On Ripping the Skin off Ingmar Bergman's Die Zauberflote

Bergman's Die Zauberflote breaks down the borders between audience and text, and, ultimately, fragments the idea of diegesis itself. The film at once includes and excludes the audience--it appeals to our sense of theatricality while remaining completely self-conscious of this very theatricality. It goes beyond being simply self-reflexive; the viewers of the movie are not only privy to the action onstage and off of it, but to the spectators of the opera themselves. Bergman creates a stage that is immediate to us by deconstructing conventional stage-film style; he rarely introduces a scene with an opening shot, often violates the staging of the rule of 180, and constantly weaves disparate settings together in a way that can only draw our attention to the invisible hand of the editor.

In addition to these allusions to the creative process, Bergman breaks down diegesis through subtle dialogue between screen-opera, screen-audience, and real audience. Taking us backstage during the intermission--allowing us to see Sarastro reading Parsifal, the Queen of the Night smoking a cigarette in her underwear, and Tamino and Pamina playing chess, Bergman reinforces his actor's characters by showing them breaking character. What, after all, could be more natural than Sarastro reading high literature, the Queen of the Night brooding and lounging around, and Tamino and Pamina playing a staged game of wits against each other? Bergman deceives us most when his motives appear purely documentary, even, or rather, especially, when he uncovers his deception to us.

Yet, after all this, we find Bergman's machinations seductive rather than alienating. We are not condescended to as a mere audience, but as omniscient beings over the whole show; indeed, Bergman flatters us by privileging us to see the actual audience of the actual production--it as if he is saying, "go ahead, enjoy your secret knowledge--you see beyond these gloating simulacra, don't you? You understand the conceit, while these unaware fools gaze stupidly in their chairs." Yet, though Bergman might pander to our voyeurism, he nevertheless uses it to keep us dependent on the film's diegesis, rather than suspended from it. The red-haired girl with bright inquisitive eyes, the first opera-viewer we see, is our commentator and our guide throughout the film. She smiles in mirth, lowers her brow in thought, and otherwise anticipates each reaction we're supposed to have. Yet her face is just the first of the many introduced to us in the overture montage--the last we see is Mozart's own--but not Mozart the mature composer of Die Zauberflote, but Mozart the innocent child. We are reminded from the beginning that the Opera is a play about play, that the Opera is "innocent", and that we are invited to participate in this childlike belief by, ironically, a manipulation of our disbelief. Bergman devices model the plot of the opera; by exposing the falsehood behind text, theatre, and film, Bergman unmasks our alienation and "initiates" into a performance of a previous era as modern viewers that are aware yet able to escape awareness--aware, yet innocent. We pass through our trial of irony and into pure union with the art.


...
Sigh.
I must write a postscript to elucidate my motivations since the style was as distant from myself as I could make it. I watched the film, liked it. Studied The Magic Flute, before, so I thought--heck, why not write something about my impressions? Vaguely derivative analysis, but not shabby.

Jude the Obscure I: Maybe a Thought.

I began Jude the Obscure diffidently, but now read it with relish. I wish it was more like Lord Jim, beyond depicting a tragic mind with a bevy of romantic antiques, so that I could weave a more literal thesis about late-victorian anxieties. Jude is hardly Jim. He's more like Childe Harold, because, unlike Jim, he doesn't even become a vestige of self-sacrifice--he is completely unable to reach any satisfactory union, any glimmer enlightenment. If character is fate, then society, as Zola described, accelerates as well and complicates the mechanism of the usual, classically-tragic, family heritage of doom. Jude's mother gives advice to him like the oracle at delphi; "[D]on't you ever marry. Tisn't for the Fawley's to take that step any more." (Jude the Obscure, I-2), which dictum is eventually transposed into pure biblical lamentation from the mouth of Jude's dying aunt much later in novel: "'Tis more than flesh and blood can bear...Ah! You'll rue this marrying as well as he." (III-9) A sick woman, possessed by true mania gives voice to the same classical fatalism of clearly spelled-out doom. W. Somerset Maugham began The Razors Edge talking about how marriage is as rich and challenging an ending as a funeral--one is the start of life, the other the close of it. But the extremes meet in Jude the Obscure. Marriage is always a negative state, and its union, its seal-of-approval on the procreative act, only reveals a contradiction in the systems and views of sex in general. Says Sue about the women of "nunnery", the Training School from which she escapes: "Their views of the relations of man and woman are limited...Their philosophy only recognizes relations based on animal desire." (III-6). Jude's idealized lust/love is really the same threat as Sue's Venus Urania: they both are relationships between intellectual and animalistic ideals unauthorized by a society concerned, ironically, with a clandestine market exchange of status and desire. So marriage become a death-sentence--not a surrender of the self to a "Thou", but a gasping, choking descent into inescapable social code.

My reading is steeped in Freud and post-modern preconceptions, because that is, in a way, the easiest course to take. It's remarkably general, really, but uses just the right terminology to make it seem legitimate. I'll write more on this subject, and many others, later