Ingmar Bergman's THE SERPENT'S EGG
an outcast in the room of dreams: frustrating filmographies #8, page 2
Interesting that Bergman already had snakes on the brain ten years earlier, and brought the visual back after he'd decided it was time to crawl under a new skin. The 1965 essay functioned as an informal declaration of self-reflection as himself as an artist - the next year he'd make Persona, which opens with camera equipment and projected images from his older movies; the first thing audible in his next film, Hour of the Wolf, is Bergman giving directions to his crew. Post-"Snakeskin," there's every indication of Bergman firmly placing himself among his recurring isolated, suffering artist characters who can't be happy, even when they enjoy popular success, and the tax evasion debacle was just too close a parallel for him to pass up. The artists in Bergman's films are forced out of their craft, either by an outside party - the illusionist being investigated as a fraud in The Magician, the acting troupe who are on trial for obscenity in The Ritual - or by their own psychological distress a'la the novelist with writer's block in Through a Glass Darkly, the actress who's lost her speech in Persona, the painter who won't paint in Hour of the Wolf.* Both these hindering agents are transposable in his characters' situations (The Magician's Albert Vogler can't help betray his own tricks to his cynical audience, Hour of the Wolf's Johan Borg is beset by harassing demons) as they were in his own: the Swedish government had indeed brought him trouble, but Bergman was the one who indignantly skipped town. Once again, as he had stated in "Snakeskin," Bergman managed to turn what he viewed as a hopeless situation into a rejuvenating one - just as Inspector Bauer opines that Abel hanging from a trapeze would be a way to "fight your fear more effectively," Bergman similarly stated that making The Serpent's Egg was his way of dealing with his imagined hardship: "I let the creativity rush in to help as if it were a doctor, nurse, and ambulance, all at once." He instinctively knew, re: "Hunger Artist," that his wasn't true suffering if there was no audience there to appreciate it.
In the midst of the mass starvation, hyperinflation and general poor quality of life that defined Berlin in 1923, nobody could be expected to care about the inner-angst of Carradine's boozy, brothel-bouncing non-Berliner/Kafka surrogate Abel Rosenberg. An unemployed trapeze artist, he falls squarely in the category of Bergman's self-defeating artists, stubbornly refusing an offer to join his high society friend's circus even though he's stuck in a strange country with no prospects. Yet like Bergman, Abel places the blame on an outside impediment, namely the wrist injury and subsequent unexplained suicide of his brother, who made up the apparently indispensable third of Abel's trapeze trio.* Like Kafka, Bergman recognized the obnoxiousness of the moody, displaced artist, and Abel is a textbook Bergman diva: impotent, paranoid, alcoholic, betrayed, the victim of circumstance who's unable to stand "normal" life or maintain a domestic situation. On the flip side is Liv Ullmann's Manuela, introduced in a gangrene-colored wig prancing before an indifferent audience at the Zum Blauen Esel cabaret; although she's managed to move on from the dissolution of the circus act, powers beyond her control do seem to conspire against her: in a matter of days she loses her savings, her lavish apartment and her job as a performer when the cabaret is raided and burned. Her transfer from the open stage to the drab confines of a laundry room is a subtle tragedy that's lost amidst Abel's obstreperous brooding. Bergman makes it ambiguous whether Abel is directly responsible for literally every one of Manuela's problems, but her attempt to satisfy his irritating Weltschmerz - her wish to do so expressly stated to priest James Whitmore - is what ultimately destroys her. Because Bergman knows: there's nothing worse than a brooding artist who won't help himself yet thinks his suffering and humiliation are more important than the suffering and humiliation of everyone all around him.
One of the best scenes of the movie is centered around the explicitly internal and ambiguously external attacks on an artist's psyche that Bergman himself may have been feeling. Inspector Bauer, having already led Abel through an appalling gauntlet of bloody bodies in the morgue, brings his ghost-pale guest to his office for an informal interrogation (Bauer insists they're "just chatting"). Instead of chatting, Bauer ignores Abel as he finishes writing a report, creating an opaque tension through which Bergman really nails the horror that Kafka envisioned in The Trial, that inaccessible authoritarian figure who's nothing but pleasant, yet sits there quietly knowing something you don't know and letting you know he knows whatever it is you don't know he knows. Bauer even says as much: "I'm not looking at you, I'm wondering. I'm wondering if I should tell you what I am wondering about. But I think not." Bauer's lack of actual allegations against Abel, who sits unaccountably detained at the station, sends the acrobat into an anxiety attack, first reproaching his apparent tormenter ("It's because I'm a Jew!") and finally flying into a full-fledged freak out where he tries to flee the station (since we know he's a trapeze artist, it's a shame he doesn't run around the office doing acrobatic flips and somersaults and shit to evade his pursuers - all Carradine manages is a pretty lame leap from one landing to another. Oh well). In this scene Bergman, who fled Sweden under dubious accusations, seems to concede that the victim of government badgering is just as likely overreacting to the situation, even though the prosecutors' poker-faced dissection may be unbearable.
When he made The Magician twenty years earlier, Bergman took a fairly unsubtle swipe at his own jaded audiences, unappeasable critics and disingenuous watchdogs from the Swedish Film Institute. Vaguely disguised in the film as narrow-minded bureaucrats who scrutinize the troupe's performance, these figures that Bergman saw as enemies parallel the hunger artist's "permanent watchers" who carefully observe his fast for any sign of a slip-up. The most determined of Magician's "watchers" is vengeful Dr. Vergérus, who takes every opportunity to belittle the illusionist Albert Vogler's dedication to his art and brings his rival to blows by brazenly propositioning Volger's wife in front of him. Bergman's films often equate the artist's indignity to sexual humiliation, the act of "performing" indistinguishable from its more lurid connotation. This idea is most apparent throughout Sawdust and Tinsel, mainly in an early sequence where Frost the clown is forced to fetch his aged wife after her attempt to flaunt her goods before a regiment of soldiers at the beach ends in mortifying debasement. Limply struggling to retrieve her from the water, Frost inadvertently puts on a little clown show for his taunting, youthful audience who hide his clothes as they jeer behind their raging, intimidating canons - the exhaustion and humiliation of the experience nearly kills him. Later in the film, ringmaster Albert Johansson suffers a similar fate when the local fancypants actor who's seduced his girlfriend physically degrades him in front of the crowd at his own circus. In Serpent's Egg, Abel defies his own artistic impotence by challenging Monroe, a drunken stud defending his manhood to a pair of mocking prostitutes, to rise to the occasion by first offering him money to perform, then taking it upon himself to satisfy the hooker when the crippled Monroe can't.** If Abel can't swing from a trapeze, he's going to compensate by swinging with a couple of floozies (it's also revealed that the last time he saw his brother they got into a physical altercation over a whore - Abel admits to taking it easy on Max due to the recent wrist injury that necessitated the act's hiatus from the circus, having perhaps subconsciously connected the artistic handicap with sexual frustration).
But Abel can't keep up the pretense because he has his own Vergérus, in this case Hans Vergérus, a former childhood acquaintance who pops up throughout the film like the menacingly amiable, likewise bespectacled Slugworth in Willy Wonka. Abel loathes Vergérus, who he remembers dissecting a cat when they were kids, even moreso after discovering that Manuela is under his rival's power and has slept with him several times. Despite this, after their living arrangement is terminated Abel agrees to move into an apartment with Manuela that Vergérus has offered them and accepts a decidedly uncreative job in the archives of Han's clinic. Vergérus' very presence mocks the hero's virility which Bergman associates with Abel's artistic integrity, the modus operandi of many antagonists in the director's films, but there's more to his portrayal than just a jibe at Bergman's supposed enemies as represented in The Magician. Because Vergérus reveals himself as the culprit behind the venomous conspiracy, chief conductor of the grotesque experiments in human suffering that have resulted in the unexplained deaths, which Vergérus believes will hatch the "perfect reptile" that is Hitler's Germany. Bergman's no stranger to Freudian symbolism, and Vergérus' projected serpent is as much a phallic threat to Abel as it is an emblem of the ensuing Wehrmacht's strength of will.
For the prolific Bergman, the artist who isn't working is lonely and vulnerable, surviving only on the belief that he's holding on to some kind of integrity: he's an artist, after all. So what if he's working at the popcorn counter at the Regal Galleria Mall, he's got a great screenplay the world isn't quite ready for yet! Abel has survived on this affirmation, which is why Vergérus completely destroys him in their final meeting. To lay out the whole scheme, Vergérus cues up a projector and proudly narrates a series of films for Abel, each one detailing the various stages of his ambitious project. Abel, who has clawed and beaten his way to Vergérus' secret chamber, is astonished into silence during the entire confrontation, struck mute like Albert and Elisabet Vogler: on top of being a man of science in the mold of Magician's Dr. Vergérus, this Vergérus is a filmmaker! It's like that popcorn counter kid finding out a modest buddy he didn't even know could paint just scored a showing at the Gagosian. Not only that, Vergérus' films are forward-thinking, portending events that will change the world through an art form that in 1923 was still relatively new and exciting. Four decades later, Bergman would lament that film had been "deprived of its poison," yet here Vergérus not only made a film that stuns his audience into silence with its sting, he literally made a film about a mass poisoning.
Considering the infanticide, madness and suicide on display in Vergérus' private little snuff film, it's surprising that Bergman uses this scene to link his own visuals to those of Vergérus, his fellow chronicler of human misery. One of the clips shows a man and a woman in a drab apartment identical to the one Vergérus set Abel and Manuela up in, sitting across from each other fornlornly in a frame identical to Bergman's earlier shot of his own dispirited couple, their position exactly the same. This shot induces the ol' George C. Scott look of horror on Abel's face at the revelation that he's been a part of Vergérus' film all along...when of course he's also been jumping through Bergman's hoops all along. It's the ultimate conspiracy for the artist to find himself under another man's creative control, manipulated into a dead end domestic situation (Abel had previously discovered a camera behind a two-way mirror in the apartment). What's more, Vergérus assures Abel that he and Manuela weren't test subjects: the poor bastard managed to reach his crippling artistic death on his own, and doesn't even get to play himself in the movie chronicling his own pathetic downfall. Vergérus ends his presentation with the silent black & white shot of the despondent crowd that opened the movie, which we believed to be Bergman's - the director has formally transferred his affinity with Abel, the self-exiled artist-victim, to Hans, who with this informal premiere "screening" of his film immediately helps himself to a cyanide capsule, having established his legacy for future generations to appreciate even if the work itself results in career suicide, or in his case actual suicide. Hans even turns his honorable exit into an exhibition, holding up a mirror so he can observe his own death throes,*** coldly fascinated with the end he's perfectly etched out for himself.
Suggesting that Bergman saw something of himself in a cat-torturing, life-ruining, Nazi-creating mad scientist may seem like a stretch, but if Vergérus is a projection of the director's guilt over an immature admiration of Hitler it has more to do with the tragically aligned advancement of history and art. With all the woe and ruin the movie constantly reminds us was rampant in the Berlin of 1923, it's easy to forget that progressive art flourished in this dismal era - the Weimer period produced such groundbreaking artists as Bertolt Brecht, Max Reinhardt, Thomas Mann, Artur Schnabel, Arnold Schoenberg, Kurt Weill & Lotte Lenya, Otto Dix, George Grosz, Paul Klee, László Moholy-Nagy, Rudolf von Laban, Marlene Dietrich, Murnau, Pabst and Fritz Lang (not to mention thinkers like Heidegger, Heisenberg and Einstein). Bauhaus, Dadism and Expressionism all came to prominence during that time. And, of course, there was Kafka's brief stay in the city which, for all the good it failed to do him, produced the last major work of his lifetime. Whatever the living conditions of the majority of German people, by decade's end there was still The Last Laugh, Pandora's Box and Metropolis; the exciting potential of early 1920's Berlin is evident from the release of Wiene's The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Wegener's The Golem, Murnau's Nosferatu. The character of Vergérus, undoubtedly judged to be a fairly goofy character in the overall Bergman canon and a bit of a cartoon Josef Mengele, is himself a homage to Dr. Caligari, to Metropolis' Rotwang, to Dr. Mabuse.****
Now Serpent's Egg is not a pastiche - its style doesn't come close to expressionism, especially compared to his earlier films, and Bergman isn't interested in celebrating the great progressive artwork from that era. Rather he uses Serpent's Egg to compare the impetus of 1920's art to the social and political change on the horizon, and how the innovative developments in the technical and creative craft of filmmaking could never, for all its excitement, change history to the extent of something like the rise of Nazi Germany. The horror of Vergérus' work is that he's taken the idea of revolutionary art and perverted it into the Hitler construct, incorporating film technique towards the goal of, in his words, "exterminating what is inferior and increasing what is useful." Bergman understands the double-edged sword of this Darwinist idea of tearing down the obsolete as a natural course of evolution: the outmoded cabarets and circus acts of 1923 Berlin are unattended or don't survive in Serpent's Egg, figuratively paving the way for the fantastic newness of film.***** Vergérus' chilling prophecy that a "society based on extremely romantic ideas of man's goodness" will "go down in blood and fire" even sounds uncannily close to Bergman's belief in his "Snakeskin" essay that art (like religion) is kept alive only for "sentimental reasons, as a conventional courtesy to the past." Vergérus thinks in terms of the future, scoffing at Bauer's "rusty guns" i.e. the traditional way of doing things, and Bergman even affords him the not-yet-invented technology of sync sound to punctuate his progression (another complaint of Kael's that's more than a mere anachronism). To an extent, Bergman admires Vergérus the filmmaker who creates pictures at a time and place where the medium was taking huge leaps forward, long before the power of cinema was "deprived of its poison" in the director's mind. Never mind that Vergérus' movie documents people actually being poisoned - the arbitration of art in the seed of time is the reason Leni Riefenstahl's work can be considered aesthetically groundbreaking while also being morally reprehensible. Through Vergérus, Bergman finds a way to channel his youthful excitement over the change that Hitler promised through his youthful excitement for the possibilities of film, the belief that its power could be just as terrifying and compelling.
* A big difference from characters in Bergman's earlier films whose ability to perform is lost more naturally, like the musician blinded in Music in Darkness and dancer whose career ends following a difficult abortion in Thirst.
** I'm obsessed with the Monroe scene, during which Glynn Turman writhes and bellows out a slew of rants laced with colorful Freudian imagery (he would have just lost the role of Han Solo, which may have informed his maniacally grumpy performance). Pauline Kael was offended by the scene, interpreting it as Bergman's way to show how things in Berlin were "so bad a black man couldn't get it up," but I think if she had considered similar scenes like the one in Sawdust and Tinsel she would have seen what Bergman was really up to.
*** It's impossible to watch this death scene now without thinking of it as being eerily prescient of director Donald Cammell's 1996 suicide and how he allegedly requested a mirror to be held up so he could watch himself die (Cammell's Performance, co-directed with Nicolas Roeg, shares Bergman's fascination with the artist who finds he can't continue his work). However I suspect Bergman might have actually based Vergérus' demise on Carl Boehm's nasty end from Michael Powell's Peeping Tom:
**** Gert Fröbe, playing Inspector Bauer, even makes what might be the only direct film reference to be found in a Bergman movie when he claims his colleague "Inspector Lohmann" is busy working on an "even stranger case." Fröbe had appeared as an inspector in Lang's The Thousand Eyes of Mr. Mabuse and played Lohmann in 1961's The Return of Doctor Mabuse, directed by Harald Reinl, who'd go on to remake Lang's Die Nibelungen and, 20 years later, get stabbed to death by his wife. And since Fröbe most famously played Goldfinger, you'd think he'd appreciate a good gas-based conspiracy like Vergérus' twisted plot in Serpent's Egg.
***** Bergman's loyalty to the theater and love of performance suggests a sense of tragedy at this transition, but that's a whole other topic I shouldn't go into here. Lord knows this article could use a little of the ol' exterminating of the inferior: I mean, did mentioning David Carradine's sissy run really provide any kind of insight into Bergman's decision to make this film?
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