Note on the politics of Lars von Trier and "Antichrist"

It is almost tempting to think of Lars von Trier's "Antichrist" as a portrayal of a variant of American-style left-wing fascism. After Charlotte Gainsbourg and Willem Dafoe lose their infant child to the window left open several floors up while they are having sex, she becomes (as reaction to this trauma?) obsessed with the history of misogyny and the oppressed person's hatred that it legitimates for her, while Dafoe makes the professional personal by devoting his expertise as psychotherapist, with its distanced stance that figures his cluelessness, to a doomed effort to figure out and help his fucked-up young wife.  People who cope with traumatic memories through extreme transgressive excess are the cyclothymic director's stock in trade.  He surely owes much to directors like Dreyer, Pasolini, and Fassbinder in this regard.  Though I began to pen these thoughts when Trump was still a candidate, it seems to me that if anything the film has gained in pertinence.  But if the film in part describes a paradigm that remains very apt in our political culture of enraged actual and wannabe victims (something similar could doubtless be done with the character of a member of any recognizable oppressed group, but gender and sex make for sites of transgression that seem privileged in their motivation), von Trier stays close to his characters.  And that no doubt helps explain why he could openly entertain the thought that he is himself some kind of "Nazi" (keep the scare quotes, please) on the stage at the Cannes Film Festival.  He's nothing of the kind, of course, but he is a provocateur who will not leave extreme experience alone.    

That her husband is a psychotherapist who regards her problem as merely psychological (and who in the end appears to be haunted, now that he is traumatized by his experience with her, by a fantasy of faceless women like her) only situates his view of her (though real enough in that she acts out her hatred of men as such on him) as part of a larger complex within which, and with regard to which, it would be useless to ask Who is the responsible party or faction (the men who supposedly have oppressed women throughout time, or the angry women who fight back blindly at them?), nor would it help to just say we are all guilty. It is a mirror-stage situation surely (in the Lacanian sense). The film shows the futility of both liberal psychologizing of this kind of anger (whatever injustice the Charlotte Gainsbourg character may actually have experienced in life, including perhaps a quotidian and not even truly "violent" childhood trauma, for we are not told) by the person with professional authority on his side (and who happens to be the husband) as well as the rage and hatred of the "oppressed" person who has an obsession with victimology that renders her at times depressed and at times enraged and willing to act it out. It is interesting that she "castrates" him by driving a post through his leg, which is reminiscent of Oedipus's having his feet bound and swollen (the meaning of his name) in the famous play's prehistory: she wants to make of him, if not herself, a little Oedipus. As a re-binding, this also is a perversely "religious" ritual act befitting the title, since that is the literal meaning of the term; and as an Oedipalizing act of crippling violence, it is an act of judgment worthy of Kafka's harrow in "In the Penal Colony."  The meaning, and often the impossibility, of transgression and its excess is a principal theme in Von Trier's cinema; he knows that it does not abolish the law and may require its reinforcement, and likewise the project of opposing the barbarism of civilization could be a movement towards liberation or the effectuation of something like a death drive.         

The plain truth is that our society does not really know how to handle oppression and the anger it produces, particularly that of race, a point made in Raul Peck's recent film "I Am Not Your Negro," on the views of American society of the late Black radical writer James Baldwin. There is on the one hand a therapeutic culture that legitimates the mental health system, the first trading in mostly empty promises of a redemptive path to success through happiness or happiness through success, and both essentially requiring people to be untroubled, contented, and get along nicely with others (what has been called friendly fascism), so that it must punish anger. And yet, anger is the emotion of those who recognize themselves as victims of injustice (or who identify with those who are - and why not? we may ask; is that not better, as Arendt thought, than the indifference that accepts whatever is ordinary?). That really is the meaning, phenomenologically speaking, of anger. Biological medical psychiatry can only call it a diseased state or symptom because it assumes that abnormal states are diseases that must be treated since they cannot really be allowed. But this begs the question, since lots of things are abnormal without necessarily being bad, and the judgment that they are bad and should be corrected cannot be made on biological grounds, as it is a matter of a social normativity that can only be decided by some form of political and governmental process.

At the same time, the opposite side of this coin, which is for the oppressed or those who think they are, that is, anyone who has been provoked to anger, and can make a credible claim that what they think is injustice is in fact (which again is a social and political judgment), to claim the right to be angry and act out (of) this anger. Even those of us who are proponents as I am of indulging this affect sometimes will admit that it is a tiger that is rough to ride. It can be doubted whether the Gainsbourg character has a politics, but then too there is something in this of a Hegelian dramatic opposition of conflicting claims or positions: she has a rage that she understands politically, while his standpoint involves judging her problems as psychological and not political.  (Also, she is an amateur and he a professional, and of course the former position is strong thanks to its passion and the latter weak because its recourse is ultimately to mere law and order.)  

So what are von Trier's politics here? Not only a provocateur who makes films about people who take interesting extremist positions, and an anti-clerical and anti-patriarchal Christian (like Dreyer and sometimes Bergman; on this see especially "Breaking the Waves"), who sides with losers and the oppressed, who, like Fassbinder, is fascinated by strategies they invent that are destructive, and so takes transgressive projects for granted while doubting the sense of the terms in which they are posed (as in "Idiots"). He tends to make film after film that in some way is a "theorem," like Pasolini's film of that name ("Teorema"), and indeed he owes something to Pasolini as well as Fassbinder.  He also has no solutions to offer and, like Fassbinder,  is interested particularly in individuals who try to oppose or escape their oppression and fail miserably. He does not show that anyone is oppressed, but takes that for granted as a starting point.

That von Trier repeatedly makes films in which the central figure is a woman is doubtless because he holds a view similar to  Fassdinder's that "women use their oppression as a weapon."  But not, in his films, by wielding power and then pretending that they are victims even when they do so.  The hypocrisy of the powerful and their smug aggression, which almost invariably succeeds, is never interesting; the troubled desire for change of the powerless who intuitively understand that they must if they want to breathe revolt always is.

That it is true enough as a matter of course that most will fail miserably is no excuse for substituting the work of thinking that binds together art and politics in a time of crisis with the moral judgment that is normally wielded so as to condemn a priori all such rebellion, and that in theater and cinema would leave us with simply plotted dramas in which we know what is supposed to happen and are only waiting to see payment made.