Antichrist

Antichrist – “Nature,” says the unnamed woman in Lars Von Trier’s Antichrist, “is the church of Satan.” A horror film with only two characters, played by Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg,

Antichrist sets about proving the heroine’s thesis with dogmatic exhaustiveness. While they are having sex, Dafoe and Gainsbourg’s young son, Nick, falls out a window on a snowy night, dying on the pavement. The little boy, a very cute little blonde lad, sees his parents in the throes of passion and turns conspiratorially to the camera, smirking in a highly unpleasant manner before venturing out an open window. It’s the unsavory smirk, and many similar effects, that gives this film its nasty, immense and rank ambience. The child’s mother can’t recover from her crippling grief. The situation is not helped by Dafoe’s character, an arrogant, self-satisfied psychologist who deprives his wife of her depression medication and sets out to restore her equanimity by using cognitive behavioral therapy at a remote cabin, nicknamed Eden, hidden somewhere in the woods of the Pacific Northwest. This turns out to be a big mistake. The woman is obsessed with witchcraft, the “sisterhood,” as she calls it, and the previous summer worked on a thesis with the sinister and unpromising name Gynocide. Apparently, Gainsbourg’s character, in her grief-induced delirium, has come to the conclusion that the men who tortured witches to death were justified – witches are associated with nature and nature is created by the devil. The evidence for this proposition is that nature’s womb brings forth creatures only to exterminate them – Von Trier demonstrates this didactically, if impressively, with an image of a deer with dead foetus extruding from its rump, close-ups of baby birds falling onto ant nests, and the rattle of acorns cast from an oak above the shack’s tin roof that fall pointlessly onto the ground only to rot in the suppurating, fern-filled rain forest. A fox rips out its own innards and mutters “chaos reigns” while Dafoe looks on with alarm. Gainsbourg is hyper-sexual, forcing herself onto Dafoe, demanding that he hit her, and, then, darting away to masturbate in a full-frontal shot next to the black void under a tree knocked over by a storm. (The image is similar to the shot of Kirsten Dunst melodramatically masturbating on the green of the golf course in Melancholia -- Von Trier is nothing is not consistent.) Dafoe had to suffer mightily as Christ in Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ, a sub-text that Von Trier exploits throughout the film, but his misery in that picture is nothing compared to what happens to him in this movie. Gainsbourg smashes his testicals with a big log of firewood and, then, masturbates him to the “money shot” – in this picture, an explosive ejaculation that is nothing but blood. Next, she bores a hole through his calf with a rusty augur (it looks like something you would use for ice-fishing) and pinions the poor hero with a fifty pound grindstone pierced through his leg. Dafoe has to crawl around hundreds of yards, it seems, with the grindstone attached to his mutilated leg, screaming most of the time. Gainsbourg catches up to her husband, there’s more sex and violence, and, then, she uses a rusty scissors to snip off her clitoris – again a shot executed in large close-up with vagina prosthesis specially made for the film. Back in the ramshackle cabin, Dafoe manages to free himself from the grindstone and chokes his wife to death – so much for the benefits of cognitive behavioral therapy. Then, with an aria from Handel’s Rinaldo playing on soundtrack, Dafoe limps back toward civilization encountering the three beggars, Pain, Grief, and Despair as well as a horde of faceless witches. In summary, of course, the picture sounds completely ludicrous, but, in fact, it is exquisitely shot and filled with haunting and beautiful images. You don’t care about the principal characters but you don’t need to – the film is overtly allegorical, a Baroque altar piece filled with martyrdom, ecstasy and horror. Indeed, I would argue that the fundamental mode of the film is Baroque – emotion-drenched, super-saturated, pictorial hysteria. Nature is evil, I suppose, when viewed in a certain light and the film is nothing if not effective in enforcing that vision on the viewer. The picture would probably be too disturbing to watch in a theater – I thought Melancholia, which is not as explicitly horrible, was close to the limit of what an audience can stand. I watched the picture during the day, over my noon breaks, with plenty of interruptions. The film is a mirthless, Nordic demonstration that reason, as exemplified by Dafoe’s psychological therapy, is insufficient to the miseries of existence and, further, that you shouldn’t look too close at things that you loathe: Gainsbourg’s study of crimes against women turns her into a perpetrator of Gynocide against herself. (And we need to recall Von Trier’s expression of respect for Hitler and Nazis that got him in big trouble at Cannes in 2011). Furthermore, there are Gnostic questions that it’s best not to ask: Why, indeed does nature produce endless sentient replicas only to torture them to death? John Waters, the film director, greatly admires this picture. He said: “If Ingmar Bergman returned from Hell to direct a porno-exploitation picture, this is the movie he would make.” And, indeed, the imagery of the cabin hidden in the woods derives from Scenes from a Marriage and there is genital mutilation in Bergman’s Cries and Whispers. Von Trier thought he was making a hommage to the great Andrei Tarkovsky and had the actors watch the Russian filmmaker’s The Mirror before filming this picture.

Second thoughts (and after watching the film again with its commentary track): Given all the mayhem in this movie involving rusty scissors, augers, shovels and spanner wrenches, no one should see this picture unless their tetanus shots are up-to-date. Antichrist is easy to mock – the film’s operatic Nordic gloom, the only real color supplied by spurts of blood, is ridiculous, although ridiculous in the style of many works of Baroque religious art. Very few films credit consultants (I’m not kidding) in these fields: music, misogyny, mythology and evil, horror films, and theology; each of these categories has an associated “researcher” listed. (I presume this is some kind of tongue-in-cheek joke although, listening to Von Trier on the commentary track, I’m not sure). Furthermore, Von Trier doesn’t help matters by his puzzling and unhelpful remarks in the commentar dialogue with an earnest, and often embarrassed British film critic. Von Trier claims that he was so seriously incapacitated by depression – which he often calls “anxiety” – that he was unable to direct the film and doesn’t seem to remember it very well. By the evidence of the commentary, Von Trier is the only Dane in his country who doesn’t speak good English – this is, indeed, probably due to his famous phobia: he will not travel by plane, drives to Canne for the film festival, and has never left the continent of Europe; thus, he has not practiced his English in the UK or USA. He seems baffled by his interlocutor’s questions, uses strange words – “humoristic” for “humorous” or “comical” – and is stubbornly oppositional to most of the interpretations advanced by the film critic interviewing him. From time to time, he seems more concerned with sniggering about the graphic sex and violence in the picture. At one point, he “humoristically” interrupts a solemn peroration by the film critic to point out “the greatest masturbation scene in all film” – the image of Charlotte Gainsbourg completely nude writhing in passion at the base of an enormous withered tree. Von Trier claims “shamanic” inspiration to the film – for instance, the use of the deer, raven, and wounded fox as the ‘three beggars” and confesses to strangely self-interested obsessions motivating the picture. Von Trier obviously despises the institution of marriage and takes every opportunity to denounce it, claiming that the psychotic violence that we are seeing on screen, is “typical of marriage”. The parts of the film involving Willem Dafoe’s attempts to use cognitive behavioral therapy to treat his grief-stricken wife are clearly “score-settling” between Von Trier and some therapist that he despises – again, he denounces cognitive behavioral therapy in the most vehement terms on the commentary and seems to hate all therapists and psychologists. (Presumably, he had bad experiences with such people when he was hospitalized for depression.) But setting all this aside, Antichrist is the genuine article – a film that is brilliantly, if perversely conceived and that makes perfect sense on its own terms. People inflict pain on themselves and one another because they long for a pain that they can control. Nature is murderous. Depression does alter the world – the world in which a depressed man lives is very different than the world accessible to someone who is not depressed. Thoughts do alter reality. And Von Trier’s vision of these terrible things, a horrific fairy tale set in the darkest of all dark woods – the hero is not only sexually wounded, pinioned through the calf with a millstone, stabbed with scissors, but also buried alive – is indisputably powerful and, in its own particular way, truthful. Von Trier even admits a moment of optimism into the film’s nightmare – just before the final scenes, we see Dafoe’s character, badly injured, limping through the black forest after destroying with fire his wife’s body. We have seen that each tree in the forest seems rooted in a corpse or corpses and, suddenly, the image shows us enormous heaps of bodies, schematically represented, like the victims piled up in a concentration camp. Dafoe finds some berries which he can eat and sees the three beggars, the totemic animals now, at peace, watching him. Then, as he descends a great wooded slope, we see hundreds of women of all ages climbing uphill toward him. The women are faceless, but they are alive and restitution for all the witches (and would-be witches) that men have killed. We have seen Gainsbourg’s shriek call down storms of hail, demonstrating female control over the murderous impulses in nature. Witches do exist, men keep killing them, but they are – like this troubling film – indisputably alive.