experiences. It is also what gives coherence to both traditions, which are defined precisely by their ethical opposition to each other. Thus what Voltaire and Rousseau, in their famous clash over the Lisbon earthquake, are really arguing about is not the abstract philosophical question of whether we live in the best of all possible worlds, but the proper grounding of consolation as well as hope. The last word of Voltaire’s Poem on the Lisbon Disaster is, famously, espérance.
 
It is, then, tragic, that throughout the history of philosophy, and up to the current day, both traditions have failed to recognize this ethical drive in the opponent, and to take the opposing philosophy truly seriously. Hence the division that continues today in even the most commonsensical uses of the terms optimism and pessimism; hence also the caricatures that have resulted on both sides, and especially those associated with pessimism.
 
And yet the person most responsible for pessimism’s bad name is also the philosopher whose name is most closely associated with pessimism: that arch-pessimist, Arthur Schopenhauer.
 
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The reason for this is that Schopenhauer, in his argument that life is marked deeply and principally by suffering, to the extent that suffering is the very end of life, leads us to the exact conclusion that latter-day pessimists are most eager to avoid: that we should cease to affirm life, and turn instead to resignation. In order to achieve “salvation”, on Schopenhauer’s view, we must radically turn away from this existence, which means turning from our pleasures as well our pains. We must give up happiness as our ideal, and go beyond ourselves, our desires, and especially our will, in order to go beyond the world.
 
 This kind of resignation, haunted as it is by dark ascetic musings, seems to confirm precisely that intuitive conception of pessimism as a kind of hopelessness, a philosophy of giving up. It also raises two questions that strike at the heart of pessimism’s bad reputation. First, doesn’t this kind of philosophical gloom make for a very potent argument for suicide? Second, doesn’t it mean we should just stop caring about anything, including our fellow man? These are the kinds of questions that have resulted in a bad name for not only Schopenhauer’s particular brand of pessimism, but for pessimism more generally. And yet Schopenhauer was the first to answer these questions in ways that should be enough to change our minds.
 
First of all: his is not an argument for suicide. Suicide, says Schopenhauer, is not an answer to the problem posed by existence. An awareness of the reality of pessimism should place us on a path of philosophical and spiritual enlightenment, in which we learn to understand the illusory nature of most of our knowledge and even of our own identities: of that which distinguishes us from other people. Pessimism is meant to help us find some kind of consolation in the fact that our suffering is not accidental and is not exceptional, but is an intrinsic part of our existence in this world. True resignation, for Schopenhauer, is an attempt to achieve salvation by conquering ourselves, which can only be done by living in acknowledgment of our human condition, not by choosing death instead (though what precisely is meant here by “salvation” remains somewhat mysterious).
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It is yet another misconception clinging to pessimism that its proponents must be pro-suicide. This is not the case even in that philosopher who famously argued that suicide is the most important philosophical question, Albert Camus. On the contrary, the canonical philosophers of pessimism give argument upon argument against suicide – but unlike most arguments against suicide, which make this case in moralistic or legalistic or theological terms, the pessimists’ arguments are deeply sensitive to the experience that informs the act, in all its tragic complexity and profundity. Their arguments distinguish themselves in that, more often than not, they are formulated from the inside of this experience, rather than from the outside, looking in. Theirs is an awareness that suicide tells us something about the darkest corners of existence and about the depths of human suffering. It is, in their eyes, not at all an action to be recommended, but an experience to be taken seriously.
 
As for the second question, far from making ethics impossible, Schopenhauer wants his argument to be a foundation for ethics: there is perhaps no philosopher who has given as much weight to the ethical mechanism of sympathy or compassion as Arthur Schopenhauer. His central idea is that, by going beyond our individual wills and pursuing an ethic of personal resignation, we will recognize that deep down we are all connected by a reality that is greater and stronger than our individual identities; hence I will recognize your suffering as my suffering, you will recognize mine as yours, and we will all want to do what we can to reduce the suffering we see in the (human as well as animal) world. It thus becomes impossible to turn away from suffering on the grounds that it isn’t I who suffer: for Schopenhauer, identity and individuality are illusory, so that a single creature’s suffering properly belongs to all creatures. While optimism, for Schopenhauer, entrenches us in our personal interests and desires and makes us insensitive to the suffering of others, pessimism grounds an ethic of extreme compassion, of suffering-with and feeling-with the other. Far from a glorification of suffering, it is an extremely compassionate philosophy. True “goodness of heart”, says Schopenhauer, “identifies all beings with its own nature.”
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                                                                                        ***
 
Of course, there is still reason to be uncomfortable with almost every aspect of Schopenhauer’s philosophy of pessimism, and especially with his ethic of resignation, the giving up of any hope of happiness altogether. Schopenhauer calls this resignation, but it sounds rather like despair.
​
Contrary to this, there is much to be said for an optimist ethic that tells us to look for the good, the lighter side in all things; one that warns us against focusing too much on what Schopenhauer calls “the terrible side of life”, lest we lose heart and hope, lest we forfeit our capacity for goodness and kindness and for joy itself. Such an ethic would remind us that we must always believe, even in the darkest of times, that things can get better – which is a view that Schopenhauer does not allow us, though other pessimists do. This is also what Chomsky is getting at in his eulogy of optimism over despair. The question is whether what he is getting at is really optimism, or rather hope.
​
Could the two not go together, then? Could there be such a thing as hopeful pessimism, as John Gray suggests (which to many of us would seem like an oxymoron) – and could such hopeful pessimism not perform the same tasks as Chomsky’s optimism, and perform them better? I think it can – and should.
​
While it is deeply mistaken to suggest that pessimism is the same as fatalism or giving up, the concern behind this suggestion is nevertheless a valid one. This is the concern, voiced most clearly by Chomsky, that if we become too convinced that things are going to get worse whatever we do, we’ll end up doing nothing at all. But, as I have argued, this is not at all the point of pessimism, properly understood. If even that strand of pessimism most oriented towards resignation (Schopenhauer’s version) retains a profound ethical orientation; if even here the recognition of suffering in the world is tightly linked to the commitment to lessening that suffering – what this tells us about pessimism is that this is a philosophy that sees itself as charged with the highest ethical potential. Far from dissuading us from ethical or political action, the point of pessimism is to motivate us.
​
More importantly, the fatalistic concern raised by Chomsky goes both ways, and cuts optimism with the same blade. If it can be said that pessimism risks demotivation, it could also be said that, if we are too optimistic, too convinced that things will turn out fine in the end, whatever we do, we’ll equally end up doing nothing. Why worry ourselves about a complex problem such as climate change if we already believe everything will sort itself out in the end; that progress will prevail? How is such an attitude more likely to motivate us than one that takes seriously the reality of damage, the reasonableness of due concern?
​
This is of course as unfair a representation of optimism as the opposing view is of pessimism. Again, the point behind both viewpoints and philosophies is their ethical drive: both are directed towards a common orientation, which is to make sense of suffering, to offer hope as well as consolation; and, at least to some extent, to try to improve the human condition insofar as it can be improved. The difference between both traditions resides in the kinds of moral sources that are prioritized. To remain with the example of climate change, the optimists believe we will be best motivated if we draw from humanity’s success stories, such as new technologies and the vast human potential for change and innovation, while not focusing too much on the reasons we have for despair. In contrast to this, the pessimists hold not only that ethics demands we do justice to the reality of suffering and evils (including the possibility of impending disaster), but also that this is exactly what will motivate us to want to make a difference: it is precisely a recognition of the dire state of affairs in the world that is needed to impel us to action. The disagreement, then, is ultimately over what is most capable of morally paralysing us: overemphasizing our capacity or rather our incapacity?
 
 
Throughout the ages, the tension between optimism and pessimism has had to do with the conflicting demands of their double orientation: towards hope and, at the same time, towards consolation. On the one hand, this means to do justice to the reality of human suffering, without which, as especially pessimism recognizes, consolation is impossible. And, on the other, to offer a perspective that opens up new possibilities, new perspectives for the future, without which, as especially optimism recognizes, hope is impossible. This tension rises again and again in literature as well as the history of philosophy. I will point out merely two passages, one as subtle in its optimism as the other is in its pessimism.
​
​The first passage occurs at the end of Tolstoy’s War and Peace, where Pierre looks back at his past sufferings and draws from them a lesson that, without discounting or playing down these hardships, nevertheless manages to place them in a wider narrative of hope and meaning:
​
           “They say: sufferings are misfortunes,” said Pierre. “But if at once this minute, I was asked, would I remain what I was before I was taken prisoner, or go through it all again, I should say, for God’s sake let me rather be a prisoner and eat horseflesh again. We imagine that as soon as we are torn out of our habitual path all is over, but it is only the beginning of something new and good. As long as there is life, there is happiness. There is a great deal, a great deal before us.”
 
I believe there is great wisdom in this. But I also think this is something we should handle with great caution; something we should not make into too general a point. It is a wonderful thing when out of deep tragedies or great suffering comes “something new and good”; when bad experiences teach us new things, help us to reach beyond ourselves, to grow as persons. Speaking of the value of life, this is surely one of those things that makes life and living valuable to us: this possibility of bad things giving entry to the good. But while we should be deeply grateful when this is the case for us, it is not something we can count on, nor is it something that is dependent on our will. Not all that doesn’t kill us makes us stronger. Not all suffering gives way to the new and good; not all bad experiences help us to grow. Some diminish us, some tragedies make life stop short in its tracks. Some suffering cuts us off from the attainment of the “new and good”, and, in Hilary Mantel’s words, makes us “foreign to ourselves”:
 
            “All of us can change. All of us can change for the better, at any point. I believe this, but what is certainly true is that we can be made foreign to ourselves, suddenly, by illness, accident, misadventure, or hormonal caprice.”
 
These words are drawn from Mantel’s memoir, Giving up the Ghost, and they comprise the second passage I wanted to mention, which seems to stand as a kind of counterpoint to Tolstoy’s muted optimism: where Pierre counterposed light to darkness, Mantel counterposes darkness to light. My own pessimism, if it deserves the name, rises exactly at this point. I believe, with and perhaps beyond Mantel, that there are those to whom the path of happiness is closed – truly closed. That there are experiences that can cut us off from ourselves and from our very capacity for happiness: from the good and from the true. To recognize this is not to forfeit hope or to give up on such persons, let alone on ourselves: it is rather to acknowledge that this too is life; this too is what it means to be alive.

​
And this is the great risk, the original sin of any overly optimistic description of reality or of the human capacity to flourish: the suggestion that this flourishing is entirely up to us, entirely in our human hands. This very modern ethic has had its most victorious moment at the heart of the American Dream, according to which each of us can (and should) achieve our aspirations, if only we are willing; “you are responsible for your own happiness”. This ethic is echoed in pop culture as it is in many currents of new age spirituality, some of which trace back all our good and bad fortunes, even our illnesses, to our own will and consciousness, thus making each of us starkly responsible for that which in older days would be referred to fate. Whatever befalls us, so say such “philosophies”, does so because we have attracted it. This is also an ethic that fits snugly within the modern Facebook paradigm, where we are supposed (there is a strong ought here) only to show our happiest face, our sunniest side – regardless of whether such a side is real or even possible for us. The pressuring potential of optimism, if wrongly interpreted, reveals itself fully here.
 
While many have surely drawn hope from the belief that our happiness is entirely in our hands, this is not simply a message of hope. It can become an imperative, and as soon as it does, it reveals its ugly side, in this overburdening of the will. This, not incidentally, was precisely what early pessimists such as Bayle and Voltaire were reacting so strongly against: the idea that we are as responsible for our suffering as for our happiness. If this gains us hope, it fails in consolation.
 
                                                                                        ***
 
A few months ago I came across a bench by a beach in Scotland that had black balloons tied to it. The bench itself was dedicated to the memory of a boy who had died one year before that day. There were flowers on the bench, and beside the flowers, a bunch of papers, with hundreds of names of persons, followed by their ages: fifteen, seventeen, twenty-one, thirty-two. On the first page there was a handwritten and touchingly misspelled note, telling us that this was a list of people lost to suicide, and suggesting to us these three things:
 
                        “ Be kind to people.
                         Look out for loved ones.
                         Its ok to not be ok.”
 
And this is what the ethic of pessimism, in its strongest, clearest, cleanest form, most pivotally represents: that “It’s ok to not be ok.” That to make suffering a question primarily of our will is merely to increase suffering, by heaping guilt upon it. That it’s a wonderful thing to live a life rich in wonder, and meaning, and happiness; and we should be deeply grateful if we are so blessed. But that our own happiness should not excuse us either from an awareness of the fragility of life, happiness, and good itself, or from a due consideration and concern for those less fortunate, less blessed, less beloved, or the truly miserable among us, who also walk this world.
 
The message of pessimism is that this, too, is a part of life, and that it deserves a place in our language, our shared experience; that we are not justified, that it is never justified, to close our eyes to that other, darker, “terrible” side of life. This is also the meaning of compassion in the ethic of pessimism, which need not at all be in conflict with optimism, but should stand shoulder-to-shoulder beside it as its necessary complement and companion. As Schopenhauer wrote, this is how deep down we should greet each other, not as Madame or Monsieur, but as “fellow sufferer, compagnon de misère.”
 
                                                                                   ***
 
Noam Chomsky argues for optimism over despair. We might equally, and more meaningfully, argue for hope over optimism.
 
If optimism risks, on the one hand, an overburdening of the will, and on the other, an understatement of the reality of true and dire damage done to the world and to ourselves – could not pessimism serve us better as a moral source? And where pessimism risks stumbling into resignation – could not hope help us to mind the gap? If optimism and pessimism both have their faces turned towards a common goal, could we not find in both the materials by which to travel forwards?
 
Why, then, not a philosophy of hopeful pessimism to guide us into the future?
 
 
Pessimism. By Mara van der Lugt. The Philosopher  October 1, 2019.
 

 

Dark Matters: Pessimism and the Problem of Suffering. By Mara van der Lugt
 
An intellectual history of the philosophers who grappled with the problem of evil, and the case for why pessimism still holds moral value for us today.
 
Princeton University Press

Mara van der Lugt, Lecturer at  University of St.Andrews 

Four Takes on Persona

 

 

 

When I saw Persona for the first time, I dug my nails into the meat of my thighs. After the film finished, I paced. I wanted to watch it again. I wanted to throw it away. I thought it was brilliant. I thought it was garbage.
 
Persona is about two women: an actor who mysteriously goes mute, and the nurse who looks after her. I couldn’t shake the unease I’d had the entire time watching—which makes sense; Persona is an uneasy film, both in presentation and plot. There’s unease in the way that the two women examine each other, circle each other, and eventually come to know of each other in ways unexpected and unexplained.
 
I went to the bathroom, just to do something, and I washed my hands. After scrubbing with soap, I looked at myself in the mirror. Here you are, Ross—a boy of 22, shaken by a film made over 50 years ago, in a language you do not speak. Pull yourself together.
 
I only watched the full film twice more over the next six years. Few moments stuck with me, except one: the sequence where the nurse, Alma (Bibi Andersson), sits opposite the actor, Elisabet (Liv Ullmann), and narrates, to her face, Elisabet’s experience with motherhood.
 
By today’s standards, the scene isn’t fancy. There are no extended takes, there’s no balletic choreography. The camerawork is simple and direct: Bergman’s camera stares at Ullmann, pushing in closer and closer. We hear the details of Elisabet’s determination to become a mother, ignited by a partygoer’s cruel words, and how this desire transforms into repulsion and fear once the baby is born and grows. We watch Elisabet look away, off into the distance, and, finally, down the lens at us. Alma’s voice rises as she finishes describing Elisabet’s fear. A sound effect plays.
 
Then the monologue begins again. This time, we gaze at Alma’s face, her determined expression and intent gaze. Her voice is placid and matter-of-fact. We meet the confronter head-on. Of course, we relax. Or, at least, I relaxed. If something happens again and proceeds just like it did the last time, you expect nothing more to happen, don’t you?
 
When I saw the silent flash of half of Elisabet’s face superimposed upon half of Alma’s, unease skated across my spine. This was new. This was a different ending to the same monologue. My expectations weren’t playing out.
 
“No!” Alma protests. “I’m not like you. I don’t feel like you.” She tries to separate herself from Elisabet Vogler. Resistance is futile. Elisabet’s face overlays upon Alma’s again. The sound effect that accompanies the shot punctuates the overlay. The sound effect this time is lower, it echoes, it’s like a foghorn cutting through deep night. The sound effect is the final note in this strange moment. The sound effect sears the image of these two faces together into my mind.
 
*
 
The two halves of the faces together—making a whole face—is strange and disquieting to me. I looked in the mirror right after I finished watching the film for the first time, and I saw the ways that my face had flattened. I forced myself to drop my shoulders and my face relaxed, too. Your mask of conformity and how you discarded it years ago is not too far from the idea of performance and identity in this film, I told myself.
 
*
 
You grow up a good Christian boy, soft and uncertain and too eager to please. You’re too aware, as a deaf person trying to formulate their Deaf identity, how different you are from others around you. When you enter adolescence, you grapple with hormones as your parents insist that you attend church every Sunday.
 
You find a community, a Deaf Christian youth group, and you throw yourself into the social events and the summer camps. You throw yourself in the pool of signing people so many times you think you want to drown. You want to stay with this community, above all else. Seeing everyone signing is like oxygen to you. The friends you make during those events sustain you through weeks and weeks of loneliness.
 
But, as you grow, you become aware of your attraction to men. You bite your tongue when an attractive male classmate rubs your shoulders. You don’t respond when someone teases you about looking at beauty magazines. You’re scared to be rejected. You fear losing the only community you think you’ll find.
 
You lose it anyway.
 
When you’re 16, a Deaf Christian woman tricks you. Her name is J—. She invites you to coffee; just the two of you, she says. She lies to you: she tells you in the car, much too eagerly, that she’s driving you to coffee with you, her, and an ex-gay.
 
Your only response is a kind of denial, a weak response: “I didn’t know ex-gays existed.”
 
You meet the ex-gay, someone who apparently exists, at a Starbucks. Of course you meet him at a Starbucks. It’s Seattle in the late 2000s, before the resistance to corporate coffee burst into the public’s consciousness.
 
He’s sitting at a table in the back, and you vaguely recognize him. He’s tall, dark, and handsome. He has a snaggletooth, exposed in a nervous smile. He’s married to an acquaintance of yours, another Deaf Christian woman.
 
The ex-gay buys you coffee, even when you say you’ve got it. He wants to do this for you. He’s glad you came out here, he’s glad you volunteered to do this. You don’t tell him that you had no choice.
 
You find it hard to look at him directly. His face is cast in shadow. He smiles at you but you’re not sure if it’s a leer or a smirk, or another sort of mask. He scares you. He scares you because he’s a walking representative of leaving your identity behind. He shows you that identity can be discarded, something to sidestep rather than delve into.
 
You’re 16 years old. You’ve been tricked. You do not want to be here, but you know that if you say anything, they won’t listen to you. They’ll insist that you listen to them, first. Your anger spills out in the resulting conversation, at this back table in this corporate coffee shop.
 
“We’re not the only species on Earth who have homosexual pairings. Monkeys are gay. Penguins are gay. It’s a natural thing.” All of your arguments are delivered with every bit of bluster and false bravado you can manage. You try to hide your anger with an aggressive willingness to get down to business, to the topic at hand.
 
But even in the heat of anger, there’s still curiosity. There’s still compassion. You sit immobile as the ex-gay tells you his life story. You learn about him, and you find yourself connecting with him more and more. You find yourself softening against your will. He was adopted. He grew up in a conservative Christian home. He often felt out of place wherever he went, and he wanted a space to belong.
 
Your anger dissipates, replaced by a festering resentment, a flash of compassion. You often feel out of place, as the only deaf person in your family. You can empathize with him, but you and him are not the same. Still, he frightens you. You can see yourself in him, and this frightens you.
 
He represents the idea that you can kill yourself. You can push down and separate yourself from a part of you that needs love and light to grow. You can be cruel to yourself. You can injure parts of yourself to make yourself more palatable and accommodating for a world that does not care about anything except what it can get from you.
 
*
 
I define myself today as a queer person. I’m confident and comfortable saying that I’m queer. And I separated myself from yourself. Yourself was the version of me at 16, a person who shook when overwhelmed and questioned everything about who they were.
 
The version of me that was constantly scared is not one I want to acknowledge as part of me, most days. I separate that version of me through suppression, through avoidance, through language. The version of me becomes not me—only referred to by you, by another pronoun. You are a version of me, a version I often ignore and try to shove firmly into my closet because I want to know nothing but pride. But you cannot cut out your past, the uncertain days and nights, the people who approached you and told you that you were wrong.
 
You looked upon the ex-gay and you knew him. You saw yourself in him. You understood his shame because you had felt it yourself. He and you both wanted so desperately to fit in and to be part of a society that chafed against a fundamental core of your being.
 
What scares me about Persona is the relationship between the two women. They are, at first, diametrically opposed to each other. Their boundaries are clear, and their sense of selves—save for Elisabet’s identity crisis and her resulting muteness—firm. Then, they go and take a stretch of time together, with only each other, at a lonely seaside cottage. Boundaries start to dissolve. The conflict becomes a question of who’s dependent on who, the nurse on the patient or the patient on the nurse? Soon, we start to wonder who needs help at all.

 
When I watched half of Elisabet’s face overlay upon Alma’s for the first time, I saw a moment where two people had lost themselves in each other. They’d started out as polar opposites, cagey and conflicted about the other’s intentions. But, with Alma’s openness about having sex and her knowledge about Elisabet’s feelings towards motherhood, the film veers towards the idea that you can, in fact, know someone intimately. Bergman shows that our secrets and our shame are not so different from each other’s. Elisabet only has to listen to Alma and her past to know how she craves stability and a sense of forward momentum after an orgy and a traumatic abortion. Through reading Elisabet’s mail, Alma sees how Elisabet studies Alma and drinks in her stories to—hopefully—move past muteness into something more.
 
Both women try to use each other to move forward in their own lives. But, both women are caught up in their own lives and crave what the other has, not seeing how the other is impacted on a granular level. Both women are so entrenched in their own loneliness that they can’t recognize the other’s predicament.
 
When the faces merged, I saw two people bound by loneliness and shame to the point where they no longer understood who was who. I saw two completely different people and disparate identities become one. And when their faces became one face, they knew each other’s secrets and knew the shame the other must be feeling.
 
In a homophobic society, it’s easy to feel ashamed for being queer. Pride has to be performed before it truly grows. You must put on a brave face before you know what you can do.
 
Past the false bravado, you were curious about the ex-gay and how he’d come here to this moment in the coffee shop. You saw him battling himself. You saw him trying to conform and wondered if he was truly happy.
 
Persona scares me even today because it shows me that there’s no easy resolution for knowing another’s shame. There’s no way to separate yourself from your past and shame, and therefore, you cannot help but feel like you know the person sitting across from you, telling you the story of their life. They’re really telling the story of your own life back to you. You cannot escape it. Once you know someone and you understand the similarities between them and you, they reflect parts of you right back to you. These parts of you and how they’re mirrored back at you become, in time, its own haunting. You’re reminded of how the choices you make dictate the path you take.
 
The overlaying of faces in Persona is this same kind of haunting. Even as Alma’s path diverges from Elisabet’s, Bergman shows us through this overlaying that Alma’s path isn’t so far removed from Elisabet’s. If their shame can be shared and felt by each other, then their futures are not too far apart. Their paths are not too removed from the other’s. Even if Alma insists that she wants children, Bergman also shows that her hating children is also a possibility. Bergman insists that there’s a future where her shame and uncertainty could rule her. After all, Bergman doesn’t let Alma finish her protest before Elisabet’s face springs up again.
 
The true horror of Persona, to me, is the idea that Alma could easily lose herself in Elisabet. The identity that she’s constructed as a nurse could fall apart entirely, and she would be ruled by her shame instead of only being haunted by it.
 
I’m haunted by the ex-gay today because it could have been easy to let my disgust about being tricked become disgust towards myself. I could have let my shame and uncertainty about my own identity consume me. Instead of being openly queer, I could have followed the ex-gay. After all, the ex-gay had felt the same intense loneliness that I’d felt growing up, the same uncertainty of what to do with yourself when you’re an adolescent and still lurching through mistake after mistake. In the coffee shop, the ex-gay said that they’d walked towards a solution for their loneliness; you’d been grasping at straws, young and scared. The ex-gay had changed themselves and now they weren’t so clumsy and lonely anymore.
 
You could see yourself at 16 as a man who walked away from a part of himself in favor of community. This path is all too easy a venture, and it wouldn’t take much for you to journey down it. After all, to be in the Deaf community outside a metropolis is not a sustained, consistent event. When you’re in the thick of the Deaf community, you greedily drink in gulps, hoping for the overflow to sustain you through times of drought. You’re the only Deaf person in your family. You’re the only Deaf person in your school. You’re the only Deaf person most anywhere you go.
 
You could make it less complicated for yourself.
 
The ex-gay hugs you as you get up to leave. The hug stretches on for longer than you’re comfortable with. Behind him, J— laughs at the look on your face. On the way home, you find yourself wondering about what he was trying to communicate with that last embrace.
 
I wonder many things about the ex-gay, even today. Even as the separation from you happens, as I grow into my queer identity, the ex-gay is someone who follows me around in my memory.
 
*
 
Finding comfort and confidence in my identity as a Deaf queer person had to come with the acceptance that there were people in the Deaf community, people I knew, who didn’t want me to be queer. I have to live with the fact that people from the Deaf community have told me, “I don’t love you as you are.”
 
Identity is a way for you to define yourself. Identity is a way to find community. But what happens when one community wants you to exorcize a part of something from another community? Do you turn your back on that person? What happens to the unease that lingers? Do you turn your back on that community entirely? To grow, I had to protect myself.
 
Whenever I watch the two different faces overlap in Persona, the effect chiefly reminds me of the different identities and communities we can be a part of. They can choose to coexist or not. People can choose to accept all of me, or not. My identities as a Deaf queer person still exist, overlaid upon each other, adding nuance to my experiences. They’re different ways of seeing and existing in this world. With Alma and Elisabet, their ways of being first chafe against each other, then open up to each other, and then find a way to coexist, for a moment.
 
After the first flash of that overlaid face, Alma whispers, “No, I’m not like you.” She rejects it, only for Bergman’s idea and the illusion to press down on her moments later, and insist that the two women in the film are not so different.
 
The ex-gay couldn’t accept his own queerness. He had to take on another mask, the idea of the reformed straight Christian man. I could have followed him down the same path.
 
“Animals don’t have souls,” he told me at one point, in response to one of my many aggressive challenges. “We’re the only ones in God’s creation who have souls.”
 
I could have been like him and killed a part of myself. My soul was at stake. After all, that was what this meeting was about. He was suggesting his logic and I could choose to take it or reject it.
 
In Persona, after the overlaying of two faces, Alma cuts herself. Alma offers herself, a part of herself, to Elisabet. Elisabet watches her cut herself and then she swoops in to feed on Alma’s blood.

 
There’s a moment where Elisabet drinks as Alma curls her fingers into Elisabet’s hair. Then Alma pulls her away and slaps her again and again, her eyes bright with liberation.
 
Alma rejects Elisabet’s path, her way of living. Alma goes back to herself. I rejected the ex-gay’s logic and his words about following the straight and true—but that doesn’t mean he didn’t haunt me as I left the coffee shop and made my way home. I had to make a choice.
 
To make an identity is to reject paths, from moment to moment, as they’re offered to you. As Alma learns more and more about Elisabet, she also learns, again and again, how to separate Elisabet from herself. But you cannot reject trauma. You cannot forget events where the path of your life is shown to you. I couldn’t think back and not think, occasionally, about the ways that my life could have been different.
 
Before leaving the cottage and making her way home, Alma gazes in the mirror and fixes her hair. There comes another overlay, an image of Elisabet pressing her hand down on Alma’s hair. It gives Alma, in the moment, pause. She stops to consider where she’s been, what she’s done.
 
To this day, so do I.
 
Your Mask, Myself. By Ross Showalter.  Bright Wall/Dark Room, March 30, 2022.

In Ingmar Bergman’s prolific career, Persona (1966) is arguably his most recognizable yet puzzling masterpiece.
 
It was 1965. Bergman was admitted to Sophiahemmet, the royal hospital in Sweden, for illnesses due to overwork. He nonetheless decided to keep his hands busy while convalescing. The hospitalization placed Bergman in a different world, segregating him from the hustle of several demanding roles. The hospital stay, while disabling the auteur, enabled him to reflect upon and question the nature of his works. This was when Bergman conceived the idea for Persona. The director claimed that he “went as far as he could go” for the film, and by doing so, the film “saved his life.” Some argued that this refers to Bergman’s artistry, but it would not be an exaggeration if one thinks of Bergman’s actual life, for his life depended on artistic creations.
 
This life-saving film chronicles the story of a stage actress Elisabet Vogler  falling silent in the middle of a performance of the Greek tragedy Electra, subsequently being taken to a mental hospital and placed under the care of nurse Alma. Following Doctor Lindkvist’s advice, the two of them move to a remote island in hopes of a speedier recovery for Elisabet.
 
Persona―Theatrical Mask
 
Among all film critics, Jacques Mandelbaum’s descriptions perhaps best fit the theme of the discussion below: the film is about “the reversible nature of appearances, the porosity of faces and absolute deprivation.” The theatrical promotional posters of Persona, which advertised with the close-up shots of the lead actresses, confirm the importance of human face in the film. Human faces demonstrate the psychic processes of a human being, and in this connection, it brings us back to the title of the film, Persona. The word persona originated from Latin, meaning a “theatrical mask.” Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung developed and defined the concept persona as “the individual’s system of adaptation to, or the manner he assumes in dealing with, the world.” 3 In simpler words, “it is a kind of mask, designed on one hand to make a definite impression upon others, and on the other to conceal the true nature of the individual.” To Jung, the persona was not just individual, it was social, historical, interpersonal and collective. As a social construction, it does not only conceal the flaws of an individual to the world, but also possibly to the individuals themselves. On the other hand, the recognition of a person’s shortcomings and powerlessness necessarily requires the individual’s acknowledgement of the multiplicity of roles they play in their lives.
 
Naturally, any individual would wish to keep such grim part of themselves hidden from the world, but Bergman chose to use cinematography to expose this side of human beings on the silver screen. In fact, the film was originally titled Cinematography, only to be abandoned and took on the title Persona at the advice of a film company executive. Bergman wrote in his book Images: My Life in Film that, in Persona, he “touched wordless secrets that only the cinema can discover.” He recognized how important cinematography was to him, for it “transcended the words I [he] lacked, the music which I [he] could not master, and paintings which left me [him] cold.” In fact, the power of cinema lies in that, as a medium, it allows people to live through an experience, thus to understand the indescribable.
 
Through taking the audience on a journey through the shadow, Bergman unfolded the Jungian individuation process in front of the audience’s eyes. Jung’s individuation process works as self-healing mechanism by recognizing and accepting the darker qualities of an individual. Jungian shadow refers to the “aspect of our personality that does not relate to our cultural notion of ‘goodness’.” Bergman expert Hubert Cohen noted that through Elisabet’s role, Bergman portrayed “the worst side of his [Bergman’s] own personality” and by the worst side of one’s personality, we can infer it as the person’s shadow. Every light casts a shadow, so wherever goodness goes, wretchedness follows. And according to Bibi Andersson, who played Nurse Alma in the film and a frequent collaborator of Bergman, whenever Bergman wrote a film script, he wrote it according to the personality of the actor/actress he wanted to be cast for the role. She also revealed that, at the time Bergman asked her to play Alma, which, according to her, is a character full of insecurities, the actress herself struggled with her own insecurities. If we are to decipher what Bergman expressed through the film, one could easily come to the conclusion that the film showcased an exposure of the shadow, the dark side of human beings.
 
According to Jung, people who are fixated in one particular persona hinder their psychological growth. Therefore, in the film, both Elisabet and Alma undergo the process of recognizing and accepting each other’s shadows. Any explorations of the shadow benefits the psyche as it provides meanings, feelings and possibility of finding values in life, an aspect that shall not be overlooked. In addition, bringing up the shadow eradicates its looming destructive power. Letting the shadow take the lead creates the possibility of leading the psyche onto the road of health.
 
The Journey Begins
 
In Persona, such exploration of the dark side of humanity starts off with the filming process, with film rolling and filming equipment turning on. This scene echoes with the ending scene, in which the audience will again see the same filming process. Such matching works function as a hint to show that this film is about the filming of a film, that the audience is about to witness an artificial construction (i.e.: a film is built on elaborate acts and performances, hence falsehood). Soon after this scene we see an approximately five-minute long montage of seemingly unrelated images. They, however, all represent motifs to be seen again later in the film: an erected penis, signifying a functioning patriarchy; the killing of a lamb, connoting the sacrifice of lamb from the Bible; hammering of a nail through a human hand, a reminiscence of crucifixion of Jesus and the prior betrayal from Judas; a short clip of a silent comedy taken from a scene in Bergman’s 1949 film Prison, in which a man preparing for sleep is startled by a burglar, Death, a vampire and a police officer, ended with Death chasing the three humans off the windows; a spider, a reference to the reincarnation of an omniscient divinity Anansi, followed by a picture of pointed steel fence, implying segregation and prohibition of trespassing.
 
After the five-minute long montage, the scene changes to a morgue-like space. A shirtless boy lying on a bed wakes up, puts on his glasses, then reads the book placed next to him which is titled A Hero of Our Time. In Bergman’s 1963 film The Silence¸ the same child actor is also seen reading the same book 4. It is believed to be Mikhail Lermontov’s work, which tells the story of a talented man who cannot fit into social norms. If Bergman’s use of this book in Persona is any hint to the audience for what follows in the film, it would not be difficult to deduce his message: you are about to witness the journey of a cowardly hero, someone who is not as good as s/he would like to be.
 
The Individual
 
Segregation from the outside world begins at the beginning of the film, when the psychiatrist assigns Elisabet to nurse Alma in a mental hospital. Elisabet is then seen in her vast hospital room, equipped with nothing but a bed, a radio and a television. The radio and television shows are the only intrusions from the outside world in the all-encompassing room. In a sense, Elisabet’s hospitalization equates a solitary imprisonment. For Elisabet, however, as she shuts herself in and refuses to talk, it appears that she finds such a stay preferable.

 
Several scenes from Bergman’s final film before retirement, the 4-hour long Bildungsroman Fanny and Alexander (1982), can be borrowed for analysis here in Persona. In Fanny and Alexander, after being rescued from the attic lockup for disobedience in his abusive stepfather Bishop Edvard’s home to his protective Uncle Isak’s home, the nephew of protagonist Alexander’s uncle, Aron, brings breakfast with Alexander to his androgynous brother Ismael, who is incarcerated in the family home’s dungeon for being a threat to others for possessing extraordinary abilities. Ismael shows Alexander why he is being considered dangerous. By asking Alexander to put down his name (Alexander Ekdahl) on a piece of paper and read what is now written on it (Ismael Retzinsky), Ismael demonstrates how the two of them are actually “the same.” He says to Alexander,
 
“Perhaps we’re the same person, with no boundaries. Perhaps we flow through each other, stream through each other boundlessly and magnificently.”
 
This scene shares much similarity with a scene near the end of Persona and can be borrowed to understand its meaning. Alma confronts Elisabet about her indifference toward her son’s massive and unfathomable love for her. The sequence was shot from two perspectives: one showing the mute Elisabet with a narration from Alma, the other showing the narrating Alma and the back of Elisabet’s head. In both sequences, half of the actresses’ face are shrouded in their shadows.
 
The heated confrontation uncovers Elisabet’s unspeakable secrets. Alma’s abilities to analyze Elisabet’s treatment of her role as a mother akin to telepathy, an all-knowing ability similar to that of Ismael, who can read Alexander’s mind. As soon as Alma finishes her monologue, Elisabet and Alma’s faces are merged into one. Earlier in the film, Alma comments that she thinks she looks like Elisabet, only that Elisabet is more beautiful. “I think I could change myself into you if I tried” said Alma. Elisabet and Alma thus can be seen as the “same person,” who can exchange their roles and perform duties just like the other person.

 
What happens next in Alexander’s encounter with Ismael in Fanny and Alexander further proves this point. In the sequence, Ismael tells Alexander, “You bear such terrible thoughts. It’s almost painful to be near you.” He then narrates a scene in Alexander’s mind in which Bishop Edvard is slowly being burned to death by a fire started by the bishop’s ancient, bedridden aunt. When Alexander asks Ismael to stop talking about what is on his mind, Ismael replies it was not him talking; he is simply speaking Alexander’s mind.
 
Similarly, in Persona, Alma reveal the dark secret of Elisabet to her, to which Elisabet responds by turning away from Alma and remaining silent,
 
“You wanted to be a mother. When you knew it was definite, you became afraid, afraid of responsibility, afraid of being tied down, afraid to leave the theater, afraid of pain, afraid of dying, afraid of your swelling body.….When you knew it was inevitable, you started to hate the child and wished it would be stillborn. You wished that the baby would be dead….You looked with disgust at your screaming child and whispered, “Can’t you die soon? Can’t you die?”
 
This scene’s significance lies in the fact that Alma exposes Elisabet’s shortcoming and secret―mother is the one role that Elisabet is unable to play. Elisabet feels shameful for her inability, which is why she falls silent when performing Electra, for her realization of her own hatred for her mother, as well as her tearing up of her son’s photo. Bergman, in his autobiography The Magic Lantern, noted that, to him, cinema is “a powerfully erotic business” for “the mutual exposure is total.” As a result, following the mutual exposure―of Alma recounting a beach orgy resulted in an unwanted pregnancy, and Alma revealing Elisabet’s lack of motherliness, the mute patient slowly becomes more responsive.
 
After the heated one-way confrontation between Alma and Elisabet above, Alma gashes her wrist and forces Elisabet to drink her blood. This could be read as psychic vampirism – Elisabet feeding off Alma’s life force. But when viewing this scene together with the kiss shared between Aron and Ismael as Aron leaves Alexander alone with Ismael, Elisabet is not necessarily taking energy away from Alma; rather, Elisabet and Alma, and Aron and Ismael are merely exchanging a part of themselves with each other. If Aron in Fanny and Alexander, who can roam free in the house and thus enjoys a higher degree of freedom than Ismael, exchanges a part of himself with Ismael, who is being confined in a small room, Aron also exchanges a part of his freedom with his brother’s confinement. Aron bringing breakfast to Ismael with Alexander and subsequently breaking the rules by allowing Ismael to talk to Alexander alone serves as a good example of this exchange of freedom. Alma’s remark to Elisabet at the end, “I’ve learned a lot” can testify that the two of them exchange deep, unspoken knowledge about each other.
 
Again, Elisabet is a human being with an extraordinary understanding of the falsehood of human acts, while Ismael also possesses a super-human-like ability in understanding human beings’ thoughts. These human “vampires” do not actively inflict harm on others as they do not enervate; and what they do is to make the other person (Alma and Alexander) realize their own shadows. Unlike the unwilling victims of vampires, Alma and Alexander willingly go to Elisabet and Ismael and allow them to have power over them. The exchange of secrets thus foster understanding and growth.
 
If we compare Elisabet at the beginning of the film with Elisabet in this blood-sucking scene, her change is noticeable: the audience are witnessing the changing of roles between Elisabet and Alma. Elisabet’s unwilling, sudden utterance when Alma threatens to throw a bowl of boiling water at her is an immediate threat of death, which effectively initiated a starting point of verbal responsiveness (albeit forced) for her. And when she later drinks blood from Alma, that signifies another step forward for Elisabet, for her shredding of her silent role and her beginning of re-acceptance of her roles as a mother, an actress, and a wife.
 
At the end of Persona, a man is then seen facing the audience, filming with a camera, with the filming equipment slowly turning off. As mentioned above, this ending scene and the opening montage suggest that we could be in fact watching the making of a film. We can confirm that nothing, whether it is reality or illusion, is ever really certain, for no definitive explanation is given for the relationship between the opening and ending scenes with the rest of the film. Are we watching a film, or are we watching a film within a film, or are we audience part of the film (because the filming camera is facing us)? On the topic of illusion and reality, Jung reckoned “what we are pleased to call illusion may be for the psyche an extremely important life-factor” i.e.: reality and illusion are simply equally important. Even if we can distinguish reality from illusion, it can just be a misleading discovery, a futile endeavor. It is unlikely that Bergman agreed that dreams, thoughts and the shame that entailed from them shall be oppressed.

 
In the denouement of Persona, Alma tidies up the cottage house and prepares to leave. As she exits the house, a giant stone head sculpture with a sad expression facing the sky is stood in front of the house, occupying more than half of the camera frame – again, Bergman is known for shooting close-ups of human faces. We can almost interpret that this stone sculpture, one made of a formation of thousands of years, is telling us what we just saw in the film, this human tragedy, the porosity of façade, had been there since the beginning of time. And as Alma leaves the house with camera slowly turning off, it is suggested that Elisabet also recovers from her muteness and return to normalcy.

 

History

Earlier in Persona, Elisabet is seen pacing around her hospital room while the television shows a clip believed to be the self-immolation by Vietnamese monk Thích Quảng Đức in 1963 in protest of the government’s persecution of Buddhist monks, to which Elisabet recoils in a horrified facial expression. Elisabet will face similar human atrocities again: by her bedside, she stares at a photo of a Jewish boy raising his arms as a gesture of surrender in Warsaw Ghetto during the Second World War. Some argue that any mentions of real-world affairs in Bergman’s films were an oddity, for Bergman was once called “an artist in an ivory tower in an isolated country.” Bergman would continue to receive similar criticisms later, such as alleging him for not shedding lights on social issues with his new-found fame. The director in fact admitted that he could not grasp human catastrophes like the Holocaust. Nevertheless, the Vietnamese monk self-immolation and the iconic Warsaw Ghetto boy picture disprove the idea that Bergman was a secluded artist making his films in the ivory tower, for in Persona, Elisabet’s contemplative expression can explain not only Bergman’s own shadow, but also the nature of photos.
 
In the second time Elisabet witnesses a great human cruelty, she does not respond with a horrified expression like the first time; instead, she contemplates and stares long into the photo. This scene in Persona very subtly implies the unreliability of photo as evidence, and no one can be certain about the story that taken place in the photo. We can even take one step further and infer that a widely-recognized human catastrophe, like the Nazi’s Holocaust, can yield different interpretations other than being a one-sided devilish act perpetuated by the media and mainstream history course books.
 
In Bergman’s youth, he was fascinated by Nazism. While most European filmmakers from Bergman’s generation leans far left, Bergman went to the opposite and ran for the far right. He only “crushed with shame and guilt” for his Nazi admiration in 1946, when the war was over. In his interview with Jörn Donner in 1977, Bergman remarked that when he found out about the concentration camps during the Nazi’s reign, he felt like he “had discovered that God and the Devil are two sides of the same coin.”  As Walter Benjamin famously remarked, “There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism” and historical materialist ought to “brush history against the grain” i.e.: to view history from the perspective of the defeated, the aspect of Nazism that gained Bergman’s admiration is possibly not as grim as the media perpetuates , hence the photo showing the little boy with his arms up in the air might carry a different side to the existing, well-known story.
 
Social Order
 
As mentioned above, imprisonment does not only appear as a motif in Persona, it also appears in Bergman’s Fanny and Alexander. Alexander and his sister Fanny’s disobedience brought them punishments―being locked up in the attic by their stepfather Bishop Edvard. Ismael is also imprisoned on the lowest level of the house, for his possession of the exceptional ability to understand human beings. Alexander’s Uncle Isak, much like Ismael, appears to be in possession of magical power as well, who is even more “powerful” than Bishop Edvard. Disobedience, superior intelligence as well as Elisabet’s “great mental strength” in maintaining voluntary silence, all deemed as undesirable in patriarchy and shall be punished, repressed, and removed from the visible by all means.
 
Back to the questionable kiss shared between Aron and Ismael: in this scene, the brothers do not only exchange a part of themselves with each other, or like what Elisabet and Alma turn out to be at the end of the film, they also blur a distinction: social hierarchy. Alma in the scene in which she lets Elisabet drink her blood is related to vampirism. This scene is analogous to the blood-drinking scene of Elisabet and Alma: Alma is supposed to be the caretaker of Elisabet, but she breaks the order by allowing Elisabet to drink her blood. In a traditional setting, if Elisabet is a vampire, this would turn Alma into a vampire, changing her from the caregiver role to a role of peer.
 
At the beginning of the film, before Elisabet and Alma moves to the doctor’s summer cottage house, Doctor Lindkvist gives her monologue about her “diagnosis” on Elisabet:
 
“But you can refuse to move, refuse to talk, so that you don’t have to lie. You can shut yourself in. Then you needn’t play any parts or make wrong gestures. Or so you thought….I understand why you don’t speak, why you don’t move, why you’ve created a part for yourself out of apathy. I understand. I admire. You should go on with this part until it is played out, until it loses interest for you. Then you can leave it, just as you’ve left your other parts one by one.”

 
Understanding Elisabet’s situation requires the doctor putting herself into Elisabet’s shoes and her own recognition of role-playing, meaning the doctor is just as “mad” as Elisabet. A smoking doctor also does not command authority; rather, it proves that even the doctor herself is a character playing in the film/in real life. As for Nurse Alma, she breaks her role by deliberately leaving a shard of broken glass on the ground and let the unwitting Elisabet walks on it. When her first attempt to elicit a verbal response from Elisabet fails, she goes as far as threatening to pour a pot of boiling water to Elisabet. Although Elisabet gives in by yelling, “No! Don’t do it!” Alma’s act significantly undermines her role as a nurse and as a caretaker. If Dr. Lindkvist, nurse Alma and patient Elisabet are all performing their roles within a structure we called society, none of the hierarchical strata exist, resulting in dissolution of hierarchy.
 
As members of a society, we all act out our roles. Our assigned roles require us to perform accordingly, so that our society runs in order. The world in Persona is a secluded one, which is the opposite of our functioning society. Even though “[e]very inflection and every gesture a lie, every smile a grimace” and every light casts a shadow, as Jung argued, and we cannot live as recluses as Bergman himself did after retirement, and hierarchy, as a social construction, is not preferable, what we should do in this world, and how should we navigate this falsehood, how do we deal with the porosity of life? As we cannot be Elisabet, the only way forward, is to try to accept the unavoidable wretchedness of our roles, to perform as best as we can, on every stage of life.
 
Persona: A Journey through the Shadow in Ingmar Bergman’s Masterpiece. By  Ka Man Chung. The Artifice, June 7, 2021. 

Persona.  Ingmar Bergman's Psychological Breakthrough

  In this video essay Julian Palmer explores Ingmar Bergman's psychological masterpiece Persona - a white whale of film criticism. After seeing the innovations of the 60s, with French New Wave filmmakers like Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut, as well Italians like Michelangelo Antonioni and Federico Fellini, Bergman borrowed their radical, self-conscious cinematic language for his own wholly idiosyncratic purposes.
 
The Discarded Image, November 13, 2020.  

When Ingmar Bergman died in July 2007—on the same day as Michelangelo Antonioni—an unexpected controversy arose. Among the obligatory eulogizing obituaries, celebrating his towering achievements and itemizing the admiration for his work by directors ranging from Woody Allen to David Lynch and Robert Altman to Lars von Trier, there were also dissenting voices (most prominently, Jonathan Rosenbaum in a New York Times op-ed) claiming he was overrated, lacked stylistic originality, and merely inflicted personal psychodramas on awestruck audiences. One might imagine this gainsaying simply reflected the longevity of Bergman’s career and a certain iconoclastic impatience with some of the more predictable hyperbole and praise heaped on the departed. But in fact it was a repeat performance: controversy over Bergman goes back a long way, and in New York was sparked by no less a film than Persona, his 1966 masterpiece. While Susan Sontag wrote an enthusiastic and, as it turned out, seminal article on Persona, another critical heavyweight, Andrew Sarris, wrote a dismissive review, taking time out to attack Bergman as a filmmaker generally, arguing that he had no talent for the medium (“His technique never equaled his sensibility”) and that he should have remained a theater director. Sontag anticipated much of the criticism of not only Persona when she wrote: “Some of the paltriness of the critics’ reaction may be more a response to the signature that Persona carries than to the film itself.” Evidently, by this point in his career, Bergman’s name had acquired a fixed set of, often contradictory, associations: “lavishly inventive” as well as “facile,” “sensual” along with “melodramatic.” But as Sontag hinted, Persona was something else altogether, taking the filmmaker’s stylistic and thematic repertoire to an entirely new level. Here, for the first time, was an unapologetically avant-garde work by Bergman that also dared to veer between vampire horror flick and hospital soap opera, all the while posing ontological questions about the reality status of cinema itself. Since that debate, writing about Persona has been for film critics and scholars what climbing Everest is for mountaineers: the ultimate professional challenge. Besides Citizen Kane, it is probably the most written-about film in the canon. Raymond Bellour and Jacques Aumont, Robin Wood and Roger Ebert, Paisley Livingston and P. Adams Sitney, along with Sontag and Sarris, have all written with gravity and great insight about Persona, not counting several books and collections entirely devoted to the film. In what follows, I shall not undertake yet another all-out assault on the mountain that is Persona but concentrate on what makes this film such an exemplary work of European modernism, as well as one of the creative peaks of world cinema.
 
Persona is instantly recognizable thanks to two shots that have become its emblems: a boy touching a woman’s face on a giant screen and two women looking at each other (and us) across an imaginary mirror. Defining images for the film, they also stand for an idea of the cinema—in fact, for two distinct but complementary metaphors of what cinema is: a portal, a window, a passage you can enter or (almost) touch, and a mirror, a reflection, a prism that gives you back only what you project onto it. Persona is also cinema about cinema—a point that Bergman makes clear with his six-minute prologue montage sequence—which is one of the reasons it is such an irresistible challenge for writers.
 
The first of these shots is from the prologue. A young boy with thick glasses, lying on what looks like a hospital bed, closes the book he is reading, sits up, and reaches out toward the camera, before a reverse shot reveals this to be a translucent surface, on which appears the face of a woman. The close-up of the woman’s face projected onto the surface and tentatively touched by the boy visualizes the cinema as a window that both fuses and separates, that invites touch but keeps us (like the boy) isolated in uncertain anticipation. As it becomes larger and larger, this face is both too close to be recognized and too blurry to be grasped. Representing the archetypal maternal imago, it is at once immediately tactile and irredeemably virtual: the boy’s longing for his mother, for direct contact and physical fusion, must remain unfulfilled, for what could bridge the gap between the two planes of psychic reality? The cinema itself is here the father figure that demands renunciation of the primary love object, to enable the boy’s eventual selfhood and identity, just as the cinema demands the separation of the body from the image for there to be spectatorship. This parallel is underlined by the boy’s initial gesture toward the invisible fourth wall, thereby obliging the spectator to feel directly implicated in his longing and to experience the separation right from the start: we will always remain “virtual” to him, meaning that he, like indeed every character in the film, exists only to the degree that we are prepared to grant him “reality,” through the act of activating our empathy, our human touch, the intelligence of our bodies.
 
If the cinema is a tactile window in the first iconic image, in the second, another look into the camera/screen, it is imaged as a mirror: Elisabet (Liv Ullmann) and her nurse, Alma (Bibi Andersson), face each other in the middle of the night in front of what may be the bathroom cabinet, where the two of them discover—or merely imagine?—an uncanny resemblance. As the scene unfolds and the lightly clad actresses move as if to kiss, their faces overlap, seem almost to be superimposed—anticipating a later shot where a split-screen image of the two women combines their faces, and making us wonder not only who but what is this face looking so intently at us.
 
•••
 
From the 1960s to the mid-1970s, film theory, influenced by Bertolt Brecht’s distanciation effect and modernist self-reflexivity in literature and the visual arts, often focused on a film’s “mirror construction.” In this, ­theory tried to catch up with the practice of European art cinema. Reference to other films and self-reference to the fact that you were watching a film became essential elements in the stylistic arsenal of New Wave directors in France and elsewhere—Godard’s Contempt and Fellini’s 8½, both from 1963, being Persona’s precedents. If Hollywood made sure you could enter the world of a film through a metaphoric window or door, the mirror construction was meant to block this passage, rendering the relationship of spectator to screen more complicated (and complicit), especially when it came to deciding what was “out there” and “for real” and what was “inside” and “subjective,” or even merely a dream or a hallucination. Persona is almost a textbook case, relishing these confusions; we can never be quite certain if what we see has actually happened, and if so, why and to what (narrative) purpose. Sontag, for instance, suggests that Elisabet and Alma may in fact be one person: “It’s correct to speak of Persona in terms of the fortunes of two characters named Elizabeth and Alma who are engaged in a desperate duel of identities. But it is equally pertinent to treat Persona as relating the duel between two mythical parts of a single self: the corrupted person who acts (Elizabeth) and the ingenuous soul (Alma) who founders in contact with corruption.”

 
But Bergman does not keep the spectator merely guessing or at a (Brechtian) distance. On the contrary, Persona has an almost hypnotic pull; it draws the spectator in and never lets go, partly because, as demonstrated in the two iconic shots, the screen can be a window before it turns into a mirror. The film continually shifts between these modes, but ultimately it is the mirror that is its major structuring motif, both bringing us into the cinematic space as alternately copresent with the characters and cut off from them and defining the relation between the emotionally remote and psychically traumatized actress Elisabet and the younger, seemingly cheerful and good-natured Alma. Having suffered a nervous breakdown onstage, in the middle of a performance of Elektra, that leaves her unable (or unwilling) to speak, Elisabet is placed in the care of a warmhearted but practically minded chatterbox, at first in a rehabilitation clinic and then, just the two of them, in a country cottage on a remote island. The ensuing rapprochement between the women gives rise to moments of intimacy and the promise of mutual trust, but also leads to mounting tensions and open conflict, with the fluctuating relations depicted as a temporary blurring of their identities in the mirror shot described above.
 
This scene is so memorable because it relates profoundly to the inner movement and dramatic development not only of these characters’ journey of self-discovery but of the film itself, its narrative doublings and reversals—form and function perfectly coalescing in images of exquisite harmony and delicacy, which nonetheless leave room for extraordinary violence, both emotional and physical. The more unsettling, therefore, that the following morning Elisabet denies the very occurrence of the encounter. Yet this, too, has an inner logic, in that it corresponds to the two movements in Alma’s character and sensibility: the outgoing emotion, the desire that brings the vision into being and makes it materialize on the screen, and the self-doubting, mirrorlike apprehension that dissolves it again. In such scenes, Bergman brings out fundamental tensions between emotion, intellect, and perception—our separate ways of apprehending the world—if we allow ourselves to follow the characters’ actions and are willing to open ourselves to the conflicting emotional signals emitted by their often unexpectedly violent interactions. In this respect, Elisabet and Alma are stand-ins for those of us spectators who first have to sort out our complicated feelings after an intense film experience before we know what to make of it.
 
 
A look at Bergman’s filmography shows that several titles reflect the importance for him of the mirror and the face: The Face (1958, released in the U.S. as The Magician), Through a Glass Darkly (1961), Face to Face (1976), Karin’s Face (1984). But what are the effects of looking into the eyes of a face that is larger-than-life, or of being in the presence of two women’s faces, often in close-up, for some eighty minutes? Watching Persona is a draining and harrowing experience, which may explain why writers have sought explanatory assistance from phenomenology, psychoanalysis, and even the neurosciences, often with intriguing results.
 
I recall a paper at a Bergman conference that cited the latest research on mirror neurons—those that fire in mimetic, or empathetic, response when humans and animals observe an action performed by another member of the species—in a reading of Persona. This brought into focus for me a feature of the film that had always struck me as especially notable, as well as disturbing, namely the link Bergman makes between hands and the face, that is, the touch and the mirror (to a person’s soul). Once more, the emblematic shot of the boy touching the screen/face seems to say it all. Yet these connections are everywhere in Persona: hands reaching out to caress or slap faces, or covering their own faces; even the photo of the Warsaw ghetto boy with his hands raised is scrutinized by the camera for hands and faces. More generally, these movements are a surprisingly frequent motif in Bergman. One thinks of a scene in The Virgin Spring (1960) where an elderly woman caresses the face of the suffering girl, or a similar one in The Seventh Seal (1957). We find a woman touching another woman in Cries and Whispers (1972), in Autumn Sonata (1978), and in Fanny and Alexander (1982), where a hand approaching a face is brusquely rejected. A man and a woman touch each other’s faces tenderly in Summer with Monica (1953), and violently in The Passion of Anna (1969), and, of course, in The Touch (1971), we have to keep the title in mind all the time. On a biographical point, it shows that Bergman belonged to a generation where physical chastisement of children was still the norm—Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon is something of a Bergman pastiche in this respect—but from a neurological perspective, the motif confirms that few gestures elicit as much empathetic mimicry as a hand touching a face.
 
Even if he would have probably dismissed such scientific findings as irrelevant to his films, there is little doubt that, for Bergman, extraordinary powers are stored and enclosed in the face. Yet such powers also underline its vulnerability and precarious status: between the openly visible and the smoothly impenetrable, between the lighting up of a spiritual essence and the merely material “surface” for deceit and disguise. In Persona, the face goes through all these permutations. Already in the prologue, the lightly contoured visage on the screen is contrasted with the darkly silhouetted face of an old woman lying on a table in a morgue. During the second half of the film, when Alma is desperate to differentiate herself as much as possible from Elisabet, she washes her face under a running tap as if to wash away with the nosebleed also the now dreaded likeness itself. After another nocturnal encounter, this time with Elisabet’s husband—perhaps a figment of her imagination—Alma decides to leave, shouting: “I’m not like you. I don’t feel the same way you do . . . I’m not Elisabet Vogler: you are Elisabet Vogler.” Following the scene of Alma’s passionate embrace of Elisabet’s husband—revealing just how far she will go to identify with Elisabet—this desperate outburst not only protests too much but amounts to a self-contradiction, made manifest in the composite image of the two women’s merged faces we see.
 
Early on in the film, Bergman plays another variation on the theme of the face in the way he juxtaposes the two women when they go to bed. Elisabet’s face, motionless and turned toward the camera, grows slowly darker and darker—an apt expression of her essentially reflective nature—while Alma, restless, switching the light on and off, comes across as temperamental and impulsive, qualities underlined by a soliloquy where just as important as what she says are her actions: rubbing on night cream, once more defining her across face and touch but where her insecurities and doubts are made to contradict, but also complement, her more resolute and self-assured daytime manner.
 
Something like a craving of the face for the charge and discharge of the touch is thus in Persona associated with Alma’s personality and her inner demons. It is contrasted with the mask (as makeup) that Elisabet wears when she is onstage and suddenly falls silent, but also with her often supercilious, ironic expression toward Alma, which she puts on like a mask. The very title Persona, of course, refers to this mask, so that one might think the film would proceed to a mutual unmasking, where fragile, unworthy, inauthentic selves are peeled away. And in a sense, this is the case, as both women are in turn stripped emotionally bare and have moments where they lose their composure, i.e., lose “face.” Opposite the mute and thus “closed” Elisabet, the seemingly carefree Alma several times “opens up” in the course of the film, sometimes verbally, at others more physically. But her fresh and open face never has the rigidity of the mask, which is what Elisabet’s enforced or self-imposed silence amounts to. Yet despite this drama of open and closed expressions, of tearing at each other’s protective surface, Persona is less about what is “behind” the mask and perhaps more concerned with what can and must pass through the mask, since besides questioning the ethics of stripping the soul naked of all pretence, Bergman also shows us both women’s wily and ingenious self-fashioning during their encounters with each other.
 
In addition to this maintenance of the mask, there is the film’s modernist self-reflexivity, which insists on our constantly remembering that we are watching a performance. Persona opens with scenes that bring the projector into the picture, and it ends with the camera and the crew appearing in the shot. In the prologue, an old-style carbon arc light movie projector is being lit, as if the images we are about to see are being shown from the impersonal perspective of a machine. Toward the end, the big Mitchell camera is cantilevered into the frame as it films Elisabet lying on her back; and as Alma is leaving, suitcase and all, the boy returns, once more touching the blurred screen image, as if to cue the celluloid strip to jump out of the sprockets of the projector, whose arc lights gradually dim, leaving us literally in the dark.
 
Yet these scenes are not merely self-reflexive, or nods to Godard’s and Fellini’s films about filmmaking mentioned earlier. Bergman here establishes a series of intriguing equivalences between mask and screen, skin and film strip. This has already been suggested in a scene where Alma’s face cracks like glass and then burns up, a combustible film strip getting torn in the projector gate, consumed by flames like the monk protesting in Vietnam on Elisabet’s television early on. A mere trick, one might think, but also a strong hint that the violence in the film and on the screen may be only a visible metaphor for the invisible violence of the screen, indicative of the aggression inherent in the voyeuristic interest we project onto the action as spectators, to which the director responds with a certain sadism of his own, by suddenly reminding us of the nonhuman materiality of his film.
 
•••
 
If it were told from a Hollywood perspective, Persona would be the story of Elisabet, nursed back to health by Alma while each of the women gradually “absorbs” part of the other’s personality. But there is no equivalence, no lasting exchange, and their only common ground seems to be that they are both women. Set against their gender are, for instance, their very distinct backgrounds: Elisabet and Alma differ in marital and social status, in class and celebrity, as well as in temperament and moral outlook. Brought together by chance, the two are locked in a fierce power struggle. At first, it appears that “life” is all on the side of Alma, the “healthy” young woman whose optimism seems infectious. But as the film progresses, the balance of power between them shifts several times.
 
This is the psychological situation, and it seems that, in the end, they battle each other to a draw, with Alma perhaps coming out a bit on top, because she still has a life to live, whereas we sense that, however much she may recover, Elisabet has little to look forward to, either from her husband (whose brief visit to the island—if this, too, is not a hallucination on Alma’s part—shows him so metaphorically, or even literally, blind that he cannot tell his wife from her nurse) or with her son, whom she emotionally abandoned early on (and who reappears, metaphorically, in the photo of the Jewish boy from the Warsaw ghetto). If we are to believe the sentiments Alma infers from Elisabet’s tacit agreement, in the scene where Alma fills in (for us) the background to Elisabet’s professional and marital life, Elisabet did not want to have the boy but was too cowardly to abort. This in contrast to Alma, who did have the strength to take such a decision when she knew she was not ready to have a child. Motherhood and the maternal are often the key characteristics of women in Bergman’s world, starting with his early Brink of Life (1958), which features a live birth. There is thus something quite archaic or primal also at work in the women’s confrontation in Persona: the power of being able to give birth or refusing to do so, the labor of parturition and the pain of having an abortion being put in the balance and weighed accordingly.

 
Along with the women’s psychology and gender, a literary side, too, enters the constellation, because Persona brings together two romantic archetypes: the double and the vampire. These two mythological figures are recurring motifs in Bergman’s imaginative universe (1963’s The Silence, 1968’s The Hour of the Wolf and Shame), and surprisingly often, they are female, in contrast to their literary (and cinematic) equivalents. Given the initial near-death situation of Elisabet, it seems clear who here is the vampire, sucking out Alma’s young blood and life force.
 
But as with the vampire in romantic literature, a political reading suggests itself as well. What used to be a metaphor for the (postrevolutionary) aristocracy retaining its deadly grip on a rising bourgeoisie now traces, in the confrontation between Elisabet and Alma, the outlines of another class struggle: this time between the well-to-do middle class and the menial working class. In this scenario, no longer the aphasia of a sick person, Elisabet’s silence becomes a weapon, the haughty refusal to trade in the currency of common and shared humanity. It makes the babble of Alma stand for the voice of the people, needing to speak regardless, so as not to choke and suffocate in the face of injustice, prejudice, and discrimination. But such is the (Hegelian) dialectic of “master” and “slave” also in this case that dependency can shift and find itself upended, which in Persona is demonstrated by the cinematic dynamics of speech and space.
 
In the scene onstage precipitating Elisabet’s nervous breakdown, when she suddenly stops midgesture, one expects a cause to be revealed, possibly by a point-of-view shot or a reaction shot. Instead, her action remains unmotivated and unexplained, a diva’s caprice. Yet the way Bergman formally organizes the scene gives us the necessary clues to its function and meaning. The disposition of figure and space, of character movement and camera movement, conveys the urgency of her choice and the claustrophobia in her mind more immediately and convincingly than any of the verbal explanations given by the doctor. We first see Elektra/Elisabet with her back to the camera, addressing an audience in a theater. Gradually, she turns around, approaches the camera, until her face is in close-up and she is looking almost straight at us. Meaning lies not in the verbal commentary (which merely fills in context) but in her physical movement. The shot begins with Elisabet facing the theater audience and ends with her facing us, the cinema audience. Both audiences are “virtual” (as in the iconic shot with the boy), since the theater auditorium appears to be empty. Signaled in her turn from one audience to the other is that she has literally come to a turning point in her life. The transition from an outer void (the world of appearances and make-believe) to facing up to an inner void happens entirely in the fluid motion that joins these two virtual spaces.
 

This movement from an outer to an inner world is reinforced, and given a concrete spatial embodiment, by the position of the camera. Elisabet is onstage (as a diva, she is also public property), and as she turns toward backstage (where the camera is), she enters a more intimate and immediate, but also a more turbulent and ungrounded, reality (Bergman makes similar use of the backstage metaphor in 1953’s Sawdust and Tinsel and 1955’s Smiles of a Summer Night). Yet what is most striking in this scene is the near complete absence of perspective and depth, which becomes a guiding principle also in the subsequent action.
 
For most of the film, in fact, the women are almost uncomfortably close to the camera; the background is often indistinct or blurred, with their faces seen as if from behind glass. Composed of flat visual planes with clear outlines, yet without a feeling of roundness and wholeness, Persona conveys an overwhelming sense of at once claustrophobia and trans­parency, of suffocation and an almost hallucinatory clarity. Such deliberate one-dimensionality in the image, coupled with strong bodily responses, transmits the women’s predicament of being trapped directly to the spectator, making sensation a form of perception. Achieved by Bergman’s refusal to let the illusion of ordinary space develop, it substitutes instead a properly “cinematic” space—without, however, destroying that sense of psychological realism, so necessary to any involvement in the interpersonal drama unfolding.
 
The presence of this flat cinematic space extends to the outdoor scenes, where the low horizon of the island setting, the pebbly beach and rocky outcrops are shot in a noticeably multiperspectival, cubist manner. This essentially abstract way of rendering physical space contrasts with the few scenes where there are suddenly edge, frame, and perspective. For example, when Alma tells of her sexual adventure with the boys on the beach, Bergman gives the room an extraordinary depth, with the two women as focal points, clearly distinguished and surrounded by pools of light that both illuminate (Alma) and isolate (Elisabet). Against the impersonal, flat, and evenly lit space of the other scenes, this one has an immediate, but deceptive, quality of warmth and intimacy. The function is twofold: Firstly, it clearly separates the two women, removing Elisabet from Alma’s experience while giving to Alma an emotional freedom outside of their ambivalent relationship. Secondly, the deep focus, providing, as it does, plenitude to the image and extending the visual space, perfectly corresponds to the sentiment that Alma tries to express. At the same time, it associates a thematic value, making evident the immensely erotic charge and liberating power Bergman wants to convey through Alma’s tale, the sensual reality of a warm, expansive day on the beach, the sexual abandon, the physical intimacy, the strangely innocent fulfillment of this impersonal commingling of bodies stirred by passion and lust. It is from all and any of this that Elisabet exiles herself with her silence and self-control, inadvertently restoring to Alma the full power and presence that come from speech and language in the cinema. The scene is evidence of Bergman’s extraordinary prowess as a writer, a craftsman of words that here are temporarily (and, one imagines, vicariously) lent to the body and voice of a great actress.
 
•••
 
Persona is a chamber play, and in recent years, many of Bergman’s films have been extraordinarily successful all over the world when staged as plays: Persona in Mexico City (2008), Autumn Sonata in Tel Aviv (2007) and Moscow (2012), Through a Glass Darkly in New York (2011), not to mention Scenes from a Marriage, performed widely. But the care Bergman devotes to his cinematic spaces gives the lie to the notion that he remained, for all the auteurist accolades he received, a man of the theater, and that Persona, too, is just Strindberg resurrected, set on an island instead of a stage.
 
Another charge made against Persona when it was released was that it examines the relation of the two women in a social vacuum. I’ve taken some pains to refute this, too, by showing the complex thematic echoes of class and status that are embedded in the themes of silence and space. But even more telling, it seems to me, are the many ways in which Persona actually infuses urgency and energy into the somewhat clichéd metaphor of the social vacuum. On the one hand, Elisabet’s silence creates a void that Alma is compelled to fill with her words, at the risk of being annihilated by that formidable silence. On the other hand, Elisabet finds in her self-­inflicted silence a release from the extroverted existence imposed upon her by her profession. Away from the role that smothered her own self under layers of makeup, she tries to discover an inner dimension, a new intimacy as the hoped-for fruit of solitude. To this, Alma brings the necessary—­devastating—correction that there may not be a self beneath the mask.
 
By yet another dialectical turn, which makes the void less of a black hole and more of a white surface, Alma finds in Elisabet’s silence the screen upon which she can project all the roles she has always wanted to play. She becomes an extrovert to a degree that seems to surprise even herself, though only to discover in the process that, by playing these roles, she has stripped herself of all her outward assurance and certainty. By dramatizing her own existence in front of her silent spectator, Alma becomes an actress, performing before an audience. Here, too, a metacinematic reference becomes evident, if only by the fact that Alma is of course played by a professional actress, Bibi Andersson. As David Thomson once dryly noted: “Bergman’s films are about actors and artists playing actors and artists.”

 
But a further, more philosophical point also emerges: silence and volubility are merely the two extremes of the same (modernist) theme, so often broached in Bergman’s films (Through a Glass Darkly, 1962’s Winter Light): the Silence of God, eliciting a complementary-compensatory, even hysterical, need for contact and communication. Persona bears out the convergence, but also the clash, of these extremes: of silence countered by words and words met by silence. Perhaps the women, each recognizing her contradictory, if not false, position in the mirror of its opposite, actually gain the insight that, in a world without transcendence, human beings have only each other. This very drama of self-knowledge through the other should give the film an inherent dynamic toward a more conciliatory resolution. It would be the Hollywood ending, but Bergman’s sense of honesty obliges him to withhold it.
 
Bergman, self-confessed charlatan and conjurer, lover of the magic lantern and lifelong devotee to masters of Swedish silent cinema, is remarkably honest with his characters, but also with his audience. If the prologue of Persona recapitulates, as it were, the pleasures and terrors of cinema experienced by Bergman as a child, the metacinema reference to camera and celluloid toward the end freely admits to the artifice, but also to the self-deception and self-indulgence, that moviemaking entails. In this respect, he was perhaps ahead of both his admirers and his critics, as if the controversies and challenges that Persona continues to provoke were preprogrammed into its very conception: not only the iconic images that are worth a thousand words but also the silences that launched a thousand commentaries.
 
The Persistence of Persona. By Thomas Elsaesser. Criterion, March 17, 2016. 

More on Persona here :

Cinephilia and Beyond including the essay  Susan Sontag wrote for  Sight and Sound, autumn 1967.

Page about  the film on the website of the Ingmar Bergman Foundation