The Virgin Spring by Ingmar Bergman

My undergraduate university showed a classic film every Monday night, in the only large, auditorium style classroom on the campus.  The university was proud of having very small classes with a very low student to faculty ratio, and proud that all faculty had doctorates. There were no large lectures except in sciences like biology, chemistry and physics. Everyone taking those subjects would have a large hall lecture each week and then two small lab classes with never more than a dozen students and a doctorate.

I got a full academic scholarship to some Big 8 university. I trembled at the thought of going to such a big school with many thousands of students. Fortunately, the school I went to gave me an almost free ride. I picked it because it was small, sixteen hundred students, and because it was known for its academic rigour.  Boring. Get to the movie, Tree.

The Virgin Spring was not the first movie I saw in that science hall. The first one was shown as a part of Freshman Studies, a course all freshman had to take that was an overview of general humanities. In Freshman Studies, we watched another Bergman film, the name I cannot recall. What I remember is that the film is noted for a very long, single camera shot of a conversation in a carriage, the camera going back and forth as each person speaks. I guess the story didn't take with me the way The Virgin Spring did.

The Virgin Spring penetrated my whole being. A sweet, beautiful young girl, about the age I was when I was incested, is sent to buy candles at the church. A maidservant accompanies her but abandons her, not that a maid could have saved her from the two herdsmen who raped and killed the beautiful, innocent, even angelic child. She approached the herdsman and offered to share her lunch with them, so they raped and killed her.

A part of me died when I was seven. Maybe that is why the movie rended my being into many broken bits. I couldn't shake the scene in the woods for weeks. It is a very beautiful, shadowed glen, a magical nurturing forest in which nature heals us.  One minute, heaven on earath, the next minute, hell for that poor child.

I just read the Wikiedia review. The herdsman take the child's clothing and then, unknowingly, stop at the girl's home. Her family offers them food, and the herdsman offer the girl's clothing for sale. The parents realize they have murdered their beloved child. The father kills the herdsman and the boy with them, who did not do anything to the child and was too small to save her but the father did not know this. And he was blind in rage.

My mom was blind in rage when she found out my father was incesting me and she killed me by beating me 100 times with my dad's belt. She hit me as hard as she could, counting out every single stroke. She paused when she grew tired. My father, at least eight inches taller than my mom and a large, physically powerful man could have simply retrained her. Instead he stood alongside her, watched her belting my backside, legs, buttucks and back, leaving welts, sometimes two if one of her lashings hit both legs. A few times Dad would say "Mary Ann, that's enough, you can stop now." She said "No, I said 100, it has to be 100. She has to learn."

My mom was out of her mind.  It was 1960, the year The Virgin Spring came out. She had, then, three other children and had dropped out of college after one year to marry my father. How would she support us? Child support was not enforced back then. So her mind chose to blame me, as I had seduced my father.

It was the death of me because I realized, in my hours of crying hard afterwards, that I was all alone in this world. I still am.  As I cried, I went over all the adults in my world, trying to think of someone who could help me. Aunts?  They would talk to my folks, who would be mortified that I had aired the dirty linen and it would not have stopped me. I knew nothing about social services, like child protection. I thought about asking my best friend's mom, who lived next door, but she was a bit of a flibbertigibbit and she alllowed her husband to smack my best friend around, although her father never molested. Once, though, when she needed a haircut and he was drunk, for he was a serious alcoholic, he ordered her to get her bangs out of her eyes. She could not get her bangs to stay out of her eyes. She and I discussed strategies and decided we'd just stay in her room until her mom came home and let her deal with the father's drunken anger. My friend wore her hair in a pixie cut so she either didn't have barrettes, which could have pulled her hair back from her eyes, or we just didn't think of barrettes. I remember both of us trembling in that bedroom. I felt reasonably safe, believing her father would not hit a child from another family. He was angry, drunk and bored. Looking to entertain himself, I think, as drunks sometimes do, he called her out into the living room. Neither she nor I disoabeyed our parents. Christ, after my beating, which was the only time my mother ever struck me, I fell all over myself trying to please her to avoid another one. My friend may have had struggles she never told me.  I know she was embarrassed that I saw her father drunk that day. She had never told me her dad was a drunk. I knew. Everyone in the neighborhood knew. But between her and I, we were just happy together and never discussed either of our private family lives. I sure never told her I had been brutally beaten. I was ashamed that I had such a bad mother. Sometimes I internalized mom's twistedness and blamed myself, as she did, for dad molesting me, and for mom beating me.