ROBERT BOYERS
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sional political approach is likely to do grave violence to the textured com–
plexity of the work. Thus a feminist critic like Molly Haskell in her book
From Reverence to Rape
can tell us that " any criticism of Bergman must be
prefaced with the understanding that he, more than any other director . . .
took women seriously ... never thought of them as second-class citizens .. .
and watched over the film-birth and blossoming and development of one
extraordinary woman after another," only to devalue most of Bergman's
recent efforts in favor of the most embarrassing and insipid film he has ever
made,
The Touch.
Why? Because the film is ideologically acceptable witpin
the terms of a feminist perspective. Its heroine, a role played with customary
artistry by Bibi Andersson, is in every sense an active, thoroughly modern
woman. Better yet, she is not one of those standard middle-aged , middle–
class wives whose husbands leave them, but a standard middle-aged, middle–
class wife who leaves her husband for a wild sexual fling with-God forbid-a
Jewish intellectual manque played with no distinction at all by Elliot Gould .
Good for her , Ms. Haskell wants to shout-anything but a "wholesome,
antiseptic, normal married life" involving the unnatural suppression of
"rude and bloody passions. " It is not that Ms. Haskell has no right to her
opinions, or that they are poignantly susceptible of evaluation as either trite
or ill-considered. What matters is that Haskell has insisted upon looking at
Bergman's film as a text holding a brief for a particular view of women . Had
she looked at the film as an aesthetic structure with a range of plural inten–
tions she'd have seen that it is unable to elaborate its own images and in–
sights satisfactorily, precisely because Bergman does not believe in his central
female protagonist. It is not merely that he doesn't entirely approve of her
behavior, but that she moves in a universe alien to his , in a hollow, insub–
stantial ethical dimension with none of the terrible density and weight we
associate with Bergman's work. The film reflects what Haskell's ideology
prevents her from observing: the film maker's futile attempt to come to
terms with the progressivist, liberationist milieu of the leisure-time audi–
ences who writhe in delighted ecstasies of vicarious pleasure-pain before
each of his films . Bergman's film is no simple examination of mass-culture
and its insatiable hungers; it is a deliberate and largely unsuccessful capitu–
lation to it. Bergman will not , surely, make another film of this sort.
What Ms. Haskell does with Bergman's poorest film is modest indeed
by comparison with Mellen's treatment of his work in general. Whatever
her faults, Ms . Haskell is no fanatic, and she appears not to have a taste for
deliberate falsification . Ms. Mellen's book, by contrast, is not to be trusted
at any point, for each page contains errors and misleading statements inde–
fensible in a serious work of criticism. That the book has been celebrated by
feminist academics is enough to warrant skepticism about the intellectual
