Happy Wild Strawberries Day! Isak Borg had his life-altering nightmares on June 1st in the 1957 classic Wild Strawberries. I’ve posted the transcript of my YouTube video here in case you would prefer to read than listen, but I’ve also embedded the video at the end. Enjoy a taste of Wild Strawberries!

I’m on this trip about mirrors in film and I was planning to talk about the 1957 Bergman film Wild Strawberries. But I realized that, first of all, there are more important things in the movie to me that struck me than the use of mirrors. But also, the whole movie is a mirror.

This is a film about a guy who is 75 years old at the time of the film, and he is a doctor named Isak. This doctor is going to get a major award, like a lifetime achievement, from his university. And the night before—which is on June 1st, he specifically says that, so I’m going to be posting this on June 1st—he has this terrible dream about being lost in a neighborhood that’s familiar to him and seeing a funeral hearse coming. The coffin falls out of the hearse, the body falls out of the coffin, and it’s him.

So he gets up in the morning and he’s supposed to be flying to get his award, but he decides that he’s going to get in the car and drive there. His daughter-in-law has been staying with him, so she wants to go with him.

All throughout this movie, there’s a lot of people having these conversations. They’re not quite word salad, but they’re very petty and sort of superficial. We’re going to argue about whether we’re flying or driving. We’re going to argue about the dishes on the table. And then there’s a few moments where people just really get real. One of the times is in the car with his daughter-in-law. They’re arguing and she’s telling him that he’s just got too many manners—that he’s using politeness to keep people at arm’s length. I’m going to tell you why that’s important to me in a moment.

He goes to take her to this vacation home that his family used to have. And there, he has a vision of his past. In the past, he was going with this girl who was his cousin and they were engaged, but she left him for his brother. When he snaps out of it, he’s seeing the past of like 1890 or something, he meets this hitchhiker, and it’s a doppelganger for his former fianceé. Only now, this girl really admires him, and she’s got two guys with her that she’s trying to decide between, just like him and his brother.

Now, this being dumped by his fianceé has ruined his whole life, and it ruined his eventual marriage. These are the things that he’s dealing with at the end of his life. Everyone that he knows personally is coming down on him for being too cold and rigid. And this seems to be what most people get out of the film. To me, I could really relate to this guy. First of all, the dream sequence at the beginning: he’s seeing too much light. It’s a black and white film, but they’ve overexposed it on purpose. I think they opened the aperture of the camera too wide and made too much light come in to where it’s blowing out the scene, and it’s hard for him to see necessarily what’s happening.

This was my first time watching this movie two days ago, but I’ve been having a recurring dream of too much sunlight for years, and it scares the shit out of me every time. I didn’t know why. I did some research and it seems like it’s obscuring what you’re supposed to be seeing, but also meaning that you’re supposed to realize some truths about yourself. I never knew that other people had that feature in their dreams, and I wonder if any of you did.

The other thing is that when he is traveling in the car, eventually his daughter-in-law is driving, he falls asleep, and he has another dream. This is where the mirror comes into play. His former fianceé shows him the mirror and is giving him a hard time about having been too closed off. Then his wife shows up and starts complaining about how she was unfaithful, but he didn’t get angry enough about it. Well, the reason that he didn’t get angry enough about it was because he’d already been cheated on by his fianceé with his brother. He thought his whole life that it was because he was too cold, but it’s really just because she was more attracted to his brother than she was to him. That was something that couldn’t be helped, and it didn’t need to ruin his whole life.

Besides that, obviously, he has made a positive impact on people. He is admired by these hitchhikers. In the course of the trip, he goes back to his hometown, and Bergman muse Max von Sydow comes out of the gas station where they stop. He’s the gas station attendant, and he’s talking about some great thing the doctor has done for him in the past, how admired he was, and how he wishes the doctor would come back and practice in that town. So, he likes him. The daughter-in-law likes him. Even though she says that she’s angry with him, she cares enough to complain. He has a housekeeper who greatly admires him and takes care of him. And, of course, these people are giving him this award. So, I think this guy has been misunderstood.

Besides that, he has this other nightmare about going back to school and having to take a test. I also have had that recurring nightmare. That, I’m sure, is a universal dream that people have, but I had that dream for years. I solved it by becoming lucid in the middle of the dream and telling the teacher that was giving me the test that I hadn’t studied for, “I’m 35 years old, lady, and I’m not supposed to be here, and I’m going out to lunch.” But this guy doesn’t do that. He has to suffer through the nightmares and get to the end of the movie.

I feel like this movie is about him being cold and rigid, and yet it’s because of the trauma that he went through when he was young. I think a lot of people do use manners and pedantry to keep people at arm’s length. I realized that I’m doing that with my YouTube channel. I talk about movies because I want to write and I want to express myself, but rather than talk about my own life, I frame it with movies. I’ve been doing that. I’ve been writing about movies since college as assignments, and for the college paper for fun and a little bit of money. And yet, if you look at my body of work, you could put together everything about me. It’s like I’ve built myself a glass house.

I feel like the Bergman movies have a reputation for being difficult, but I feel that people should understand that they are extremely accessible. This movie is about a surreal road trip with nightmares. Also, I said that a lot of the conversations were nonsensical, but they were witty and humorous.

When I watched Wild Strawberries, it immediately shot into my top 10 movies. You can see the influence of this movie on the work of David Lynch, who we all love, and who at least film fans find to be fairly accessible, but actually is much more hard to understand and inscrutable than Wild Strawberries. This is something that holds a lot of universal, relatable experiences. So, just in case there’s anyone listening who isn’t into old movies, isn’t into black and white, or things with subtitles, you should try a taste of Wild Strawberries and it may change your mind. It’s a trip.

Tell me in the comments if you have any recurring dreams about too much sunlight or the “back in school and I haven’t learned anything” dream, and I will catch you in the next one. Good night.