From "The Problem of Marital Loneliness/The new 'Scenes from a Marriage,' on HBO, avoids the dark questions that Ingmar Bergman confronted in the original" by Agnes Callard (The New Yorker).
This article transcribes a quote that I'd half-remembered since I saw the Bergman movie in 1973: "I have a mental picture of myself that doesn’t correspond to reality... My senses—sight, hearing, touch—are starting to fail me. This table, for instance: I can see it and touch it, but the sensation is deadened and dry. . . . It’s the same with everything. Music, scents, faces, voices—everything seems puny, gray, and undignified."
That's said by an older woman to the main female character, who is a young woman under the impression that she has a fine marriage. I was seeing the movie when I was 22, and I had just gotten married, and those lines truly freaked me out. The feeling of being dead while alive — separated from life and unable to get back into it — is a terrible thing, and if you attribute that feeling to you marriage, how frightening. Marriage is what had seemed like the destination, an opening up into the greatest feeling of being alive.
ADDED: This seems to call for the song "Being Alive." Here: pick one.
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[Hagai Levi, in the HBO remake of 'Scenes from a Marriage'] sees marriage as a way of navigating one’s place in the economic and social order.
Levi sees marriage -- surprise, surprise -- from a leftist perspective.
John Waters said they should only remake the bad movies.
Muriel Spark, Memento Mori: the problem with modern marriages is that couples actually expect to spend a great deal of their time together. They approximate having no secrets, and the result is often divorce. I know, this seems cynical to people today. "I had such hopes."
Bergman suggested that marriage was meant to address a metaphysical need: our connection to reality.
The purpose of marriage is to help produce offspring which survive to adulthood. That fact that not everyone does this is irrelevant.
Connecting to reality, navigating one’s place in the economic and social order and journeys of personal growth, etc, etc are all pretty nifty but quite secondary, if even that.
I love the quote that you pulled. I saw the original in my college years and I am sure it would come across much differently to me after having lived a life. I'm much more interested in seeing the Bergman original again than a new HBO remake, though I may take on both.
Therapy for Bergman's palsy.
Marriage as an institution tries to solve a problem that derives from basic biology. Basic biology provides for a system of reproduction that leads to a small number of dominant males participating in procreation and most males living in a beta/non-reproductive life of frustration.
This is an acceptable situation when you are talking about animals like bears or cows. Probably even beneficial as long as the way to determine who the dominant males are leads to good genetic offspring.
But in a complex society like some of the societies we have built it does not lead to good outcomes. Unless you think constant war is a good outcome. But that is a different discussion. The pattern of the majority of societies females being monopolized by a dominant group of reproducing males and leaving the only option for the buffer population males to access females by taking them from outside populations is a common precursor to war.
The institution of marriage is an affront to basic biology and we have all of the obvious individual rebellions.
But from a societal development perspective the institution of marriage is absolutely brilliant. It has incredible benefits for everyone except the tiny portion of dominant males. It would even help them be better people if they could get them to act like humans instead of animals.
But you still have people who support rapists like Joe Biden and Bill Clinton.
When experiencing extreme heart failure, I was steeped in a deep and profound sense of impending doom. One of the side effects is feeling completely detached from the world and the living... everything is dead to you as well. I can imagine that a psychologically broken heart can have a similar effect.
Once the heart mends, those darkest of emotions disappear.
"I have a mental picture of myself that doesn’t correspond to reality... My senses—sight, hearing, touch—are starting to fail me. This table, for instance: I can see it and touch it, but the sensation is deadened and dry. . . . It’s the same with everything. Music, scents, faces, voices—everything seems puny, gray, and undignified."
This is part of a popular Swedish off-color joke that starts with Have you heard the one about the girl tuba player who was stranded on a desert island with a one-legged jockey?
Then there's some more preamble about their situation followed by the tuba player's quote above, capped off by the punchline: So the one-legged jockey says, "Don’t worry about me, baby. I ride sidesaddle."
I don't get it. But I'm told everyone in Malmö will buy you a drink if you tell it with just the right pathos.
(They say there's a version in Danish attributed to Kierkegaard, but that's probably an exaggeration.)
Sorry, I prefer Patrick Hernandez' "Born to be Alive".
My senses—sight, hearing, touch—are starting to fail me.
You can check off smell, and with it much of taste, so just three to go
In the wonderful 1925 Rolvag novel, Giants in the Earth, these same questions are posed for a Norwegian settler couple in the Dakotas. All the projects a man can do, cannot change the feelings his wife has. The corpse of the husband has a smile on its face, when found after he commits suicide while trying to satisfy his wife's desires.
There's a lesson there for all of us.
Being Alive makes me think of all the early deaths of my cousin and other older friends.
The old ways were better. As a child of the first great generation of divorce, I can say with absolute authority that staying together for the children is one hell of a lot more important than finding yourself, which you don't do anyway.
Or just don't have kids.
When we marry, we get a glimpse of how selfish we are, and when we have children, the glimpse becomes a torrent of truth.
"You are the salt of the earth. But if the salt lose its savour, wherewith shall it be salted? It is good for nothing any more but to be cast out, and to be trodden on by men." Matthew 5:13
I know sermons have explored endlessly the theological meaning of this statement, but couldn't it also be viewed as describing the natural human experience of youth turning into old age, sickness and death?
Mildred Spark, Momento Mori: Modern married couples ask a lot by planning to spend a lot of time together. They head down the road to having no secrets, and this contributes to divorce. Yes, I know, people will consider that cynical these days. "I have such hopes."
this was filmed at a house around the corner from me. White Plains taking the place of Boston. that's why i watched the first two episodes. while the acting is excellent, the story is boring...
Well, I see this references the total rip off of Jerry Lewis' Scenes from an Idiot’s Marriage.
Around here, back in the day, you had to try hard to see a Bergman movie; it took me a while but I came to realize I wasn't missing much. Remakes? Bah.
the idea of "Remaking" Bergman and making him more "happy" is so amazing. Its like someone read a woody allen joke and took it seriously. I could barely make it thought the orignal scenes of a marriage, the idea that I'd want to watch a 2nd hand "Knockoff" by a nobody writer is a nonstarter.
Yet, you can just imagine all the writers at the WaPo/NYT and Lynn Cheney and AOC all watching it on HBO. American "culture" - what a clown show!
Ha! There was an ad for this up on HBO Max last night. It said, "Five acts. Endless emotions." I said, "Wow, it's like someone wrote that blurb to keep me from watching it." Sometimes I get tired of art that overcomplicates marriage. Some people make marriage complicated, and some people are stuck in complicated marriages because of those people. But marriage doesn't need to be complicated.
Somehow the headline reminds me of guys who praised their wives as being their "anchor" who kept them "grounded" and connected to reality, and then decided a few years later that their wives were dead weight that was dragging them down and had to be cut loose.
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