The movie itself, of course, encourages a wide range of interpretations, and indeed is so recondite it was initially booed by some Spanish audiences.
I had to sleep on it, but I think I have reached some conclusions that work for me.
First, though, I wanted to comment on how I am realizing what a deep psychological hunger I feel for symbols which are authentic for me, which I can “eat” and “digest”, and make a part of me. This hunger, which I think we all feel, is nearly entirely unsated in our modern world. Where once we had Honest Abe, a problem-free respect for Columbus, a near universal Christianity, and an abiding respect for American democracy, now all the constructed symbols of our political, and largely our religious world, are gone, and this matters. I won’t say any more on that for now.
I feel all the scenes have a place and a purpose. First, we see the movie imported into the village. It comes from somewhere else. Then we see the father, caring for his bees, and looking at his watch, sadly, it seems to me. Then we see the wife–who we don’t find out for sure is his wife for some time, writing a letter to her lover, who went off to fight the war, and who may or may not even be alive, then we see her riding to the train to send off her letter. The father comes home, looks for her, can’t find her, and then asks if there is food. His house-keeper tells him yes, but he should keep regular hours like everybody else.
The children, at night, light a candle, and Ana’s sister Isabel tells her nobody died in the Frankenstein movie, and that Frankenstein’s monster is a spirit she can conjure. This, in response to her logical childlike question: why? Why did the girl die, why did Frankenstein’s monster die? It made no sense to her.
The father, staying up late, writes the following, from which we get the name of the movie:
Someone to whom I recently showed my glass beehive, with its movement like the main gear wheel of a clock…Someone who saw the constant agitation of the honeycomb, the mysterious maddened commotion of the nurse bees over the nests, the teeming bridges and stairways of wax, the invading spirals of the queen, the endlessly varied and repetitive labors of the swarm, the relentless yet ineffectual toil, the fevered comings and goings, the call to sleep always ignored, undermining the next day’s work, the final repose of death far from a place that tolerates neither sickness nor tombs…Someone who observed these things after the initial astonishment had passed, quickly looked away with an expression of indescribable sadness and horror.
Now, I want to move from description to interpretation, particularly since I can’t remember the precise sequence of events.
The first critical piece of information is that the father knows his younger wife is having or had an affair, that she is thinking about someone else. We are told that. He is tending his bees, wondering where she is. Perhaps she even gave him that watch. He comes home, looks for her, and she is gone. This causes him emotional anguish, which causes him to be unable to sleep, and to write what is written above. Note that he himself is not sleeping properly. He falls asleep at his desk. He himself is “undermining the next day’s work” and anticipating death.
So there is a dark secret in the family that both parents know but can’t speak. The children can’t know this, but there is a fertile, latent underlayer for the creation of foreboding. Children–even outwardly happy, playing children–feel when something is happening.
The scene with the anatomy lesson: what is the last thing they put on? What have they forgotten? The Eyes. The ability to see.
The farmhouse in the distance becomes the setting for the appearance of Frankenstein’s monster’s avatar.
Let me back up. The scene with the candle with the two children was, in my view, intended to evoke religion and the Christian Church, which teaches that no one ever dies, and that the spirits–and God himself–are there when we call. This means that the monster, which did not die, can still be saved.
Logically, then, Ana tries to save the soldier. What she had feared had happened was reversed. He came back to life. A new future was possible (the train symbolizes the future, I think, which she is nearly run over by, and which she was sort of trying to stand in the way of unconsciously). And then the soldier is killed, and her father seems in her childish mind to have played a role. Her father becomes a monster to her, first a mob, then the actual monster, and then SHE becomes the monster, perhaps after having in her dream eaten the poisonous mushroom. She inherits Original Sin. All the fate and weight of the world–and latently of the anxiety and pain in her home and her nation–falls on her.
This of course makes her sick. It causes her mother to feel shame and regret. She burns the letter. She puts a coat on her husband, and puts away his glasses carefully, showing affection after months or years of having treated him coldly. Ana looks for redemption in the darkness. She tries to hope to herself that the monster is still alive somehow, but she fails. She turns, and the last scene shows her silhouetted in darkness. She feels like the monster, still. The monster is not out there. It is in her. It is a tragic ending, in my view. And apparently making this movie messed that child actress up for many years.
If I might return to the Original Sin metaphor, perhaps the monster killing the girl–an act of innocence, since he did not know what would happen–is Eve eating from the Tree of Knowledge. Perhaps the monster being killed by a mob is Christ’s redemptive act.
But in this movie, there is no redemption. There is no resurrection. The dead remain dead. This is where I think we should look for the war symbolism. It is a latent critique of Christianity as a whole, as peddling lies. And it is a latent critique of the war because the war, in this view, accomplished little or nothing. Nothing living came of it. A monster–not THE monster–was slain, but countless more remain, because that monster is in our souls.
And it is difficult, is it not, to separate the grotesque appearance of the monster, with its seeming capacity for murder, with its essential innocence? It did not MEAN to kill that girl, but it did. And it was slaughtered as if it had been truly blood-thirsty.
Stylistically, I will comment too how interesting it is that Erice was able to include another entire movie within his own movie, without showing more than a minute or two of the original.
This movie is a tragedy in my view about the loss of innocence, about the loss of faith. The girl became terrified of her father, but large segments of a nation also became terrified of their new ruler.
I do think this is in the rough neighborhood of the director/author’s intention. The beehive is life itself, seen from the perspective of someone who feels trapped and helpless. You have to do your part, even when it feels like farce and horror.
Having said all this, though, it is still a beautiful movie, and one I will likely watch again. This is the thing: so much of life is beautiful, even in the midst of horror. We want “life” to give us one signal only, but it gives us many. Much of the task of living is focusing our attention on the one’s which build us up and make us feel good. We have that choice.