Antichrist

Shot by Anthony Dod Mantel – Dogme 95’s onetime photographer in residence – w/ awe-inspiring etherealized gorgeousity one minute and raw guttering nerves the next, Lars Von Trier’s Antichrist is, if nothing else, easily the best thing he has done since his masterpiece The Idiots (’98) (the only film he ever made under the strictures of his Dogme manifesto’s various vows of chastity). Unveiling the new film at Cannes this year, the walking Danish personality cult attempted to explain its origins by way of describing a creative impasse brought about by a period of clinical depression and extreme anhedonia to which an extreme act of purging was the only viable artistic response. Certainly Antichrist is a film that feels overwhelmed by crises at once personal, artistic, and spiritual. It details a Satanic metempsychosis wherein all of nature, within and without the realm of the human and the personal, has become transfigured by daemonia. No vision of hell realized on earth has ever been rendered so impersonally while at once feeling so extremely grounded in specters of personal suffering – it seems to suggest firsthand experience of how easily life can be lived into a corner from which one suddenly cannot escape, where the earth itself burns the soles of yr feet and the spasms and shudderings of a cataleptic horror become the lingua franca of all human exchange. Antichrist tells of a married Seattle couple whose lives are shaken to the core when their infant son escapes his crib and crawls out the window to his death whilst they, taking a break from doing the laundry, are hastily (and graphically) fucking. This is merely the prologue, done in slowed-to-a-pulsing-seethe b&w tableaux vivant accompanied by Handel. From here we enter the tidal process of their gradual, terrific undoing, accompanied by a pernicious, droning score and delineated with baleful inevitability in four chapters and an epilogue, each separated by smeared chalkboard title cards: “Grief,” “Pain,” “Despair,” and “The Three Beggars” – the beggars in question being manifestations of the three previous chapter titles embodied by a deer perpetually giving birth to a half-externalized stillborn, a talking fox eviscerating itself (“chaos reigns,” it extemporizes), and a crazy fucking resilient crow, one of each of which is introduced at the end of each of the first three chapters as brief, calamitous visions of universal enmity, all congregating in the final one. The film proper starts w/ “She” (Charlotte Gainsbourg as withered gynec apparition) in a state of almost complete grief-stricken collapse, being subjected to a strong-arm regime of recovery by her stupid, rigid, and invasive therapist husband, “He” (chiseled, phallic, and purplish Willen Defoe w/ lips not unlike that of a penis). Our couple soon retreats to their cabin in the woods, portentously named “Eden,” He trying to take her to the core of her fear so that She may be expunged of it. From here their Ingmar Bergman-school Kammerspiel sparring culminates w/ the two of them driven to the brink in an explosion of cathexis and violent desublimation whereby a whole history of gynocide precipitates a confused degeneration of human and extra-human nature (not to mention a bloody cock-bludgeoning and an unspeakably graphic clitoredectomy-w/-scissors). “The Epilogue” follows He, emerging half-crippled from the woods, leading a giant procession of women w/ blurred, amorphous faces; the repressed female dead of a phallocracy built atop their myriad corpses; the depersonalized currency w/ which evil has spent itself. She, a creature of Intuition and Nature who has been working on a dissertation concerning the history of 16th Century violence toward women, is no longer certain that such violence was not in some way justified by virtue of an inherent evil embodied in the feminine, a nature which has evidently been awakening within her for some time, evidenced by the fact that She appears to have been secretly abusing their son during the period leading up to his death. He, in his way, represents the Rational and the realm of Control, though some sort of invagination of his cortex allows him visions of animal excrescence and a connection to the realm of sublimated destructive evil w/ which the natural world surrounding Eden is invisibly pregnant. The violence that erupts when She becomes terrified that He will leave her confuses this dynamic all the more as She proceeds to enact a mutual mortification of the flesh that parallels the kinds of violence men have traditionally visited upon women, almost religious in its ritualized singularity. It is almost impossible not to, by the end of the film, see the two characters as two sides of one nature inscribed upon the hand, and in the head, of Mr. Von Trier. As a filmmaker who has often said he identifies w/ the women his films keep martyring as if he were doing them a favor (much to the dismayed chagrin of many a feminist), he is also famous for being rigid, arrogant, and especially cruel to his actresses. It seems obvious that Von Trier deeply relates to both characters: both part of nature and both, ultimately, overwhelmed by it. If nature is, as She would have it, “Satan’s church,” then it seems fit that each of us, and not just Mr. Von Trier and his human puppets, should be possessed by and in possession of an unspeakable evil that courses through all that which is and which manifests itself in forces which overpower all rational blockades we may seek to impose upon them, whether internally or externally. Evil, then, is in the aether and Antichrist is less about gender than it may at first appear – instead it is finally about the absorption and depolarizing of gender’s pitiful surfaces and the assertion of its ultimate irrelevance. The film ends w/ a bizarre dedication to Andrei Tarkovsky, a filmmaker whose deeply religious vision was not nearly as troubled as Antichrist’s is. What Von Trier’s film does share w/ Tarkovsky’s masterpieces, though, is an absolute disgust w/ all secular-humanist institutions and modes of address as well as a gauzy visual power. The distinction is – and it is a great one – that Antichrist has no room for the divine. Its sodden wounds are cauterized w/ bile and sap.