100 Movies Every Catholic Should See #114: Through a Glass Darkly (1961)

Written and Directed by Ingmar Bergman. Starring Harriet Andersson, Gunnar Bjornstrand, Max von Sydow, Lars Passgard.

*content warning: Through a Glass Darkly contains some very heavy themes of mental illness and sexual confusion. Nothing graphic or explicit is shown, but it is not for the faint of heart.*

Ingmar Bergman’s best films are, ultimately, about faith. Faith in God is something Bergman struggled with all his life, ultimately losing his native Lutheranism in the 1960s and identifying as an agnostic. Through a Glass Darkly is one of the films he made in this period of a crisis of faith, when he was deeply questioning who God is and how He relates to the world, but had not yet concluded that God is entirely unknowable. Bergman thus is able to create a deeply poignant cry de profundis while still retaining some hope, continuing a search not yet abandoned and creating a work of art with profound observations about the shattering of the human psyche in the twentieth century.

Through a Glass Darkly follows a small family through a trip to their cabin on a remote island. David (Gunnar Bjornstrand), the patriarch, is a novelist struggling to finish his latest book, and has brought his daughter Karin (Harriet Andersson), recovering from a mental breakdown, to the island for a period of rest. Accompanying them are Karin’s husband Martin (Max von Sydow) and her 17 year old brother Minus (Lars Passgard). On the surface, the family is quite happy enjoying the simple idyllic life on the island, but underneath are unresolved tensions which will lead Karin deeper into her madness and culminate in unspeakable acts.

Bergman is obviously struggling with God in this film, but one of the lenses (glasses?) through which I found it fruitful to view this struggle was the crisis of masculinity and femininity in the mid-twentieth century. For an American, 1961 might seem to be near the beginning of the shattering of the traditional gender order, but Europe had been experiencing a crisis of masculine identity since the end of the First World War. It is with this crisis as the backdrop that much of the film’s struggles with God, humanity, sanity, and reality emerges into stark relief and reveals the roots of Bergman’s struggle with faith.

Through a Glass Darkly portrays three male characters who all have a disordered relationship to Karin. David, the father, is either absent or exploitative of his children. He spends most of his time traveling around Europe, giving lectures and gathering material for his books. When his daughter falls ill, he writes in his diary of his “urge to record its (the illness’s) course…to make an accurate description of her disintegration…to use her.” Rather than expressing love and concern for his daughter, he wishes to use her as a model for his novels. Karin’s discovery of this diary is the catalyst for her relapse into madness, driving her further and further away from the father who had more or less abandoned her and only returned for his own selfish purposes.

Martin, the husband, is on the surface a doting husband, sacrificing his life and his interests in order to care for his wife. However, his deeper character is revealed to be less self-sacrificing and more self-interested. He has developed not a true love for his wife but rather an unhealthy attachment, swinging between fetishing his wife’s condition and trying to medicate away what is clearly a spiritual malaise. He makes a couple sexual advances towards his ill wife, and when she rebuffs him he is clearly upset. He feels a sense of injustice, angry that he does so much for her and yet receives nothing in return. His love is not truly sacrificial but transactional, and when he is not getting what he sees as his due he takes the easy way out and sedates his wife with drugs.

Minus, the brother, is less to blame for his own particular masculine failings. He is the second generation of this crisis, the product of an absent father who never showed him how to be a man. He is also young, still coming to terms with the world, his growing body, and his raging hormones. He gets his disordered view of women from porn magazines rather than from true encounter, and is filled with rage against women in general for their sexuality, something he desires yet also fears. His view of women is so warped by his disordered view of sex that it extends even to his sister, which he expresses in frustration towards her sisterly signs of affection, interpreted as teasing and flirting. Tragically, this leads to him committing incest with his sister during a particularly vulnerable moment for both of them, his sex obsession and his sister’s insanity sweeping both of them away.

Is it any wonder that with the masculine in such tatters that the feminine goes utterly insane (or becomes possessed by demons, an interpretation that this movie could also bear)? Her father uses her, her brother lusts after her, her husband condescends to her. Karin feels utterly defenseless, “like children cast out into the wilderness at night. The owls fly past, watching you with their yellow eyes. You hear the pitter-patter and rustling, the soughing and sighing, all the damp noses sniffing at you. The wolves bare their teeth.” And yet her husband Martin, the man who should make her feel defended, abdicates this responsibility by denying there is any threat at all. “I don’t hear a sound, and the wolf is only in your imagination, Karin.” He refuses to confront the deeper spiritual war that is consuming Karin’s soul, he will not engage with the darkness at work, only deny it.

And so Karin withdraws further and further from him, further and further into her madness. She becomes so mad that her very view of God is warped. She hears voices telling her to expect the coming of God, but when she sees him arrive, she sees a giant spider come to rape and consume her. She shrinks back, shrieking in terror, and must be carried off to the mental hospital, trapped (she now believes forever) in both a physical and mental prison. And is it any wonder that her view of God is distorted? How can she clearly experience God the Father when her own father is absent and exploitative, or Christ the Bridegroom when her own bridegroom demands recompense for his love, or the All-Consuming Love of the Holy Spirit when her brother has been so totally consumed by lust? The disintegration of true masculinity leads to the disintegration of femininity, combining into a total disintegration of the imago Dei: madness for all of humanity. Even if God exists, can a people who can only see him through a funhouse mirror (or a glass darkly) truly comprehend or experience him at all?

Bergman clings to only one answer, expounding on it only in the final three minutes of the film. After Martin takes Karin away to the mental hospital, David and Minus are left to confront their own roles in her descent into insanity. Minus is deeply in despair, ashamed of his sin and seeking for meaning. David, too, is a seeker, but a bit further along in his search and able to give Minus some clues that he himself has found. Stepping into his role as father for what seems to be the first time, David tells Minus “I can only give you a hint of my own hope. It’s knowing that love exists for real in this human world…I don’t know if love is the proof of God’s existence, or if love is God Himself…suddenly the emptiness turns into abundance and the despair into life.” David and Minus in this moment find the answer, a transcendental, selfless love for Karin which is, David believes, God Himself.

This answer, this hope, has been staring us, the audience, in the face the whole movie. Bergman, an Lutheran pastor’s son, knew his Bible intimately; yours truly, a good Catholic boy, unfortunately had to look up the phrase “through a glass darkly” to find its scriptural context. It comes from St. Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians, Chapter 13; the more famous verses from this chapter go like this:

Love is patient and kind; love is not jealous or boastful; it is not arrogant or rude.

Love does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrong, but rejoices in the right.

Loves bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

(…)

For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.

David has finally grasped the central message of the Gospel, and he clings to that belief like a lifeline. By sharing it with Minus and showing that paternal love to him that has been so long withheld, David is starting his family down the path to healing and knowledge of the truth. So far the family has seen each other, and through each other God, through a glass, darkly; they begin to move towards the time when they can truly know, love, and see each other face to face. This revelation stuns Minus, and he reacts with the words all believers and seekers hope one day to be able to say, words that Bergman deeply wanted to say but sadly it seems he never could:

“Papa spoke to me.”