Recently I had the sublime pleasure of watching one of Danish directors'--Lars von Trier--more allegorical and symbolic movies. From the get go, after seeing the title of 'Prelude' on the screen, I was arming myself to apprehend every picture and scene to have an underlying meaning. Trier was being very kind by smoothly initiating his viewers into a film that was about symbols and structures--rather than the couple and their apparent struggles (though by no means does that make them insignificant)--by announcing the film´s "introduction" in grey, extremely slow moving images with the background of Handel's heavenly music.
The couple and their dealing with the loss of their child is of chief importance, but instead of a mirage of realistic scenery where we move implicitly from one scene to the next via an adventure of meeting old friends and new people, that would eventually help the couple rejuvenate their life; we get here explicit signatures of the inner movement of their minds, or more precisely, the mind. Consequently, the three characters 'He' (played by Willem Dafoe), 'She' (by Charlotte Gainsbourg) and the child Nic (Storm Acheche Sahlstrøm) are not individuals in their own right, but aspects of the same being. (To soothe the text a bit, I will use various alternative pronouns for 'He' and 'She' throughout this blurb, and sometimes as even as a name.)
Which role is then addressed to each character? While it may at first spark in one's mind to consider Him (Dafoe) as masculine authoritative "Apollonian" reason and Her (Gainsbourg) as feminine submissive and unpredictable "Dionysian" nature; I find these categorizations much too steeped in traditional dualism. We may harvest a Nietzschean tragedy from the wreckage of Nic's corpse, but the unfolding story would then be stillborn, or at the very least static and lifeless.
I propose instead, something along the same lines but with a crucial difference, that He is conscious attention and She is subconscious sensitivity/irritability, with the child Nic being the unconscious entity. He (Dafoe) embodies the symbolic landscape of words, meaning, laws and protocols. His training as a psychoanalyst is emblematic of this. His profession is one that allows him to peer into the souls of his patients and to devour freely their hopes and miseries, to the advantage of his satisfaction as a systematic knower and spiritual scientist. All His actions are (early in the film) considered 'proper', well measured, and morally excellent; he grieves at the funeral of his child, he takes care of Her in her weakened state. She, conversely, manifests the core of willfulness, manic and riveting emotions, to the extent that she sinks wholly into whatever mood or state she happens to be in. Unable to take stock of her situation, She resorts to blindly but attentively become her emotions, which seem to be at the 'improper' volume, time and length since the tragedy. In spite of her tempestuous wanderings, She is far more present in the moment than He seems to ever be, and, instead of attributing each state of hers to some prescribed process or law, she lives fully the internal logic of each emotion and let it unfold or morph as it may, from vapid sadness to egregious desire.
The child Nic is the most mysterious character in the story, and, although he (or it, for the sake of absolute neutrality/negation) only appears in the flesh in the introduction, he repeatedly returns to (haunt) Her in memories and memorabilia. As a child he enjoys (or suffers) the status of innocence and ignorance, but when he witnesses the act of his parents coitus, he does something none of the other two characters will do later in the film; he makes a choice. In this scene, I was reminded of Freud's Wolfman; that is, the instance where a child witnesses a sexual act (usually by their parents, as is the case in the film), and, unable to understand the act, sees it as a frightful act of violence while yet retaining the sexual undertones. Understood in psychology as the primal scene, it can nail trauma or evoke "splinters" for the sexual development of the child that witnesses it.
And here comes the strange part. Nic, upon witnessing the act and starring his mother in the eyes, seems to intuit some notion of the impending damage just wrought on him. He clearly does not understand, but he seems to understand that something is greatly amiss in that he does not understand; and thus construes a vague idea that this is actually something quite terrifying for him at this stage. The scene and tone of the film however drones merrily on for the parents in their sensuous delight, as exposed by Handel. Nic, on the other hand, turns away from the sight, goes back to his room and begins to climb the table near the window. As he scales the table he topples--like an empyrean godwarrior--three statuettes, each titled 'Grief', 'Pain' and 'Despair', as if he had made his choice now to end his life "peacefully" than to live in the shackles of what is to come for his weakened soul.
Perhaps the grief, pain and despair were destined to be the inheritance for Nic, something his parents in this 'Prelude' seem to have shedded, as spiritual and cultural education for the child. But without the child bearing those burdens, it falls back on the parents. Here I am reminded of Tarkovsky's Stalker (1979), where the protagonist narrates at the second part of the film:
"Let them be helpless like children, because weakness is a great thing, and strength is nothing. When a man is just born, he is weak and flexible. When he dies, he is hard and insensitive. When a tree is growing, it's tender and pliant. But when it's dry and hard, it dies. Hardness and strength are death's companions. Pliancy and weakness are expressions of the freshness of being. Because what has hardened will never win."There needs to be an element of "weakness" and "flexibility" that the parents are unable to properly manifest. Their problem seems to be one that requires a freshness of being, a "new" birth or a complete overturn of mind--without the added luggage (language) their history, or as it were, without an (explicit) link to the past. Only through new generations can the language of despair transform to something else. However much they attempt to grapple with events, they blatantly fail; as the expedition to the cottage summons, not only jarred scenes from memories of Nic, but structural defects in their own character. Her incomplete PhD (which comes like a surprise to Him), and His lack of foresight to the danger that She is capable of (the danger, which, at its ultimate is not Her at all, but Him). What is interesting is that we could potentially use these faults as pointers to what could have caused "the fall" in the 'Prelude', as 'Grief', 'Pain' and 'Despair' did not simply materialize at Nic's downfall... they were always-already there.
*
In part one we begin to observe the unraveling of Nic's choice. She, clearly submerged in her grief, collapses in the funeral of the child and we are promptly fast-forwarded to her timeless time in the hospital. He, disagrees with the treatment of drugs that is being given to Her, decides to nurse her himself using psychotherapy. This we might read as the mind unwilling to let others treat it by relying on its sheer willpower and symbolic crutches (the use of words, formula and things as signs and symbols for a particular problem). He therefore takes Her home and tries various methods to eject her grief and the drugs she inhabits. This process does not bode well, She frequently overcomes with Him with sexual desire and inflicts both physical pain and mental strains on both herself and Him. These swings in temper and irritability can be viewed as relapses of the mind; unable to sustain the disciplinary rigor in meeting the problem head-on, the mind turns to lax self-gratification as an escape from its self-prescribed torment.
Realizing the fruitless endeavor, the attentive analytic mind merely exasperates the diagnosis by intensifying the treatment; if She was being ordered to surrender her fears before, she would now be mandated to confront it face to face. They go to a cottage in the forest, where the vegetation generates in her a bloodcurdling reverie. It is interesting that our characters at this stage enter the forest, a place which is emblematic for confusion, despair, loss, violence, wilderness and cold indifference. Whereas most classical stories at this point would have their protagonist(s) come out of it, our characters give themselves little more than perhaps seeing the problem clearly in the eyes (which, we must remember is already diffused by attributing the source of Her grief; something other than the death of her son, which will turn out to be almost prophetic). So, consider the character Dante in Inferno for example, where he begins at his rock bottom in the forest meeting three terror-filled beasts of his own (coincidence with Trier's film?) and manages to find a way due to the guiding beacon of Virgil. In Antichrist, our two characters enter into the forest with no distinguishable pathway or guide and irreversibly succumb, as it were, to its amnetic magic.
The fact that the cabin in the woods that our characters go to is named Eden, suggests either a gross infantilism in the attempt to return to a place pre-fallen and sin-less or, a state of war and hunting; the highest state of imagination à la Blake, where there is not simply creativity in the form of synthesizing existing entities but creatio ex nihilo--'the becoming of what in its wake did before not sleep.' Given that the intention of the journey, however, is to restore the purposeful spurs of Her as prescribed by Him, I think there is a strong Blakean drive. That does not rule out the infantile aspect, as perhaps the two are somehow connected.
I do not quite know what to make of the deer with the dead fawn still half inside it. In some Celtic symbolism, the deer represents the bounty of the forest, as it was a reliable source of food in pre-agriculturean societies. In other imagery we find that there are humanoid deities donned with the pelt or head of a deer (more often a stag, with spectacular horns). In more modern representations still, they are the very forest themselves, albeit in more spiritual form. Perhaps we should focus more on the dead fawn rather than the deer? That the lodged fawn represents the grief in its most elemental: As the connection to the other is disrupted or lost, the nurture that the other's other had is severed and with that, it decays. Grief is the un-dislodged corpse of what once lived and thrived within oneself.
This grief is perhaps what She has been cripplingly burdened with all along, but we (seeing through the eyes of Him) get only a glimpse of this when She sleeps. (Which suggests that He and She are able of some other form of communication other than the symbolic landscape of word, of which he is the man of the cloth.)
**
Tensions heighten as our characters move deeper into the forest and draw closer to the cabin. While Her fears are vague and connected with premonitions, He yields not a few times to frights of his own. The swollen ticks and the hailstorm of acorns concern Him greatly, but dent barely Her. Yet her fears are more "environmental," that is to say, it is more connected with general space and atmosphere than specific objects. Perhaps this is to illustrate the two different ways the two perceive the world? Even though both characters have fear, it manifests differently--this is to establish that fear does not simply lie with the sub-conscious part of the mind but with all of it.
This part of the film bears witness to the brutality of nature. As She makes her way across the symbolic stepping stones He prepared for her as her therapeutic treatment, she drowns in fear at the sight of a baby bird falling down from above. The baby bird being first swarmed by ants then picked up by mature bird (presumably her mother), and torn up to be eaten alive. This brutality of nature is ultimately embodied in the self-disemboweling fox, who tells Him, after he gets separated from Her once again, that "chaos reigns".
Before we move on to the next part of the film, let us consider the curious lead-up to the conclusion of this part. She emerges from the house on the morning after the terror of the birds, whilst he is sitting contemplating on the porch (after having found a letter that tells of Nic's autopsy report), and they have a casually brief but substantial conversation about dreams, Freud and modern psychology. In what seems as a miracle, She launches out to the forest and displays fearlessness in areas where she previously was numb with dread. This spontaneous "recovery" befuddles Him, as it would since it seems to come from no where! Causa sui! He is, as She points out, unable to be "just happy for her", since he needs to understand, only then will he have control and thereby his identity in the matter; that is, only then will he be able to relate. His lack of response and skepticism rebukes her joy and she flees into the forest with Him in pursuit. This is when he finds himself alone in the vegetation and comes across the fox, the second animal.
***
Chaos reigns and the third part begins in heavy, despairing rain. This is the most complex part of the film. It presents our characters in their most coherent but unstable particularity. That is to say, as the differences between the two grow to the extent where the unity can no longer be sustained, the two spiral out into into their most essential characteristics and destroy eventually each other.
He rectifies his moral status when he argues that the women in the witch burning were not inherently evil; the misogyny she seems to have identified with during her PhD research, rather than critiquing it rationally. Furthermore, suspects her of maltreatment of their child, he questions her about a photograph where Nic's boots were put on the wrong way. He retreats into the shed and discovers that the photographs of Nic, in his time spent with his mother alone in the cabin, are all with the child's boots the wrong way on. At the moment when he realizes what she has done, she breaks into the shed and batters him from behind. Here, Her properties manifest openly. After short, rapid cycles of violence, paranoia, pleasure and domination, she attaches a grindstone to his leg to prevent him from leaving her.
At this point we now have something of the pre-fallen world of Nic that we can begin to piece together. As He writes on his psychoanalytic worksheet of her, the top of the pyramid of fears is herself. Something in her life made her choose to identify with the hatred of women and as a consequence of this maltreated her child when she was liberty to do so. Where this attitude stems from is difficult to tell, but if we are going to proceed with the idea that all three characters are one, then her fault is not hers alone, but the fault of everyone. The fact that her maltreatment of Nic and the incompletion of her PhD has gone unnoticed by him suggests that there has been a gross amount of ignorance in his gaze. The death of Nic, she experiences, is really the final nail in the long coffin that is her life: the psychomanic destabilized de-centered center that is her frail cogito. Thus, as we indicated at the beginning, there are really no choices to be made in the film. He scrambles to recover the situation but Nic's death signifies the beginning of the end of their relationship.
But we must make note of the crow that appears when He is hiding in the foxhole. It is the third and final animal in the sequence. Traditionally, the crow symbolizes clairvoyance, omens (generally ill-fortune), messenger (of the Gods) and freedom. Here, however, the crow is the determinism of despair. That is to say, the will of despair to linger on and consume its desire. As she is furiously seeking Him, who is momentarily hiding successfully in the foxhole, her will to find him is so powerful that it summons the crow, seemingly out of nothing, like magic, at the very place he is. Even as he tries to smash the crow, it still caws on louder and louder, which eventually enables Her to find him.
Now, here we have something which may seem a contradiction, because is not despair the very absence of desire? How could despair create anything - when its substance is utter and abject lack? If that were the case, then She would not be able to perform any kind of activity, let alone those energetically violent ones. She would be in the hospital chewing on pills. But, as events proceed, something within her prompted the refusal of that flatline and into more exposure-like self-treatments. Therefore, we must see despair as a desire, albeit a thwarted one. Desire comes into being when we relate ourselves to an other, but how we relate ourselves to this other dictates our desire. Sounds circular? It is, but let us not be naïve about it. Every interaction between our desire and the other fosters a transformation between ourselves and the other, since a part of us is transmitted into the other as much as something of the other infects us. These interactions may turn out to be fatal or they may be blessedness, but only inasmuch as the other is do we have the ability to know ourselves. Needless to say, the removal of the other vanishes desire and vital component of our image.
Something in Her life has progressively disjointed her desire to the point where it had become a tempestuous despair. The death of Nic, the real and genuine other, was the threshold where she lost her freedom completely. He, on the other hand, is unable to comprehend because he is too late; his owl ascends only at dusk, when the affairs in spiritual daylight have long been concluded.
****
The final part begins with Her digging up Him from the ground like some wicked ritual. One has to wonder whether the change in Him has already happen at this phase, as his re-emergence bears the semblance of re-animation, the living dead.
Her mood, now momentarily shifted to pity and compassion, helps Him back to the cabin. They search in futile for the wrench to unbolt the grindstone that keeps him prisoner. It is when he asks her if she is going to kill him that we gain a valuable glimpse into the truth of her fantasmatic apparatus, which has been simmering at in the backdrop throughout the film. When the three beggars arrive, someone must die, is her response to his question. Telling us that the three beggars; crippling grief, chaotic pain and spiteful despair are her rationalizations of her life, with the categorical premise being self-hatred.
The vicious passions which have up to this point been both energetic and torturous, takes a definite turn for the worse as her self-hatred reaches a new dimension in the mutilation of her genitalia. As if to silence the voice of desire, she turned physically towards its phallic embodiment and performed a shearing critique. This seems to be her own response to the rampant despairing desire, which, however efficient (she becomes for a moment completely calm, numb, still...), cannot be said to solve the dilemma to anyone's welfare.
Brought to his senses, as it were, He wakes up to the hailstorm of acorns again and hears cowing underneath the cabin planks from the crow. He bolts his elbow through the cracks and finds the wrench. Now it is his will that manifest the crow. Releasing himself, but not before suffering several attacks by her in his attempt to take of the grindstone, he looks at her and sees unmitigated blackness.
There are no words, not even a trace of his former professed love or willingness to help. Disrobed from his symbolic regalia, he launches at her after a brief glare and destroys her in his hands. The seconds beat slowly away as one life ebbs out its course, and another flows into new reigns. He has become his Antichrist.
As if to fulfill a strange prophesy that her fantasy of misogyny had any merit, he burns her, like a witch to a stake. He may have been instrumental to the fantasy all along, if not its source.
*****
The prevailing question throughout the film is who (or what) is the Antichrist? The basic answer to this is that everyone of them is Antichrist insofar as the mind can become its own worst enemy, the replete negation of itself. From the wisp life-horizon that Nic is in his vigor, who can equally relinquish these powers of growth in favor for a absurd void, that follows like a shadow the finite damned remnants of the world. To the attentive mind ('He' / Dafoe) which frantically attempts to converse and decode its drives and passions ('She' / Gainsbourg), which in turn experiences all too well the despair that killed their ability to make a choice and interact with the world. The walls that is their body are cracking at the sunless dawn that battered it bloodless, leaving absurd nature to dismantle this helpless singularity from its beauty.
Trier's Antichrist tells the story of a mind that, in a ambiguous way, made the choice to not choose - suicide. Or, in milder expression, became burdened through the interactions with the world to the point where despair and all its darkly desires were the only means of life for it. The three beggars are the last friends of a tattered soul, brought to the brink of its extinction by the relentless woodland labyrinth.
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A note on the stills: The stills/screenshots from the film in this post are considered by the author of the blog to be in cooperation with the principle of fair use for bloggers. This is a theoretical commentary on the film that uses a very small portion of its imagery, in relation to the whole of the copyrighted work. Furthermore, the use of the movie stills are not intended to have any effect on the potential marked or value of the film. There is not being set up a competing product or reducing the size of the marked for this film, merely the advancement of its theoretical study.
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