Gone Nuts

[October 28th, 2009]

Antichrist is the most bloodless movie ever to contain a clitorodectomy self-performed with a pair of scissors. It may be unfair to call it junk cinema, though director Lars von Trier’s latest taunt does contain many shots of its lead couple’s junk, mostly in the process of being smashed with fireplace logs. But it’s clinical and abstracted, as if its characters were numbed not only by grief but also with horse tranquilizers. Don’t let the marketing fool you—the movie is not a piece of woodland camp, even if it features a lot of hoo-ha about nut trees, millstones drilled through the femur, and a talking fox. (Between this and The Fantastic Mr. Fox, the evidence suggests that Willem Dafoe will agree on principle to any script that includes a chatty Vulpes. ) No, this is Serious Cinema, using adroit techniques to address Serious Ideas. The problem is that these ideas are a load of balls.

“I never interested you till now,” Charlotte Gainsbourg informs her therapist husband Dafoe, who is attempting to fast-track her through the stages of grief after the death of their unattended toddler. “Now I’m your patient.” She could be laying the accusation at the feet of her director, who is raring for vivisection. Certainly her spouse has been previously interested in her in some manner, since the movie opens with a gleaming black-and-white montage of them engaged in vigorous copulation in the shower, atop a clothes dryer and finally on a decidedly non-professional couch. As the soundtrack weeps with a Handel aria, the intertwined couple proceeds to knock over, in slow motion, every surrounding item not tied down: a toothbrush, a bottle of booze, the baby. Well, they don’t literally knock over the baby, but the causation is there, as during her orgasm the child tumbles out a second-story window to a snowy demise: La petit mort. This awful incident is languorously shot, which makes it all the more difficult to take it straight—this pattern is repeated when He (did I mention this couple has no names? They don’t have names) decides that She needs to go off her antidepressants and journey to a forest called Eden, which terrifies Her. If you go out in the woods today, you’re in for a big surprise.

Cue the suppurating fox, the doe with the fawn-fetus hanging out of its vulva, and the eagle chick covered in ants. In these woods, it’s always a macabre Mother’s Day. This middle passage of Antichrist is by far the most haunting; von Trier momentarily pauses from his rush for significance, and sound editor Kristian Eidnes Andersen does extremely unnerving work with the thudding of filberts on a cabin roof (a foreshadowing of falling nuts to come). But eventually She reaches the end of the talking cure, and discovers Her true nature entails masturbating amid the roots of a great hardwood, then jerking Him off until he ejaculates blood. She explains this in a set of notebooks entitled Gynocide: “A crying woman is a scheming woman.” So out come the scissors.

Here is the part where I am supposed to write about how Lars von Trier has been sadistically debasing women from Breaking the Waves through Dogville, or argue that he’s secretly engaged in some kind of guerrilla feminism. But here we might ask whether it’s worth getting outraged by a movie where the weightiest assertion is “bitches be crazy”—or whether the other possible moral, “people be crazy,” is any more profound. Antichrist is packed with all kinds of Biblical imagery (He and She engage in carnal knowledge beneath a tree in a garden called Eden, for gosh sakes), all suggesting that von Trier is absorbed in some Medieval Catholic self-flagellation. This quickly turns into the ritual flaying of other selves. If the old truism goes that liberal humanists love humanity in the abstract at the expense of individual people, then it’s also true that religious doctrinaires want to save humanity in the abstract through the suffering of individual people. And that’s what is happening here, as von Trier uses shock effects to make the trite observation that people, when you boil them down, just ain’t no good. So we all must be punished: For 104 minutes, Lars von Trier surgically removes our capacity for pleasure.