The Vampire's In Us

Blood-sucking. Lust. Sexual inhibition and frustration. They've been in the movies ever since there were movies to talk about, in the French silents and the like. They're the most primitive, basic reason why we go to them, and the evolution of this exciting perversion is a fascinating thing to follow. For the blog-a-thon, I'd like to write a few sentences about one of my favorite films, one in which the vampiric component of film and audience is most shamelessly in evidence, and one of the most horrific works of art ever made.

Ingmar Bergman's Persona might seem at first like an odd, inadequate choice for a Halloween post, and the educated will tell you how it's one of the most complex works of psychology to be committed to celluloid. There's truth to the claim, to be sure, but ignoring the source of Persona's unabashed, terrible, passionate eroticism is to deny its basic essence.

The movie plays quite like a dream, but its ambiguity threatens to turn into nightmare. The tall, blonde, gorgeous Scandinavian talents Bibi Andersson and Liv Ullmann play the leading roles, a nurse (Alma) and an actress (Elisabeth), and the sensuality in their relationship is made evident from the get-go. Alone in an island, the horror of their isolation and loneliness is evaded by the two souls coming together, forming a strong friendship in which the nurse tells all, and the actress (apparently mute) listens. The two creatures, coming ever closer to each other, begin to look the same, feel the same, become the same.

In the most erotic movie scene ever shot, the nurse lets out all her deepest insecurities, fantasies, and memories. She tells the actress of a past encounter with two underage boys, and as she goes on about them touching her and her letting them touch her and relinquish herself to them, the ecstasy in her voice and intonation reaches an almost unbearable high, and so does our attachment to what happens.

The scene is followed by one just as iconic and memorable, as Elisabeth and Alma wander around a surreally lit bedroom as if they were vampires, and they join and become one before us. In love with the notion of being loved, Alma allows Elisabeth to enter her, and Elisabeth's shown in a vampiric fashion, as if sucking Alma's blood were a symbol of sexual consummation. Everything that follows is frustration, anger and vengeance in a relationship that has gone far too deep, in a desire to love and to be loved that will inevitably lead to character destruction. It's in this masterly sequence that the movie most clearly reveals its roots, and it turns us into vampires; we need the movie to fulfil us even as we recognize the impossibility of the wanted satisfaction: the film will leave us all too soon.

David Lynch would repeat the motions forty years later with Mulholland Drive, in which two actresses are driven to their deaths by success and frustration, following a closeness made up of intense desire and love. In the Lynch masterpiece, the sexual tension is built upon and it's consummated, only to leave us brutally devastated in the scenes that follow. In Bergman's, the act is figurative and brief, but it leaves just as great a mark.

And it's when these films are over, leaving us feeling rejected and in a state of exhilaration, that we get just how much there's to relish in, and lust after, the sinful condition of the deepest of confidantes, cinema.

For more vampires (or actual vampires for a change), go to the blog-a-thon headquarters.