NOT EXACTLY ANTI, FAR FROM PRO

Okay, 48 hours have passed…I can begin to ease myself into life as a normal person again. I haven’t slept. After seeing ANTICHRIST and being total sapped of all enthusiasm, hope, and positivity – I am once again on the road to recovery, my heart beating normally, my mind not wandering to tableaus of still born deer, genital mutilation, blood…

Oh but we are getting ahead of ourselves. ANTICHRIST is of course Lars von Trier’s (THE IDIOTS, MANDERLAY, DANCER IN THE DARK) latest offering. And because I adore some of his films, and because the star power here is first rate (Willem Dafoe and -!- Charlotte Gainsbourg), and because I love horror movies and this seemed truly, genuinely, scary…well I was pretty damn excited.

To get this out of the way: I don’t understand the criticism of this film. And by CRITICISM I mean the critical reaction, positive and negative. There’s so much about how perverse, manipulative and over-the-top this film is. But I have to wonder who it is that is saying such wholly uninteresting things. There is nothing in this film that isn’t matched (or topped!) in J-Horror or K-Horror, nothing in fact really original at all about its metaphor-system or imagery or carnage. But this movie isn’t an egregious piece of trash either, and the hostility it’s gotten for being a dupe and a manipulative sham is undeserved. The reality is that it is too uninteresting to be anything so extreme.

So why my visceral reaction? Why the physical ailment that followed me around even two days after seeing this? The one thing I will give credit to ANTICHRIST for is its mood. About three minutes into ANTICHRIST things get a bit nutty involving a baby and a window sill, and thus begins the strange mood of the film. Sometimes this mood is exploited for horror movie purposes (MATCH CUT TO: shadows rolling over tree branches, the whip of wind) but I don’t think it’s wholly manipulative in like a personally affronting way. It’s well documented how Lars von Trier was fighting depression during the making of this movie, and I think there is evidence here of a real cathartic artistic process. But I wasn’t expecting that by exorcising his depression Lars was actually handing it off: and in this way was leaving the audience with their own bit of his foul outlook. So this may be manipulative but only in so far as von Trier made this movie for his own self, not for me or you or Michael Eisner, and I sort of wish more filmmakers approached their art with such solipsism.

Also, of course, I take issue with the criticism because what horror movie ISN’T manipulative. It’s almost an aesthetic criterion of the form, an attempt to handle or control an audience to produce a reaction. I guess where ANTICHRIST worked for me isn’t in my “reaction” to the film (frankly, I didn’t really like it) but in the feeling I got from it: namely, that things are terrible and everything is most certainly not going to be okay. Oddly enough, in the masochistic feedback loop of a horror fan, the cumulative experience is positive – even if the actual experience was literally awful.

Sounds like bullshit? Maybe, but we have to ask ourselves why anyone would go see a movie called ANTICHRIST without the tiniest desire to punish oneself. Anyway, the point is that the film was successfully atmospheric, so calling it “the worst piece of shit ever” (as one friend who saw it did) seems hyperbolic when plenty of movies come out that have neither plot NOR atmosphere. I'd take this film any day.

Of course that leaves plot, and this is where ANTICHRIST failed me, and this is where I think it fails in general – and why people can’t see past its abhorrent imagery and appreciate the brilliant cinematography and design. The plot of this movie is ridiculous. It starts out with a beautifully shot sequence of a husband and wife having sex to a swelling Handel aria…as their newborn in the other room climbs up onto a snowy window ledge and jumps to his death. Yes, this is awful, but it’s such a stock scenario right out of any given melodrama – what if…what if…we could have stopped him! It also ties in the film's psychological themes in the most straight-forward and uninteresting way; as if von Trier is announcing that sex is associated with violence and death, and if you don’t believe me watch this scene!

Unfortunately this film never evolves much further psychologically from this basic Freudian tenet. In addition to LIBIDO—the life force—Freud postulated THANTOS, our “death instinct.” Everyone is clamoring for a slice of NONLIFE, of UNBEING, of THE WOMB. For Freud, and for ANTICHRIST, Libido in tied to THANTOS in a Gordian Knot -- there is no solution for one that doesn’t involve the other. Listen, this is definitely not bad psychoanalytic terrain for a horror movie to mine; it’s just how does von Trier expect to find gold there when so many others have come before him?

But psychoanalysis aside, the plot’s biggest failing is more in another psychological realm – the whole Behaviorism/exposure therapy conceit is TRULY RIDICULOUS. It’s actually like insultingly bad. First and foremost, I cannot accept that Willem Dafoe is both Gainsbourg husband AND HER THERAPIST. I mean…why? Why couldn’t this movie just be about a man helping his wife through the stages of grief? Why does it have to be couched in prosaic, clinical psychological concepts? Because the truth is it goes against fundamental psychological treatises to have your therapist also be your lover. It actually sort of negates the entire therapeutic scenario. And while you may feel like this is a small thing, it actually is a huge problem in the film.

Actually, it would have been fine if the film took a different turn than where it eventually ended up. I figured they were setting up Willem Dafoe as “the evil one” because of this just totally ill-conceived therapeutic strategy (along the lines of: if he’s a bad therapist maybe he’s also…a bad person). But instead they fall back on what is probably the most uninteresting of all possible scenarios. Willem Dafoe is our hero…it’s the bitch who is crazy. It’s FEMALE SEXUALITY that’s the snake in the grass (the fox in the hole??...aha!). This is so insipid, so prosaic, so easy. I don’t even care about the argument IS LARS VON TRIER A MYSOGYNIST because the climax of this film is too uninteresting to really be taken seriously. Trier was building towards something pretty interesting – the sexual aggression that exists between a couple, before and after terrible personal tragedy. But by shifting it in the end to make one good (Dafoe) and one bad (Gainsbourg) it simplifies this to the point of nullity. How much better this film would have been if the two were just violently attacking each other on a truly two-way street…well I’m not sure it would be MUCH more appealing but at least the psychological perspective would be subtler. At least there would have been a point.

Instead Lars von Trier gives us a beautiful-looking film that has no point, and it’s a sad thing. In some ways I feel he must have known this, because he makes reference to almost every horror movie under the sun. It taps into BLAIR WITCH and THE EVIL DEAD’s cabin-in-the-woods; it has a SAW moment involving a rusty grindstone; it channels Takashi Miike’s AUDITION (among others) with its gore and body fluids; it has a Hitchcockian blackbird and a tell-tale heart and a million other horror movie tropes. I didn’t mind this stuff because it at least looked good, but I was hoping that all that homage was being used to better present what is ORIGINAL. Then I realized there isn’t much that’s original, and I went home, and I didn’t sleep for two nights.

So who knows? Maybe that in itself is a measure of the film’s success, or maybe I just need Ambien?