I went to see Lars von Trier’s Antichrist a few days ago. Of the reviews I’ve read, Brent Plate’s captures the way in which the film’s images persist in haunting one’s consciousness. Plate, aptly I think, compares the film to Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will, the film that Adolf Hitler called “an incomparable glorification of the power and beauty of our Movement”:
“Like Riefenstahl’s Triumph, Lars von Trier’s Antichrist is a beautiful film. Ultra slow-motion flashbacks and intercuts reminiscent of a Bill Viola video; high-contrast, black-and-white lovemaking; textured, hypnotic, surrealistic scenes of humans intertwined with nature; and extreme close-ups of human eyes, bamboo in a glass vase, and unkempt hair (the camera sporadically zooms in on the backs of heads a la Hitchcock’s Vertigo) all make for a film that is impossible to get out of one’s sensual body. Antichrist’s images and sounds have infiltrated my dreamscape for the two weeks now since I saw it at the New York Film Festival, along with about 700 other attendees. I wish I had their phone numbers; even the disgusted dozens who walked out halfway through. I’d like to call them at 3:00 a.m. and ask what they are thinking about, what they are dreaming, if indeed they are sleeping. I need some therapy. This is one messed-up film.”
I don’t need therapy from seeing the film, but I am convinced that von Trier needs it. It’s a beautiful film, cinematically masterful at times, but it goes off the rails. Whether it’s misogynist (probably, though one could legitimately debate that), misanthropic (no doubt), just troubled (it certainly is that), or merely pranksterish and provocateurial (and self-promoting to the max), von Trier plays, enchantingly, with the power of images in a way that only those who don’t believe in the power of images can fail to be perturbed by. Where Coppolla’s/Conrad’s/Colonel Kurtz’s “The horror, the horror…” was motivated by something tangible (the Vietnam War, the Belgian Congo, war itself, the murky depths humans sometimes descend to), von Trier’s war is a war at the heart of nature, humanity, everything, and it is a war we lost a long time ago.
Slyly dedicating the film to Andrei Tarkovsky, von Trier is Tarkovsky’s demon brother, his evil genius twin. Where Tarkovsky believes in hope against hope, salvation in a universe that sometimes seems stacked against it (though it’s really us who stack it, and in which ultimately time, nature, and beauty redeem us), von Trier’s is a hopeless beauty, a laugh in the face of cruel darkness, which happens to be a cruel darkness he imagines into existence for us and lets us wander around in at our own risk. He’s too good a filmmaker for us to watch as he drives off a cliff; someone ought to rein him in.
After watching “Breaking the Waves” and “Dancer in the Dark” I swore off von Trier’s films because they messed with my head too much. But I couldn’t resist and ended up seeing “Dogville” which also messed with my head but is my favorite of the three films I’ve seen of his.
His films create new higher-level ethical problems for me in terms of violence and art. On the one hand we can think about whether or not films that have gratuitous violence should be censored or restricted with some kind of rating system, and when does the artistic value of the work outweigh the social harm. On issues like this I tend to be fairly extreme in terms of defending creative expression.
But with von Trier’s films the act of being subjected to them is violent in and of itself. It isn’t in the same category as something a war film that glorifies warfare and violence where we can worry about what kind of values it is reinforcing in the culture at large. And it isn’t like violent video games where we can worry that someone who plays these video games constantly might repeat this violence in real life.
With von Trier’s films we can locate the violent act in the act of watching them. There is something really criminal in his films. They change the viewer but not the way that propaganda does or the way that video games do. They change the viewer in a way that is similar to the way that surviving a car crash might change someone.
Thomas: “They change the viewer in a way that is similar to the way that surviving a car crash might change someone.”
This is very well put. While I had some qualms about each of three other films you mention, I thought it pretty clear that their artistic value (and maybe “positive moral value”) outweighed any “social harm” (and “negative moral value”). In fact, I enjoyed Dancer in the Dark and was impressed with Dogville, which I found difficult and a little nasty, but also smart and very lucid.
With Antichrist, however, I think he might have turned a corner – though it might just be a corner for me that, for others, he had turned long ago. Here I really did feel as if I had witnessed something like a slow-motion car crash. One with real beauty, and somehow involving and implicating the whole universe. But with a kind of hollowness at its center. I think it’s his most brutal film, partly because it lacks the lucidity of the others. It’s just not clear what he’s up to, or why, except for the sheer perversity of it.
But I’m not sure what kind of warning it should be accompanied by. Maybe just “Have you read the reviews? Do you know what you’re about to see?”