Persona and personal meaning

So I was discussing Persona with Ieri the other day. Persona, despite or because of its nihilism, feels like a natural progression from Bergman's earnestly angsty The Seventh Seal and humanistic Wild Strawberries. As we explored our radically different interpretations of Persona, I realized the futility of trying to extract the meaning of it all. Naturally viewers will start a film with the notion that there is a "true" meaning encoded in the mechanics of the film, and that its mechanics dictates the one "real" meaning. This is quite an extreme statement, but I have never been fond of the kind of lunatic interpretive freedom employed by today's intellectually lazy literature and film analysts. Surely even unwatchable tripe like Toy Story can encapsulate metanarratives on Freudian sexuality, capitalism and deconstructionism, but until the film analyst employs at least quasi-scientific methods to back up such claims, he has stated nothing but vagaries. We are irrational by nature, trained by evolution to discover patterns and make deductions based on them. This innocuous irrational bent curbs the spirit of scientific inquiry, the means of obtaining any meaningful conclusion. Hence, my distrust of a deconstructionist reading of text or film.



Ieri proposed that subjective readings were still useful if you directed them at yourself, because one of the best representations of ourselves is painted by our perception of art. Where he saw a film about nothingness, I saw a very luminous exposition on psychological vampirism and violence, and about the dreary banality of communication. Our perceptions say more about us than about the film itself.

Ieri's interpretation: Bergman attempted to expose the hypocrisy of the film script, and through the final burning of the film left a Parthian shot at the viewership's status as the receiving end of an exercise in hypocrisy. It is somewhat shocking when instead of merging smoothly into rolling credits, the film leaves us to witness the destruction of what occupied us for the last hour and half. I agree and disagree; the opening fast cuts of random images (he said he caught a glimpse of Buñuel) shows a Bergman reveling in the artistic freedom of filmmaking, a Bergman who probably wouldn't think of painting artistic communication with the broad brush of hypocrisy. Rather I feel that his intention was to beat communication as a concept with the stick of communication as a medium. The futility of presenting dysfunctional communication is not itself the message. It only serves to hint at the expiration of all hope of connection. Rather than ruminating on the hypocrisy perpetrated by the talking faces on the screen, rather than tsk-tsking at the words uttered during the film, we have to scratch our collective head at everything we ourselves have said so far.

"We are engaged in a struggle with language."

                                     - Wittgenstein

We now go from the freely-interpreting natural habitat of the mind, to our rule-based languages. Rules create meaning, and not vice versa. And since rules are fixed at any time by universal consensus, language - what is essentially the mode of thought - is regimented and not free to interpretation. I wonder to what extent this brings into question the solipsistic nature of deconstructionism and the subjective reading of text.

There is hope yet. The rules of language are in flux, affording us some relativism with respect to the intransigent monolith of language and providing historical insight into semantic transformations. Similarly, in the reading of text and art, à la Derrida, unbeknownst to the writer, the text reveals subconscious narratives on the collective history and culture that had played an invisible hand in its writing. Maybe our collective irrational impulses at interpretation are simply pointing to a greater meaning that surpasses the understanding of any single reader or of the writer himself.