This series originally started out as three films, the two already featured, and The Shining to cap things off, but it’s a leap year, my dears, and along with an extra day, I decided to treat myself to an extra dollop of depression and cover one more ode to ugly love with Von Trier’s much-maligned, impossible to ignore Antichrist.
The story is oh-so-simple, and it’s all the uglier for it. An unnamed man, credited only as He, and his wife, She, engage in passionate sex while their infant son plummets from an open window (a potent image that would come back to haunt Von Trier in his first volume of Nymphomaniac). She, distraught and wracked with guilt, languishes in a hospital until her husband intervenes. He is a therapist and quickly decides to take charge of his wife’s grief. So, the two abscond to a deserted cabin in the middle of nowhere (sound familiar?) where He attempts to help his wife come to terms with her mourning while fastidiously ignoring his own pain. While sequestered in the cabin, He finds his wife’s research on gynocide, the systematic killing of women throughout Western culture, and when supernatural forces come knocking, the stress is too much for the couple to bear and a literal orgy of violence ensues.
There are a hundred ways to look at this film--religious allegory, art house meditation on mental illness, demented roman a clef, sadistic pornography, a nihilistic manifesto--and darling, you wouldn’t even have to buy me a drink to hear me ramble incoherently about this thing from every conceivable vantage point. But, thankfully, the theme of “Amour Foubruary” gives me a laser tight focus for the would-be mania this movie inspires in me.
The basis of the whole film is the fraught relationship between He and She. He, a psychiatrist, easily represents the Western patriarchal system, specifically, the anti-feminist tendencies of the medical industry. She, in contrast, is a scholar who studies the inherent misogyny of Western culture. When they are isolated, alone against the horrors of their grief, insanity takes over. Like Hour of the Wolf and Seventh Continent, isolation seems to be the catalyst for madness, and when the couple retreats, they are inexorably defeated.
Having been raised on a diet of optimistic romances, Antichrist joins its brothers in the amour fouternity in dispelling the great cultural myth that romantic love is the last bastion of hope against the ugliness of the modern world. In these films, with Antichrist serving as a uniquely grotesque example, the couple as a unit is a site of imminent, explosive danger. In Hour, the man in the relationship destroys himself while his wife stands helplessly by. In The Seventh Continent, the couple works cooperatively to meet their untimely end. But Antichrist demonstrates the way a couple can turn on each other when the cultural weight of unbalanced power and unresolved trauma can be too much to bear.
Antichrist offers more than just a frank clitoralectomy and memes about chaos reigning (though, really, what else do you need for a long weekend?). Let’s talk about that infamous clitoris, by the way. Maybe only Nixon could visit China and only Von Trier could aim a camera directly at a woman’s genitals and then collectively horrify the world with one awful scissor snip. Shit, take that Oedipus Rex. While all other filmic castrations (invariably male) focus on the loss of potency, power, and procreation, Charlotte Gainsbourg’s self-castration is an act of complete abjection worthy of the annals of Kristeva herself. Cutting herself off from pleasure, from ecstasy and physical joy, She, possessed by the narratives of a culture who hates her, divorces herself from her own body, marking the culmination of centuries of phallocentric propaganda--and damn, that is a lot of jargon.
Basically, this is why you should see Antichrist even though Lars Von Trier is a piece of shit. (That’s right, Lars, I thought you were a fragment of human refuse before Cannes thought you were a Nazi.) This movie lays out, with fearless, unrelenting ugliness, the lies women are subjected to at every level of society. We’re weak. We’re sexless. We’re sexually insatiable. We’re stupid. We’re too smart for our own good. We’re nurturing saints. We’re demonic bitches. And then, it makes a female character confront all these contradictory, crazy narratives. And the result, but of course, is madness. Violent, horrific madness.
If Amour Foubruary has shown me anything it’s that modern cinema labors under quite a few socially constructed delusions about love, and sometimes, occasionally, a filmmaker has the insight to break through those myths and examine our greatest preoccupations with a cold, clinical gaze.
Pennie Sublime