The roles have been reversed from Bergman's original series: Mira is the primary breadwinner and adulterer. I found her to be selfish and, gasp, "unlikeable", not helped by the fact that she starts nearly every episode very tightly wound - I was desperate to see her relax, just once, but carefree and light are not tones this series strikes. The scorn that Mira has received from audiences effectively reveals our collective intolerance for women who don't appear to put their family's happiness before their own. We accept that men can be difficult, hedonistic, intolerant and narcissistic in ways we don't allow women to be.
I asked Greg what he thought it all meant and he said it didn't mean anything, it was just scenes from a marriage. Because I know he thought he was being profound, it pains me that he was right. I spent a good portion of the series trying to figure out who these two people were as individuals, what their relationship was, what categories I could fit them each into and ultimately whose side I should be on. But it was a fool's errand. We only see them in relation to each other, not in any other contexts that would give us a fuller picture of their true selves. The series is an exploration of the ways two people who know each other's buttons intimately can inflict pain and ecstasy in equal measure. Isaac and Chastain are incredible at mining the spectrum of marital emotions: love, guilt, shame, desire, anger, sadness and so on. It's an immersive experience that at times I wanted to get out of but just before I couldn't take it anymore, it was over. Hopefully, the same isn't true of our marriage, which, having survived the series without issue, is certifiably rock-solid.
HE SAW
Part way through one of the episodes of Scenes From a Marriage, which to some extent is a show about marital infidelity, Zanna hit pause and, with a note of panic, said: "Have you put the electric blanket on?" I said I had. She looked at me lovingly and said: "Imagine if I was out cheating on you and I came back and you had put the electric blanket on for me. I would feel so bad."
AS THE final credits rolled on the final episode, Zanna said: "What did it mean?"
I bridled. This constant search for meaning! Why does everything have to mean something? As someone once told me Murakami once said: "Sometimes a cat is just a cat."
"It didn't mean anything," I said. "What it meant was marriage is hard, but that's a meaning and it didn't mean anything. It was just scenes from a marriage."
"Oh! Okay!" she said witheringly. "Now I get it!" Then she whispered, "God you're smart."
THE KEY to the show's watchability is that the marriage at its centre could belong to any of us (not me and Zanna; ours is fine) so submerged are the feelings and issues that explode over everything.
I texted a sensible and well-adjusted friend to ask if he'd watched it with his wife. He sent two replies: "No way", followed by, "No thanks."
EARLIER THIS year, Zanna told me she was done with picking up my undies off the bathroom floor, at which point I told her I didn't leave my undies on the bathroom floor, to which she replied that I definitely did. We entered a pointless back and forth that ended a few weeks later, when she had accumulated a great deal of evidence in support of her position.
So I felt much pleasure the morning after watching the final episode of Scenes From a Marriage when I entered the bathroom to find a pair of her undies on the vanity.
"Don't worry," I said self-righteously, "I'll just put these in the washing basket."
She said: "Those are clean, dingleberry."
That was a bitter enough pill, but then I had a thought that made my whole body go numb. I turned to look and there on the floor were my dirty Bonds, shed not half an hour before, nowhere near a washing basket. As I grabbed them and stuffed them in my pocket, she said, "Don't bother, I'd already seen them."
Scenes From a Marriage is streaming now on Neon.
