Symbol and Metaphor in Lars Von Trier’s Antichrist, Part 2

[Spoilers aplenty]

It has been a long time since Part 1, and there have been moments when I have considered changing the ‘in’ in this title to ‘and’, or even abandoning the idea altogether. In brief, an excursion into conceptions of symbol and metaphor, myth and allegory, has led me to all kinds of interesting areas – some of them far more interesting than the movie. In particular, reading Jung’s Man and his Symbols has proven rewarding. Jung’s notions of symbols and archetypes extends the idea of symbol towards something like the psychological equivalent of genes. Symbols become the building blocks of consciousness, and their meanings may differ radically from individual to individual whilst still preserving reverberant ancient/primitive forms. This further erodes the distinction between symbol and metaphor I discussed in Part 1. At one point Jung states:

“One could say that this dream picture was symbolic, for it did not state the situation directly but expressed the point indirectly by means of a metaphor that I could not at first understand.” We’ll return to this in the concluding section.

In Antichrist, the slippage between action and meaning fosters a piece that eschews empathy. We are faced with a cold beauty that is uncompromisingly vicious, and devoid of human emotion. In this sense, the film is not alone in Trier’s oeuvre, but it is exceptionally bleak. The carefully constructed symbols and metaphors seem to be arbitrarily thrown together - with meticulous skill and acuity. This is paradoxical: a skilful roll of the dice?

The Story

On the face of it, the narrative runs thus: happily married, bourgeois man loses everything, including his balls; kills his wife, and walks out into a mysterious world of blank faces that ignore him. The blank faces are attracted like moths to the flame of his wife’s funeral pyre. This might be symbolic of the director himself walking away from his creation/destruction, and the blank faced people represent filmgoers attracted by the flickering light of the movie cum bonfire of his vanity. In this sense, the film is a metaphor for Von Trier’s own torment. Since there are two protagonists though, there is another parallel strand: that of the woman. Bourgeois woman loses everything, including her life. Much of the loss she appears to bring upon herself, however, whereas the man is to a great extent victim. Towards the end, She assumes the role of unstoppable harridan, a worthy counterpart to The Terminator himself, and a character that only death will halt. Finally, however, she defeats herself by excising her own motivational chip, which happens to be her clitoris. When the husband ultimately executes the saisir de grace, one feels it is almost out of pity rather than revenge or self-preservation.

There has been much, largely misplaced, debate over the misogynistic turn in the film. To step back out into the real world for a moment, it is sobering to contemplate that the act of female circumcision is routinely practiced among many peoples of the world. Around 6000 women/girls a day succumb to this barbaric practice and, ironically, most of the operations are carried out and perpetuated by women. Many women die following the operation, or in subsequent childbirth. It is tempting to contemplate how much of the gynocide in the attic of the log cabin is carried out by women themselves. Perhaps this is one of Her reasons for abandoning the study. Is it possible that Her horrific act symbolises the plight of these victims? It would be disingenuous to argue that Von Trier is in any way campaigning on behalf of the anti-female circumcision lobby though. In my view, this film sides with no-one. But in a sea of chaotic symbols devoid of common emotional anchors, anything goes.

Beyond Good and Evil

The morality displayed in the film puts me in mind of Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil. The work is striving to say something within humanity and within history that is impossible to say, for it is, by its own aspiration, outside humanity and history. The fearful arbitrariness of an uncaring Nature brooded over by a debilitating vacuum devoid of meaning is hard for us to bear, witness or express. Yet this forms the basis of the film’s ontology. Similarly, Nietzsche’s exploration problematises notions of Good/Evil that are grounded in Nature, human or otherwise; he is also notoriously intolerant of religious reasoning. Incidentally, the book also contains some wincingly misogynist remarks. Perhaps there is a connection there somewhere. Either way, one of the most distinctive features of Nietzsche’s book chimes very nicely with the way Antichrist has been constructed. The book is aphoristic. Whilst there may be a simple overall narrative line in the film, it is portrayed and punctuated by a series of portentous standalone scenes and images, akin to a procession of slowly moving tableaux vivants. Whilst each scene is replete with symbols, they seem to be strung together arbitrarily and, despite appearances and talking animals, the whole doesn’t amount to anything like a traditional allegory, or extended metaphor. For instance, the device of the talking animal is common in allegory (Animal Farm, for instance), yet it is here reduced to a single motif – literally the voice of the director: “chaos reigns”. This aptly illustrates a central theme of my experience of the film: the symbolic unfolding of the film is aphoristic and largely arbitrary, constantly leading us to reflect on the director himself.

One of the reasons Nietzsche wrote his book as a series of aphorisms lies in his fearless questioning of the fundamental conceptions of traditional philosophy. He felt that adopting a standard form of exposition would have been self-defeating. 

Dada

Dadaism was one of the first artforms to explore this territory, and there are many Dadaist resonances in Antichrist. Whilst the film contains homages to the immaculate cinematography of Tarkovsky, and allusions to the closely observed musicality of Bergman, it is actually far closer to the likes of Buñuel in execution. To take one example: I was reminded of the notorious sliced eye opening Buñuel’s Un Chien Andalou. A pair of scissors supplants the razor, and the vulva replaces the eye but the act of cutting leads us back to the same place: the director. In any movie ‘the cut’ is determined by the director, and although Trier has experimented with various techniques to absolve him of this burden (see The Boss of it All, for instance), he remains firmly in control of what is kept in or out of his movies. Why has he chosen to include a graphic representation of this act? To show that he is THERE? Is it a symbol? A metaphor? A woman, symbolising unquenchable animalistic, murderous lust, attempts to (re)gain control of herself by cutting off her access to sexual pleasure, excising that which drives her to repeatedly attach herself to her therapist/lover/husband. Once detached, She ceases to struggle and becomes defenceless. This unlocks the final sequence of events leading to her own death. What might this be telling us? Simply filleting out a single strand is not necessarily going to give us a ‘key’ to the film, but it is a pivotal point. The hapless unmanned man walks away, whereas the woman remains locked in the film. By becoming light, the woman becomes the film. Something we can come and gawp at, time and time again – even freeze framing the gorey bits should we so wish. The man/director walks away, as do we in the end. But we HAVE to look back at Trier when we reflect on the genital cutting scene, and maybe we don’t like what we see. Are we the faceless audience flocking to the flickering flame of the pyre of womanhood ignoring Him because he got away? Do we flock to pay homage to the dead, the captured, to the lost ideal, to a beauty that is destroyed… or do we simply awaken from the dream with all our impressions sinking back immediately into our unconscious, leaving a niggling suspicion that we have woken into another dream? Von Trier's dream?

Before we flap off into the sunset, we must return to earth though. Buñuel said of Un Chien Andalou “no idea or image that might lend itself to a rational explanation of any kind would be accepted… Nothing, in the film, symbolizes anything.”     ... echoed by Lars Von Trier's “I am not trying to say anything”.  

From a Dadaist perspective, this is laudable, meaning is after all arbitrary. Both Antichrist and Un Chien Andalou summon up demons, whether we like it or not. We all have archetypes inhabiting our dreamworlds...

CUT!

The Red Legged Scissorman

Genital mutilation gave the film a free boost of publicity and doubtless generated a whole new audience for Von Trier. It would be interesting to see his overall sales figures before and after the release. Alongside this, we notice that the unkindest cut in the film has also divided audiences and critics alike. The scene where She goes to work with a large pair of scissors is shocking, but it is only a small step from things you might find lurking in Grimm’s Farly Tales, or Shockheaded Peter. As as child, I was terrified of the ‘Red Legged Scissorman’ (poem), more terrified than I will probably ever be again when witnessing a piece of shocking (non-live) art.

The simple act of cutting as that depicted in the film will have different effects and meanings according to the individual witness. The poles of metaphor and symbol unite at this deeper level. But no matter how much dissection is carried out, the body cannot be understood via a dead analogue though.

Consequently, it’s not simply a case of looking under the bonnet and finding Adam and Eve in Eden after The Fall, then announcing ‘well, there’s your problem then, mate’. No.

Having said that, one of the more articulate cinema-goers attending the same showing did conclude: “that was fookin shite”. Symbols, in this lowly milieu at least, are those things you get on the outside (and sometimes on the inside) of toilet doors; a stunted vocabulary of metaphors will churn up phrases like ‘at the end of the day’... The notion of film as metaphor is unlikely to divert such tides.

Mirror

One of the reasons I started this investigation was Von Trier's homage to Tarkovsky in the final credits. When asked by the press about this dedication, he responded wrily: “If you dedicate a film to director then nobody will say you steal from him.” Link There were indeed certain Tarkovskian qualities to Antichrist, but on the whole they were superficial, especially in relation to the deployment of symbol and metaphor. In Mirror, a film Von Trier rates highly, Tarkovsky displays an uncanny ‘control’ of Chance and Nature in a meticulously ordered multilayered/non-lineal narrative that concerns itself with living memory, in all senses. Mirror lies almost at the opposite end of the scale of human empathy and emotion, yet there are distinct resonances. The hut in the forest, the rain/elements on cue, cameo animals, are trivial references to Tarkovsky; the beautiful cinematography is doubtless indebted to some of Tarkovsky’s painstaking techniques, but where do these great directors sit on the symbol/metaphor scale? This was the question Von Trier put in my head by dedicating his film thus.

Unsurprisingly, symbol and metaphor were big issues for Tarkovsky. Perhaps surprisingly however, he was insistent on preserving a strong demarcation between the two. The further I have investigated this binary relationship, the more I have come to see it as a continuum without a clear dividing line, not so Tarkovsky. Firstly, on symbols:

“I am an enemy of symbols. Symbol is too narrow a concept for me in the sense that symbols exist in order to be deciphered. An artistic image on the other hand is not to be deciphered, it is an equivalent of the world around us. Rain in Solaris is not a symbol, it is only rain which at certain moment has particular significance to the hero. But it does not symbolise anything. It only expresses. This rain is an artistic image. Symbol for me is something too complicated.”

Interview Ein Feind der Symbolik with Irena Brezna in "tip" 1984 (3), pp. 197–205 [Pol. trans. Adam Sewen]. Link

Here Tarkovsky is further distinguishing between complication and complexity, between a rigid mechanism and a shifting organism. In this sense, beauty is something that can be incredibly simple (as opposed to complicated), but at the same time it can be infinitely complex (as in a pretty nest of fractals). This immediately put me in mind of another great director: David Lynch. Eraserhead is one of my favourite films of all time, and David Lynch has produced some incredible work, but increasingly the films seem to consist of a complicated arrangement of symbols with little or nothing beyond other than a possible key. They become puzzles, like computer quest games. Indeed Mark Allyn Stewart’s David Lynch Decoded sets out to put meaning to each of the recurring symbols in Lynch’s films, down to the colour of the curtains, literally!

Lynch is unquestionably a modern surrealist and has acknowledged his debts to Dada and the like, but there is something missing here. This is what Tarkovsky is hinting at above and more forcefully below:

We can express our feelings regarding the world around us either by poetic or by descriptive means. I prefer to express myself metaphorically. Let me stress: metaphorically, not symbolically. A symbol contains within itself a definite meaning, certain intellectual formula, while metaphor is an image. An image possessing the same distinguishing features as the world it represents. An image — as opposed to a symbol — is indefinite in meaning. One cannot speak of the infinite world by applying tools that are definite and finite. We can analyse the formula that constitutes a symbol, while metaphor is a being-within-itself, it's a monomial. It falls apart at any attempt of touching it.

Interview Le noir coloris de la nostalgie with Hervé Guibert in "Le Monde", 12 May 1983 [Pol. trans. Malgorzata Sporek-Czyzewska].

This marvellous utterance will help us on the road to our sunset. Whether or not we fully agree with Tarkovsky’s strong demarcation, hopefully we can concur that it is true for certain, perhaps limited, notions of symbol. The broader, more flexible ideas of symbol in, say, Jung, may percolate into what we commonly accept as the ground of metaphor. Tarkovsky is telling us that metaphor-image, held up as a mirror to nature, will yield us something that may be both indeterminate in meaning and deeply resonant with the human spirit. I feel touched or moved by this when I watch Tarkovsky's films, but this is strangely/purposefully missing in Antichrist, even though all the elements are tantalisingly present. This level of understanding is available to us precisely because we are not cold, rational calculating engines following arbitrary traffic signs to oblivion, we thrive on indeterminacy and we create meaning from it. Possibly Her transformation from truculent patient to raging murderess symbolises this movement.

A crucial factor in the construction of this kind of metaphor-image is the relationship the director has with Nature. Whether Nature is with or without spirit, and whether human spirit abides as part of this, or is somehow banished from it into irrelevant absurdity. This might even be framed as a religious question, and it is one that is addressed in Antichrist. In doing so, the film goes way beyond soft targets like Christianity, Islam, or even New Age pseudo-paganism. As a result, Antichrist goes much further than Nietzsche’s The Antichrist (coincidence, I’m sure), which is primarily an Anti-Christian tract. For all the critics’ hoohaha, I think, if anything, the film attacks Pretension.

Still the question remains though: does it hang together as a Tarkovsky-esque extended metaphor, or is it merely a loosely connected series of symbols signifying nothing? If nihilism is its ontology and meaninglessness its goal, then has Von Trier succeeded? What would success look like? The answers to these questions are not straightforward at all. I think the film is a success even though it doesn’t achieve the level of empathic transcendence that Tarkovosky often does. Tarkovsky draws us into Nature without sentimentalising the human condition, Von Trier struggles to pull us away. This divergence is revealed in how these two directors see and use symbol and metaphor. There is a book in that. Possibly a trilogy, if you add Lynch and Buñuel!

The Fall from grace at the beginning of the film is driven relentlessly forwards by the impassive force of Nature as Satan’s Church in a land where Chaos Reigns (cue rain), until death and destruction is achieved. Nature continues regardless, audiences flock to the movies, the director walks away and lives to make another film, hopefully.

Well, that’s part 2, and I really must get on with something else now. If there is ever a part 3, it will probably be a random string of one-liners swept up from the cutting room desktop. Probably should have done that in the first place.

“The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk.”

Links:

The Independent review

Counterfire review