Scandinavian Filmcourse 4

The line drawn between Alexander and Hamlet could be easily dismissed were Igmar Bergman's genius not comparable to that of William Shakespeare. Alexander, the young boy in Bergman's somewhat autobiographical film, "Fanny och Alexander," is haunted by the ghost of his father, a man of the theater who valued the little world inside of the theater's four walls. The value of the theatrical realm comes across from his father almost as an attack on the outside world. The film, from that moment forth, is an attempt by Bergman and by Alexander to ameliorate the father's grievances about the world outside the walls of the theater. In real life, Bergman's father was a clergyman, not an actor or director, but Bergman sees fit to haunt his cinematic alter-ego with the paternal ghost of the theater, as Hamlet's father famously haunts Shakespeare's Danish Prince.
If the Ghost in Shakepeare's "Hamlet" saught bloody vengeance and restoration of the crown, the vengeance which young Alexander takes up has a more subtly contrived artistic bent than an overt political one. Bergman always confronts the question of religion and punishment, but in "Fanny och Alexander" he breaks from the methods of his father and takes up a punishing force all his own. The step-father in the film enacts a ritual lifted from a practice of Bergman's real father, a clergyman. In his autobiography, "The Magic Lantern," Igmar Bergman describes the beating he'd receive from his father as well as his delight at his older brother receiving the brunt of the punishment. He continues, "After the strokes had been administered, you had to kiss Father's hand, at which forgiveness was declared and the burden of sin fell away, deliverance and grace ensued." Without any supper and without a bedtime story he would be sent to bed, relieved that the punishment had done its job. Pain was not the difficulty for Bergman so much as the humiliation. No doubt, he grew to resent his father's administration of this punishment, evidenced by the replacement of his biological father with the man of the theater in "Fanny och Alexander."
Whatever his artistic drives and wherever they were born, in no way could their origin be said to derive from any kind of certainty. Haunted by the ghost, like Hamlet, Alexander does not share with the Dane the clarity of a task. He can only look upon the ghost and remind himself, no, I am not Hamlet. As he is not the heir to a throne, let alone someone with a clear incentive to achieve that throne, Alexander's purpose becomes lost in mystery. Bergman enacts the mystery through Alexander's participation in witchcraft, the ultimate subversion of the Protestant church.
Bergman shares with Carl Theodor Dreyer a sympathy for the categorical sinner and persecuted enemy of popular religion. Where Dreyer seems to embrace witchcraft along with any of the evil power associated with it, Bergman can't help but explore the problems therein. No clear answer exists against the church, for even the union between Alexander and dark forces are born out of an emotional rebellion rather than ideological alignment against the tenets of faith. The sorcery which results in the fiery death of Alexander's gluttonous bed-ridden aunt is an expression of the boy's power over those who look down upon him, but it cannot be appreciated unless the artistic voice has expression here as well. Just as Bergman is able to usurp the his biological father with a ghost of the theater, he set fire to a figure of pomp, laziness, and superiority. He can use Charles Dickens, as well as witchcraft, to envelope the oppression and hypocrisy of his childhood in a conflagration. The importance of the action is artistic.
The massive aunt never deals directly with Alexander and as such the fire which consumes her must be symbolic. She is the representative of inertia and indifference facing the treatment of children within Sweden's religious household. Worse than the Step-father, this woman (played by a man) has no feelings of a higher calling to justify her slothful acceptance of the world around her, but has to be cared for as a sinless, joyless, inhuman blob. Witchcraft provides a haven for Alexander to destroy the aunt without being judged. Essentially it doesn't matter where his feelings can find expression so long as they can be expressed without the necessary retaliation of corporal punishment. He turns to another world, a system without a pretense of righteousness.
At the conclusion, Bergman does not retreat into the beautiful little world of the theater revered by Alexander's father, though one could certainly argue for the inclusion of the theatrical world at the film's conclusion based simply upon the nature of film. This story of Alexander's escape from the old religious household exists as a part of a fictional cinematic world. As Alexander is able to do once his rebellion finds expression, the darkness associated with the witchcraft elements has to be set aside as a means to artistic expression for Bergman and an emotional expression for Alexander. What occurs at the end of the film is a retreat into a newly conceived household, and a repetition of the ghost-father's reverence for the little world of the theater. The new world is that of the family, in which a man's sins are not the burden of the world so much as they are the burden of his wife, who will bear them, if she is wise, with a certain amount of forgiveness. It is by such forgiveness that Bergman imagines a happy household, regardless of moral imperfections.