We recently had the opportunity to view the Swedish classic THE SEVENTH SEAL (1957), Ingmar Bergman’s meditation on death. A large part of the popularity of movies is simply the novelty effect, the exploration of a new topic, or an old topic in a new way. Often, this is how classics are born, and is also, in an entirely different way, why some books and movies (OK, stories in general) have outsized effects on us. To elucidate, I have occasionally found something I experienced as highly stimulating the first time is dull or, more embarrassing, well, embarrassing the second time (Heinlein’s I WILL FEAR NO EVIL falls into this category). The particular story gains classic status because of newness, not because of deepness; and so one might suspect this is true of THE SEVENTH SEAL.
So, as no longer a carrot freshly dragged from the ground, what is still interesting about THE SEVENTH SEAL? As a helpful reminder, a Swedish Crusader returning home washes up, with his squire, on a beach near his home, only to meet with Death. He challenges Death to a chess match, and then goes on his way, occasionally playing a few more moves as he traverses plague-ridden Sweden, searching for his wife, married 10 years ago and not seen since.
Cinematography
Is marvelous. It’s a reminder, for those mesmerized by color, that monochromatics in the hands of a master can be profoundly striking, emphasizing important details and setting scenes in unforgettable ways. 30 seconds into this film, my Arts Editor muttered, “Wow, this is beautifully done!” As she’s highly visually oriented, I knew she meant the cinematography.
Characters
Every character permitted to speak has a story to tell; from Death and the Knight, worn out from his crusading, to the acting troupe they meet on the road, all have something to say, even if not enunciated, as their inner urges, from abstract worries about God, to avarice, fear or lust, force them to their actions. Too many stories are filled with faceless, prolix spear-carriers; here, the spear-carriers are present but are essential landscape, admirable for their appearance and their silence.
The Carts
I actually only mention the Carts, used to haul the Witch to her fiery doom and by the Acting troupe for transportation and housing, because they looked brutally painful to use on those rutted roads; an element of realism in a work beset with realism but seasoned with allegory. For the careful viewer, the casual brutality of travel in them brings to mind questions of convenience vs environmentalism: could we, if we had to, go back to using horses for travel? …But I digress.
Death
The personification of Death is not unique to this story, but it remains an unusual element. As a character, he (a pronoun I find preferable to ‘it’) remains within the bounds one might imagine such an entity should inhabit, while still summoning our interest and wonder. Yes, he harvests the living for his dance, but to what purpose would he agree to a game of chess? At the end of the movie, we wonder whether he has ever lost; for he has, in order to gain an advantage, mislead the Knight into revealing his strategy.
Is this a metaphor of the inevitability of our own mortality? May we delay our termination through various human devices, but never abrogate it? While my interpretation may be easy and even obvious, the questions behind them remain those that most of us will eventually confront. Death’s willingness to play chess also lets him discuss some philosophy with the Knight, illuminating one man’s inner quest and preparation for the inevitable, and that is of interest to the serious audience no matter what the era or their maturity.
Incoherency / The Death of Skat
We speak here of a story, an ordered set of actions and reactions, or so the manuals on story-telling would have us believe. Yet in this movie the plague is moving through the countryside. Death, for all that it is personified, is neither an active nor reactive force, even if he consents to the proffered game of chess. Even as a gender pronoun, he simply is. Such is the plague, a mindless random force that eliminates people.
This is what happens to Skat, the satyric actor. One might say that Death takes a bit of vengeance on him, for in order to escape the fury of a cuckolded blacksmith, Skat fakes his own suicide. Upon his successful escape, he climbs a tree to avoid wolves and ghosts, and at this point Death appears and, despite the semi-comic entreaties of the actor, proceeds to fell the tree, thus destroying the actor.
But Death evinces no grievance over Skat’s deception; Death’s reactions to the actor’s entreaties merely indicate this is a task for Death to undertake, and if he takes some pleasure in it, it is irrelevant to the finality of the act. Skat will now dance at Death’s direction. And this lack of vengeful attitude leads to this conclusion: It’s a random act.
An action without inner motivation. Not a reaction to another’s.
At this juncture, I thank my friend Ward Rubrecht for directing me to a fascinating article by Galen Strawson on the nature of personal narratives, in which she argues,
‘Each of us constructs and lives a “narrative”,’ wrote the British neurologist Oliver Sacks, ‘this narrative is us’. Likewise the American cognitive psychologist Jerome Bruner: ‘Self is a perpetually rewritten story.’ And: ‘In the end, we become the autobiographical narratives by which we “tell about” our lives.’ Or a fellow American psychologist, Dan P McAdams: ‘We are all storytellers, and we are the stories we tell.’ And here’s the American moral philosopher J David Velleman: ‘We invent ourselves… but we really are the characters we invent.’ And, for good measure, another American philosopher, Daniel Dennett: ‘we are all virtuoso novelists, who find ourselves engaged in all sorts of behaviour… and we always put the best “faces” on it we can. We try to make all of our material cohere into a single good story. And that story is our autobiography. The chief fictional character at the centre of that autobiography is one’s self.’
So say the narrativists. We story ourselves and we are our stories. There’s a remarkably robust consensus about this claim, not only in the humanities but also in psychotherapy. It’s standardly linked with the idea that self-narration is a good thing, necessary for a full human life.
I think it’s false – false that everyone stories themselves, and false that it’s always a good thing. These are not universal human truths – even when we confine our attention to human beings who count as psychologically normal, as I will here. They’re not universal human truths even if they’re true of some people, or even many, or most. The narrativists are, at best, generalising from their own case, in an all-too-human way. At best: I doubt that what they say is an accurate description even of themselves.
At length, Strawson suggests that some people have strong senses of a personal, coherent story, while other folks are more witnesses to an incoherent Universe – or self.
Similarly, the reaction to the plague will depend on one’s sense of how much the Universe is a story, or a random set of actions in which we attempt to act, senselessly, in some coherent fashion.
Epitomizing this agony, near the end the Knight questions the Witch, a teenage girl named Tyan condemned to be burned for carnal knowledge of the Devil. As to whether she had actually had contact with the Devil, we are left to decide. From here:
TYAN: But he is with me everywhere. I only have to stretch out my hand and I can feel his hand. He is with me now too. The fire won’t hurt me. He will protect me from everything evil.
KNIGHT: Has he told you this?
TYAN: I know it.
KNIGHT: Has he said it? [Said forcefully]
TYAN: [Unaffected by the Knight’s forcefulness] I know it, I know it. You must see him somewhere, you must. The priests had no difficulty seeing him, nor did the soldiers. They are so afraid of him that they don’t even dare touch me.
The Knight’s pursuit of the question of God is interchangeable with the question of story: are we part of a greater story, or is our consciousness an evolutionary experiment in the ongoing quest for survival, and our perception of a story – as strong or weak as it may be – a mere illusion in a random Universe devoid of meaning and purpose?
For the viewer for whom their religious persuasion has become part of the bedrock of their lives, questions of these erupt, if ever, with great rarity but with debilitating force, fracturing lives long spent in certain assumptions. But for those of us who find our religious assumptions more frail, questioned, or even outright false, the subject of meaning and purpose can be devilish if we have failed to find the inner meanings as instructed by the atheists and agnostics of the age. These eternal questions will attract generations of audiences. That’s what ultimately makes this such a classic film.
