Lars Von Trier's 'Anti-Christ'

Despite some protestations to the contrary (by principal actors Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg), Lars Von Trier's latest film, the controversial Anti-Christ is best viewed as a tale of the supernatural, with Gainsbourg playing a modern variant of the 17th-Century witch, a woman who might struggle with the evil that overwhelms her but who ultimately belongs, whether by misadventure or by nature, to the devil. It is only our insistence that a 'serious' modern film be rooted in something other than discredited superstition that causes us to reject the film as unrealistic or inappropriate. When we compare it to real life, look for psychological parallels, or try to interpret the film's many puzzling and dreamlike symbols, we are bewildered - many critics have been positively outraged - because the film is patently unlike any human experience we are familiar with, yet audiences continue to complain that the movie is unrealistic, over-the-top, shocking, pointless, and absurd. That is, they continue to demand that it conform to modern paradigms. Its first showing at Cannes early this year met with boos and hisses. One reporter actually demanded Von Trier 'justify' himself.

The story follows a married couple in the wake of their infant son's death; Dafoe plays an arrogant, misguided therapist who overrides other doctors' recommendations in taking his grief-stricken wife out of the hospital and off medication, encouraging her instead to face her crisis of grief and fear head-on. He discovers that she is afraid of 'nature' and specifically of the forest around their summer cabin in a place called Eden, and so the couple head out there in pursuit of his version of recovery, a sort of total-immersion therapy. As all readers of old fairy stories know, the descent into the woods is a descent into the hell of our unconscious, an immoral place of darkness and reversal, where everything we have learned not to be comes back to torment us. If we read this through the lens of modern history, the return of the repressed is a return to the sort of superstitious beliefs that prevailed in the 16th and 17th centuries before the Age of Enlightenment and the advance of civilized society, universal education, technological innovation, etc. In Catholic Europe this was a time of massive witch-hunts, show trials, and public execution of women for the crime of sorcery and congress with the devil, a phenomenon which served to shore up the embattled Roman church against reformist onslaughts in the minds of credulous provincial folk. It is no incidental detail that the unhinged and grief-stricken She of Von Trier's film has recently abandoned her thesis on this very episode of European history. We see sinister period engravings of witches' trials and executions pinned to the rafters in the cabin's attic, along with notes for the thesis in handwriting which becomes progressively deranged and illegible; she later admits to a feeling that women are evil and, as the film twists ever deeper, we understand this belief to be connected somehow to her out-of-control sexuality, which concludes with a horrific act of self-mutilation, and to the general malignancy of nature at large, as seen in the lurid, writhing scenes of growth and decay in what is a thoroughly sinister 'conscious' landscape. These are details straight out of the trial literature - testimonies typically included confessions of sexual perversion and boasts of power over nature or accusations of being in league with nature in its malignant, chaotic (ie. unspiritualized) aspect - nature (flesh) as enemy, as the beast. The triad of enigmatic animal familiars, the fox, deer, and crow which appear at intervals throughout the story, and the host of faceless 'sisters' who magically appear in the final scene are further clues to the supernatural essence of this tale.

Von Trier admits to having been sunk in a depression before and after shooting of the film took place, and speaks of its personal, therapeutic content, so it is not out of place to look for psychological keys, but there are no straightforward symbol-object relationships, only a fevered, nightmarish, deeply associative world in which something other than humanity prevails. We might interpret the male therapist as arrogant human rationality and the deteriorating female as everything that falls outside that definition; the relationship between the two could be the state of a human in the throes of a deep depression, struggling to both maintain connection and coherence while at the same time trying to identify the problem and reject what cannot be assimilated. But don't look for an authentic portrayal of grief and its attendant patterns in the human psyche. The film isn't about that. It is a journey to the center of the irrational human heart, where, as the fox says, chaos reigns. Its weird, gorgeous, hallucinatory visuals are entirely appropriate to this realm, as are its scenes of violence, madness and death. The film is stunning in every way, and not least of which, in the absolute fearlessness with which it was produced. This is a balls-out, no-holds-barred production, a fantasy without regard for limit, which is the only way a contemplation of our horrific past and our still-existent if repressed irrational core should be conducted. Don't be fooled by Von Trier's critics. The film is superb.

McClure's Beach

Elsa Morante 'Aracoeli"

Italian writer Elsa Morante's dazzling final novel Aracoeli has received far more than its fair share of uncomprehending critical rejection since its initial publication in 1983. Despite winning the Prix Medicis Etranger in 1985, its reception both at home and abroad has been mixed: critics have complained of its cynicism, fatalism, morbidity, and despair; Morante's only biographer Lily Tuck pronounced the novel almost pointlessly disturbing and shocking and even the introduction to the new edition currently available from Open Face Books questions the author's fatalistic philosophy, acceding that no doubt there are readers who will feel offended by the book's attitude. Offended! Americans are famously optimistic, but must our literature be morally uplifting, must there be always a development from darkness to light for our literary sensibilities to be satisfied? Let's hope not.

Aracoeli is a dark and troubling book, but its lyrical beauty and analytical precision make it compelling. Its thoroughly depressed gay narrator (43 year-old Manuele) embarks on a journey from his native Italy to his mother Aracoeli's birthplace in Andalusia in an attempt to unravel the knot of their tortured relationship. After what is admittedly a somewhat tedious first 100 pages, in which Manuele relates his present state of mind, his sexual failures, his aversion to company etc. (nothing out of the ordinary for a reader of, say, Fernando Pessoa) the book suddenly catches fire in mid-section as memories of childhood begin to flood his mind. From this point on the story is powerfully hypnotic and intense, a relentless exorcism of the demon of a ruined love, a Freudian romance in which one fragile identity is first nurtured and then twisted and crushed. After some blissful years alone with his mother the boy Manuele's world is plunged into darkness as Aracoeli first loses her second child and then succumbs to a sort of sexual mania, an obscure illness which drives her to express her inflamed desires in more and more perverse and flagrant ways. For the child whose identity is still fused to that of a devout, tender, and loving mother, the rapid and incomprehensible changes that take place in their shared locus of existence completely overwhelm his sense of security. Readers become witness to the emergence of what is easily one of the most searing existential crises this side of Dostoievsky, as Morante calmly analyzes the breach with surgical precision. We read of dark symptoms, the unnerving, ulcerated lament of Aracoeli's pleas, of her infected, convulsive movements, her strange cowardice and pathetic regression, her little, revolted moans of bizarre pain; she is variously obscene, befouled, virulent, sterile, perverse, degraded, aching and lacerated, febrile to the point of indecency.

As Manuele is slowly wrenched from his unconscious dream of being and forced to contemplate factors way beyond his understanding, he uses his imagination in fabulous ways, and the story becomes by extension a trenchant look at how and why human beings fantasize, dream, lie, and create, at the possibility that identity itself is humankind's greatest artistic product. Manuele's desperate visions are seen to be as real as anything occurring on the physical plane, perhaps more so, since they are the bedrock of his newly forming, newly warping identity. The effect is fascinating, thrilling. The scene in which he witnesses his mother respond sexually to a stranger on the beach is just flat-out brilliant, combining as it does the minutiae of perceived experience with the slightly hallucinatory qualities of concepts formed under stress. Physics and metaphysics bind together in the development of the narrative as of the child - the book becomes an object lesson in Nietzsche's epiphany that we have art so that we will not perish from the truth. I can't think of any other modern novel that so clearly maps the crossroads of truth and fiction and so directly evokes their mysterious interdependence. If this isn't a subject for great writing, I don't know what is. Morante's obtuse critics are sissies, afraid of the dark. If they must have hope, they might try recognizing it in the brilliance of this singular human voice, a writer capable of illuminating our deepest mysteries and our greatest pain.