"Scenes From A Married Life", Or The Dangers Of Too Good Relationships

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

Starting to watch Ingmar Bergman's film "Scenes from Married Life", I thought about how comfortable these relationships are, how little aggression and conflicts they have. The film consists of 6 scenes showing the married life of Johan and Marianne over 20 years. Desperately, spouses do not notice a fairly large part of their needs in order to satisfy the desires of society and parents

This film gave me the inspiration for Donald Winnicott's concept of a “good enough” mother. Like a spouse in a relationship, a mother cannot be ideal and satisfy absolutely all of the baby's needs. In a healthy environment, a mother can only be “good enough”. Such a mother tries to give the child support and understanding, at the same time, without limiting his freedom and creativity, without imposing her desires and unfulfilled dreams on him. This is a mother who is frustrated by how much to give the child, over time, the opportunity to find his identity, to understand his desires and needs. Such a mother pays more attention to satisfaction with each other's relationships than to social rules and stereotypes.

In the film, we see how desperately the characters are trying to fulfill all the points in order to correspond to the "ideal" family, where everything is scheduled in detail for years to come. So, they always spend Sunday with their parents and know where and when they will celebrate certain holidays. But suddenly, behind the curtain of plans and commitments, we see two spouses, driven into a trap, where married life takes away even more from them the autonomy and spontaneity so necessary for the creative living of life. Where Johan discovers that he is very fond of poetry, but cannot be realized in this, and Marianne from childhood wanted to become an actress, but works as a lawyer.

One can also think of another concept of Winnicott, namely, the false and true "I". The false "I" serves as a kind of mask that covers the true desires and needs of the individual, when the true "I" does not withstand the onslaught of the environment. It took Johan and Marianna 20 years before they found their true selves. There is no boredom in him, and thanks to him we are able to creatively and vividly experience the moments of our life. At the end of the film, we see how their relationship becomes more lively and open.

One might think that a couple becomes creative when conditions are created in it for creativity and the realization of their capabilities. Conditions that were not available with parent objects.

In the course of the film itself, a lot of phrases slip through which one can judge about the growing discontent and crisis in the couple, the crisis of the false "I".

Some of them:

"The absence of problems is the biggest problem", "I just want to pierce your lucky ball." "We did not choose such a life for ourselves, or maybe our mothers chose it for us." After visiting a psychotherapist, the main character argues: "Why can't you enjoy what is in this world. You can be big and fat and always in a good mood."

We see many scenes indicating dissatisfaction with the marriage of both spouses. Marianne listens to a lengthy monologue of a woman who has never been happily married and only waited for her children to grow up so that she could get a divorce. She says: "I imagine to myself that these possibilities of love are in me, only they are in a closed room and the life that I have led up to now more and more covered these possibilities with a shell." And, Marianna, unwittingly tries on these possibilities, trying to understand whether she was happy with her partner and in life in general. Has she ever felt free and creative.

"Our life together is full of tricks and prohibitions."

And so, one day he tells her that he has found a mistress. She admits, “This is so weird. I didn’t understand and didn’t notice.”And it seems that she doesn’t even suffer because of this. After which Marianne says absolutely distantly:“Let's go to bed. It's getting late. "And invites him to pack his bag." You know how long I kept it in myself. Throw you away. "" We were suffocating from lack of oxygen."

He leaves and she realizes that her whole life has collapsed. But it seems that it fell apart much earlier. “All my life I've tried to please everyone and pretend.”

And only when they signed the divorce papers, he was able to tell her how much he periodically hated her.