Shame and Shame

Rare is the war film that refuses to identify it's own backdrop; rare is the war film that does not set itself some time, some place, some zeitgeist in our construction of history. I realized this only after finishing Shame (1968) -- Bergman's masterful foray into the war genre -- as I grappled with the weight that this film pressed upon me. Ultimately, I settled on the fact that Shame resists direct interpellation into the seams of the genre. It's a profoundly anti-war film -- not simply for it's profoundly anti-war content and humanist resonance -- but also for it's profound disavowal of the explicit norms of war cinema, namely, it's failure to identify of the conflict in question, it's failure to attend directly to a history which the audience is already familiar. It denies the audience it's habituated understanding of warfare (Hitler as incarnation of evil, the dichotomous good/bad mentality, history as complete documentation of events...) and instead crafts it's own conflict, it's own war to depict something altogether novel about warfare. I think Shame lands with such a specific weight: it's the weight of warfare in general; in other words, it depicts the absolute-ness of war, a near Platonic form of war's effect. When one is deprived of historical content, one must face war's effect in a whole new way: one can no longer think "the events I am seeing on screen are justifiable, because the actions of Hitler/Confederates/Rome/Bad Guys were atrocious and needed to be stopped", as the film has been stripped of this easy moral-logical defense against any depicted violence and destruction. In the face of blistering objectivity, depicted in Shame, one can only gaze at the pure -- and paradoxically -- subjective effect that war in general has upon those involved, unable to escape the stunning horror of it all.

This is not to say that the film is simply a "war is hell" sort of experience either -- even if it is that in it's own way. Comparisons to Come and See (1985) might be most apt, in this respect, for their shared tone, their spiraling descent into what anyone would consider a hell-scape, marked by futility, confusion and humanity's ultimate degradation into it's most vile form. But Shame is not just a "war is hell" humanist affair. In it's generality, all that remains is the individual, and their attempt at survival. We might see, one sense, Sartre's famous line "hell is other people", embedded at the heart of this film: it is not, ultimately, the bombs, the guns, the planes, the history that destroys the lives of Eva and Jan. Bergman places that destruction firmly on their interactions with others and others' interactions with them. When Shame strips away all known historical significance, when Shame strips away context, the characters interactions with others becomes the only possible way to understand the atrocity at hand.  

All that's left -- in this "hell is other people" situation -- is shame. The failure to act, the act of saving oneself at the expense of another, the sight of weakness, acts of favoritism that allow one more comfort than another... these situations leave the main characters asking "why me, why am I alive?", a question that can only be answered shamefully: "I am still here because I have friends in high places; I am here because I killed that friend to free myself." In one sense, the specificity of this sort of survival to war-time should not be underestimated; this film brilliantly depicts precisely how the unethical wartime acts come to completion (Bergman mentions in an interview that Shame attempts to answer the question "what would you do in wartime?"). Yet, we might see this film as more metaphorical, in another sense. Are we not all, sometimes, deeply ashamed of our own position in the world? Maybe this shame finds itself manifested in memories of our own unethical moments, our own failures. Maybe it comes at the expense of find ourselves well off in a world of suffering, pain, and war. Bergman's choice to decontextualize warfare allows the audience to experience the near impossibility of acting well during war (would you really house Anne Frank, when Nazi storm-troopers parade down your street, and stories circulate about the killing of entire German families suspected of housing Jewish people?), but also to see how this shame might very well be a more general, permanent fixture of human life (what are you doing right now, as wars and protests rage around you...? what am I doing...?).

Shame leaves us without hope, stranded at sea, cast out of home, incapable of being fully human (having a family, children, a life, happiness). Yet, the film does leave it's main characters with dreams. The last lines: Eva describes a dream she had, telling Jan of the beauty of burning roses, covering a wall, destroyed in the heat of war. In one sense, we might identify shame at the heart of these lines: finding beauty in something horrible (the destruction of beauty as beautiful seems horrifying). The pessimistic reading of the end might be that shameful acts are all that can be known, all that those that experience the shameful can feel. In other words, shame becomes a part of those that are shamed. Yet, in another (more optimistic) sense, we might see this as an admission, when all hope and life seems lost, that there can be beauty in shame, and that shame does not necessarily culminate in the inaccessibility of beauty. In fact, we might see the last moments of the film as a resurrection of humanity, through shame, a dream like attempt to find something human (beauty is a profoundly human thing) in the midst of the darkness, the apparent end of lives. Yet, we might even identify this act, searching for beauty at the apparent end of ones life, as a shameful act, but an act that must be done regardless, so as to find ones humanity in the face of destruction and death. It's a challenging ending for a (war-)film for this reason: the resolution of the main character's shame comes as the impossible act of finding beauty (symbolically) in their own horrific acts (unlike the ending of Come and See, which feels profoundly humanist, by comparison). It's this impossibility which I find most compelling about the film. Specifically, Shame makes war shameful (and the war-film itself, I think), in it's meaningless, anti-human nature; through its disavowal of context, temporality, and history, war becomes profoundly unethical, without defense; the audience blisters under the weight of war in its most incalculable. Yet, the film still finds a perverse sort of beauty within it the very shame of war -- in the love and devotion between the two conflicted characters, the symbolic beauty of roses burning under bombs. More generally, Shame identifies shame as a fixture of life, one that we are paradoxically called to find beauty within. One is never free of shame, one must live with it, and attempt (lest they slip into a deep depression) to find some sort of solace in it. They must attempt to move forward, trying to find some human beauty.