Antichrist: Lars and the Real Issue

by Vadim Rizov

Most Lars von Trier films are about the arrogance of males who think they know everything, yet are supremely fatuous in their advice. In other words, most of Lars von Trier's movies are about himself. Epidemic and The Five Obstructions both foreground one "Lars von Trier" (playing himself) as an arrogant, know-it-all blowhard who, come final scene, gets his comeuppance. Similar roles are occupied in The Kingdom (by Dr. Stig, who almost certainly would've gotten smacked down in part 3 had actor Ernst-Hugo Järegård lived long enough to complete the projected trilogy), David Morse in Dancer in the Dark (who pedantically advises Björk all the way up to her execution) and Tom Edison Jr. (Paul Bettany) in Dogville. Not least in this tradition is Antichrist's He (Willem Dafoe), who is all of those characters recapped: a man offering advice way beyond his pay grade, only to find himself shot down with extreme physical vengeance.

That physical pain was Antichrist's main selling point in theatrical release; in the UK, distributor Artificial Eye upped the ante by marketing it as straight horror fare, a financial calculation that paid off. Antichrist isn't a horror movie, though it has both squeamish torture-porn moments and supernatural grotesquerie to spare. Listening to what von Trier says during press conferences is always a tricky proposition, so ignore his (incredibly entertaining) proclamation that "I am the best film director in the world" and focus in on the real disclosure: the film emerged from two years of depression and was made as therapy. Antichrist has a manic-depressive structure, its operatic, lush black-and-white opening followed by about one hour of boredom leavened with occasional weirdness, brutally broken with by 25 minutes of straight-up torture, and capped off by an equally lush closer. The gear-switching has the feel of internal stock-taking and clearing.

To my mind, Antichrist isn't a terribly good movie (it could be von Trier's worst), but for fans it's a recapitulation and amping up of the traditional agenda. In the mostly unremarkable short documentary profile Lars From 1-10, he's asked if he'd liked to be punished. "Oh yes," he giggles, "and spanked as well." He's not kidding: all the tortures visited on He are von Trier begging for someone, anyone to take him in hand. He is a lecturing scold, explaining to She (Charlotte Gainsbourg) why her every visceral urge and intellectual justification is just wrong, and for this he's punished. The on-screen von Trier is a heavy pedant too, and he gets similarly rebuked. In 1988's Epidemic (still one of his best and most unfairly overlooked films), he and screenwriter Niels Vorsel set about writing a horror movie that they can use just to laboriously do all the heavy subtext lifting horror films are supposed to do. "Here we can poke fun at religion," von Trier announces.

The actual horror movie turns out to be about a doctor trying to stop an epidemic from spreading only to find out he's been the one spreading it all along; von Trier himself is hilariously punished by film's end. So too—to lesser extent—is the von Trier of The Five Obstructions, who spends the whole movie tormenting Jørgen Leth with filmmaking challenges. The final challenge, though, is to simply read out von Trier's voiceover, which turns out to be a confession of arrogance. This is possibly von Trier's most sincere statement ever; that he gets someone else to read it is typical.

Though von Trier is often accused of misogyny for the incredible amount of suffering his women go through (to be a female in a von Trier film is pretty much begging for martyrization), that recrimination misses the point. Sure, von Trier clearly wears his issues nakedly (though that seems irrelevant to the quality of his work), but more often than not his subject is the arrogance of someone with all the solutions getting smacked down. Sometimes that person is a woman—most notably Nicole Kidman in Dogville—but gender seems largely irrelevant to the larger agenda. von Trier makes didactic cinema about didactic people: it's the same impulse that led him to declare Dogme 95's necessity, only to pretty much instantly abandon it. Antichrist isn't landmark cinema, but it's as pure a cathartic attempted exorcism of those urges as could be imagined.

[Antichrist is on DVD and Blu-ray today, from the Criterion Collection.]

Posted by ahillis at November 9, 2010 12:10 PM