Antichrist

Seen at: Lyric Cinema Cafe, about six weeks ago

It is impossible to make a comprehensive statement about this movie, other than perhaps it is the only indisputable masterpiece of cinema from last year. It's also unwatchable. After having seen it, I wanted to unsee it.

My particular take on this film is this: it is essentially the same movie as Avatar.

In any movie, one is asked to imagine onself as one or more characters on screen. In Avatar, we are asked to imagine a second level of identification on top of this. In particular, as screen characters, we are asked to become a lower form of life (with a tail). We are then asked to imagine a third level of identification, in which, as these tailed beings, we imagine our conscious will being fused with giant flying reptiles. Finally, at the climax of the movie we are asked to imagine our conscious wills being fused with the largest imaginable flying reptile.

Avatar is thus about identification of the human with lower forms of life, going down to the level of the reptilian. My biggest beef with Avatar, thematically, is that is portrays this a path towards enlightenment, and goodness. I think it leads in the opposite direction, generally.

Avatar supposedly shows the light side of this nature-identification (and nature worship); Antichrist fills in the dark spaces about nature-identification religion. Here's what really happens, if you go that route.

Where does this path lead, according to Antichrist? Towards the inhuman, towards insanity and psychotic breakdown, as one would expect. You really expected to fuse your consciousness and will with a giant flying reptile and remain sane?

Both movies are similar in another way, in that they examine the fusion of human into nature consciousness in stories in which female characters rise to overt dominance over men. In particular, mother figures become dominant. We see the light and dark poles of that, respectively, in the two movies.

I think these two movies make a "twin pair," but I give the edge to Antichrist, as a film, because I think it explores deeper truths that will resonate longer as art over time.

But like I said, I wanted to unsee it. Well, not really. I'm glad I saw it. Yet it's easy to see why folks walked out of it at Cannes last May.

Perhaps the movie of the year. We're getting close.