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Making fun of Death seems like a risky prank—like poking a stick at a poisonous snake—but, that has never stopped filmmakers, comedians and animators from spoofing the character of Death as seen in Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal (1957), a title currently streaming on FilmStruck as part of series devoted to Sweden’s most renowned director.
The character of Death is easy to spoof because as depicted by Bengt Ekerot in Bergman’s most famous film, he is iconic. “Iconic” is a word routinely tossed around to refer to recognizable films and filmmakers, but The Seventh Seal actually fits the definition. In common usage, iconic describes something that is not only widely recognized but also universally acknowledged for its distinctive excellence. Death’s peculiar black cowl with its tight-fitting hood and extra wide sleeves make him easy to parody, while the chess game between Death and the Knight, played by the preternaturally ageless Max von Sydow, is a potent symbol of the wish to stave off the inevitable. However, if Bergman’s film weren’t such an international classic, viewers would not get the reference.
During the chess game, Death’s scythe, which he uses to harvest souls, is not part of the mise-en-scene. It is visible in the final scene when three of the characters join Death in a danse macabre across the horizon, signifying their acceptance of their mortality. However, in many spoofs, a scythe is visible during the parodied chess game, perhaps to make the reference more obvious.
The Seventh Seal owes its familiarity among younger generations to Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey (1991), the sequel to Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure (1989). Hollywood’s most famous slackers, played by Alex Winter and Keanu Reeves, find themselves dead due to an outrageous series of circumstances. To get back to the world of the living, they accept a challenge offered by the Grim Reaper to play a game. In a Gothic-looking dungeon, reminiscent of the austere, gloomy environment of The Seventh Seal, the Reaper, played by William Sadler, gives the boys their choice of games. Big mistake. Bill and Ted choose Battleship, which vexes the Reaper, and he loses. Angered, he changes the rules of the challenge, telling the boys they must win two out of three games. They pick Clue, the murder-mystery board game, but the Reaper is outsmarted once again. He alters the deal one more time, and the boys choose Super Bowl table-top football. When that doesn’t work, the Reaper is reduced to contorting himself in Twister. The medium shot of the Grim Reaper with a deadly serious expression playing Battleship with Bill and Ted recalls the composition of the chess game in The Seventh Seal. It is the funniest sequence in this film because it deflates the solemnity of Bergman’s allegory about bargaining with Death.
I recently showed The Last Action Hero (1993) in one of my classes. Directed by John McTiernan, this parody of blockbuster films stars Arnold Schwarzenegger as action star Jack Slater in a film-within-a-film story. The premise involves a magic golden ticket that transports the young protagonist into the world of a film. Chaos occurs when the villain of the film-within-in-a-film discovers that the ticket also allows movie characters to enter the real world. He conspires to release villains from other films into our world, resulting in a slew of references and homage to movies past and present. The homages are reverential but also funny. A highlight is Ian McKellan as Death, who steps out of The Seventh Seal with his scythe to harvest souls in modern-day New York.
Oddly enough, some of the best spoofs can be found in family films or children’s programming. The producers of the Muppets seemed obsessed with The Seventh Seal. In The Muppets Go to the Movies (1981), one of the Muppet movie parodies presented is Silent Strawberries, directed by Gummo Bergman, who is supposedly Ingmar’s cousin. It contains a scene in which Beaker plays Death, which is funny for fans of The Muppet Show. Beaker was the lab assistant to Dr. Bunsen Honeydew, and he always seemed to be the victim of the good doctor’s crazy experiments. A later episode of Sesame Street included a spoof of The Seventh Seal in which a Swedish fisherman looks for Sven the Seal, who is his seventh seal. And, in the “We’re Doing a Sequel” production number in Muppets Most Wanted (2014), a character called the Swedish Chef tries to convince Kermit that he should star in a movie in which he plays chess with Death. In an episode of Animaniacs (1993-1998), one of my favorite cartoon series, the three main characters end up in Sweden at a meatball-eating contest. After one of them eats one too many, resulting in his near demise, the trio challenges Death to a game of checkers.
The figure of Death with his scythe is so associated with The Seventh Seal that even when a Reaper-like character is not playing chess for souls, he is compared to the character in Bergman’s film. In Woody Allen’s Love and Death (1975), the figure of Death wears a white cowl and carries a scythe. He comes to take Allen at the end of the film, and the two participate in a danse macabre, but he does not look like Death in The Seventh Seal. Given Allen’s admiration of Bergman, the assumption is that the scene is at least a passing homage to the classic film.
In Bergman on Bergman, the director stated, “The Seventh Seal is an allegory with a theme that is quite simple: man, his eternal search for God, with death as his only certainty.” He also recalled, “The great question was: Does God exist, or doesn’t God exist? If God doesn’t exist, what do we do then?” In 1957, this was a serious theme for a serious movie. But, parodies and spoofs of a classic work of art beg the question: What is the impact of so many parodies and spoofs on our appreciation of this film? Or, any iconic film? It’s like viewing the Mona Lisa, which no one can look at without seeing her face replaced by the mug of the latest hip celebrity from memes and Facebook jokes. Do we think of Bill and Ted sitting across from Death instead of Max von Sydow in that famous chess scene? Will first-time viewers see a timeless classic that considers the hard questions about faith and meaning, or the source material for countless Muppet spoofs? Does the original suffer from the parodies and spoofs, or do they enhance the original, ensuring its recognition by future generations?
Susan Doll