Quodlibetica

What a stir Lars von Trier creates with each of his movies. He is the Danish director you love to hate and who, until recently, loved to be hated. His latest film, Antichrist may be his first masterpiece, but no one seems to have noticed. The critical reviews range from the faint praise to outright condemnation, and we should expect no less. But we could hope for more.

To hear the critics, Lars von Trier is a lazy filmmaker, or a redundant one. His latest film is an exorcism of personal demons, or it is a blunt instrument of hackneyed symbols with which he bludgeons his captive audience. It is a torture porn movie on the level of Saw, only less sophisticated. Of course, it is all this and more, and it is easily the best film I’ve seen this year.

First, a few words about the man Lars von Trier. He’s a shameless publicity hound, a notoriously difficult man to work with, and a terrible house guest. The first two I can overlook, but I find this last unforgivable. YProxy-Connection: keep-alive
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see, I attended a little film school on whose board he served, and I can verify that he will not be asked back. This was very disappointing for me as a student, although I can’t say that I am a fan of Trier (it’s incorrect to append the “von”, especially when it’s artificial).

As for the film: the story goes like this. Jack and Jill go up the hill to treat her depression upon the accidental death of their infant son. After the death of their infant child, the characters, a psychologist and his academic wife, known only as He (Willem Dafoe) and She (Charlotte Gainsbourg), retreat to their remote wilderness cabin (which they call Eden) to work through her grief. He is sure that grief and depression are simple adaptations that must be worked through with steely bravery. She describes her grief as atypical. To begin with, there are complications: among them, the child died as He and She made love, troubling the characters’ relationship to sex. Also, they are not alone in the cabin. She has invited the history of misogyny: a thesis-in-progress entitled Gynocide.

Her abandoned work is in the attic, blossoming with swollen pages like a Necronomicon. It’s a kind of scrapbook of history – full of sculptures of breasted demons, flying witches, and woodcuts depicting their trials. The themes have found their echo in the woods, and at times it seems that She has opened Pandora’s box. Thus, the unctuously confident Dafoe finds himself battling not only his wife’s increasingly troubling mental illness, but an entire history of bloodshed and torture in the war between the sexes. What’s more, the animals that the couple encounters in the woods are now sinister zombies:  a doe’s dead fawn hangs half-born from her womb, a raptor eats its young, a talking fox has disemboweled itself, a noisy blackbird rises repeatedly from the dead.

I often hear that Trier is obsessed with punishing women. This criticism, along with unqualified analysis on his misogyny and gynophobia, flows so freely, it must sound quite original to those who say it. Yet I know of no other misogynist who so deeply engages the subject of misogyny. Most are content to pretend that it doesn’t exist and let the invisible engines of the patriarchy do the work for them. But Trier’s middle period dramas – Breaking the Waves, The Idiots, Dancer in the Dark, Dogville – are obsessed with depicting patriarchy as it grinds their female characters down. In Breaking the Waves, Bess suffers at the hands of a theocracy, then again by the opposite demands of her husband. In Dancer and the Dark and Dogville, Selma and Grace are obliterated by the smallest units of patriarchal society. They suffer, but is it for our pleasure?

Most of Trier’s films fill me with the warm glow of a secondhand righteous indignation, but I’ve always found their situations a bit contrived. Antichrist departs from this righteousness with a shrug and a shudder. Discussing her reason for abandoning her thesis – a genealogical litany of crimes against women – Gainsbourg says, “It no longer interested me.” It sounds like Trier addressing his critics when She says to Dafoe, “You found it glib.” Later, she internalizes the gynophobia, her self-loathing culminating in spasms of terrifying sex, masturbation and self-mutilation. “A crying woman is a scheming woman,” she says.

The torture in this movie is utterly integral to the horror of the story, yet in some sense, I agree with Anthony Lane, that it’s possible to leave the film when the tools come out and miss only the cathartic epilogue of a masterpiece that aims to show the full horror of its maker’s vision. Critics have smugly compared Antichrist to Saw, calling it torture porn, but what does that mean? Torture porn is an epithet that is frequently hurled at today’s horror films. Yet pornography implies a specific attitude toward an art object: it aims to register on the body of the spectator in the same manner that it registers on the bodies of the objectified others (1). Thus, Antichrist absolutely and appropriately qualifies, because as we watch the characters punish each other’s bodies, we wince and cringe, yet we crave more. We are angry, agitated, and excited. Like the paintings of Goya, it may be enough for the complacent to merely read about them and not to stare deeply into that void. The torture and mutilation of the characters’ bodies comes as a kind of insufficient revenge upon a history of murder and torture of women that, if taken on its face and all at once, unleashes a sorrow that is insatiable. For a moment, the compounded grief and sorrow of Trier’s film seems indiscriminate, even chaotic. In refusing to exonerate the bereaved parents, Antichrist becomes a harrowing tale of human frailty.

“Chaos reigns,” the tagline of this film, signals Trier’s new approach to wilderness. In The Idiots (1998), a suburban retreat presents an Eden in which a clique of young adults explore the liberating possibilities of “spazzing”, a pastime in which they pretend retardation in order to shed their social inhibitions. “Spazzing” acquaints the spazzers with their true desires and ultimately challenges, however fleetingly, the patriarchy. Trier himself filmed much of the movie naked in order to elicit a more naturalistic performance from his performers. Ultimately, it’s the intrusion of culture – the patriarchal family unit, the fascist city council, and the subtler socializations of the work environment – that represent everyday evil in The Idiots. Similarly, In Breaking the Waves (1996), Bess McNeil is torn apart by the contradictory demands of the superstructure. Similarly, in Dancer in the Dark (2000), the sylvan Selma is obliterated by the state. In Dogville (2003), Grace is imprisoned by a micro-civilization.

But Antichrist reveals a vision of horror that is new to Trier: a horror that comes not from social order but from its lack. Here, the enemy is chaos, but it is also history: the crimes of history when left to grow in the dark, like root vegetables sending out their winding runners. Trier’s vision adds a layer of mythology that reaches up to the stars: A set of constellations, The Three Beggars, lurk along the horizon. They are Grief, Pain and Despair. The opening libretto, from Rinaldo, during which we are introduced to them, carries an invitation to these anthropomorphic emotions (2), as though a woman’s cultivated sufferings can only be released by the greatest sorrow.

The mixture of hatred and faint praise that Antichrist has received from the critical establishment baffles me, but maybe it shouldn’t. Few films accurately and grimly engage the entirety of the man/woman problem in a context of social totality, and when they do, the results are often disorienting, impolite and inevitably soaked in bodily fluids. Well-placed people are often offended by the transgression of honest art. They doubt its necessity, and if it isn’t necessary, it is certainly unpleasant. I was reminded of Jane Campion’s phenomenal films Holy Smoke and In The Cut and their tepid critical reception. (3)

There is a brilliant contradiction to Antichrist. It’s a sorrowful journey that ultimately entreats us to reject sorrow. Trier finally admits his own fear of darkness. His pitch black film, excoriated for its explicit scenes of violence and its needlessly bleak outlook, may be as close as he will come to a love letter to society and to history. Like the best ghost stories, it sends us fleeing the darkness to the embrace of our flawed but comfortable society. We must prefer it to the fallen garden of Eden, tainted as it is by knowledge without order.

Trier’s film is dedicated to Andrei Tarkovsky, and it’s easy to see homage to Stalker and The Mirror. The descent into madness calls up Bergman, and there are bits of American grindhouse, and set pieces worthy of Ken Russel. But Antichrist is ultimately a horror film made up of the real open wounds sutured over by every heterosexual union. If it neither excites you nor scares you to death, please don’t invite me for dinner.

Shortly after pressing the smooth red button that sets the film’s disastrous events into motion, The Box’s Norma Lewis (Cameron Diaz) wobbles unsteadily on a prosthetic foot that her husband (James Marsden) has made for her. (4) Director and cowriter Richard Kelly is similarly unsteady coming into this film after the nuclear disaster that was Southland Tales.

As Diaz takes her first synthetic steps, Kelly’s new film seems unstoppable. Although nothing in Diaz’s performance has approached the believable, as Norma wobbles on her heel, we are on the edge of our seats. This working of hyperreal kitsch to achieve saccharine empathy recalls the best of Douglas Sirk and David Lynch. Not the least bit sarcastic, these masters convey their respect for the mundane even as they disdain realists: those who would try to represent life on film by simply capturing it without embroidering the truth.

There’s nothing believable about Diaz and Marsden as a schoolteacher and aspiring astronaut in 1970s Langley, Virginia, nor in the way they relate to their son, Walter (Sam Oz Stone). They speak lines of exposition as though they’ve just met each other. Yet each of the film’s odd repetitions turns out to be a well timed motif, each heavy line is the stroke of a chiasmus, and the echoes swirl around each other in a rising helix. In the rising structure and the sinister rendering of mundane suburban dreams, we see the master who brought us Donnie Darko. And then, as the story spins off its axis, we glimpse again the overconfident egghead – rapt by quantum theory – who deadened the resonance of Donnie Darko’s existential yelp with a director’s cut: a reworking that emphasized both science and mysticism.

The Box begins when a mysterious man, Arlington Steward (Frank Langella) presents Norma Lewis with a box and a choice. She may collect a million dollars cash by pressing the button under the box’s plastic dome, but to do so will cause the execution of someone “entirely unknown to you.” The plot is, to this point, based on Richard Matheson’s short story “Button, Button.” Matheson is a science fiction moralist, the sort whose stories are easily transliterated into Twilight Zone episodes (as this story was in 1986, with Mare Winningham playing Diaz’s role). He wrote I am Legend which has sired three satisfying film adaptations. His formulaic stories are famous for unexpected twists and poetic justice, but they also deliver some insight into their characters and have provided some of the most memorable suspense, irony, and surprise endings in a half century of film. (5)

The twist in Matheson’s story and in the Twilight Zone adaptation happens at its end, when the unsuspecting Norma discovers the fine print of her ponzi scheme – Arlington Steward portentiously tells her that the button will be delivered to someone “entirely unknown to you,” and they will be given the same gambit. It’s this sort of chill that Twilight Zone’s half-hour format excelled in:  A simple reversal of a moral dilemma throws its true cost into sharp relief. Yet Kelly wisely places that moment before the film’s midpoint, freeing himself to explore other possibilities. When Langella delivers that punchline in this version, it carries considerably less weight.

Kelly is more interested in afterlife and redemption than in using death as the final punctuation in a morality tale. He sees in the counterbalanced terms of the box’s gambit a mirrored pair of false escapes:  the million dollars, which offers no true release, and the romantic escape of death. His ultimate cheat for these lapsed characters is that their death is, in this vision, much like life – the continuation of a Sartrean hell.

I shifted in my chair, and I can’t blame anyone who left at this point. For a science fiction realist, Kelly is surprisingly indifferent to Occam’s razor, that law of succinctness that requires a minimum of assumptions or, in this case, supernatural or unexplained phenomena and events. A related screenwriter’s axiom says it’s best to ask the audience to suspend disbelief early and just once. But I’m increasingly intrigued by films that resist this instinct for detection, this gradual sharpening to a single point. In American films of horror and science fiction, phenomena that may at first seem legion are reduced to a single cause. But in the horrors of Italians Dario Argento and Lucio Fulci, for instance, horror multiplies because a portal to Hell has been opened. The supernatural never bows to the laws of the natural world. Similarly, in Kelly’s world, little is organic or logical about the eerie conspiracy that grows ever wider even as it becomes eerily quotidian. By pressing the button, Norma has opened a door to the inner workings of damnation and salvation, and Kelly’s visions of afterlife and judgment flow unedited.

The Box moves fast and loose. There is something about controlling the lightening, space aliens and a collaboration between NASA and the NSA. Roger Ebert has called the film preposterous, even while praising its ambition and interest. David Denby has entreated Kelly to drop the eschatalogical mumbo jumbo and just make a good suspense film. But Kelly, though a controlled director of action and a gifted surrealist, is not interested in mere formal studies. With a geeky love of illustrated quantum physics, he’s an alternately lucid and confused existential writer.

The original cut of Kelly’s breakout debut, Donnie Darko poignantly presents the dislocation of a single adolescent in the absence of God. In 80s America, as secular humanism elevates popular psychology to private school dogma, the titular character refuses the petty authorities of his world by escaping down the rabbit hole of psychosis, with its opportunities for heroism and alternative narratives. Many critics deride this as a cult film for teenagers. But Donnie Darko resonates strongly with the generations who have come of age since the 1980s: Young people who experienced the arrival of teenage agnosticism as the ultimate existential gag.