Antichrist

When it comes to Lars von Trier films, I'm no slavish devotee. My experience has tended to be wildly ambivalent, ranging from lovelovelove (Dogville) to hatehatehate (Dancer in the Dark), but rarely corresponding to popular taste or the views of most critics. I didn't read too much about Antichrist before watching it yesterday afternoon, but a depth of critical immersion isn't exactly necessary to know, prior to viewing this uber-controversial film, what most people think. The briefest skim in the temperamental waters of the Internet yields the following iron-clad judgments: Antichrist is sexist! misogynistic! exploitative! sensationalist! and, worst of all, pretentious! While a small minority continues to insist on its place at the top of best-films-of-the-year lists, the casual moviegoer was obviously horrified and disgusted.

I don't want to make too much of my powers of cinematic analysis, but from very early on, about the first ten minutes or so, the following thought began to float around in my head: Oh, interesting... Lars von Trier is making a film in the style of Andrei Tarkovsky. And, lo and behold, the final frame is a dedication to the Russian filmmaker and the years of his life-death. Now, I'm probably more likely than most to see the Tarkovsky connection -- Slavic stuff is what I study; plus, I just really like Tarkovsky. But I'm pretty shocked that nowhere in the handful of professional reviews that I read did I come across any mention of this facet of the film. I guess everyone was too hung up on Willem Dafoe's dick and Charlotte Gainsbourg's vadge to notice?

The Tarkovsky connection is clearly crucial, but even before we get to that, let's start by addressing the first of the disparaging evaluative terms in that shopping list from above: sexism and misogyny. Obviously (obviously!), a film that opens with a shot of three miniature figurines of Grief, Pain, and Despair and features an analyst counseling his wife through the trauma of losing a child by taking her to a place called Eden is not going to be TRUE FACTS realism. A talking fox about halfway through should be the final tip-off that we're dealing here with a little thing I like to call "allegory." (Incidentally, if you have no plans to see this film, just watch this one scene. It's the best.) And, like any allegorical world, this one is primarily concerned with the separation of good and evil, though with one interesting twist. At one point, the wife (Gainsbourg) -- who'd been writing a thesis on the titillating subject of "Gynocide" before the accidental death of her toddler son -- says to the husband (Dafoe) that over the course of her research, she'd slowly come to realize that since humans have a violently bestial streak in them, and that women are closer to nature and hence to the world of this violent bestiality, then the violence inflicted on them by centuries of witch-burners and inquisitors was, in some ways, justified.

This, I guess, is where a good feminist is supposed to flip her shit. Except, this is first and foremost a really penetrative insight into the murkiness and borderline schizophrenia of Christian morality (where does evil come from? how can God allow it in the world? is nature inherently evil or Edenic?), and only secondarily a gendered debate. As long as we're dealing with allegorical figures -- and I'd argue that we are: Man, Woman, Child are about as archetypal as you can get -- it seems silly to see this all through the reductive filter of sexism or misogyny. But since a gendered reading is in order, I think it's useful to look at it in the terms of the late, great Barbara Johnson, and acknowledge that von Trier is actually quite bold in his willingness to focus on the "infanticidal" language of the bereaved mother, whose somatic investment in procreation does make her "closer to nature," as opposed to the abstract/aesthetic "procreation" of a man. As pointed out by Johnson in her seminal essay Apostrophe, Animation, Abortion, female poets have been using this kind of language for years when discussing the fraught topic of childbirth and death. They internalize the accusation of bad parenting and increasingly see a dichotomy between creating art and creating children. The fact that the wife in the film faces a very similar dilemma and consequently suffers a massive mental breakdown points to the way gender both organizes and deforms our experience of the world.

Okay, now that that's out of the way, let's get back to Tarkovsky. As I said, I'm no slavish devotee to von Trier's brand of cinematic epatage, and I think that the "message" I just outlined above would have been a lot more successful -- and a lot less misunderstood by mainstream viewership, though I'm sure he revels in that -- if he were a better filmmaker. What seriously holds this movie back is that while von Trier loveloveloves him, he doesn't actually seem to get Tarkovsky. Sure, he gets the thematic focus on the natural world and the surface cinematic tricks: slow motion, long tracking shots from strange POVs, mixing black-and-white with color and non-diegetic opera with diegetic silence, as well as the great iconic stamp of the Tarkovsky film (actually stolen from his mentor Sergei Parajanov, who in turn stole it from Aleksander Dovzhenko, but who's counting?): the ethereal, otherworldly shot of wind rustling through a field of grass. But unlike the polemically-charged von Trier, Tarkovsky's representation of nature is always highly agnostic. In fact, it's pre-Christian, in the sense that good and evil do not exist as categories. This allows for some ageless, intricate, transcendental meditations on life, death, and existence, but it also creates some of the most hauntingly primordial visual tableaux ever committed to celluloid. Once you've seen something like The Mirror (one particularly beautiful scene here), you'll never look at a rainstorm or a forest the same way again; and yet, paradoxically, you'll feel like Tarkovsky must've somehow pulled those images straight out of your deepest, darkest childhood memories and fantasies. For all his attempts to recreate this Tarkovsky-esque primal scene -- and for the handful of successes that he has viz. beautiful, haunting imagery -- von Trier ultimately ends up relying on too many stock elements and clichés and never quite makes it work.

And that's where the question of pretentiousness comes in. Of all the scornful adjectives heaped on Antichrist, this is perhaps the only one I actually agree with. Not only is there an unimaginable amount of bombast involved in making this kind of film, but there's clearly a tremendous lack of self-awareness in making the opening scene (NSFW, obvs)...



eerily resemble this:


(Sorry, could only find this clip in German -- but somehow, that's even more appropriate.)

Again, one could point to Tarkovsky and say that his films are the source material for the art-house clichés from which this Simpsons parody spring. But I think it's important to press the question: what makes something truly original, stunning, and beautiful and what makes something flat-out pretentious? There is, of course, the etymology of the word: if it's clear that an artist is only "pretending" to be something -- to be Tarkovsky, for instance -- then it's pretty hard for his/her work to be original or stunning. But I think, ultimately, what it comes down to is skill. Pretending and being are actually quite slippery, and what separates the one from the other is a lot of self-confident mastery over the medium. Though he uses the techniques of other filmmakers, Tarkovsky doesn't pretend to be anybody but himself; moreover, his best work doesn't pretend to offer any easy answers, any Meaning with a capital M. Like his agnostic presentation of nature, his films resist the pull toward facile, pre-programmed interpretation, challenging the viewer to think beyond conventional allegory. Von Trier, for all his notable effort, can't quite get there.