It was Alfred Hitchcock who, speaking from bitter personal experience, said a filmmaker should never (in a film) kill off a child or a Shetland pony. Lars von Trier is of course a provocateur of long standing, and is hardly bound by the kind of rules Hitchcock espoused: Von Trier kills off a child in the first few minutes of his new film, Antichrist, and I’m sure he wouldn’t hesitate, if he so desired, to murder any number of Shetland ponies.
In the year since Antichrist was released in Europe we have heard much about it. It comes with a reputation for being shocking, disgusting, disturbing, et cetera. Reviews of it diverge wildly, some seeing in it a complex piece of symbolism and a cry of existential pain, whereas others (such as The Guardian‘s Peter Bradshaw) see it as an elaborate put-on.
Me, I think it’s a load of old poppycock. Yes, it’s shocking and disgusting — because Von Trier has done his considerable best to ensure that it is. But no more so than gorefests such as the Hostel pair of movies or the seemingly endless sequence of Saw bores. Maybe it’s the use of genitalia that makes it more shocking (though Hostel: Part II ended with castration — in midshot, that is). Antichrist may seem more disturbing to some because it’s going as an “art movie”, or because it’s pretending to be meaningful, or because the shock-horror-disgust part of it happens after a long hour’s worth of relatively quiet, even dull, exchange between the two characters.
This technique of quiet lead-up to loud horror has already been used, to superb effect, by the great Japanese horrormeisters. Takashi Miike did it in Audition; Hideo Nakata did it in Ringu. And both, in my view, did it much better than Von Trier does. In any case, it’s more sensible (and more effective) to take the horror genre and rework it, adding a few extra layers of meaning if you like, than it is to make an “art movie”, with all its pretensions, that is really at base a rather ordinary horror flick.
The central two people in Antichrist are named only He and She (and Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg are the only credited actors). Here is the first move in the film’s staging of itself as a kind of universal fable about “the human condition”. He and She are having sex in stylised black and white, with cutaways to real genitals in action and shots of some important ornaments, when their young child goes a-wandering from his cot and falls from a high window to his death.
That’s the prologue. The “chapters” that follow are titled “Grief”, “Pain”, “Despair”, and so on, like a truncated version of the Elizabeth Kübler-Ross quintet of psychological responses to the knowledge of death. But He, a shrink himself, is not willing to let She do the full Kübler-Ross in her own time. No, he removes her to a cabin in the woods, where he will perform some kind of therapy of a vaguely cognitive kind upon She, hoping (it seems) to fast-track the process of her grief.
You know this has to be a bad idea. And not only because He is abusing his psychologist’s and husband’s power over She, as his outwardly caring but clearly creepy behaviour makes obvious. It’s also because their cabin in the woods, or the area in which it sits, is called “Eden”, which means that this Adam and Eve will be confronted by some kind of serpent offering a dodgy apple. But does the apple bring “knowledge of good and evil”, as the book of Genesis proposes? In this case, it brings the knowledge of evil alone — and, after such knowledge, what forgiveness?
There is none. That much is clear. But the icky mutilations and so forth that drive the third act of Antichrist are so horrifying (theoretically at least) that they may blind the viewer to the fact that the symbolic elements purporting to tell us what all this suffering is “about” are, in fact, pretty threadbare. There’s some reference to medieval “gynocide”, and there are three mysterious animals who appear from the woods, plus a few hallucinatory images that are the most visually striking in the film.
But, really, all this huffing and puffing says little. The viewer is likely to ask, as one does when faced with so much apparent significance, “What does it mean?” Or, perhaps even more querulously, “What is it trying to say?” These questions are usually asked in a whinging tone by a viewer baffled by what feels like an overdetermined superflux of significance but who, nonetheless, has a gut feeling that it may in fact all be rather underdetermined.
Artworks, I think (and by that I don’t just mean “art movies”), are entitled both to provoke and evade such questions. Makers of artworks, moreover, are entitled to serve up bleeding gobbets of their tortured souls as a kind of case study in the human psyche — this is the quasi-Romantic idea of art as a kind of Petri dish. But we, as the receivers of such artworks, are also entitled to conclude that a particular work doesn’t really mean much at all, that it offers no fresh insight into ourselves or the world around us. We can legitimately conclude that such works are best enjoyed, if they can be enjoyed, merely as a play of surfaces. (And, certainly, Anthony Dod Mantle’s cinematography for Antichrist is superb — and very different from his work on Slumdog Millionaire.)
If one tries to boil down the “message” of Antichrist to something communicable, it’s no more than the bland statement that nature, or “Satan’s theatre”, is destructive and evil, that humanity (especially womankind, it seems) is evil, and so on. Everything is evil, and there is no redemption. Hence perhaps the title Antichrist, which otherwise makes no sense.
Maybe it’s a reference to Nietzsche’s work of that name (though also translated as Anti-Christian), in which he articulated for the first time his idea of the “will to power”, the drive towards domination that is our natural heritage. We deny our true natures, and our destiny to evolve into stronger, greater beings, if we indulge in pity or compassion, which Nietzsche sees as typically weakening Christian sentiments. Von Trier shows no pity towards his characters. That much, at least, of the Nietzchean schema would be relevant to Von Trier’s movie, though the most heavily moustached philosopher in history would scorn the obvious Catholic symbolism that Von Trier employs.
This is the old Augustinian theology of original sin and a fallen world. As “explanation” or “motivation” for movie characters, though, it is inadequate. Better, I think, simply to have an unspeakable and inexplicable evil that comes from nowhere, as in an excellent non-arty horror movie such as Feast — which, by the way, has more irony and self-awareness in it than an entire oeuvre of Von Trier self-lacerations.
Antichrist also lacks any entertainment value. The first two thirds are boring and the last third is unpleasant. It’s interesting only in the extremes it broaches to shock. It doesn’t want to make you think, really, despite all that over-obvious symbolism; it just wants to make you squirm. It’s The Passion of the Christ without a Christ, which is to say without anything to give this suffering meaning. In fact, I’d say that’s the best way to see Antichrist: as an answer of a kind to that religiose blood-wank.
Mostly, Antichrist left me cold. The only reason to see it, really, is to be able to take part in whatever discussion follows its release here, and to wonder whether it’s Dafoe’s real penis we are being shown. Beyond that, Antichrist is a well-made but empty exercise in gore-as-porn, no more. Von Trier, at least, lets slip in a press-release interview the fact that he’s just fiddling with the horror genre. “If I were a chef,” he says, “this would be my version of a classic pork roast.”
Bon appetit.