Lars von Trier's Antichrist

 

Lars von Trier’s Antichrist in Connection with Fantasy Literature: the Lack of True Reception in Mass Media

by David Car­rillo Rangel

Ex: http://www.new-antaios.net/

I orig­i­nally intended to deal with fan­tasy lit­er­a­ture but I realised it would be too risky with­out men­tion­ing the prece­dents of myth, sym­bol and uni­ver­sal arche­types. I also intended to write about utopia and about the duplic­ity inher­ited from folk­lore and fairy tales. Alto­gether it might be a lit­tle bit too much. There­fore, I would rather talk about film crit­ics’ igno­rance, for it seems they have not read many books and show a gen­eral lack of human­is­tic knowl­edge, regard­less of how many films they might have seen. Lars von Trier’s lat­est and con­tro­ver­sial film is finally out in DVD[1] and those crit­ics dare to pre­scribe about which is already a part mass cul­ture and post­moder­nity with­out being able to see all the details. So, I will be deal­ing here with that film, Antichrist, because it is def­i­nitely linked to all the top­ics I men­tioned at the begin­ning. Obvi­ously, I can­not deal hear with an exhaus­tive analy­sis for lack of space, but any of you can later inves­ti­gate through Google and see what lies beneath the image of the three beg­gars that embody the final part of the film.

I will not explain the argu­ment since you would only need to watch the movie, but, indeed, I can assure you it is not all about women’s evil. May be, it is more about the per­cep­tion of evil in women that dom­i­nated West­ern cul­ture dur­ing cen­turies –let us not for­get that some time in his­tory they were even claimed to lack a proper soul-. We have got clear exam­ples of this in Eve, the first one, the one who suc­cumbed to the Ser­pent in the Gar­den of Eden; in witches, burnt alive; in nuns and all the heretic tra­di­tion within the West­ern world. You have got plenty of bib­li­og­ra­phy about these that you can read on your own.

I will now try to focus in the most con­tro­ver­sial points in the film. Many reviews give Willem Dafoe’s char­ac­ter as a psy­chi­a­trist when, in fact, he is a psy­chol­o­gist. He rejects all med­ica­tion to fight the sense of guilt the mother is feel­ing when con­fronted with the trauma that acts as a cat­a­lyst for the devel­op­ment of the plot. The psychologist’s strate­gies dif­fer to med­ica­tion try­ing to put order in mad­ness. Mad­ness which we can relate to drunk­en­ness, dream and states of altered con­science. In fact, there is a bridge, which is a key in the devel­op­ment of the plot and bridges, as you all might know, always sym­bol­ise a pas­sage between two dif­fer­ent worlds. Nobody seems hardly to remem­ber that in Medi­ae­val Europe, Church pro­moted the build­ing of such bridges. Nowa­days the bridge remains impor­tant as a fun­da­men­tal sym­bol of union between to sep­a­rate lands. In Fran­cis Ford Coppola’s Apoc­a­lypse Now the tough­est fight is the one when a bridge was being built at day and destroyed at night, in a seem­ingly per­pet­ual fash­ion. One beyond that point, the main char­ac­ters are able to get into the sacred –the objec­tive of their quest-.

Claude Lecou­teux[2] stud­ied the dou­ble world as per­ceived dur­ing the Mid­dle Ages whereas Régis Boyer[3] did the same regard­ing Scan­di­navia. That sym­bol, its mean­ing related to anguish, should not go unno­ticed. More­over, von Trier admit­ted him­self the influ­ence gath­ered from Strind­berg[4]’s Inferno, the result of a depres­sion and the con­tact with Emanuel Sewendeborg’s phi­los­o­phy. It has also gone unno­ticed the ded­i­ca­tion to Andréi Tarkovski –whose film, Mir­ror and Sac­ri­fice, we should cross-compare with Antichrist-.

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[1] Antichrist, Cameo edi­tion, with another DVD con­tain­ing all the  Extras.

 

[2] Lecou­teux, Claude (2004), Hadas, bru­jas y hom­bres lobo en la edad media, His­to­ria del Doble, José J. de Olañeta, Palma de Mal­lorca

[3] Boyer, Régis (1986), Le Monde du Dou­ble, La magie chez les anciens Scan­di­naves, Paris, Berg

[4] Strind­berg, August (2002), Inferno, Barcelona, El Acantilado

There is a very sig­nif­i­cant take: the attic where SHE keeps her notes from her the­sis about gyno­cide –mur­der of women-. All the images appear­ing there are real.

In the first chap­ter of Inferno, we are pre­sented with a scene sim­i­lar to Goethe’s Faust but in Inferno Lucifer is the son of Light and Christ is Lucifer’s son. Strind­berg is sug­gest­ing that Cre­ation is no more than a fancy game to enter­tain gods and that these crea­tures sooner or later will have to return to dust, which is, pre­cisely, Lucifer’s task. This inter­pre­ta­tion makes us think about the Cathars and the anni­hi­la­tion of the world by halt­ing its repro­duc­tion cycle. Lars von Trier is not imply­ing that women are evil, he is refer­ring to a mys­ti­cism pushed to its lim­its, where sal­va­tion relies on anni­hi­la­tion. That is the mean­ing of the last take: Epi­logue.

 

Gen­i­tal muti­la­tions that appear here have been widely crit­i­cised. How­ever, the fact that SHE beats his crotch with wood, the fact that HE ejac­u­lates blood and HER final muti­la­tion are not gra­tu­itous. In fact, von Trier leaves noth­ing to chance; he gets really involved in each of his works in over­whelm­ing way. You need only to take a look at the extras that come with the DVD. How could we believe that such direc­tor would cre­ate a chain of uncon­nected events? Lack of under­stand­ing is part, in fact, of the mys­ti­cism von Trier wants to trans­mit. Behind mad­ness, stands a fright­en­ing lucid­ity. Sac­ri­fice is needed. Von Trier stated that he delib­er­ately made the stran­gling take long on pur­pose, since stran­gling hides many links to past tra­di­tions when there was mur­der­ing in order to set free, suf­fer­ing in order to get freedom.

And what is the rela­tion between all this and fairy tales or Fan­tast lit­er­a­ture? The Eden of the film is a fan­tas­tic place, sim­i­lar to Nar­nia, Mid­dle Earth or YS. In those worlds, spe­cially in the ones devel­oped by Ursula K. Leguin -The Left hand of Dark­ness, for example-, one can philo­soph­i­cally spec­u­late about the pos­si­bil­ity of becom­ing another, that is, a lab­o­ra­tory of Utopia.

Von Trier makes an exten­sive use of ele­ments that appear in Fan­tasy lit­er­a­ture but he sets them within a dif­fer­ent con­text –this is sim­i­lar to Avant-garde Literature-. One might claim he has not been able to reflect that clearly, but in our cur­rent mar­ket there is a very thin line sep­a­rat­ing ethics and reflec­tion from end­less ben­e­fits. Against the pre­dom­i­nance of light stu­pid­i­s­a­tion trough prod­ucts like Avatar -that aims only at com­mer­cially viable ecol­ogy– only those with real tal­ent are strong enough to sur­vive. This way, there is not really a need for expla­na­tion; the story unfolds itself, this is what post­mod­ernism is all about. But this one takes plea­sure from aes­thet­ics and thinks beyond cathar­sis –feel­ing good about being in the world-.

I believe we ought to search for our own hermeneu­tics, I mean, not the inter­pre­ta­tion of the artis­tic object but our­selves. We are more than a mass, and we should be more, con­sid­er­ing all the tech­nol­ogy we have at the reach of our hands. We should, then, defeat mass cul­ture for it can­not reach far­ther that gen­er­alised moral­ity; it can­not go beyond crit­i­cis­ing any trace of provo­ca­tion; when provo­ca­tion is merely a cause of think­ing. For our own sake, we have for­got­ten nature, gar­dens and forests: Spir­i­tu­al­ity. One that needs not adscrip­tion to any reli­gion but which all human beings require in order to sur­vive their own order.