PicoBlog

I've always avoided Ingmar Bergman—I've seen lots of old movies because I was part of my university's film club and they aired weekly, including silent films like Metropolis and Dr Caligari's Cabinet with live piano music. Bergman seemed too intense, too dark. I preferred more light-hearted works like classic screwball comedy.

During my convalescence, slow as it is, of major surgery to remove a malignant tumor I thought of giving his Seventh Seal a chance.

I am glad I watched it (you can watch it for free here btw). There's a lot of commentary on this film that I can't really check out (my bandwidth for intellectual stuff is still very small). So here are some initial thoughts upon a first watch.

This is a very multilayered movie, lots to think about—how society reacts to disaster (the plague in the middle ages), human relationships and their social mediation, how religion helps us (not) to deal with the really difficult stuff life throws at us.

I want to focus on the main character of the knight, Antonius Block. He's a good man, a devout Christian who wants to do right by people, and has come back from the crusades where he has experienced moral injury (as one does, fighting an unjust war). It makes him question his whole belief system: is there a point to it all? We suffer, we live in injustice, we die, that's it?

The Knight asks Death for answers in their long and fated game of chess. In the confession scene (image above, link to the scene here ), Block asks why God hides. Why hide in half-promises and half-miracles? What about those who want to believe, but can't? What will happen to those who don't want to, and who cannot believe?

Block wishes deeply to evict God from his heart, but he can't. God still seems real to him, in spite of it all. He wants knowledge, not faith. He's looking for answers in his prayers:

Block: “But it's as if no one was there.” Death: “Perhaps there isn't anyone.” Block: “Then life is a preposterous horror.”

We can say that life has much good to offer regardless of whether the world is godless. But intriguingly, there is solid data to support the idea that if your life is going less well, you tend to hope that there's something more. For example, it may seem surprising but the people in the US who believe in the prosperity gospel—who think the Bible can give them insight into how to attain wealth and health tend to be poorer and not white. This is people wanting wealth and health in this life, by the way, not some sort of consolation prize after death. So, we do cling to religion to give us meaning, hope, and guidance.

There's another more light-hearted element to Seventh Seal, embodied in the juggler family. The juggler/actor Jof and his wife Mia, who is also juggler/actor move from town to town to perform. They have an adorable baby, an endearing relationship, and you root for them and their survival as the plague rages on.

Jof has the gift of mystic perception: he sees, at some point, the Virgin Mary and her son. He also sees the knight play chess with death. This alerts him that they should go away as fast as possible, and you root for them, and for their escape. Jof has what seem to be accurate mystical perceptions but his wife Mia thinks he's silly—she thinks he's just making it up. Overall though, neither he, nor the knight, are any closer to this great mystery of God's silence in the light of immense suffering.

It made me think, if you have mystical perception/experiences sometimes, as I've had, and even you've been explicitly told, to put it in Julian of Norwich's words, “All shall be well, all shall be well, all manner of things shall be well,” how can we possibly interpret this, or trust it, in the light of such a devastating amount of contrary evidence?

Maybe the most rational for the mystic is just to ignore the experience—it's just a figment of one's imagination. A friend of mine told me about how they had cancer when they were a young adult, and their mother brought them to a chemotherapy appointment. The mother, an Evangelical Christian, prayed for a parking spot close to the hospital. And lo! A parking spot appeared, just like that. A car pulled out. She thanked God for this great gift. My friend said “Really? I've got cancer and God's going to be bothered for a parking spot?”

Atheists will pounce on that sort of thing to say, see, this is all really very silly. I think this is in part why Seventh Seal is such a hard-hitting movie. Maybe it's meant for those wishing to evict God, or anything supernatural, from their heart, but find that they can't. They want to make a kind of reverse of what the unbeliever does in Pascal's Pensées: try to make it so they don't believe. The knight is so tortured because he doesn't succeed, you can see how he's doomed from the start (not a spoiler. Don't play chess with Death. It's not going to work).

But then, somehow, the movie gives you that glimpse of hope with the lovely juggler family surviving in spite of it all (okay this is a spoiler). They get to live another day, and as long as you have that, the allure of finding some sort of transcendent meaning in spite of all the horrors, stays alive.

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