ANTICHRIST

Lars von Trier, 2009

ALL YOU NEED IS LOVE, OR WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT LARS

It’s almost too easy to find fault with ANTICHRIST, a contentious extravagance by the one-time self-proclaimed bad boy of Danish cinema. So easy, in fact, that reviewers tripped over themselves in the rush to scoff at the film upon its release. Mind you, who can blame them? The film is full of moments that can be dismissed as sophomoric, pretentious, or risible, but as anyone familiar with Lars ‘the von’ Trier knows, it’s par for the course with this wilful provocateur. I wouldn’t call myself a fan, but I’m inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt. While some of his films are irritating (well, all of them to varying degrees), he is nevertheless an artist with solid thematic concerns willing to challenge the conventions and sensibilities of middle-class passivity.

I could end this blurb there, as I doubt if anything below will advance my argument for “tolerance of Lars” better than acknowledging that any artist who confronts middle-class indifference deserves a pass. After all, what does one expect from artists if not to challenge assumptions or at least attempt to articulate something truthful? And what does it say about us if we too readily put the boot in? One doesn’t have to like their work, but one can acknowledge and respect their intentions, assuming one recognises them, of course.

In the days when he asserted his provocateur credentials, Trier didn’t shy away from controversy. True to form, he liked to say that everything written about him was a lie, which may have been more defensive than he let on, just as his provocations more than likely masked a self-doubting moral conservative. His parents supposedly believed that boundary-setting stunted the development of children — we don’t have to wonder how that turned out. By his own admission, his upbringing is at the root of his insecurities and depression. It certainly informs (directly and indirectly) his work. Take MEDEA, for example, which is, to some degree, a precursor to ANTICHRIST.

Trier’s characters are often thematic avatars. Men broadly represent the severity of the world: reason, authority, condemnation, intransigence, and (not least) patriarchal power, with which he was evidently at war, while women embody sacrifice, redemption, suffering, and a similar battle with bullying bastards. ANTICHRIST was apparently drawn from Trier’s extensive therapy, so the central couple represents conflicting sides of a single entity. Actually, it’s a three-sided entity that includes their 6-year-old son, who falls to his death in the opening flashback while his parents are “preoccupied with themselves”. The boy is Trier’s inner child (or Id), left to perish (metaphor) while the adult sides of his psyche (Ego and Superego) are engaged in self-centred conflict. So when ‘He’ (the unemotional male side, played by Willem Defoe) gets too close for psychological comfort, ‘She’ (the emotional female side, played by Charlotte Gainsbourg) acts to neutralise the threat.

Problems occur when viewers confuse allegory with Trier’s supposed gender politics. The much-maligned “punishment of women” in his films is partly an outworking of themes related to patriarchal oppression, but it mainly juxtaposes “worldly” power, money, and hatred (masculine) with “spiritual” forgiveness, love, and suffering (feminine). These themes aren’t exactly hidden, yet some have missed them, and things get messy if one engages with Trier’s stories without accounting for his subtexts. For example, when Roger Ebert said of DOGVILLE that “American citizens would never chain a helpless woman to a post so that the town could rape her”, he obviously missed (or pretended to miss) the allegorical intent. It illustrates how problematic it can be to take Trier’s films literally.

Interestingly, the religious aspects of Trier’s work are rarely discussed. In a sense, he and Tarkovsky have more in common than camera placement. But where Andrei emphasised Divine Omnipotence, Lars grappled with theological contradiction. One may not regard ANTICHRIST as one of the great works of the cinematic canon, but it did nevertheless attempt to examine personal and universal struggles with artistic and spiritual sincerity.

Trier’s films broadly grapple with ‘the affliction of belief’, and in this respect, they resonate with the work of Ingmar Bergman. However, where Bergman’s beef with 'The Big Guy’ was the existential angst of an atheist (supposedly), Trier seemed to be a theist with a love-hate relationship with religion. He also shared Bergman’s preference for female protagonists with whom he seemed to identify, and yet he got flack for supposedly being a misogynist. He certainly had a “complicated relationship with the ladies”, but he had “issues with the lads”, too, so maybe he was less of a misogynist than a misanthropic. Indeed, one could argue that there is no gender bias in Lars von Trier’s disdain, although these days, he’s probably more conciliatory. How things change.

If it’s true that he set himself the task of writing a number of pages a day as part of his therapy, then ANTICHRIST parallels Bergman’s PERSONA as a work that (as Bergman put it) “saved its author”. Both films respond to the brutality of life and personal implosion. They are both two-actor films in which each character is one half of a single entity: the emotionally reactive “patient half” and the more logical “healer half”, and both end with the characters merging on a note of ambiguous transcendence. Benjamin Christensen’s WITCHCRAFT THROUGH THE AGES could be another influence, an early Danish masterwork that caused outrage in its day for — wait for it — its graphic criticism of the “religion-endorsed oppression of women”. In ANTICHRIST, the thesis ‘She’ is writing is called “Gynocide”: the self-destruction of women oppressed by patriarchy. In terms of subtextual meaning, Trier couldn’t have offered a bigger clue as to how one should read his film!

His work may not have the high-art nuances, subtlety or grace of his mentors, but nor should it. Trier has his own artistic temperament and preoccupations, his own “spiritual angst”. The hysteria and excess in ANTICHRIST reflect the disgust of his howling inner child and its longing for spiritual and psychological health. Despite claims that ANTICHRIST is meretricious and dishonest, it may be one of Trier’s most personal and revealing films. Whether one has any interest in the revelations is a matter of taste, but critics should, in fairness, give the film a little more consideration and a little less self-congratulatory condescension.

As I’ve already indicated, the misogyny Trier is accused of may stem from a misreading of the allegorical suffering of his female characters, complicated by a problematic upbringing. Hence, my suggestion that his “misogyny” may be a more general “misanthropy” or, more accurately, narcissistic self-hatred: an inability to give or receive love due to the fear of abandonment and betrayal; and a tendency to have contempt for those least able to defend themselves or who pose a significant intellectual or emotional threat. For the narcissist, the subject of their attack is a kind of de-facto self, deserving scorn for either being too much like them or inferior to them. Narcissists abuse others to shield themselves from self-loathing. Given what Trier said about his childhood, this could shed light on the conflicts in his films, particularly ANTICHRIST.

The title of the film might also be self-referential in terms of describing someone unable to submit to the ‘Authorial Influence of God’. It could also describe someone who self-heals through therapy and, therefore, is “anti-Christ” in the sense that they have no need for the Love and Healing that is (within a religious context) “ God’s Job”. Well and good, but many who see the film for the first (and probably only) time might not twig to it, but even if they do, by dismissing the film as “Scandinavian heavy-handedness”, they risk missing what might be a bold examination of the brokenness of human nature.

If you can see past the histrionics of ANTICHRIST (a film about madness that literally goes berserk), you might notice how beautifully made it is. It’s also rather funny, and some laughs are intentional. In the end, it comes down to how much slack one is prepared to cut for a petulant show-off who happens to have a disagreeable way of expressing unpleasant truths. When a sneering prankster holds a mirror before our carefully concealed nature, it’s not surprising that our first reaction is to send them packing, but any filmmaker who gets booed at Cannes must be doing something right. Dreyer’s GERTRUD had to endure jeering attacks when it screened at Cannes in 1964. It was also a film about narcissistic dysfunction, but who now denies its position as one of the great works in the cinematic canon?

Of course, the hysteria, hyperbole, and downright unpleasantness of ANTICHRIST is likely to ensure that it never achieves the elevation of Dreyer’s masterpiece, but once the hysteria, hyperbole, and downright unpleasantness subsides, more considered appraisals might emerge. Like it or not, ANTICHRIST is packed with conviction, a forceful and insightful example of what auteur cinema is about. One doesn’t have to like it to recognise that it has the right to be what it is and that its ideas say more about us than most of the Euro-trifles pretending to be cinematic art.

That said, if I am to be completely honest, I struggle to equate Trier with the best directors in world cinema. Like all narcissists (and don’t get me wrong, he may not be one), Lars was probably his own worst enemy, and the essential missing ingredient in his work might simply be love.