by Douglas Messerli
Ingmar Bergman (screenplay), Alf Sjöberg (director) Hets (Torment) / 1944
Alf Sjöberg’s memorable movie, Torment, begins with an incident wherein a young boy arrives late
for school, missing early morning prayers. As he enters the towering
staircases, trying to
In the very next scene, we see that
things are not much different for the seniors of this school, particularly in
the classroom of their Latin teacher, who they have nicknamed, with good
reason, “Caligula” (Stig Järrel), who torments them during their attempts to
translate Latin passages into Swedish, threatening and demeaning them upon even
slight infractions, and demanding immediate rote memory of Latin endings. Like
the teacher in the first scene, Caligula seems to delight in their petty errors
and his gratified by serious failures, awarding demerits.
Although all these
young men are terrorized by and hate him, one handsome student, Jan-Erik
Widgren (Alf Kjellin) is clearly Caligula’s favorite target, continually
putting the diligent Jan-Erik to the test, and threatening him, pointing stick
in hand, for even the most minor of mistranslations and for his use even of the
Swedish language.
Although neither
the director nor the screenwriter, Ingmar Bergman, openly suggest any sexual
reasons behind Caligula’s torture of the boy, it is apparent that, as in the
film’s first scene, there is something perverse in the teacher’s obvious focus
on Jan-Erik, certainly the best-looking boy in the classroom; if his behavior
isn’t a manifestation of a sublimated sexual attraction, it is, nonetheless,
possible that the ugly older man is envious of young charge, and determined,
for that very reason, to do him in.
Throughout the
film, moreover, Caligula admits to others and the headmaster that he has
recently been “sick,” implying that his intolerance of his students has
something to do with a recent illness from which he has apparently not yet
completely recovered. He never makes clear what this illness might have been,
but surely it must have a relationship to his treatment of Jan-Erik
When, soon
after, we discover that the sleazy teacher also has his eye on a young worker
in the local tobacconist shop, Bertha, we perceive that this “sickness” is even
deeper that we might have imagined. If he, at least, pushes Jan-Erik away from
him or, more simply, wishes to control him, his attempts to woe Bertha are far
more nefarious and disgusting.
Caligula, we
soon discover, has been following and, possibly, threatening Bertha for some
time, leading her to drink. When Jan-Erik,
after
a night out with his classmate, discovers her
Terrified that
her mysterious stalker will try to enter her apartment—even though she has
changed the lock on her door—she begs her underage savior to stay with her, not
only depriving him of his needed study time, but ultimately seducing him—in an
act that today we would brand as child-abuse—into her bed.
At least her
“abuse” is of the pleasant kind, and this young Werther—Jan-Erik imagines
falling in love with one woman for whom he will play his violin—quickly falls
madly in love with her, abandoning his studies to be in her presence.
If Caligula has
long stalked her, with Jan-Erik’s interest in Bertha he becomes even more
compelled to torment the woman—and, in his own version of child-abuse—his young
male charge.
Although
Jan-Erik calls the police, accusing Caligula as having murdered Bertha, like
all the adult beings in this film, the police dismiss the boy’s assertions,
finding that Bertha died of a heart attack, freeing Caligula to not only slap
Jan-Erik in front of the far gentler headmaster (Olof Winnerstrand) but to
demand the boy’s expulsion.
Given the
public criticisms of this first version, Sjöberg
and Bergman added a final scene wherein, after all the other students have
graduated, the headmaster visits Jan-Erik, now inhabiting Bertha’s old
apartment, telling him that he will help him to get back on track and find a
new life.
Caligula arrives
to seek forgiveness for his behavior, but his former student turns from him,
walking into the light, now free from all the “educational” abuse that even the
family doctor has described as something closer to living in a concentration
camp (a theme which is underscored by a scene showing Caligula reading Dagposten, the Swedish Nazi newspaper).
Many critics
have proclaimed that the teacher called “Caligula” represents the increasing fascist
elements taking over in Europe, and there is quite obviously enough in this
film to give their viewpoint credence. As commentator Tom Brayton suggests in
his on-line review in Alternate Ending:
“The film is part of the long, glorious tradition of movies
similar, but worse than, Jean Vigo's 1933 masterpiece Zero for Conduct.
At a school in Stockholm, several boys nearing the end of their secondary
school careers are suffering under the tyrannic rule of a Latin teacher they
have taken to referring as "Caligula" (Stig Järrel). He treats his
classroom like a kingdom - or more to the point, a dictatorship. Given the
first draft's 1942 composition date, and the 1944 release date, it hardly seems
reasonable to doubt that we have, in front of us, a metaphor for the rise of
totalitarianism in Europe, though I do not know that either Sjöberg or Bergman
ever claimed as much. Still, given Sweden's very particular situation during
the Second World War - officially neutral but geographically close enough to
Germany that it somewhat nervously acceded to German influence - and Bergman's
own youthful fascination with Hitler's charisma, before the developments of the
late '30s shocked that out of him, it is exceedingly hard not to see this as a
story about contemporary politics, and not just a coming-of-age story about a
student finding it in himself to resist a single teacher's casual brutality.”
Yet even more
commentators have continued to puzzle over the reasons for the professor’s
behavior to his fellow students, some hinting that the lack of motivation
weakens the film, and turns it into a mere melodrama. Obviously, Caligula is a
kind of sadist, but so common, as the writer of The Film Sufi review
argues, not to even be taken too seriously. This reviewer even dismisses the
political interpretations, arguing that it is simply an exaggerated vision of
the student, Jan-Erik, himself:
“But I think such interpretations offer an overly
externalized picture. I see the film as
primarily an internalized nightmare on the part of the young protagonist,
Jan-Erik. When you are young and
impressionable like Jan-Erik, the world seems to have an overabundance of
threatening characters like Caligula. Actually, the Caligula character, while
objectionable, is not all that unusual – you have probably run into many
instances of people of his type. These people are troublesome, but they are
usually not monstrous ogres, and anyway there are just too many of them. Here,
it is true that Caligula’s insidious hectoring of the alcoholic and vulnerable
Bertha contributed to her heart attack, but, regrettably, there are many such
people, and we do not have grounds for having them all arrested. We have to
deal with them in a civil way and carry on with our higher pursuits. This is what Jan-Erik has to do at the end of
the film. So, yes, Torment is essentially a mood-piece about the traumas
of youth.”
Strangely, this
argument seems to only concur with most of the adults of this film, who do not
even take Bertha’s death seriously, and certainly couldn’t be bothered by the horrified
reports of what they see merely as merely an overwrought youth. In this case
the critic appears to be siding with the villains of the piece, the society
which looks the other way when it encounters a system—in this case the state of
education in the day—which, again as the good doctor has observed (as
summarized by the Film Sufi commentator) “overworks the students with
pedantic, narrow, and meaningless exercise of no good purpose.”
I would argue
that all we need do is return to Caligula’s own assessment of himself: he has
been sick, he insists. That sickness fits the pattern of a closeted gay man’s
recognition of his own attraction to men, or in this case, young boys. It seems
quite apparent to me that, as I hint above, it is his own attraction to
Jan-Erik that forces him to keep at the greatest distance that keep’s the boy
by constantly enforcing various punishments to maintain a hostile relationship and
at arm’s length. The metaphor of the teacher on the chase has already been
established in the very first scene of this film, and Caligula is careful that
he might not fall into that pattern.
A common
resolution to such feelings in closeted men is to search out a woman who might
be attracted or needy enough to involve herself in a sexual relationship with
the individual, thus proving to himself that he is a heterosexual at heart.
Caligula has seemed to find such a figure in the alcoholic shop clerk Bertha. And
despite her abhorrence and fear of him, he literally stalks her as a solution
to his increasing attraction to his student.
Inevitably, when
he discovers that his student and his would-be heterosexual solution have
joined up in their own sexual relationship, his entire world collapses; he has
lost both his originally sublimated lover and its mediating alternative. Such a
diseased mind, a self-hating homophobe in love with a boy, now has only the
choice of destroying both if he can. In this case, it is the professor who is
the tormented beast, who, in turn, torments the others around him as a palliative
to his own sickened condition.
The tacked on
last scene, accordingly, is not at all in accordance with the rest of the film,
and actually weakens the original horror story which is not that different from
many a later psychological nightmare Bergman would create.
For that last
scene, Sjöberg was absent, having other commitments, enabling the young
Bergman—the man who would eventually rise to take over Sjöberg’s position as
the most noted of Swedish directors—to direct his very first scene.
Yet this picture
is still very much Sjöberg’s film, with its intense use of deep blacks and
luminescent whites, along with the director’s fascination with winding and
treacherous staircases—clearly representing the terrifying paths these young
students have daily to undertake in order to become adults—and the many
mirrored images which the children (and audience) perceive but seemingly have
little effect on the frozen-minded and visually blind adults, who like
vampires, cannot see themselves for who they truly are in the mirrors images.
Los Angeles,
April 17, 2018
Reprinted from World
Cinema Review (April 2018).
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