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.

Macademia

Yesterday was gorgeous: one of those pioneering spring days when the city suddenly blossoms with stoned street performers and knock-kneed teenage girls in too-short skirts. I had a doctor's appointment and arrived at the office in shorts and a tank top, meeting the jealous stares of nurses and reception staff who'd been inside their concrete fortress since the wee hours. "Is it true that there's.... sun?"

While waiting for my name to be called, I sat near an elderly man, who looked oddly familiar, and started on the last chapter of The Poetics of Space ("The Phenomenology of Roundness" -- you just can't get any more Continental). Then the elderly man's name was called, and I realized that this was not just "an elderly man," but one of the most important scholars in my field, author of numerous canonical texts and protege of Roman fucking Jakobson. I'd seen him at various colloquia and seminars, but something about seeing him in a doctor's reception room -- leafing through a dog-eared doctor's office copy of Time magazine while waiting for a nurse in Hawaiian print scrubs to check his blood pressure and cholesterol -- just didn't quite click in my brain. I was still mulling this over as I lay on the examining bed in a flimsy paper sack and the doctor poked and prodded me in every intimate inch of my body, all while droning on about the weather. "It's supposed to be 70 degrees on Saturday! Feet up into the stirrups, please."

From the diary of Witold Gombrowicz:

Thursday

How should I explain why existentialism did not lead me astray?

Perhaps I was close to choosing an existence, which they call authentic — in contrast to a frivolous temporal life, which they call banal. That is how great the pressure of seriousness is from all sides. Today, in today’s raw times, there is no thought or art which does not shout to you in a loud voice: don’t escape, don’t play, don’t poke fun at yourself, don’t run away! Fine. I, too, in spite of everything, would also prefer not to lie to my own being. I, therefore, tried this authentic life, full of loyalty to existence in myself. But what do you want? It can’t be done. It can’t be done because that authenticity turned out to be falser than all my previous deceptions, games, and leaps taken together. I, with my artistic temperament, don’t understand much theory, but I do have a nose when it comes to style. When I applied maximum consciousness to life, in an attempt to found my existence on this, I noticed that something stupid was happening to me. Too bad, but no way. It can’t be done. It seems impossible to meet the demands of Dasein and simultaneously have coffee and croissants for an evening snack. To fear nothingness, but to fear the dentist more. To be consciousness, which walks around in pants and talks on the telephone. To be responsibility, which runs little shopping errands downtown. To bear the weight of significant being, to instill the world with meaning and then return the change from ten pesos. What do you want?*

*Emphatic emphasis all mine.

Would you be an outlaw for my love?

More YouTubes. RIP, Alex Chilton. A lot of people (self included) wish you'd stuck around a little longer.



PS - I'll be needing that CD back, you!

Smart smut

All I could think when I watched this video was: someone should tap these kids to star in a modern cinematic adaptation of Witold Gombrowicz's Pornografia. And then I realized, oops, there already is one.

In The Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard points out that Henri Bergson derided Kant for his view of all the sciences as "frames within frames." According to Bergson, the world could not be classified into ready-made concepts, just like, according to Bachelard, the metaphor of the drawer that Bergson loves to use when discussing concepts cannot be reused to teach Bergsonian theory. For Bachelard, it is ultimately the new, rich, and surprising poetic image rather than the old, static, expected metaphor that has the potential to surpass traditional philosophical discourse, since it has the potential to unite the disparate fields of aesthetics, philosophy, and phenomenology and truly penetrate the depths of human consciousness in a way that each of these separate disciplines cannot.

Whether or not I think Bachelard's project is ultimately successful (I haven't yet finished the book, but it makes for some seductive whiskey-drunk reading on a spring break night, I'll tell you what), that's exactly how I'd describe Gombrowicz's novels. In the hands of a realist novelist, actions are framed within two-dimensional diegetic space in a neat, neutral, unobtrusive tableau -- the epitome of the Bergsonian drawer/frame/concept. I'm thinking of Tolstoy, the master of this game... specifically, one of the greatest showstoppers in any novel ever written, the horse-racing scene in Anna Karenina, wherein the adrenaline-pumping race and the gruesome injury suffered by Vronsky's horse is presented in meticulous (if heightened Sir Walter Scottean) realism, gesturing gracefully, elusively to the inevitable tragedy bubbling up alongside their passion.

Gombrowicz, in contrast, conjures up the realist tableau only to destroy it, obsessively continuing the process of framing and reframing, rejecting any naturalness that might have been present in the connection between the event and the its signification/interpretation. Take the opening scene from Pornografia (in Danuta Borchardt's recent translation), for example:

He was served tea, which he drank -- but a piece of sugar remained on his little plate, so he reached for it to bring it to his mouth -- but perhaps deeming this action not sufficiently justified, he withdrew his hand -- but withdrawing his hand was something even less justified -- so he reached for the sugar again and ate it -- but he probably ate it not so much for pleasure as for the sake of behaving properly ... towards the sugar or towards us? ... and wishing to erase this impression, he coughed, and to justify the cough, he pulled out his handkerchief, but by now he didn't dare wipe his nose -- so he just moved his leg.

In this one-sentence scene, the narrator manages to overload a few insignificant actions with a pathological amount of significance and, in doing so, destabilizes the narrative project as such. The reader might follow along the first or second of the narrator's dogmatic interpretations of the tea-drinker's action, but it isn't long before we start to question the ability of this narrator to extrapolate truth from such trivial details (it is no coincidence, I think, that Borchardt's hardback boasts Milan Kundera's appraisal of Gombrowicz as "one of the greatest novelists of our century" -- Unbearablelightnessofbeingreliable Narrators Club!). And yet it is precisely because of the sheer ingenuity of this narrator to create the most bizarre analogies and metaphorical connections in the most mundane (and not-so-mundane, decidedly "literary") events that this novel is so incredibly seductive. If ever there was a text that embodied Bachelard's utopian aesthetic-psychoanalytic-phenomenological project, this would be it, but the kind of findings of this poetics of inner space are decidedly less refined or, uh, French.

In fact, in crafting this kind of fiction, I think Gombrowicz answers back to Bachelard's main fault: he points out how contaminated human consciousness is with all kind of literariness, with undigested chunks of other people's stories, or with our own desperate, pathological desire to cast ourselves in the role of director/author of the petty spectacle of our lives. By always having to express our thoughts not in primal images, but in an acquired language (even if what we're expressing is the primal image!), our experience of the world is inseparable from our experience of pre-narrated reality. And, with all due propers to Steven Pinker and the new gang fronting the "back to images" linguistic movement, I'd say that's one of the profoundest -- and scariest -- lessons that literature can teach us.

Words, words, words

I remember the first time I read Derrida. It was my second year of college, but for at least two years before that magical moment, I'd already been throwing around terms like "deconstruction" and "différance" without any knowledge of how they fit into the Western theoretical canon. Actually reading Derrida (some photocopied snippet from Of Grammatology, I think, for an Intro to Lit Theory course) only solidified my arrogant assurance of my own brilliance and superiority. I rushed home and, at the first chance I got, gleefully blurted out, "Everything is a language game!" to a philosophy major who'd been lecturing me on the finer points of Hegel and Kant. I probably felt just like an entire generation of post-WWI European schoolkids upon discovering the quasi-mystical kabbalah that was Marxist-Leninism. Grand theory of everything: discovered. Mysteries of life: solved. Check and check. So... worker's rally, then nip of gin and some foxtrot?

Reading Leibniz's Monadology (with excellent commentary by George MacDonald Ross), I'm reminded again of that bittersweet moment when all the complexities of the universe are crystallized under the aegis of one theoretical framework. Sweet not just because we as humans are lovers of orderly patterns, but also because, as Ross points out, many of the esoteric or just plain kooky aspects of Leibniz's philosophical system have recently been vindicated by the 20th century discovery of quantum mechanics. But bitter, too, for precisely that reason. Ross says the following of the modern-day application of the monad:

The Leibnizian point is that you can escape from this infinite regress only by postulating ultimate entities which do not have the properties of matter. Quantum mechanics comes quite close to this, despite the concept of a smallest possible but finite quantity (which is what ‘quantum’ means), since the characteristics of space, time, motion, and causation at the sub-atomic level are almost unrecognisably different from the macroscopic level. The same goes for relativity theory and very large magnitudes.

It's nice to know that what a century of scholars thought was crackpot theorizing is actually somewhat sound. But who's to say that in a hundred years, we won't look back at the quantum explanation of matter with equally patronizing mirth as we do at Leibniz's monad -- or Aquinas's immaterial angel. "They were brilliant thinkers," we'll say of the men and women who, today, we consider cutting-edge experts in capital-S Science (c.f. capital-T Truth), "and if they'd only had Technological Innovation X and Mathematical Breakthrough Y, they'd have finally reached what we know today, which is that matter is actually Z!" We'll still read their work, of course, but stripped of that transitory eureka power, the everything-finally-explainedness that makes the world make sense, it'll be mere logical cartwheels. Esoteric word-play. Nothing but... a language game.

We know what gravity is. We have all the mathematical formulas, the experiments with feathers and bowling balls, the variables and coefficients. But not a single person in the world can actually explain it in anything other than those terms. What's the point of all this endless theorizing, abstracting, parsing the world into terms and numbers that have as much relation to reality as g-force does to a brick dropped on my toe? It's moments like this that either the capital-T Truth of Neo-Platonism (aka, religion) or the quietus of a bare bodkin (aka, David Foster Wallace) seem really attractive. Or maybe I just need to get the hell out of grad school.

Grad skool

When he reads, the one afflicted with acedia yawns a lot and readily drifts off into sleep; he rubs his eyes and stretches his arms; turning his eyes away from the book, he stares at the wall and again goes back to reading for awhile; leafing through the pages, he looks curiously for the end of texts, he counts the folios and calculates the number of gatherings. Later, he closes the book and puts it under his head and falls asleep, but not a very deep sleep, for hunger then rouses his soul and has him show concern for its needs.

Evagrius Ponticus, 4th century AD

How very unpleasant is wisdom to the unlearned, and the unwise will not continue with her. She shall be to them as a mighty stone of trial, and they will cast her from them before it be long. For the wisdom of doctrine is according to her name, and she is not manifest unto many, but with them to whom she is known, she continues even to the sight of God. Give ear, my son, and take wise counsel, and cast not away my advice. Put your feet into her fetters, and your neck into her chains: Bow down your shoulder, and bear her, and be not grieved with her bands.

Ecclesiasticus, 2nd century BC

Misery and the Muses

There's been a flurry of recent news stories like this one on the positive effects that depression has on our ability to think critically, rigorously, and methodically. What's funny is that in The Origin of German Tragic Drama, Walter Benjamin critically, rigorously, and methodically explains how the link between depression and the intellect originates in Classical antiquity, with the figure of Saturn/Cronus. Cronus, the allegorical embodiment of depression in ancient Greece, was associated both with intensely absorbed contemplation and madness. Then, in the Renaissance, the image of Saturn/Cronus as ambivalently pensive/psychotic thinker was reinterpreted in a new conception of intellect -- what today we might call the absent-minded professor. And, in the baroque, this figure was again reread: the brilliant, hermetic, distanced-from-the-world monkish thinker was now the embodiment not of brilliance, but of the degenerate, fallen state of the world, in which even the loftiest heights of intellectual investigation would could only explore the manifest phenomenal realm of worldly things and never touch the transcendental, noumenal, Godly realm. Thus, in the 17th century, Robert Burton writes an "Anatomy of Melancholy", where he digresses into the inevitable tendency of scholars in his and every age to fall victim to fits of the most abject, pathetic, mental and physical feebleness -- i.e., depression. It's one of the greatest texts ever written in the English language, beloved of Samuel Johnson and Emily Dickenson. It's also a terrible thing to read while in grad school.

My point is that all the sophisticated technology and scientific advances of cognitive science over the course of centuries and centuries of human existence have simply succeeded in confirming the neurological mechanism for something that was already well-known to Pliny and Plato. Moreover, all the sophisticated technology and scientific advances of cognitive science over the course of centuries and centuries of human existence have figured out the effect, but not the cause, despite the fact that they're clearly part of one and the same vicious circle. Smart people get depressed because they realize the limits of their consciousness. Then, they hyperfocus on the limits of this consciousness, like self-harmers picking at the crust of their wounds. If they happen to be employed in academia, they harness their special powers of attention long enough to write a few monographs, maybe get tenure, and drink themselves to death (and, if they're really smart, they bypass the whole professional academic thing, write one brilliant book, and shoot themselves in the head on the Spanish-French border).

Congratulations, world! Once again, you've proven yourself to be an uninterrupted chain of more of the same, with no risk of transcendence is sight. Vanitas vanitatum et omnia vanitas.