Queer Bergman: Sexuality, Gender, and the European Art Cinema

2. The Cultural Construction of a Cold War Auteur: Discourse and Counterdiscourse

59 The day after Ingmar Bergman’s death at eightynine , on July 30, 2007, an article titled “Five Ways to Think about Bergman as a Genius” appeared on a popular Internet film site. Written by the American screenwriter Larry Gross, whose harrowing We Don’t Live Here Anymore (2004) suggests the influence of Bergman’s 1970s middle-class dramas, it functions as a typical postmortem celebration. As he concludes, however, Gross attempts to tackle an immense issue in two paragraphs, and he ends his essay on a familiar note of naiveté: The world’s post World War II conception of the Scandinavian countries —prosperous, sexy, vaguely liberal and well-educated, cosmopolitan and neurotically suicidal—was more or less derived from Ingmar Bergman’s films. There were times when angry journalists or politicians from those countries took exception to Bergman’s depiction, as one sided or narrow or unfair. And no doubt, there were things he left out. Chapter Two The Cultural Construction of a Cold War Auteur Discourse and Counterdiscourse 60 Queer Bergman But this is, in part what a genius does. He helps to create the taste by which he will be judged. We have a hard time identifying the “truth” about modern Scandinavian life, apart from Bergman’s representation or conception of it. That is what it means for a creative vision to have authority.1 Such declarations about the artist’s power are hardly limited to artistcritics , and if there has ever been a feature-film maker whose work represents the efforts of a strong-willed person, it was Ingmar Bergman. Still, as the film-studies discipline has argued for decades, there is more to one’s understanding of a film than the film itself. Furthermore, the image of Sweden that Gross describes predates Bergman’s emergence on the world stage, and as I will explain, that image can actually be seen as having helped mold Bergman’s “authority,” rather than the other way around. At the very least, that dominant twentieth-century view of Sweden can be seen as having formed part of the framework for the emergence of Bergman’s “vision” in the first place. From a different school of thought than that illustrated by Gross (and probably representing the feelings of a larger percentage of contemporary Americans), the right-wing critic and former Reagan administration official William Bennett offered a different assessment of Bergman. “I say too bad about foreign films,” he exclaimed with characteristic self-righteousness in 1992. “If they can’t make it, tough. I stopped going at the same time I threw away my black turtleneck . . . I went to those Bergman things and felt bad, and felt good about feeling bad, and the ’80s was good medicine for that.”2 Essentially, Bennett’s statement was a snide observation made in the service of an argument against public funding for arts organizations in the United States. Yet it is emblematic of a discourse, and a discursive utilization of Bergman, that was in operation as early as the late 1940s and is at least as powerful as the ideas that Gross asserts regarding the power of genius. Put simply , Bennett offers an implicit critique of a specific political and cultural ideology that resides squarely on the left side of the political spectrum and often is associated with European introspection and, more punitively, a European decadence ultimately inseparable from modernist understandings of queerness. Ever the shrewd propagandist, Bennett implicitly contrasts this queer-tinged decadence with the supposedly optimistic, conservative, and surely nonintrospective values of the political right that were exemplified by, but have certainly not been limited to, the Reagan era. 61 The Cultural Construction of a Cold War Auteur If one were to speculate why Bennett invoked Bergman rather than other European filmmakers with dark sensibilities in order to personify Continental masochism, Old World decadence, and, perhaps most insidiously, foreign perversity, the resonance of the Scandinavian auteur ’s nationality should not be underestimated. Bennett is surely a nationalistic thinker, and Bergman himself has repeatedly been defined through the idea of nation, indeed of nation as essence.3 It is worth remembering that the height of the filmmaker’s fame in the United States—which ran, roughly, from his appearance on the cover of Time magazine in 1960 to the director’s second consecutive Best Foreign Film Academy Award, for Through a Glass Darkly, two years later— coincided with the height of...