Lars von Trier's Antichrist is arriving in theaters. For some reason I always look forward to a new Lars von Trier film. I shouldn't, but I always do. I must fall prey to some embarrassingly shallow fallacy that because he's a Dane, I'll get some deep Kierkegaardian existential insight.
I like the stylization and the sheer audacity of von Trier's films, and the themes upon which, on the surface, they seem to be premised, with the promise of revelations into deep Manichean dualities of the human soul. I like disturbing art that challenges us to explorations of evil, the tragic nature of human existence, the anguish of love and guilt and loss. I pass up on the DVD with the blurb, "It will touch your heart." No, I like depressing movies -- really depressing.
But von Trier is inevitably so over the top that he sacrifices dialectic for spectacle.
His Dogma 95 manifesto informs the hand-held camera (for almost three hours, no less) in Breaking the Waves. If that isn't enough to induce nausea, the ending, dripping with kitschy mysticism, will. Bjork's performance in the quite un-Dogma-esque Dancer in the Dark (though von Trier relies on that nauseating hand-held camera again) is a tour de force, but stopping the action to allow for musical numbers -- even if they are meant as episodes of respite from the tragic situation in which the protagonist is otherwise engulfed -- gives the film a jolting quality.
His USA: Land of Opportunities trilogy (Dogville, Manderlay, and the still-in-production Wasington) purports to be "a series of sermons on America's sins and hypocrisy." With diametrically opposed stylization -- bare sound stages where the sets are marked only by lines on the floor and a few stray props -- these films set out to explore questions of slavery, greed, and misogyny. But do they? After all, as many critics complained, von Trier has never himself visited the Western hemisphere.
As the historical fiction writer David Liss remarks in his blog (which got me started on the subject of von Trier in the first place), von Trier is "the kind of filmmaker who can only exist in Northern Europe – a product of long, unending winters and public funding for the arts. Though, to be honest, those are two things I kind of like."
A. O. Scott, writing in the NY Times observes that "The scandal of Antichrist is not that it is grisly or upsetting but that it is so ponderous, so conceptually thin and so dull." Scott goes on, von Trier "is...a bit of a snob, a filmmaker who undermines his pulpy instincts with high-flown, vaguely political ideas."
And that's just the problem. The ideas are not rigorously explored. They are not deserving of their high-flunged-ness. Even Kierkegaard, that author of such cheerful titles as The Concept of Anxiety, Sickness Unto Death, and Fear and Trembling, would spend years exploring Socrates in order to write The Concept of Irony, a work of which a contemporary reviewer remarked, "...not only treats of irony but is irony."
So I will faithfully escort myself to the theater to see (Scott says "endure") Antichrist, but if the critical response (even reader reviews where one usually finds some cultish devotion) are any indication, I am going to be disappointed. Yet again it sounds as though we are given an intellectually shallow premise slathered over with gratuitous gimmicks rather than a thoughtful examination of the human condition that might lead to a philosophy of insight.
Lars, don't take yourself so seriously; if Kierkegaard could find irony in the depths, maybe you can, too.
No comments:
Post a Comment