Painfully Honest
It’s unbearably wise, & sometimes difficult, but there aren’t many films out there as honest as this one.
Not many movies even come close to this one’s brutality in its genuine awareness of people.
At once poignant, considered, bitter, painfully insightful.
The above are random viewer comments on Scenes from a Marriage, the classic Ingmar Bergman film. After it was first shown in 1973, the counseling and divorce rates in Scandinavia shot up. Bergman says he was trying to show characters who were emotionally illiterate, so I guess that description must also apply to those of us who found the film to be remarkably honest about emotions. Just one of hundreds of examples: each time someone in the film says they don’t care, they clearly do care.
Watching the five hour version recently made me suspect limits to my commitment to honesty. The characters and story were engaging, but I found myself wanting to look away, to think away, to avoid facing the brutal honesty they presented. Is my willingness to be honest a limited resource? That is, if I choose to be more honest about relationships, might I end up being less honest about other things? Or will expressing courage in one area give me more courage in other areas? Arnold Kling explains this is the key question.
"I don't want to look to deeply at that" might well be a slippery slope to dishonesty when you do it because you fear the implications of "that" would be unpleasant. But there are other reasons to say "I don't want to look to deeply at that" that seem to me to be at worst neutral with respect to misleading oneself. Consider, for example, David Friedman's "When I am picking problems to work on, ones that stumped John von Neumann go at the bottom of the stack."
but I think it is often the case that the "I don't want to look to deeply at that" strategy is equivalent to self-deception.
It is, very much so. I wouldn't advocate it. But it doesn't have the cost that believing a lie does. If you can't face an inconvenient truth (and there may be valid reasons for that, especially if you have other pressures at the time) it's much better to turn away than to lie.