Hour of the Wolf (Vargtimmen–literally, “Wolf Hour”) is a 1968 psychological horror film written and directed by Ingmar Bergman. It stars Max von Sydow and Liv Ullmann, with Gertrud Fridh, Georg Rydeberg, Erland Josephson, Naima Wifstrand, Ulf Johanson, Gudrun Brost, and Ingrid Thulin.
At first, Bergman had come up with much of the story as part of a screenplay, The Cannibals, which wasn’t produced, but given up on so he could make Persona in 1966. His inspiration for Hour of the Wolf came from Mozart‘s opera, The Magic Flute (a segment of which is shown in a puppet play in one scene of Bergman’s film), The Golden Pot, a novella by ETA Hoffmann (which includes a love interest named Veronika, and the protagonist of Hoffman’s novella finds himself falling in love with her as well as with another woman–just as the protagonist of Bergman’s film is torn between his wife and an old paramour named Veronica), and some of Bergman’s own nightmares. There are also allusions to vampire and werewolf legend in Hour of the Wolf.
That Bergman incorporated some of his own nightmares into the film is significant, since it is disturbingly autobiographical, with von Sydow’s and Ullmann’s roles (a married couple in the film) corresponding to Bergman and Ullmann in real life; she not only frequently collaborated with him, but also had a relationship with him, resulting in a daughter, Linn Ullmann.
Hour of the Wolf was negatively received by the critics in Sweden upon release, but in time it was received far more positively. According to a 2012 directors’ poll by the British Film Institute, it was ranked one of the 50 greatest films of all time. David Lynch called Hour of the Wolf one of the five films that inspired him the most, and he called it a masterpiece. On Rotten Tomatoes, 92% of critics gave it a positive review. Ullmann was awarded Best Actress at the 1968 National Board of Review Awards, and the 1968 National Society of Film Critics Awards, for her role in the film, and Bergman won Best Director for the latter awards, too.
Here is a link to quotes from the film in English translation, and here is a link to the complete movie, with English subtitles.
The film is called “Hour of the Wolf” because, as painter Johan Borg (von Sydow) tells his pregnant wife, Alma (Ullmann), that hour is when most births and deaths occur. This is an interesting idea, given how one thing incorporated into the film is legends about the werewolf, which is ‘born,’ if you will, through its transformation from a man, and then it causes death to its human prey. Also, just two months after the premiere of The Magic Flute, after its ‘birth,’ its creator, Mozart, died in 1791. Not too long after Johan disappears, after which I assume Alma’s narration couldn’t have come much later, she’ll give birth to their baby, which will be in a month. The hour of the wolf is when nightmares come, deep into the darkness of the night, when Johan’s inability to sleep is at its worst. He associates his fear with his guilt, the source of which I’ll go into later.
While not necessarily a literal hour, the Vargtimmen (for my purposes here) represents a short space in time between death and life, which can also be represented by the ouroboros, a cyclical symbol of eternity in which the bitten tail can be seen as death, and the biting head seen as birth.
As I indicated above, Johan has been suffering from increasing insomnia. He’s had frightening visions, which he’s sketched and shown to Alma. The people of these sketched visions he has named the Birdman (which was partly influenced by Papageno from The Magic Flute, and he is Lindhorst [Rydenberg] in the film), the Insects, the Meat-Eaters, the Schoolmaster, and the Lady With a Hat, among others.
Because people agitate and upset Johan so much, he and Alma have come to the island of Baltrum, one of the Frisian Islands, where he hopes to find peace and quiet. He likes how quiet Alma is, and so he enjoys his dyadic relationship with her (more on the significance of that later). The sight of footprints on the island upsets him, though, and indeed, he’ll have to deal with others on Baltrum.
The people on the island, corresponding to those of his sketches, he considers to be demons, or cannibals. Since he is slowly losing his mind, they more accurately represent projections of internal objects, people from his past, his own inner demons. Johan can escape from other people, but not from himself.
During the opening credits, we can hear the film crew as they’re talking and working to get ready to film a scene. This gives off a Brechtian alienation effect, reminding us that we’re watching a movie and removing the illusion of the story ‘really happening.’ Just as we’re kept consciously aware that we’re watching a movie, so are we kept conscious of the fact that Johan is an artist, and later, during the puppet show Lindhorst has the guests at the party watch (the Magic Flute scene), we are fully conscious of its spectacle as a puppet show, a scene that can be understood as a microcosm of the entire movie (more on that below).
Now, opposing the idea of Brecht’s distancing effect, of alienating us from identifying with the characters in the scene, is how Alma tells Johan that, having been married to him and living with him for so long, she feels that the two of them are beginning to resemble each other. She empathizes with him thoroughly, and if I am right to think that Johan’s ‘demons’ are projections of parts of himself, then such empathizing and identifying with him makes it possible for anti-Brecht Alma to see his projected demons as clearly as he does.
Her name is generally thought to mean ‘kind,’ ‘fostering,’ or ‘nourishing,’ which reflects her gentle, empathetic, and supportive attitude to Johan as he is going through his dark night of the soul. In some of the Romance languages, Alma can also mean ‘spirit’ or ‘soul,’ making her, in her closeness and resemblance to Johan, his Jungian anima. Alma can yet again be heard as a pun on alba, or ‘dawn,’ ‘white,’ to contrast with Johan’s dark night, or his ‘hour of the wolf,’ his blackest moments of madness and despair. After his disappearance and presumed death, she lives on to bear his child and tell his story; she who identifies with him is the dawn and white light after his blackest moment.
She hopes to grow old enough with him that they will think each other’s thoughts, so much does she love him and empathize with him. If I’m right that his ‘demons,’ such as the Lady With a Hat, are really his mental projections, then Alma is already sharing Johan’s thoughts when she sees the Lady With a Hat the very day after she’s talked with him about beginning to resemble him and think like him. In fact, the Lady With a Hat will urge Alma to know even more of his thoughts by telling her of the diary he has hidden under his bed.
When she reads the diary, she begins to learn more of his deepest, darkest secrets, including not only the strangers, real or imagined, but also real people like his old paramour, Veronica Vogler (Thulin), whom he’ll see again on the island, her tempting him to more adultery.
In his diary, Johan has written of meeting Baron von Merkens (Josephson), who lives in a nearby castle and invites the painter and his wife to a dinner party there. The baron also owns the island, so on one level, we can see here the relationship between the wealthy and the worker, for it is at this party that Johan will feel a sense of oppression from his host and the other guests, his ‘demons.’ The baron’s reason for inviting Johan and Alma is that he and his wife, Corinne (Fridh), are among Johan’s fondest admirers.
Alma continues reading the diary and comes upon an entry in which Johan says he’s encountered Veronica by the rocky beach. She exposes a breast to him and tells him about a letter she’s received, an ominous one that seems to have been sent to her from his ‘demons.’ He kisses her on the cheek. This juxtaposition of the lovers’ meeting with the threatening letter reinforces the sense that his illness, insomnia, and fears all stem from his guilty past. Eros, the life and sex instinct, is here juxtaposed with Thanatos, the death drive, that moment of birth and death that is the hour of the wolf.
Alma reads more, and comes to an entry about Johan being accosted and chased by Heerbrand (Johanson), who finds Johan to be strenuously shuffling away and avoiding him. Heerbrand calls himself a “psychiatric curator” (implying a combination of a therapist and one potentially interested in Johan’s paintings), one who would “finger people’s souls and turn their insides out.” Since Johan has some dark shadows inside himself that he’d rather not bring to light, Heerbrand is the last man he’d want to be talking to. Since Johan can feel Heerbrand trying to pry into his mind, he slaps the man hard, knocking him to the ground, and tells the loquacious man to shut up. This violent act is a clear case of resistance. Heerbrand, still on the ground and reeling from the swat, has a nosebleed and needs to hold a handkerchief to his face. That guilt that Johan feels is far too much for him to bear, let alone disclose to the “psychiatric curator.”
Alma’s fears for her husband are growing, and she puts the diary back under the bed just before he returns home. As he’s eating, she discusses her accounting of the family finances, and her need for more money, since there are so many expenses they have. The juxtaposition of this moment with the following scene, their visiting the baron’s castle for the dinner party, clearly puts in relief the class differences between Johan and Alma, on the one hand, and the baron, his wife, and his other wealthy guests, on the other.
The baron introduces Corinne, his mother (the countess), and the other guests (who include Heerbrand and Lindhorst) to Johan and Alma. Recall the baron having told Johan that he and Corinne are admirers of his work, as is Lindhorst. The wealthy are often patrons of the arts, and I suspect that the baron, Corinne, and Lindhorst, as examples of Johan’s projected internal objects, all either are or in part represent such patrons from his past, people he doesn’t like hobnobbing with, but has to, for he depends financially on their patronage. In this tension, we can see the class aspect of Johan’s suffering.
All of these ‘demons’ also personify what Wilfred R. Bion would have called beta elements that irritate Johan. According to Bion’s theory, one normally takes raw sensory data (beta elements)–which chafe, agitate, and annoy us–and processes them (a procedure Bion called alpha function), turning them into what he called alpha elements, or experiences that can be dealt with and tolerated.
Sometimes, though, one finds that one cannot, or refuses to, process the beta elements, and thus one splits off, expels, and projects them outwards, resulting in the formation of what Bion called a beta screen, composed of unprocessed beta elements and preventing alpha function, or the transformation of the raw, irritating sensory data into meaningful experiences that lead to rational thought. This prevention leads to psychosis, which brings us back to Johan’s problem.
His ‘demons,’ rejected beta elements that are split off from him, expelled, and projected, have become what Bion called bizarre objects, which are Johan’s hallucinated projections and the cause of his growing mental illness. Alma empathically shares in the experience of these bizarre objects because she, having lived with him long enough to share his thoughts and now resembling him, has now made his delusions into a kind of folie à deux, though she doesn’t experience his horrors on the same psychotic level as he. They merely sadden her, for his sake.
At the dinner table with the baron, Corinne, and all of their loquacious guests, he tries to bear all of their noisy, endless chatter as best he can…all of those irritating beta elements. Due to the class difference between Johan and Alma on the one side (i.e., all of their expenses), and the baron, his wife, and other moneyed guests on the other (e.g., their sumptuous feast), Johan must put up with it all. It is all very oppressive for him.
One woman at the table (the countess?) says, “The summer heat makes you so thirsty,” the thirst being an example of a beta element in need of processing, of quenching, and an example of something far more easily dealt with by the wealthy than by the poor. Already we can see Johan’s agitation: his head rapidly turning left and right as he tries to respond to each guest addressing him, his wiping of sweat off of his face, his loosening of his collar, and his frown of discomfort.
One guest, the baron’s brother, Ernst, complains about the housemaid, calling her “damned awful,” and “cheap,” meaning she’s paid a small enough salary to motivate her not to be any better. We again see how class conflict is a factor in how oppressed Johan and Alma feel among this company. Ernst continues to be irritating in his incessant complaining, blaming himself for the loss of the baron’s money (which, by the standards of the wealthy, still leaves the baron rich, hence his castle and dinner party); Ernst claims he embezzled the family fortune–he is clearly neurotic, perhaps a projection of Johan’s guilt, his inability to make more money for Alma.
Adding to Johan’s tension, Corinne, sitting next to him, brings up Veronica, that he knows her. Later, he and Alma will be in Corinne’s room, where she’ll show the husband and wife a picture of his old paramour. Corinne and the others at the dinner table all eagerly agree on how beautiful and charming Veronica is; all of this talk of her will make both Johan and Alma most uncomfortable, reinforcing his guilt and her jealousy (recall her reading about Veronica in his diary).
After the dinner, the guests all go to see a little puppet show by Lindhorst, the one based on an aria from The Magic Flute. Recall that Lindhorst, the Bird Man, is the Papageno equivalent in this film, to Johan’s Tamino. The aria from the opera that the guests hear is “O, ew’ge Nacht” (“O, eternal night.”) The protagonist of the opera, Tamino, sings in despair, wondering when the blackness of night will finally end and the light return.
The puppet show is thus again a provocation for Johan, whose sleepless nights, each an hour of the wolf, are exactly of this kind of eternal blackness, causing him a despair like that of Tamino. Lindhorst is rubbing it in for Johan, knowing of his and Alma’s suffering and taking delight in aggravating it.
We can see Johan closing his eyes during the puppet show, him unable to watch it. Lindhorst watches him intently, noting Johan’s discomfort. After the show and the applause, Lindhorst gives everyone a commentary on what happens during the aria, and on its emotional meaning. By graphically describing Tamino’s despairing dread of the darkness and wish for a return of the light, Lindhorst is again rubbing it in for Johan. Lindhorst also mentions the illness Mozart had at the time of the early performances of The Magic Flute, of how fatal the illness was. Johan’s growing mental illness will prove fatal for him, too, and Lindhorst et al are egging it on.
Tamino’s asking if his love, Pamina, is still alive reminds us of how Johan must wonder if Veronica is still alive, arousing his adulterous lust, Alma’s jealousy, and his guilt. Lindhorst praises Mozart’s aria as “the highest manifestation of art,” suggesting a link between the composer’s genius and the greatness, as felt by Johan’s admirers among the ‘demon’ guests, of his paintings. The artistic link, of course, suggests in turn a link between Tamino’s love of Pamina and Johan’s continuing desire for Veronica.
In expressing his modest opinion of his own art, Johan is deflecting any comparison with Mozart and his genius…and by implication, he is also deflecting any comparison between his passion for Veronica and Tamino’s love of Pamina.
After the party, and after seeing the picture of Veronica in Corinne’s room, Johan and Alma are back home at night. “VARGTIMMEN” is shown on a black background, indicating that that time has come again for him. We see him holding lighted matches before his eye in the darkness; he stares at the flame obsessively, craving the light. She is with him, of course, always worrying about his worsening condition.
They both note how quiet it is. He wistfully remembers back on those nights when he could sleep, “deep, dreamless sleep,” he says. Bion noted that psychotics can’t dream or sleep because they don’t process beta elements as described above. The work of dreaming creates the conscious and unconscious mind, not the other way around; so when one cannot dream, one cannot differentiate between conscious and unconscious experience. His psychic state, therefore, cannot differentiate sleeping from waking, dreaming from perceiving the real world.
Bion’s ideas thus can help us understand why so much of this film is surrealist, since surrealism expresses the unconscious. Johan in his psychotic state is increasingly seeing and experiencing dreamlike images and events in his waking life. The ‘demons’ he sees are all projections of internal objects from his unconscious.
Johan speaks of “deep, dreamless sleep,” which in the past must have been a prelude to his insomnia, a prefiguring of the psychosis that was to come. It is here, at the worst hour of his sleeplessness, that the “hour of the wolf” comes, as he tells Alma, when most die and most are born, and “the nightmares come to us,” which for him are in his waking hours at night.
He then tells her of a traumatic experience he once had as a child. He was punished by his parents, who threw him in a closet and shut the door. It was quiet and dark there, just as it is now in the house with her at night. He as a child was, of course, as terrified then as he is now, for his experience of the Vargtimmen is a PTSD-like reliving of that old closet trauma.
His parents told him there was a little person living in the closet, one “who gnawed the toes off naughty children!” Such a punishment sounds symbolic of castration, Johan’s punishment for having Oedipal feelings for his mother, presumably, and an explanation of how his current fears are caused by guilt. His desire for Veronica could be a mother transference, and the ‘demon’ guests, like the little person in the closet, are on this level all representations of his parents, who are punishing him for his naughty Oedipal desires.
Certainly the baron later on, towards the climax of the film, tells Johan of his own relationship with Veronica, that she has been his mistress for several years, and that he knows that Johan has returned to his castle to find her. The baron knows of Johan’s sexual relationship with her, and naturally, he is jealous.
So if Veronica is Johan’s mother transference, and all the ‘demons’ in general represent Johan’s parents in one sense or another (i.e., judging him and tormenting him as his parents did when he was trapped in the closet), then the baron here is a father transference for Johan. In this triangle of Johan, the baron, and Veronica, we can see a relived Oedipal triangle of Johan as a child with his parents, and in this triangle we can discover the unconscious root of his guilt.
Now, I’m sure there are many reading this who are scoffing at my reliance on Freud as a basis for interpreting the symbolism of Hour of the Wolf. To be sure, Freud got a lot more wrong than he got right, but as Don Carveth explains in his YouTube video on the Oedipus complex, Freud was on to something, even if he’d limited its application to a strictly literal, sexual one. It is a universal narcissistic trauma, Carveth explains, based on a child’s painful realization that he or she must give up hogging the Oedipally-desired parent all to him- or herself, and must share Mom or Dad with each other and with many others (e.g., brothers and sisters).
That universally-held child’s wish to hog Mom or Dad all to oneself doesn’t have to be incestuous, sexual desire; it just has to be a wish to have that parent always exist as an extension of one’s narcissistic self, to be a kind of 24/7 slave to the child’s ego, always doing everything for the child and for no one else. The Oedipus complex often enough can be sexual, though, and so when one realizes one cannot have the Oedipally-desired parent, one tries to find a more socially-acceptable substitute in someone else as a transference, as Johan has done with Veronica as his illicit lover.
When we hear of young men desiring older women, calling them MILFs (a “Mom I’d Like to Fuck”), it’s obviously an Oedipal transference. When women call the men they’re attracted to “Daddy,” it’s obviously the female version of the Oedipus complex (what Jung called the Electra complex) as a more socially-acceptable transference of the desire, going away from an object of incestuous desire.
Finally, while most people today reject Freud as a ‘heap of hooey,’ back when Hour of the Wolf was made, his ideas were still much more accepted. Think, for example, of how often 20th century productions of Hamlet showed the Danish prince having a thing for his mother, Queen Gertrude. So it should be quite reasonable to give a psychoanalytic interpretation of Hour of the Wolf as being a product of its time, even if one doesn’t agree with Freud’s theories.
Back to the story. When trapped in that closet, little Johan knew that his hour had come, the hour of the wolf, the same terror that the present Johan has as he’s talking with Alma. He as a child was being punished, ultimately, for his primary narcissism, since his parents wanted to push him away from ego-love (with his mother as a mirrored extension of himself) and towards object-love, or the love of other people. Lacan would have called this shift one from the other to the Other (i.e., from a dyadic relationship with one other, as an extension of the narcissistic self, a metaphorical mirror in the Imaginary, to the Other of society, of many people, as in the Symbolic).
Johan has recently, however, in his growing psychosis, needed to experience secondary narcissism (a return to ego-love, away from object-love) as a defence against psychological fragmentation, a falling apart of the mind and a psychotic break from reality. So when Johan tells the guests, after the puppet show, of his modest assessment of his own artistic creations, we can see this as an example of his false modesty, his conflicted attitude to his narcissism, an attempt to resist the defence of secondary narcissism, which in turn puts him in more danger of psychosis.
A little bit after Johan’s telling Alma of his childhood experience in the closet, he tells her about a time he was fishing on a rocky shore, and a boy in a bathing suit was sitting by him. Johan ended up struggling with and killing the boy, then throwing the body in the water, but it bobbed up to the surface for a moment.
Alma is horrified to hear this confession from her husband, but given how the fishing scene is filmed–it’s overexposed, with quick edits of more than thirty shots, and it’s mostly without sound (except for the boy’s cries of pain as Johan bashed his body against a rock behind them), replacing the sound with creepy music–we get the impression that Johan’s flashback is a fantasy rather than a real event.
If it’s a fantasy, as I’d say it likely is, then what we’re seeing is a distortion of Johan’s actual, unconscious mental processes. Professor Frank Gado, in The Passion of Ingmar Bergman (1986), speculated that Johan fears he is homosexual. Earlier, when Johan showed Alma the pictures he sketched of his ‘demons,’ he spoke of one of them, “the one who turns up most often,” as “almost harmless” and–Johan thinks–homosexual. Since these ‘demons’ are his projected internal objects, this one could easily be his projected fear of homosexuality. Also, towards the end of the film, when he has heavy makeup put on his face, this can be an association made in his mind with homosexuality based on the stereotype of effeminacy as often perceived by society, and thus also probably by Johan.
Anyways, the fighting with and killing of the boy, meant by Bergman to look “orgasmic” according to Barbara Young in The Persona of Ingmar Bergman: Conquering Demons through Film (2015) can–as a fantasy–be like a dream distortion of the homosexual rape of a boy, or at least the unconscious desire to commit such an act, or in turn the fear of such an unconscious desire. The boy being on Johan’s back, as he bashed the boy against a rock behind them, could be a projection of Johan’s (perceived and feared) forbidden wish to be on the boy’s back.
The fantasy of killing the boy can also be like a dream distortion of raping the boy in how historically rape, including the pederastic sodomizing of boys, has been compared to murder…sometimes seen as even worse than murder. So in Johan’s mind, distorting the scene from one of rape to one of murder can be a way for him to mitigate his guilt somewhat.
Dropping the boy’s body in the water symbolizes Johan’s attempt at repressing the feared forbidden desires in his unconscious. The body briefly rising to the surface, however, represents the return of the repressed, which always comes back in unrecognized forms…in the case of this dreamlike fantasy, like the form of a dream distortion.
After Johan has made this confession to Alma, a man arrives in their house to invite Johan once again to the castle for dinner, and to give him a pistol. Veronica Vogler will be at the party, so naturally, Johan is interested.
The visitor leaves, and Alma in her growing jealousy wants Johan to tell her more about Veronica. He tries to trivialize the affair as something that came and went, but she knows from his diary that it’s still alive in his mind. As she’s reading of his obsessive passion for Veronica in the diary, he’s playing with the pistol. Since the gun is a phallic symbol, this fondling of it can represent masturbation as he hears his wife reading about Veronica.
He says it was a five-year affair, which could be an unconscious distortion of a five-year-old boy’s experience of the Oedipus complex. His guilt from the scandal of the affair with Veronica, his mistress, could be a distortion mitigating his guilt of actual Oedipal love.
Now, I’m not saying that I agree with the following idea (I most certainly don’t), but I bring it up merely to explore the Freudian themes as I see them unfolding in this film. An unresolved Oedipus complex, in its classical (and I believe far too limiting) formulation was thought to lead to homosexuality, which could explain Johan’s fears of possibly being gay, given his Oedipal transference in Veronica. The point is that she as a mistress, as is the case with him possibly having homosexual desires, is just repression, distortion, and mitigation of his forbidden Oedipal feelings. Better to love other men, or a mistress, than to want one’s own mother.
Johan, of course, won’t let Alma’s jealousy stop him from being with Veronica again, so he takes the pistol and shoots Alma. He doesn’t kill her: he only wounds her, which reflects his conflict over whether he wants her or Veronica, resolving itself in a parapraxis of three shots fired. Then he rushes off to the castle.
The first person he meets there, significantly, is Gamla Fru von Merkens (Brost), the countess mother of the baron. She could be seen as an unconscious displacement of Johan’s own mother, a projection onto the baron. During the dinner table scene, we heard her say, “nowadays I want to be loved.” And all Johan could do during all that irritating dinner chit-chat was to drink and drink, to take his mind off of all of it.
While with the countess now, she’d have him accompany her as she eats her dinner, she who wants to be loved, as if it were a romantic dinner date. She’s clearly trying to seduce him. She tells him she thinks of herself as one of the “old harlots,” to use Lindhorst’s words, who “have an unhealthy desire to fill their mouths and stomachs.” Such a choice of words sounds unmistakably sexual especially in the context of Johan’s wish to reunite with Veronica.
The countess offers him a bite of the chicken leg she has on her dinner tray, and she denies any knowledge of a dinner party. Looking at him lewdly, she asks him to help her remove her stockings. That she’s old enough to be his mother, never mind the baron’s, clearly implies an Oedipal relationship that makes Johan most uncomfortable, since the countess is far too close to the real thing, whereas Veronica, his age, is further removed as a transference, and so she makes for a far less uncomfortable mother-substitute for the guilt-laden man.
The countess senses he doesn’t want to touch her, yet she says she is the one who can tell him where to find Veronica, so connected the two women are to each other. The point is that both women are associated, in his unconscious, with his Oedipally-desired mother. The countess asks him to look closely at her feet, at her young, tight arches, her smooth and fine heel, and her “strong toes and beautiful nails.” She asks him to kiss her foot; he gives in and kisses it. She caresses his cheek like a lover, and she tells him to go to the west gallery to find Veronica. Off he goes.
So both the countess and Veronica, in the mishmash of Johan’s unconscious as it’s expressed in the surrealism of this film, are his mother transferences, split off from each other. On the way to the west gallery, first he sees a raven…an ill omen. Then he encounters the jealous baron as I described him above. He is the countess’s son and Veronica’s lover, a relationship paralleling that of Uranus and his mother/lover, Gaea. Recall that I described the baron, in this connection, as a father transference for Johan, fearing a supplanting (a Laius complex) comparable to how Uranus hated his Titan sons and daughters, including the son who would supplant him, Cronus.
It’s interesting how, at the end of this scene, the baron walks away from Johan, then in a surreal moment, he walks up a wall and onto the ceiling, looking down on Johan from above, like a sky-father god (Uranus, Cronus, or Zeus) looking down from the heavens onto Earth and speaking of his jealousy. The baron, thus, is like Uranus hating his children, or like Cronus fearing being dethroned by his, or even Zeus, fearing being dethroned by his unborn child (who would be Athena) in the womb of Metis, which brings me to my next point.
Johan’s shooting of pregnant Alma could be in part motivated by a Laius complex similar to that of Cronus or of Zeus…or the father of Oedipus, of course. Johan’s own paranoid anxieties could indeed be partly caused by that child growing in Alma’s womb: will it supplant him? His shooting of her would thus be like Zeus eating the fetus in Metis’ womb, only in his conflict over whether or not to kill Alma, Johan’s shot missed and only wounded her in the arm, leaving a little scar.
Johan leaves the baron and comes to a room in which we hear a man playing music on a harpsichord; the music is from the Sarabande of JS Bach’s Partita No. 3 in A minor (BWV 827). Corinne and the Lady With a Hat are in the room with the musician. Corinne tells Johan that Veronica has been waiting for him, and that “she has become even more beautiful.” Corinne knows of her suffering husband’s jealousy, which amuses her, given how she has every reason to be jealous of his passion for Veronica. This would of course motivate Corinne to encourage Johan in pursuing Veronica, and so Corinne lies that one of his gunshots killed Alma, thus freeing him of her so he can have Veronica.
So we have Alma’s jealousy, Corinne’s jealousy, the baron’s jealousy, and even Johan’s jealousy over his unborn child: jealousy is a major theme in Hour of the Wolf.
When the Lady With a Hat takes it off to hear the beautiful harpsichord music better, her hair also comes off. In another surreal moment, so do her face and even her eyes. We’re reminded of how Oedipus ‘lost face’ upon learning of his incest with Iocaste, and how he put out his eyes, and she hanged herself, having also ‘lost face.’ Thus the Lady With a Hat can be seen as another projection of Johan’s mother internal object, and her removal of her eyes and face can be seen as a projection of Johan’s own ‘loss of face’ and his wish to put out his own eyes in shame.
Johan leaves the two women and comes into a room with Lindhorst, where again he encounters the cawing raven, his ill omen of what’s soon to come. Lindhorst notes how pale Johan looks, no doubt from the horrors he’s experienced and the guilt and shame he feels from approaching his next sexual union with Veronica, his mother-transference. Lindhorst applies makeup to Johan’s face.
With the makeup on, Johan is also given perfume and “beautiful pajamas” to wear from Lindhorst. This feminizing of Johan is symbolically an emasculating of him, similar to the castration symbolism of the gnawing off of the toes of naughty children by the little person in the closet of his childhood trauma, as I mentioned above.
Indeed, the threat of castration by the father is how a boy is supposedly made to end his incestuous love of his mother, according to Freud. In Lacanian terms, le Non! du père forces the boy to realize he cannot be the phallus for his mother, a symbolic castration that takes him out of the dyadic mother/son relation of the Imaginary, from the other to the Other of society in general, to the Symbolic.
On the way to see Veronica, Johan sees a large group of fluttering birds: yet another ill omen of what’s to come.
So in the climactic scene of the movie, when ‘tarted up’ Johan is in a room with naked Veronica lying on what appears to be an autopsy table, with a blanket over all of her body, as if she were dead and left with the coroner, it’s as if he were at last reunited with his (dead?) mother, back when she was young and beautiful. Eros and Thanatos are one in this moment, the hour of the wolf, a moment of birth and death. He removes the blanket and runs his hand up and down her body, an action symbolic of sex with her. Then she arises suddenly and laughs, and he kisses her passionately.
Then he hears the judgmental laughter of all of the guests, his ‘demons.’ With his lipstick smudged, he looks in shame at them; he’s reliving the dissolution of his Oedipus complex, as he had as a child in that closet. He feels castrated once again, like the gnawing away of his toes by the little person in the closet, and he feels humiliated for it. He masochistically thanks the guests for judging him for his sin, they who represent his punishing father; and as he continues speaking, we hear no more of his words: he’s entered the wordless, inexpressible, traumatic realm of the Real. We then see a flashback of the dead boy floating to the surface of the water, Johan’s fear that he’s homosexual, his mental association (right or wrong) with psychological castration.
Alma says he’d been writing in his diary the whole time; in other words, his trip to the castle has all been a hallucination, the waking dream of a psychotic who cannot sleep or dream, as Bion described such people. She goes into the woods to find him. He’s lying on the ground, only half-conscious. She tries to comfort him; but because she, in her closeness to him over the years of their marriage, is at one with him, she shares the hallucination and sees him become the baron.
Johan is farther off in the woods. All the ‘demons,’ or ‘cannibals,’ as Johan has called them (also Bergman’s original name for the film, recall), are there with him. Heerbrand gets his revenge on Johan and slaps him several times. He’s bleeding at the neck, as if from a vampire bite. The other ‘cannibals’ close in on him. He sees the omen of the raven again. The attacking ‘cannibals’ are punishing him, as Father would, for his Oedipal desires, his transference of them onto Veronica. Alma can only watch helplessly. Then Johan disappears forever, absorbed in the void of the Real.
At the end of the film, Alma finishes her narrative, asking if she’s really become like Johan, out of her love for him. She thinks and sees like him, sharing his hallucinations and madness, though without its violence–she’s only deeply sad about it. She loved him, but in being like him from that love, of course she couldn’t have protected him better. He was beyond hope, as was their marriage.
Such incurable madness, based on a universal narcissistic trauma (wanting to hog a parent all to oneself) that so many of us deny even exists, is in my opinion what makes Hour of the Wolf so disturbing. We all have in us the potential to go as mad as Johan does, to disappear, to lose our very souls–all because of unconscious feelings that are all too relatable.
Infinite Ocean 