Toward “What Bleeds or Trembles”: Reflections on Bergman’s Wild Strawberries

By way of its protagonist Isak Borg, Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries (1957) enacts and exemplifies a psychoanalytic understanding of change. Bergman’s film, in its form and content, presents and ultimately overturns a narcissistic world of “living death”—a form of living closed off to constitutive features of desire and to meaningful relationships with others. By the film’s end, rather than a “living death,” Bergman stages a life that has been achieved—a life that embraces anew the risks and joys of desire.