Antikrist

This afternoon I screened Lars von Trier's Antichrist for a small group of students. It was my first time seeing it, and I was prepared to be disturbed. It ended up disturbing me indeed, but in unexpected ways.

One of the very first things that struck me is that this is yet another of Trier's (I refuse to call him von Trier, by the way) dislocated geographies of pain. Just like in Dancer in the Dark, the film is purportedly set in the Pacific Northwest, but obviously filmed elsewhere. For some reason, this utterly fascinates me. The result is a bizarre hybrid of to me familiar geographies (Scandinavia and the Northwest) that are then imbued with the most intense experiences of human suffering and injustice. There's an odd contrast between the pragmatic, comfortable existence that I have lead in both places and the torment of these films.

The film is dedicated to Tarkovsky, but I was really struck by how much it owes to David Lynch. There is a scene where an injured fox strikes out at one of the protagonists and says in a cliché creepy devil voice "chaos reigns." That could have been straight out of Twin Peaks or Fire Walk With Me. In fact, I'm starting to think that Trier's Northwest films are basically what Lynch's Twin Peaks would be if you stripped away the humor and camp and just left the eeriness and obsession with embodied evil.

Visually I was blown away by Antichrist. It's a beautiful film. It has a wonderfully dreamlike quality. The scenes of sexual violence are so over the top that I really couldn't watch them or take them in in any meaningful way. They were simply absurd. I also didn't buy the thesis-on-the-history-of-violence-against-women story line at all. I think it was just a premise for Trier to get going on his obsession with biblical-style good and evil.

It's really hard for me as an atheist to understand why such a brilliant film maker would spend so much time pondering what to me is totally a non-issue. I'm with the fox: chaos does reign in the universe, so what's the point of all the angst? You can get snuffed out in an instant and everything is meaningless. But I still love my family, still knit sweaters, still write articles, and still am fascinated by great art and trashy tv.

I am having trouble understanding the epilogue, and specifically the hundreds of ghost women who pass by the male protagonist in the woods. Trier makes it clear that the female protagonist tacitly let her son die and earlier on abused him, so the male protagonist's actions in the end are on some level at least justified, or at least comprehensible. Why then do all the women start walking toward him? Are they ghosts? Are they victims of violence? Are they there to avenge the female protagonist? And what exactly happens? From what I could see they appeared both to converge upon him and to pass by him. Definitely need to see this again.

I finished my wacky orange sweater this morning and wore it to work. I actually really love it. Now all I have left for Ravelympics is the crocheted baby blanket.