For whatever reason — our inherited medieval imaginations, the cycles of the moon, perhaps — in their short life the movies have been perennially haunted by a fear that when two or more women are left alone together, some kind of dark magic will inevitably rear its head. No wonder the Bechdel test has historically yielded such dismal results. The amount of trouble film still has getting two women to talk to each other about something other than a man belies how redundant so many writers think (subconsciously or otherwise) such a scene might be. After all, what would two women talk about? What would the conflict be, if not about a man? Wouldn’t it get confusing? Wouldn’t it be too hard for the audience to try to tell them apart? Two women talking: a recipe for witchcraft, an unnatural feedback loop, a cursed redundancy. Ingmar Bergman’s 1. Persona is a landmark for many reasons, but its legacy, which has show no signs of age in the 5. Alone in the Dark is a 2005 Canadian-German-American action horror film loosely based on the fourth installment of Infogrames' video game series of the same name. Alone in the Dark è un videogioco ideato da Frédérick Raynal e distribuito da Infogrames nel 1992, primo capitolo della serie omonima. Si tratta di uno dei primi. While Persona, with its avant-garde flourishes and violent rending of its own film stock, remains uncategorizable (it gets the agreeably redundant “psychological. U. S. The nature of that conversation varies depending on who’s talking, but it always comes back to women onscreen — their clashes and merges, and the way they bear the baggage every viewer brings with them to the cinema. It started from Bergman’s own inability to tell two women apart: After a chance meeting on the street with the film’s eventual stars, Bibi Andersson and Liv Ullmann, Bergman became preoccupied with what he felt was an uncanny resemblance.
Search them on Google Image and you will learn, without having watched a frame of Persona, that the mind sees what it wants to see. There are two contextual details I like about the making of Persona: First, that Bergman had just finished making a parody of Federico Fellini’s 8 . The second, that Bergman wrote it during a bout with pneumonia. It was 1. 96. 5, creatives around the world were discovering the inspirational benefits of mind- altering substances, but few could match the heights Bergman achieved with just a monster dose of fluid in the lungs. Persona introduces us to two women: Elisabet (Liv Ullmann), a famous stage actress, and Alma (Bibi Andersson), her young nurse. Elisabet is going through some kind of nervous crisis that has rendered her — possibly by choice — mute. Alma is assigned to be her caretaker, and eventually the two move to a summer home by the beach. Elisabet remains silent, while Alma, growing more comfortable with her glamorous companion, provides a running monologue, telling Elisabet of her life — her fianc. But Alma’s openness is soon betrayed, and the two become drawn into a kind of dreamy psychological turf war. Their identities begin to overlap — Elisabet’s husband visits and mistakes Alma for his wife; Alma reveals much of Elisabet’s backstory, including the reason behind her apparent loathing of her son. In the end, one woman is left standing, but at that point it’s hard to say which one. While Persona, with its avant- garde flourishes and violent rending of its own film stock,remains uncategorizable (it gets the agreeably redundant “psychological drama” tag on Wikipedia),its descendants collectively form a kind of loose horror subgenre. Even though they’re largely bloodless, they share a sense of pervasive dread — as well as the double female leads and, more often than not, the remote location. But you can take two women, put them in a cabin by a lake, and make them clash, and all you’ll have is a perfectly conventional domestic drama. What moves Persona and films indebted to it into the realm of horror is the liminal dream- space they wade into, or submerge themselves in completely. Though they start with familiar enough dichotomies — virtuous vs. Which, depending on who you are, could be the worst nightmare of all. In going through these “persona swap” films, critic Miriam Bale noted that “one or several of these films is on the list of the favorite films of virtually every woman director or film critic I know.” I can attest to that, and yet I’m struck by how many of these films — and the vast majority of the best of them — are directed and written by men. These films are often excavations of men’s subconscious fears of the slipperiness of identity — the performance of being a woman (hence how many persona- swap heroines are actresses). But they also strike a truthful note for everyone. My persona- swap list differs slightly from Bale’s; I wouldn’t include Desperately Seeking Susan or Freaky Friday, which aren’t operating in the same (winding, multilane) avenue of inquiry. But I would add to the list Heavenly Creatures, Peter Jackson’s 1. New Zealand. Although Pauline and Juliet (Melanie Lynskey and Kate Winslet, both making their screen debuts) remain practically distinct as characters, the mania of their friendship, which most women will tell you is only slightly more intense than any other real- life “best friends forever” pairing between teen girls, is what binds them and makes them capable of more. Heavenly Creatures is very nearly a female- empowerment buddy movie; itcame out three years after Thelma & Louise and is a kind of inverse of it, with an adolescent intensity that makes its emotional peaks all the more externalized and raw. Jackson’s co- writer, Fran Walsh, has said she had been interested in the story of the real Parker- Hulme murder since childhood, less for its grisly elements and more for “the uniqueness of the world the two girls had created for themselves.” When complex depictions of female friendship are rare in pop culture, they can double back and become an object of intangible fascination. Like the mind of a killer, a room where two women are alone becomes a kind of cinematic cave fresco, an unknowable, volatile space that may or may not operate within the realm of sanctioned reality. Robert Altman’s 1. Women, one of the more acknowledged descendants of Persona, is not only about women who are literal roommates, but women who are both half- human in their own ways. Altman’s film almost operates as a science- fiction story about two artificial intelligences “living” together — running up against each other’s incompleteness and unable to give feedback other than an error message. Shelley Duvall’s Millie is the most obvious automaton, an image- obsessed casualty of female consumer culture whose efforts to conform have actually led her to ostracize herself. Sissy Spacek’s Pinky is more of a void, an android whose programming was never completed. I’ll become that person.’”It’s a criticism of a certain kind of anemic idea of womanhood, but it’s not a polemic, even if there are shades of The Stepford Wives in Millie’s “decorated apartment” and horrific dinner- party menu (pigs- in- a- blanket, pudding cups, berry- flavored wine). The idea of 3 Women famously came to Altman in a dream, and like Bergman’s pneumonia haze, the film’s mood and atmosphere is fully formed, while its characters function more as ideas. Both it and Persona speak to a female experience, while never really attempting a literal depiction of it. Both films ask the audience, “You know how women . The audience completes the sentence themselves; therefore it rings true. The women in these films are metaphorical, but their crises are not. When Persona arrived in the States, in 1. Susan Sontag, in her famous essay for Sight & Sound, prefaced her critique by remarking at how elusive the film was for criticism: “The most skillful attempt to arrange a single, plausible anecdote out of the film must leave out or contradict some of its key sections, images and procedures.” For the Times, Bosley Crowther suggested that “studious efforts at interpretation” might not be the most rewarding, suggesting the audience rather engage in “outright involvement of themselves, empathically and esthetically, and let the egos and ids fall where they may.”Very few films can get critics to shut up like this; few have since. It’s interesting to contrast these critical reactions with the popular reception of David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive, probably the most well- known contemporary persona- swap film. Even in 2. 00. 1, the advent of the internet had changed the way films lived, or snowballed, in the public imagination. It was no longer enough to contemplate two women in a room talking. It was now a thing that had to be solved. When I moved to Los Angeles in 2. Hollywood of Mulholland Drive was what I was after. I was slow to fully appreciate the city, but the first flickers that intoxicated me were the dingy diners and sun- bleached stucco apartments flanked with forlorn topiary shrubs, forgotten bungalows where a dead body might have been festering. There were plenty of Mulholland Drive fan sites on which one could find the addresses of all the film’s locations, but while perusing them I noticed a related, but altogether separate, obsession — decoding the film, as if it was some literal puzzle that would turn into a linear, logical series of events if a viewer devoted enough brain power to the task. I loved Mulholland Drive, but it would have never occurred to me to try to figure it out in any more dedicated way than simply letting the film wash over me again and again, revealing its various dimensions and inflections. Betty decides to help her, eager to get involved in a real Hollywood mystery. But as Betty and Rita get closer to the truth, the film breaks, and another reality emerges. Watts and Harring take on different names and characteristics throughout the film; they become lovers, they become scorned lovers, a third actress throws a wrench into their relationship. Betty goes from being helpless Rita’s would- be savior to a brokenhearted wreck. To me, the film always seemed to be about the mourning of a bond with another woman, how even in a nonsexual relationship women take on the characteristics and concerns of each other in a way we can’t with men. The mystery of the film could not be put into words, the “solution,” if you needed one, was the climactic visit to Club Silencio, where both women are seemingly inexplicably moved to tears by a lip- sync performance.
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