Persona is a 1966 Swedish film written, directed, and produced by Ingmar Bergman. It stars Bibi Andersson and Liv Ullmann, who respectively play a young nurse treating a stage actress who has suddenly stopped speaking…but which one is really giving the therapy, and which one is really receiving it?
Persona is an avant-garde film exploring themes of duality, identity, motherhood, and abortion, with even overtones of vampirism and lesbianism. There has been much critical analysis, interpretation, and debate of the film.
Though edited at first because of its controversial subject matter (which includes a sexually explicit monologue by Andersson and a split-second flash of a phallus towards the beginning), Persona was well-received. It won Best Film at the 4th Guldbagge Awards, and it was the Swedish entry for the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film. The censored content was restored in English-language versions in 2001.
Many consider Persona to be one of the greatest films ever made and Bergman’s magnum opus. Furthermore, the performances of Andersson and Ullmann are considered two of the best of actresses in movie history (Andersson won the Guldbagge Award for Best Actress in 1967, and she was nominated for a BAFTA Award in 1968). The film was ranked the 5th-greatest film of all time in Sight and Sound‘s 1972 poll, and 17th in 2012. It influenced such directors as Robert Altman and David Lynch.
Here is a link to quotes from the movie in English translation, and here’s a link to the full movie.
Crucial to understanding the meaning of the film is that of its title. Persona is the Latin word for ‘mask,’ worn by actors in ancient drama. The word came also to mean a character, a role played by an actor. In other words, a persona is a fake self the actor plays, as opposed to his or her real self, and this is where Jung‘s use of persona comes in, since so many of us (if not all of us) present false selves to the world.
Elisabet (Ullmann) is already an actress who takes on personae as her art form, but in the story, she takes on one of a mute, even though it’s obvious to her doctor (played by Margaretha Krook) that she isn’t mentally ill. In listening to the one-way chatter of Alma (Andersson), Elisabet is also taking on the role of psychoanalyst, even though the giving of therapy is supposed to be Alma’s role, her persona as nurse. The process of the film is to get both women to remove their masks and expose their vulnerabilities.
Since, as we learn through the process of watching the movie, that both women are as much each other’s therapist as they are each other’s patient, there is a strong theme of duality, a dialectical unity between two characters who are supposed to be on opposite sides, a dialectic of self vs other.
Going along with the theme that Persona is about people playing roles and pretending to be someone they aren’t, the film opens, closes, and is interrupted in the middle by images of projector film, and at one point towards the end by movie cameramen filming. This all gives Persona a Brechtian alienation effect (as we also saw Bergman do during the opening credits for Hour of the Wolf), reminding the audience that they are seeing a movie, dispelling with the illusion that the events seen on screen are ‘real.’ The very film itself is a mask, a pretense of reality.
With these abrupt, jarring projector images, Persona starts off by immediately telling the audience that it is an experimental film. Among the many, seemingly random images thrown at our faces are a nail being hammered into (Christ’s?) hand, a slaughtered lamb (the Lamb of God?), and a spider.
Then we see shots of an old woman, an old man, and a boy, each lying on what seems to be an autopsy table with a blanket on his or her body, as if each of them is in a morgue. The boy, however, wakes up, puts glasses on, and after looking in a book for a moment, gets up and reaches out at a huge, blurred image of a woman’s face: is it Elisabet’s, or Alma’s? Since the boundary between the identities of the two women is blurred, which one she is will be a valid question, for the boy is her son (played by Jörgen Lindström)…presumably Elisabet’s, but given that blurred boundary between the women, and Alma’s weakening mental stability and deepening insecurity as to who she really is, we wonder if it could instead be hers.
As we come to understand by the end of the movie, Elisabet’s going mute is triggered by her anxieties and conflict over motherhood, which is on a collision course with her acting career. Her love/hate relationship with her son has come to a head, and she can no longer cope.
She goes mute in the middle of a stage performance as Electra. If you’re familiar with the Electra myth, you know she hated her mother, Clytemnestra, for taking a lover, Aegisthus, while her husband, Agamemnon, was fighting in the Trojan War; she and Aegisthus murdered Agamemnon, whom Electra dearly loved, when he returned from the war. Her hate of her mother and love of her father inspired Jung to call the female version of the Oedipus complex the “Electra complex.”
I suspect that part of Elisabet’s reason for not wanting to be a mother, though socially pressured into being one, is unconsciously linked to a hatred of her own mother. She didn’t want to become like her own mother, which she felt compelled into becoming by unconscious promptings from object relations (i.e., her mother’s internal object pushing her into being the same despicable person, because she knows no other way to be a mother). So pregnant Elisabet tried to abort the fetus, and having failed, had her son raised by relatives and a nanny.
I believe the old man and old woman seen on the autopsy tables are Elisabet’s parents, seen in a dream of hers as wish-fulfillment: her father, like Agamemnon, was already dead, and her mother, like Clytemnestra, killed by Electra’s brother, Orestes, is now thankfully dead, it seems, too (until her eyes open!). Still, though, Elisabet’s son, with his hand out as if to touch the face of his mother in that dream, feels an Oedipal longing for her. He’s woken from his sleep-of-death on his autopsy table, so her wish for his death, because so conflicted, remains unfulfilled.
When Elisabet plays Electra (the former name almost a pun on the latter), her identifying with the character–something any actor must do in order to play the role, the persona, convincingly–is too much for her to handle. Wanting the death of her mother as Electra, combined with Elisabet’s guilt over hating her son, feels almost like wishing death on herself. Of course, she doesn’t completely want her own death: part of her still wants to live and be an actress. So she meets things halfway and stops talking, and for a while, even moving.
After receiving her assignment from the doctor to look after Elisabet, Alma goes into the hospital room where Elisabet is staying. She is lying in bed, just as those on the autopsy tables were lying down, and just as–according to the doctor’s report to Alma–Elisabet’s maid had found her in bed, just after her failed performance. Lying in bed, motionless and speechless, is as close as Elisabet is willing to kill the Clytemnestra inside herself.
Alma–her name meaning “soul” in Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian, yet also derived from the Latin almus, for “kind,” “fostering,” or “nourishing”–is having misgivings about taking care of Elisabet, since as her “soul,” she can already feel a sense of kinship and identity with her new patient. After all, we will learn of Alma getting an abortion, and though soon to marry her fiancé, Karl-Henrik, she will be on a collision course similar to Elisabet’s, as a woman with a nursing career on the one hand, and having to be a wife and (future) mother on the other. Since this movie takes place in the mid-1960s, the reality of sex roles all too often meant a woman’s having to sacrifice her career and intellect, for apparently, “a woman’s place is in the home.”
So, is that boy Elisabet’s, or is he really Alma’s?
The two women will stay at the doctor’s cottage by the sea, and while still not talking, at least Elisabet is now moving around. Alma talks enough for both or them…and this is where matters start to get psychologically screwy.
Alma, as Elisabet’s nurse, is supposed to be providing therapy for her; but by doing all of the talking, Alma is unwittingly playing the role, the persona, of the free-associating analysand, while mute Elisabet is playing the role, the persona, of the observant, listening psychoanalyst.
Alma appreciates how, in Elisabet, she feels that this is the first time in her life that someone is actually listening to her. So Alma talks and talks, revealing uncensored details of her personal life as a patient might do with a therapist. Elisabet seems sympathetic, so Alma feels encouraged to continue. Playing the persona of therapist, though, Elisabet is actually “studying” Alma.
What should be noted here is that Alma as a nurse is in a quasi-maternal role, taking care of Elisabet. Yet Elisabet, in her capacity as Alma’s ‘therapist,’ is also taking care of her, rather like a mother. In this, we can see how the one character is a double of the other.
So while both of them have been scared of becoming mothers, hence the attempted or successful abortions, both can enjoy playing the role of mother for each other. In Elisabet’s case, she may dislike being a mother to a son, but may prefer the maternal role to a daughter–transference in Alma, perhaps because, as I suspect, Elisabet’s mother wasn’t loving to her for the same reasons Elisabet isn’t loving to her son: a fear of motherhood as a form of career-killing bondage.
In wishing to avoid being a mother to her son, Elisabet is experiencing a female version of the Laius complex, a fear of the son killing and supplanting the parent, as Oedipus did Laius. Elisabet of course isn’t afraid of her son literally killing her, as Orestes did Clytemnestra, but of him symbolically killing her by forcing her to give up her acting career to be a full-time, stay-at-home mother. Acting is her life. All that Elisabet is centres around being personae. So while she can’t be a mother to her son, she can play the role of maternal psychoanalyst to Alma.
What causes Elisabet guilt, though, is that her son has an Oedipal love for her, not an Orestes hate for her, even though his very existence implies an Orestes-like threat of annihilation of her. He sees in her a Iocaste; she sees in herself the Clytemnestra of her own mother, as I suspect. Her mother didn’t love her, so she cannot love her son. Her hate of him is really hatred of herself.
Anyways, in her ability to speak freely about her life without inhibition, to engage in free association with Elisabet, Alma tells her about a sexual encounter she and a girl friend had with two boys while the girls were sunbathing in the nude. Alma, in all frankness, vividly describes the orgasms. Now, she had already been seeing Karl-Henrik when this sexual encounter happened, so she felt guilt about it and had the abortion to conceal the pregnancy.
Her ability to trust Elisabet is shattered when, on a drive alone, she reads Elisabet’s unsealed letter. Alma learns Elisabet has written to the doctor about the sexual encounter, that she’s flattered by Alma’s near-lesbian feelings for her, and that she has fun “studying” Alma. Alma’s furious, but in reading the letter, she has violated Elisabet’s trust, too. In this way, the two women are doubles of each other once again.
After Alma’s returned to the cottage, the women fight, which includes her threatening to throw scalding hot water on Elisabet and getting her finally to speak, begging Alma not to. Note how, on the one hand, the near-lesbian attraction Alma has for Elisabet, and on the other hand, the hostility both show each other are reflective of their mutual transferences. As I said above, each of them, as a giver of ‘therapy’ and care to the other, is a mother-figure to each other. Transference often involves a mixture of love and hatred for one’s therapist, and the mother-figure element introduces Melanie Klein‘s notion of the loving good mother who provides her baby her breast, and the frustrating bad mother who doesn’t provide it.
Prior to the fight, and upon Alma’s return from the car drive, she’s had some time alone to ruminate on her feeling of betrayal from Elisabet because of the letter. It’s around this point, in the middle of the film, that the projector acts up, and we see a white hole in the middle of the film, then a moment of only white, then fragments of sound and silent movies, the nail hammered into Christ’s hand again, and a blurred image of Elisabet walking around the room.
The disorienting effect of all of these seemingly incoherent images gives off the feeling that Alma, feeling the Brechtian alienation effect of Elisabet’s persona as false friend, is experiencing psychological fragmentation. She’s in danger of losing herself to a psychotic break from reality, since she’s losing her sense of her individual identity, it being merged with that of Elisabet. In her confusion, she doesn’t know if she’s the giver of therapy, or its recipient.
At the end of that disorienting sequence of images, the camera refocuses, and we see Elisabet looking around anxiously for Alma, then she smiles with relief at finally finding her outside, by the beach. After their fight, Alma tells Elisabet how “rotten” she thinks she is, and now Elisabet is furious and runs off, forcing Alma to run after her and beg her for forgiveness. As we can see, both women need each other, because both women complete each other. Each is only half a human being without the other (recall the shot later of halves of the women’s faces put side by side).
This combination of love/need and hate, so essential to a therapist/patient transference (and countertransference), is also reflected after Alma’s climactic twice-telling of Elisabet’s hate of her son, Alma then slapping her hard, banging her hands on a table, scratching her arm ’til it bleeds, and Elisabet sucking the blood like a vampiress. In the duality of the two women’s merged identity, we see literal and symbolic projection and introjection of their mutual love and hate, and of their self-hate and guilt.
About an hour into the movie, Elisabet is lying in bed at night, and she sees on the bedside table a photo of some Jews being rounded up by Nazis after the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. One point of focus is a Jewish boy with his hands up.
The concern on Elisabet’s face here is comparable to her pained expression upon seeing, far earlier in the film, footage on TV of a Buddhist monk having immolated himself in Saigon in 1963, in protest over the South Vietnamese government’s ill-treatment of Buddhists. These two males’ experiences can be tied in with the image of Christ’s crucifixion (and the slaughtered lamb), or whoever’s crucifixion that early image was supposed to be, since thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, of Jews were crucified after failed revolts against the Roman occupation of Judea.
In Elisabet’s eyes, these persecuted males are equated with her son, whose unrequited Oedipal love for her he has unsuccessfully protested. The three male protestors died (with the possible, but unlikely, exception of the Jewish boy), just as she has wished death on her son. The pain she feels on contemplating these acts of violence against the three is simply her guilt.
Shortly after, Elisabet’s husband (played by Gunnar Björnstrand) arrives at the cottage to see her, but since she’s been sleeping, Alma answers the door and sees him. It seems that he’s mistaken her for his wife, and she tries to correct him, but he won’t be corrected. When Elisabet, suddenly all dressed as if she’d never been asleep, arrives and is standing right behind Alma, it’s as if the identities of the two women are fused into one.
He makes love with Alma right in front of Elisabet, who doesn’t mind at all, and Alma ecstatically receives him as if she really were his wife. Before the lovemaking, Elisabet has taken Alma’s hand and put it on his cheek; she’s clearly projecting herself onto Alma, making their identities fuse and removing her guilt from her relationship with her husband and son. He has black sunglasses on, as if he were blind, but he doesn’t seem to be wrong about which woman is his wife…is Alma really the guilty one about not wanting a son?
He takes the sunglasses off and looks on Alma with eyes that clearly see; and at this point she embraces him and gushes with love for him as a wife that Elisabet cannot be. Elisabet has successfully projected herself onto Alma, who then makes love with him, while his actual wife stands by without showing any emotion, as if an automaton.
It is around this time in the film that we see its iconic overlapping of faces, something mimicked and parodied many times, and which is symbolic of the merging of the women’s identities into one, of Elisabet’s projecting hers into Alma, and Alma’s introjection of Elisabet…and vice versa. Elisabet imagines she’s purged herself of her unmotherly hate of her son…or has she?
Alma confronts Elisabet with the photo of her son, the one that she tore up earlier; and Alma tells her–twice, significantly–that she knows that Elisabet’s muteness was triggered by her anxieties about motherhood. She didn’t want motherhood to end her acting career, yet she also felt socially obligated to become one, hence, her conflict over her boy. The telling Elisabet twice is linked to the theme of duality in the film, since Alma has similar misgivings about motherhood ending her nursing career, though they’re not as severe for her as they are with Elisabet. Nursing, after all, is similar enough to maternal duties. Still, it’s a job without Alma having to be a kept woman.
It’s significant, also, as I mentioned above, that Persona, a film about such conflicts in women, came out in the mid-1960s, when women were pushing to get out of the kitchen and pursue careers. We see the overlapping of their faces again as Alma tells Elisabet of her conflict over her boy, reinforcing their shared identity. Elisabet tried playing the role, the persona, of mother, but found she couldn’t, and in her conflict became mute onstage. In trying to take care of Elisabet, Alma has tried playing the role, the persona, of nurse, but finds she can’t, and she goes crazy, hitting Elisabet, banging her hands on the table, and scratching herself. The women’s shared identity is reinforced yet again with a shot showing half of Alma’s face merged with the other half of Elisabet’s face.
Tearing up the photo of the boy is a symbolic castration of him, he who in his Oedipal longing for his mother desires to be, as Lacan would have put it, the phallus for her, which would explain that split-second shot of a phallus at the beginning of the movie. Instead of the father castrating the boy, it’s his mother who does so, for Elisabet has a feminine version of the Laius complex.
Alma, in telling Elisabet of her conflicts, is also in denial that she has the same ones; for indeed, her discussion of those conflicts has been projection of them onto Elisabet. Alma wants to play the roles of nurse and mother, and at the point of her Alma’s denial, we see the merging of the halves of the two women’s faces.
We see Alma in her nurse’s uniform again when she bangs her hands on the table, scratches her arm, gets the blood sucked out, and slaps Elisabet repeatedly. Alma is at the height of her conflict right when she’s costumed in her nurse persona. She can get Elisabet to say only “Nothing,” in all dialectical irony. Both women are doing the opposite of what their personae would have them do: a mute actress isn’t much of one, and an abusive nurse isn’t much of a nurse, either.
The film ends with them leaving the cottage, and there’s a film crew seen shooting the scene, to remind us all that “all the world’s a stage,” or in this case, a film (we also see the film projector again). We all act out our personae, but some things make it especially difficult to do so, such as when a boy interferes with that acting out, because of his Oedipal longing for the mother’s face he wants to touch. And which woman is the mother trying to avoid being his? The blurring of their faces, as he has his hand held out, maintains that ambiguity.
Are we really who we think we are, or are we someone else? And how do we handle anyone who challenges our sense of self, the personae we play every day?
