I would love to read a diary elucidating your cheeky preacher's kid interpretation of the film.

This would perhaps fill a whole book.  But simply, in Protestant societies, the clergy was the dominant intellectual class for several centuries.  This made it an occupation that provided an entry into the upper classes for young men of ambition--especially in countries such as Sweden with a state church.  Bergman's father was certainly this kind of social climber.  The problem with being a clergyman, however, was that the career advancement wasn't based on scholarship but a reputation for being a stern moralizer.  This fact cannot be hidden from the children.  So the preacher's kids grow up completely comfortable with the language of moral authority and an understanding that this is just a tool like a loan portfolio is to a banker. This leads to an insider's perspective.  I heard my first funeral joke at 9.  Playing chess with death is a sophisticated funeral joke--one that says Bergman understood the implications of his father's careerism.

Was this due to a typically Swedish strain of pacifism?

I think so.  Folks seem to forget how warlike the people of the North once were.  I read somewhere that the Swedish Army still has more captured battle flags than any other on earth.  One effect of this vast experience of warfare is that all illusions of the "glory" of war are eventually shattered.  The other effect is that that eventually everyone who thinks war is a good idea is eliminated from the genetic pool.  Swedes are not pacifists like Ghandi--they are much more pragmatic.  For them, warfare is the strategy of the partially evolved and the extremely stupid.  The fact that war is evil is a trivial argument by comparison.  And because they have the battle flags to prove them, these assumptions are not questioned by reasonable Swedes.

The operative word being W's.  America is a work in progress.  We -- you and I, everybody -- are designed to fit in that America, the one that we must continue deliberately to evolve with hard work and perseverance.

I would love to believe you are correct.  But I didn't fit in well with Johnson's and Nixon's war against the Vietnamese either.  Trust me on this, if my culture had ANY influence in this country, we would NOT be killing people in Iraq, we would NOT have for-profit predatory medicine, we would NOT be having a phony debate on climate change, etc.  (This is not to say Swedes are perfect--the role the Nobel committee has played in legitimizing the nutball wing of the economics profession should be considered a crime against humanity.)


"Remember the I35W bridge--who needs terrorists when there are Republicans"