Love to Hate: Bergman on The Nature of Love

One of the most persistent, if not the most present, theme in the entirety of Ingmar Bergman’s oeuvre is the intertwining nature of love and hate. Bergman’s pairs: mother and daughter (Autumn Sonata), stepfather and stepsons (Fanny and Alexander), sisters (The Silence, Cries and Whispers), man and God (Winter Light) and most evidently, man and woman (Shame, Scenes from a Marriage), all show that the condition for love is the unfailing development of hate. Bergman’s characters tend to first show tenderness and care, which quickly blossoms into contempt, resentment and repulsion, showing the true face of what happens when two humans get close. The intensity of love is always undercut by the ugliness of the ego in corrupting the seemingly purity of this most revered sentiment, transforming it into the horror of love-hate. This form of hate does an enormous amount of emotional damage to the psyche. It is the kind of hate that obliterates relationships, destroys hope and turns humans into bitter, self-loathing creatures.

Love-hate corrodes the soul in a way that no other feeling does. It is a dark abyss in which the only responsible parties are the pair in question. Love-hate usually cannot find blame in social forces or structures; it is the most intimate projection of our insecurities and fears, our assurance that loneliness and death are inevitable and that it is possible to extract from the most blissful—yet fleeting—feeling, the most corrupting—yet lasting—state. Love-hate is the purest expression of the abandonment of the soul, the representation of the barren wasteland of the fragile Ego under the pressure of a redemption-less world.

Hate is unidirectional, it has a targeted stream from subject to object. Love-hate develops in an ambivalent, tortuous, complex feedback. It mixes the love and hate one feels for oneself as well as for the other person. The love for oneself tends to slowly build up into hate for the other, and the hate for oneself is many times what makes one seek validation and comfort in another’s bosom. Our insecurity and weakness is the main culprit in our propensity for falling in love. The search for completeness in another soul can only lead to the disappointment that not only oneself is lacking, emotionally and metaphysically, but that the other has the power to highlight how omnipresent this lack is. Bergman’s characters rarely display rage, they are most often bitter. Rage happens in outbursts, which accounts for its quick and intense release. Bitterness is the slow, all-consuming feeling of the ineptitude of the ego in attempting to surrender to love and care; it is the gradual accumulation of love-hate in the soul.

Bergman is a master and depicting how love is the ultimate illusion, the most intense yet most deceiving metaphysical comfort a human can adopt. Love begins in a confusion that humans are able to connect, to communicate. But as Bergman returns again and again, he shows that this ephemeral bonding results in the breakdown of communication, which is the first and greatest symptom of love-hate. Bergman demonstrates how love is the artificial condition which almost always fails in mitigating our natural state of loneliness, of inexpressiveness, of weakness. Bergman’s characters hardly ever engage in small, ordinary talk. They are almost always engaging in the dramatic battle of the egos, or processing the deafening silence of the impossibility to communicate one’s feelings. Contra Wittgenstein, Bergman shows that every unitary ego possesses its own private language, many times incomprehensible to oneself and certainly impenetrable to others.

Bergman’s depictions of love rarely present humans in a hopeful or positive light. Their liberating affect is not one of empowerment, but of realization of powerlessness. This realization drives many of Bergman’s characters mad (Persona, Through a Glass Darkly), but it can also open them up to a world of freedom granted one refuses to acquiesce the crushing weight of the lack of meaning. The silence, though often negative, indicating lack, can also produce power, positive possibilities. Silence is as much music as Bach for Bergman, in all its tragedy and glory.

The consequence of loving and surrendering for Bergman is almost always estrangement, alienation and metaphysical malady. Bergman understands that humans are inherently selfish, and will always look out for their own benefit. This contradicts the mission of love, which asks for compromise, care and giving. There are moments, lapses of love, but these are momentary escapes from the stasis of incompleteness, abandonment and coldness. Silence is such an important tool of expression in Bergman precisely because it represents the metaphysical void that is always in the background of human relationships and the human search for meaning. The divine is a precipice revealing emptiness. Anguish is the most common human emotion in Bergman, and it is often born out of the incapacity for connection and love which causes the breakdown of communication.

Esther (Ingrid Thulin) and Anna (Gunnel Lindblom) in The Silence (1963)

All of Bergman’s characters are needy. But they always look for comfort in the wrong places. Or rather, they show that any kind of comfort is fleeting and destroyed by the sovereignty of the ego. The needy nature of humans is in full display when searching for affection and validation on the other, something that shows how weak and insufficient humans tend to consider themselves. Bergman’s characters often search for this validation in words and gestures, which invariably show how cruel and unforgiving humans can be when they realize that their love is a product of the projection of the incessant feelings of self-doubt and insecurity—which love only temporarily conceals. Bergman finds the most insurmountable distance in those instances where humans exhibit the most intense closeness. Opening oneself up is the momentary weakness which gives way to the violent closing that causes love-hate and self-loathing.

The clash of egos and attrition of interests is what causes the tragic symphony of destruction in relationships. All throughout Bergman’s corpus, we see characters who, in trying to attend to the necessities of others, only show how vain and selfish they are. The best example of this are present in Cries and Whispers and Autumn Sonata. In Autumn Sonata, we see Eva (Liv Ullmann), a daughter desperate for the affection of her mother, Charlotte (Ingrid Bergman), who in turn only cares about her art and her arrogance, always pushing her weak, burdensome, undesired offspring away from her life.

Eva (Liv Ullmann) and Charlotte (Ingrid Bergman) in Autumn Sonata (1978)

In Cries and Whispers we see Maria (Liv Ullman), a pitiful creature who desperately seeks validation in the superficial tenderness of her husband and sister, but whose feigned innocence reveals a darker capacity for cruelty, abuse and manipulation. These same characteristics which Maria condemns in her sister Karin (Ingird Thulin), who is openly uncaring and cold, manifest in Maria to show that she was not much different from her sister after all, putting the ultimately selfishness of love and pervasiveness of hate in full display.

The only glimpse of compassion and unselfish love we get in the movie, and a rare moment of genuine tenderness throughout Bergman’s work, is in the famous scene where Anna (Kari Sylwan), the housekeeper, comforts Agnes (Harriet Anderson), the dying sister, in her bosom, giving her a momentary escape from her anxiety of impending death, as well as a break from the increasingly hostile atmosphere of the love-hate game happening outside her scarlet chambers. It is telling that in Bergman's world, this expression of love is more intense and authentic than any other in between couples.

Anna (Kari Sylwan) and Agnes (Harriet Andersson) in Cries and Whispers (1972)

Bergman’s meditation on young love (Summer with Monika) is perhaps his most piercing, wherein he captures the disillusionment that hits individuals when the initial ardent flame of love fades and gives way to true human nature: selfishness. The movie starts with the beauty of woman and nature in full display and towards the end we get Monika (Harriet Andersson) looking at the camera, her eyes empty, hopeless, the lives of the couple forever changed when the barren reality of life and the city hits them. The movie progresses from sexual liberation, the discovery of the touch, closeness and intimacy and gradually shows that the most intimate touch results in the most insurmountable distancing. Even the fruit of their love, their daughter, is given up to adoption by Harry (Lars Ekborg), since the symbol of love that she bears has turned into an expression of the most intense love-hate, a token of a joyful time now lost, a wretched victim of the impossibility of communication and genuine understanding.

Monika (Harriet Andersson) in Summer with Monika (1953)

Reconciliation is a difficult theme for Bergman. Often, a character will not find redemption or salvation in rekindling or in loving once again, but in discovering the liberating power that comes with the realization that love-hate one day dissolves into hate and then into indifference. Until it all fades away, like our bodies and soul.