Villains Week: Antichrist (2009)

2 years ago

Villains Week: Antichrist (2009)

b&w

MEN ARE FROM MARS, WOMEN MAIM YOUR PENIS

by Tess Lynch

Why do horror films exist? This is, apparently, a question that people other than me ask. Why do we like to be scared and uncomfortable? Why will we pay for this experience? Some theories: because society is violent we want to see violence and its resolution in our art, because we feel as though we are somehow more capable of handling scary situations if we see them play out on a screen, because the setting is controlled but we still get the adrenaline rush, because we are able to feel negative and positive emotions concurrently without anything personal at stake, and the hoary escapism clause. I know that I like to watch scary movies because they are almost never boring, even when done badly. I also like to see an imaginary world without rules, because it appeals to something primal in me that wants to see what would happen if everybody ignored social mores. And of course, it’s a good way to get your mind off of your own world and its problems which pale in comparison to the problems of, say, Freddy Krueger. They also remind us that we’re not bad people: for all the crap tips you left when you were out of work or the snotty remarks you toss at your friends, you have not murdered every teen on Elm Street or been locked by a villain in a boiler room with your friend’s amputated hand. The worst horror films underwhelm us and lack a fully-formed imaginary world with its own sensibilities. In order to be scared, we have to see something we recognize and understand the rules. Only then do we actually feel afraid.

fawn

The most terrifying villains are people. Not monsters or zombies or vampires — unless they have the characteristics of humans, that is, which the good ones do — but people, because not only are we people (so we see the potential to become a villain in ourselves) but because we are constantly in the position of trusting other human beings. Horror films justify our own mistrust of other people; our realistic fears that others will be cruel to us or abandon us when we need them or do something to make us feel pain. In an imaginative and metaphorical world, these fears become not fear of being dumped, but fear of being murdered. Fear is a genuinely scary movie. The door to becoming a victim is trust, trusting the wrong person, ignoring your instincts. The audience represents the people who say, “Maybe you don’t want to be dating Mark Wahlberg, Reese. He’s giving me the willies. The movie is called Fear! Girl, get out of there!” Those people are generally right when they say things like this to you in real life about someone you’re in the process of trusting, but shouldn’t, and they represent the gut instinct that you are in the process of shutting up because your homicidal boyfriend is hot.

Another thing scary movies expose is our mistrust of ourselves. Many horror films turn from fun vacation to bloodbath because of one shitty decision made by the victim: venture into the city with your girlfriend and smoke weed with some people on the street? Bad idea. Answer the door? The phone? Bad ideas. Any one of a million decisions we make over the course of our lives could stick us in somebody’s basement banging a tin cup against the bars of a man-made jail cell, or rubbing lotion on our skin reluctantly — reluctantly because we wish it was not about to be ripped off our bodies and turned into a peacoat.

silence!

So. Have you seen the movie Antichrist? I asked our editor Chad this question last night and his response was one form of the reply you usually get to this question, which is “Oh, I keep almost doing it and then think, no, I just ate a sandwich/am not a strong enough person today/I don’t want to view my reproductive organs in that way, not now or ever.” Antichrist’s reputation precedes it. You might know that there is a scene that caused four people to faint at a screening, and depending on how curious you were when you heard that, you might also know that there are some violent scenes involving, separately, a penis and a vagina being whack-a-mole’d. Generally when you see penises on-screen, in a not-explicitly-pornographic context, you’ll be presented with a fifteenth of a second’s worth of skin as somebody runs down a hallway. Usually seeing a penis is like finding Waldo: not easy. If you want to see genitalia working the lens like Myrna Loy, I would tell you that you’ve found your movie in Antichrist. However, I would have to add that if you have a penis or a vagina, you might feel, upon seeing their representations in Antichrist, as though somebody has shoved something cold and metal up your bottom and then administered a stinging slap to your face. Take that into account. There are many things in this movie that will make you squirm, but there are two scenes that will make you squelch. You can’t talk about this movie without a disclaimer: if you cringe when you handle a chicken’s giblets, you will most definitely have to cover your eyes for at least fifteen minutes of the film.

tender momes

wah-wah, I’m covered in feelings

Now that I’ve disclaimed, let me tell you that I loved Antichrist. I’m not even going to qualify it: I loved the movie. I called my parents after I’d seen it and asked if they had rented it. They hadn’t. What do you do if you loved a movie but the last thing you’d ever want is to recommend it to anyone? I loved it, but I can’t inflict it. I feel strange about myself, loving it, and wasn’t ready to admit to even liking it until I realized how deeply embedded it had become in my thoughts. I was totally engaged in what was happening, because this movie isn’t the easiest narrative I’ve ever figured out (or tried to figure out); it’s challenging.

woodsy

Lars von Trier, who was depressed and pouting throughout the filming process (after it was released, he called himself the best director ever), takes on giant Gothic themes and seems to kind of feel his way through them, without bothering to ever quite get at the point; this sounds bad, I know, but the trick is that there’s enough to lead you to your own conclusions. A minute or two chopped off this movie would have left me frustrated, but I’m inclined to believe that an extra scene would have left me utterly grossed out forever and resentful of my time spent watching Willem Dafoe holding his nuts. In this way, it’s handled brilliantly. Some shots have a Dogme-esque reality to them, the dialogue (and, often, lack of it) nails the timbre and percussion of artsy academics/therapy types, and then suddenly everything is dream-like and obscure. It’s impossible to know what to expect from chapter to chapter (the film is divided into a prologue, four chapters, and an epilogue) as each has its own reality. The descent into madness and desperation progresses at the fever pace of the true stories you hear of people who lose their shit. When I was living next to some neighbors who were clearly losing their shit and descending into madness because of how often I played karaoke games on my PS2, I kept thinking of the term “it escalated.” When you read testimonies online of people who found themselves in ludicrously scary situations, you wonder how things got so intensely bizarre so fast. This passive aggressive move led to that moderately aggressive action which then allowed for people to behave like freaking savages. “It escalated.” This is how Antichrist grips you: it hits you with something that looks like reality in chapter one, and by the epilogue you know why you got into this desperate situation. Everything makes sense even though it totally doesn’t make sense at all. You feel the crazy desperation of the whole thing. Its reality really does mimic our own, and its violence is so horrific and specific that it seems too strange to be fictive. It’s the kind of appalling stuff only real life can provide, because it’s so unbelievable.

our house

The main characters in Antichrist, really the only characters in Antichrist, are the Man (Willem Dafoe) and the Woman (Charlotte Gainsbourg), a married couple. The movie opens with a tragic event that happens while the Man and Woman are in the process of boning. If you can manage to get through this scene, with its slow sexing and Eric Clapton themes, then you should give yourself a round of applause. This was my least favorite scene of the movie next to the title cards. The tragedy (I’m so anxious to avoid spoiling this movie for you, which is nearly impossible, but I’m trying my damnedest) essentially causes a nervous breakdown in the Woman, and her husband, who is a therapist, decides to treat her himself, unhappy with the treatment she’s getting from other shrinks and doctors. This is where the theme of trust comes in: the Man is asking the Woman to trust him to cure her of her sadness and increasingly disturbing delusions, and the Woman is asking the Man to trust the authenticity of her feelings. The Woman tries to deal with her grief by aggressively trying to seduce her husband, but the Man takes on an almost God-like responsibility towards her. He stops being the Man and starts being the Therapist, and decides to subject his wife to exposure therapy by bringing her to a cabin in the woods that causes her to feel really intense fear and anxiety, assuming that confronting her fear will help her handle her grief. She presents one truth to him (her feelings) and he responds with a different truth, a cerebral rationality; they can’t relate to each other and they can’t trust each other. He causes her pain. He insists that he knows what’s best for her even though she is living in an alternate reality.

chaos reeeeeeigns!

completely authentic photo still from the real set of the actual movie

While staying at the cabin, the Man uncovers the Woman’s thesis, which is about gynocide (the systematic killing of members of a gender, in her case women), and while reading her notes we realize that she’s come to the conclusion that women are evil. I should pause here to add that various critics have called Antichrist misogynist or anti-misogynist, with equally valid evidence and reasoning. Certainly, because this movie is called Antichrist, and because the cabin is called Eden, and because this is about the struggle between a man and a woman, there are biblical themes relating to the expulsion of Adam and Eve and carnal knowledge and who’s to blame for the loss of innocence, etc, etc. Perhaps the Woman’s emotional response and the Man’s inability to understand it is a comment on the subversion of women, the idea that because they were, for a long time, considered to be subject to irrational waves of emotion (like histrionics) that made them less powerful or reasonable than men. If you see it that way, the movie ends up being anti-misogynist, because when the battle between the emotional Woman and the reasonable Man heats up, the Woman’s emotions are more powerful than the Man’s wish to dominate them with book-learnin’. She is, for quite a bit, able to dominate him and her breakdown is, to say the least, evidence that the Man’s therapeutic approach has failed. It was no match for her, and in fact seems to be the cause of her violent insanity, which was once just moderate insanity. The rustic, rural setting of the cabin underscores the primal nature of the Woman’s sadness, perhaps suggesting that the Woman is somehow a force of nature (or God?) and that her feelings are rooted in something more real or pure than her husband’s, whose sentiments are diluted by knowledge and reason. If so, though the Woman is the first to introduce violence into their relationship, the Man ends up being the Antichrist. The Man, by trying to control nature with reason, is the villain.

On the flip side, the Woman does some gnarly, gnarly things to poor Willem Dafoe. She deceives him, she entices him, and then she pulls some Misery-style torture moves on him. He wasn’t the cause of the event that landed her in sadsville; they were complicit. If anything, sex is to blame for what happened to them, and sex is the only way the Woman can see to undo the knot of her despair. She wants it, and then she wants to destroy it by castrating the both of them; I guess you could say she’s behaving a little nuts. I guess you could say that by reacting emotionally she loses all sense of the real world and ends up seeming pretty psychotic. If you’re following this logic, then you can easily make a case for the Woman being a sort of Eve figure, an evil temptress, whose pursuit of knowledge (researching gynocide) leads her to her own downfall (becoming the evil woman she believes all women to be). Her emotions are the chaos to the Man’s rational world, and there’s a cute talking fox with Lars von Triers’ sinister, yet unintentionally silly, voice that pops up in chapter two to tell you that “chaos reigns.” [How Danish is the phrase “chaos reigns”? Check those vowels, man!] Of course it does: Eden the cabin isn’t anything like Eden the place, because after the fall of man humans were banished to the bummer trip that is von Trier’s planet earth. Imagery of fucked-up nature scenes is everywhere in this movie: stillborn deer and crazy angry crows and kamikaze acorns that shoot out of the sky. Nature is a constant reminder of the cruelty that supposedly differentiates being here, our screwy planet, versus being in Eden. If you think that’s Eve’s fault, then I guess this movie is more misogynistic than Neil LaBute smoking a cigar with Strindberg; at the same time, there are moments where the Man’s obnoxious probing psychotherapy tactics on his fragile wife make it clear that he is courting his own demise. He’s trying to get her in a feral state, pushing her into an irrational space against her will. Okay, I’ll go there: he’s kind of emotionally raping her. These scenes gives you the impression that it’s the Man who’s really driving the violence of the film, not the Woman.

cannes

I was recently reading about (and I can’t find it no matter how much I search for “philosophy therapy creative killer” or “artists suffer because therapy” or “philosopher who said artists good therapy bad”) a philosophy suggesting that psychotherapy is a method of stifling creativity in artistic people, that artists are often deemed insane but they should continue being insane so we can enjoy their art. There’s an element of criticism implied in this movie of therapy, a kind of what-right-have-we attitude when it comes to dealing with other people’s feelings (von Trier had gone through some cognitive behavioral therapy of his own). Why is the response of the Woman different than the response of the Man, considering the fact that they both were (arguably) affected similarly by the tragedy that spawned all of this wang-murdering and vagina-bashing? Is one right, is one wrong? Clearly it’s wrong to go nuts, but maybe not if you experience what can be considered one of the worst things to experience, and you feel as though it were your fault, because it kinda was. Clearly it’s right to reason through the emotions, because that’s what makes us different from the kinds of critters who eat their babies; at the same time, the brutality of an emotional response is equal to the brutality of life, whereas a “rational” response might be a dishonest one.

It’s literally physically impossible to stop yourself from reacting to this movie. You almost feel like a Pilgrim who’s just heard Nine Inch Nails, sent back in time in a tube with an mp3 player and a post-it saying “Play Me”: you are scandalized and astonished, but also challenged and…scandalized some more. It’s kind of fun to be scandalized and horrified. When it works, as I think does in Antichrist, it gives you the adrenaline surge and puts you on the edge of your seat saying, “Please, stop doing that to my eyes!” but when it’s over, you’re safe again. For a minute, you thought you weren’t. That minute is worth the time spent scrubbing your brain with a Brillo pad, because it created a reality like your own, and then it escalated. And escalated. You have to consider the movie thoroughly before you even understand when you became afraid, and why, and you’ll want to discuss it, because everyone’s answer will be different, though everyone will agree on when they no longer could finish their half-eaten cheesesteak.

vampyre

I’d like to leave you on this note: Willem Dafoe’s penis was so large that it was distracting, and it was replaced by a stunt penis. Lars von Trier claimed that people were so confused (his word) by the size of Dafoe’s penis that it detracted from the action of the film. I would like to let this stand as a reminder that, no matter how intensely bizarre horror films sometimes get, nothing beats real life in terms of surprises.

Tess Lynch is an actor and writer living in Los Angeles. She is a Willem Dafoe fan and was only joking when she said that thing about his giant penis being a surprise. She literally had no opinion on that, she had not cast aspersions. She just needed something snappy for the end of her very long essay and it seemed right at the time. She apologizes to Mr. Dafoe and, again, she says to say she’s a really big fan of his. Not confusingly big, just regular big. She tumbls here.