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Schadenfreude and the Seven Deadly Sins [spoilers]

posted 8 years ago by thesnowleopard
2 replies | jump to latest

I found it interesting how the film deliberately sets you up to want things and then gives you that emotional payback in the worst and most devastating way.

For example, dark-haired, Pagan Ingeri is shown as being treated poorly for being pregnant. It's implied she is a bastard herself and there is little sympathy for her plight (whoever the father is, she's bearing all the punishment alone), or respite from her work duties because of it. And we also meet her first, when she's up before dawn, trying to light the fire. This turns our sympathies naturally toward her.

The film contrasts Ingeri with Christian, beautiful, blonde, buxom, virginal, horrendously spoiled Karin, who is too lazy to get up with everyone else or dress without her mother's help. Karin is as sweet-tempered as Ingeri is bitter, but she is also complacent, perhaps not the sharpest tool in the shed, and she assumes her place in the world is fully deserved. If Ingeri suffers from envy and (maybe) lust, Karin is a poster child for pride, sloth and possibly gluttony.

So, I think we want to see Karin get taken down a peg. But when Bergman does it, it's so horrible, so far beyond what this innocent girl deserves, that there is no way to enjoy the schadenfreude. You keep hoping it will stop with "just" their being creepy to her, or at least "just" with the rape, or even "just" the murder, but no, they have to strip her body and go off to seek shelter at her parents' house, no less. The punishment this poor kid suffers never seems to stop.

In this sense, Ingeri is the audience's stand-in, getting what she wished for and then some, and totally regretting it. We also get the Virgin/Whore dynamic entirely turned on its head, where the Virgin dies horribly and the Whore lives to tell the tale.

Similarly, we want the rapists to pay and pay dearly, but then we're shocked by the murder of the boy. Was he really guilty enough to deserve a death like that? Does it even matter?

There's a lot of symbolism of Pagan vs. Christian that's interesting, as well as some unexpected (and not entirely explained) character dynamics. For example, the one-eyed man at the mill represents Odin, as does the crow who watches where Karin's body lies. Ingeri is convinced she "wished" Karin harm and Odin fulfilled her wish far beyond her worst fantasies of envy and malice. Maybe she's right?

On the (mostly) Christian side, there's the spring that flows after a repentant Töre makes his vow and the parents lift the murdered daughter up. But flowing water and springs in Celtic and Germanic lore are as revered as they are in Christianity. Are these people truly giving up Paganism for Christianity, or is this a more complicated act of giving up the darkness and bloodiness of revenge for the light of repentance and forgiveness, regardless of religious belief?

Finally, there's the scene where Töre gets Ingeri to tell him what happened. At first, she tries to flee and he's rough with her. But as she pours out her heart and her sense of awful guilt, he holds her gently and seems to realize for the first time that his good, Christian family's dynamic turns on an unconscious and unacknowledged injustice that allowed them to make a heavily pregnant woman do hard labor while letting their lazy young daughter do nothing.

We saw him "notice" Ingeri with concern earlier that morning. We never learn why the family took her in, or who the father of her child is. Was she seduced or was she raped? And why can't she get any justice for that?

It's not even clear how she is related to the family. Is she Töre's bastard? Is Töre the father of *her* child? Something is going on here that makes him consider her family and therefore not to blame, because technically, he could consider her as guilty as the rapists--she certainly does.

To a large extent, the rapists die, not just because they're rapists (rape was not always a capital crime in medieval society; murder wasn't always, either, for that matter), but because they are strangers. Not even the boy escapes Töre's wrath, so it's not as though he is automatically incapable of harming someone who is only peripherally "guilty." Something makes Ingeri not guilty to him, or at least forgivable and not subject to his wrath.

Ingeri is not a stranger. Not only does Töre not hurt her during her confession--not only is there not even a hint from his body language that he wants to hurt her--but he then instructs her to gather things and help him participate in a Pagan ritual of cleansing, expiation and retribution on the true culprits. As he does his wife, he includes Ingeri in the revenge. Whether she's related by blood or not, whether she's a servant or not, she is family. And in the end, Ingeri finds peace and further redemption with a self-baptism in the spring.

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[–] butaneggbert 8 years ago

What an excellent post! Makes me want to sit for wine or coffee with you for hours, hashing this over.

My one very strong difference is in the rapists being killed primarily because they're strangers. Their place in the narrative is the representation of evil (maybe, as compared to Ingeri, irredeemable evil, at least in the case of the two men). The dichotomy between who belongs and who doesn't isn't a strong element in the tale. It would dilute, too, the near-complete evil of the two men.

Töre even acknowledges familiarity with their town and its troubles, so they're not utterly foreign to him. In a parable drawn in such broad strokes as this, establishing them as strangers (utterly foreign) would have omitted this.

It stands out to me that the three were killed in descending order of criminality: the one who made the first move on her (betraying the pastoral enchantment of the little luncheon, as Karin was spinning it), pushing up to her face and giving her the first fear, taking the lead in the rape, and killing her, was first to go.

By the time the two men are dead, Töre has lost control and judgment. Märeta has already taken in the boy's innocence - noting his sickness at the table, finding the blood on his face. She even tried to stop Töre from hurting him. It was the boy's innocence that brought Töre back to earth to decry what he found himself doing.

Did you notice that Karin and the boy shared the only silver-bright hair in the whole piece? No one else had that. Some facial characteristics in common, too. They could easily be taken for brother and sister.

I think the similarity was a deliberate link - both were flawed, ultimately without guilt, died unjustly. That makes Töre's sin clear.

There's arguably a link, too, between Töre and the bald rapist. Both were brought up short by what they'd done - the rapist crawled off to the side and curled in on himself, unable to look at Karin. Both of them recognized their shame, then roused themselves to do the next thing (hiding the body in one case, finding it in the other.

It's the innocent boy who's horrified and paralyzed - another contrast with the evil men.

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[–] thesnowleopard 8 years ago

My one very strong difference is in the rapists being killed primarily because they're strangers. Their place in the narrative is the representation of evil (maybe, as compared to Ingeri, irredeemable evil, at least in the case of the two men). The dichotomy between who belongs and who doesn't isn't a strong element in the tale. It would dilute, too, the near-complete evil of the two men.

I don't agree that this isn't a factor. In the original medieval tale, the father kills all but one of the killers, believing them strangers, only to discover that these are the sons he and his wife abandoned years before. Vengeance then turns to horror, even though the original crime is actually worse for the boys having slaughtered their own sisters.

By the time the two men are dead, Töre has lost control and judgment. Märeta has already taken in the boy's innocence - noting his sickness at the table, finding the blood on his face. She even tried to stop Töre from hurting him. It was the boy's innocence that brought Töre back to earth to decry what he found himself doing.

I think this is an interesting flip on the medieval tale, in which the father does spare the last boy. Atanarjuat does something similar and opposite with a medieval Inuit tale. In that film, the evil rapists/murderers are spared their lives initially, only to be driven out into the winter on their own (where they may well die, anyway, but their blood will not be on the hands of their kinsmen). In the original legend, they are killed immediately as soon as the vengeful surviving brother traps them in the tent.

Did you notice that Karin and the boy shared the only silver-bright hair in the whole piece? No one else had that. Some facial characteristics in common, too. They could easily be taken for brother and sister.

It's probably a call-back to the legend.

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