Gimme Cockaigne: MELANCHOLIA (2011)

"When life itself seems lunatic, who knows where madness lies? Perhaps to be too practical is madness. To surrender dreams—this may be madness. To seek treasure where there is only trash. Too much sanity may be madness. And maddest of all, to see life as it is and not as it should be." –Don Quixote

When true doomsday comes, perhaps the manic depressives and bi-polars amongst us will at last have an opportunity to shine in calm perfection while walking through slow motion rain. That seems to be the message of Lars Von Trier's latest, MELANCHOLIA (2011). Until then, alas, the ordinary madness of our civilization and all its unconscious munching, adherence to unexamined cultural mores, and slow death momentum, will have to be endured. Lars, I feel ya. But Jeeze. There are pills for that now!

MELANCHOLIA makes me nervous because I don't want to lose one of the best auteurs of our post-art house age and the film has the earmarks of a cinematic suicide note, a message from someone planning to be dead by the time you read it. His whole post-Dogme 95 life is flashing before our eyes and on some level he's reached the frontier from which no traveler returns. In order to keep going into the wilderness, for Lars is an explorer first and foremost, the film ceases to rim a frontier, but rather settles in and lets the frontier fall right upon it. It's a film about endurance, and the inability of some to handle normalcy vs. others to handle apocalypses. And Lars' star Kirsten Dunst, no longer the vampire child of Lestat, or the willowy cheerleader, has never seemed more Nordic. It's as if she's spent her life scowling through meaningless sex and animal fat-enriched meals solely to get to this part, solely to face this one vanishing point.

For in MELANCHOLIA, Von Trier dives headfirst into the same abyss that Terence Malick only wades up to his knees for THE TREE OF LIFE.  There is no real comparison between the two other than their release dates, and ponderous linking of 2001-style classical music-scored outer space vistas. It's fun to compare them anyway: MELANCHOLIA, the tale of a woman's post-wedding depression coming to life in the form of a world-destroying planet, is the suicide note before to TREE OF LIFE's faded funeral notice after. TREE mourns my soon-deceased father but MELANCHOLIA mourns for me, and the son of my unborn son, and the ground beneath our unborn feet.

My girl and I saw the film this past Saturday night at the charmingly dilapidated Brooklyn Heights Cinema with its blaring, distorted speakers rumbling the seats with Wagner's aria to Tristan und Isolde as Kristen Dunst and company writhed in Bill Viola-style (see above) slowness. It was so loud I had to cover my ears. But rather than be the one to complain to the ticket taker, I tried my best to accept it. And then suddenly the music stopped. I missed it.

The 1st chapter of Lars' film is a long and expensive wedding for our melancholy heroine Justine (Dunst) over the course of which she flits with ecstasy before dissolving into a deep depression, winding up in the bathtub upstairs, refusing to come out. The sight of a distant star unnerves her. Soon she's telling off her boss (Stellan Skarsgard), losing her groom John (Alexander Skarsgard, insufferable as ever), sleeping with a kid on the 18th green, pissing off her sister Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg) and her sister's rich husband John (Kiefer Sutherland), infuriating the wedding planner (a great Udo Kier) and drawing gasps from everyone but her loving drunk of a father (John Hurt) and psychotic mother (Charlotte Rampling), who makes the toast "I think marriage is a crock of shit."

Handheld Dogme verite style used to film weddings by now almost quaint: Demme's RACHEL GETTING MARRIED, Vinterberg's THE CELEBRATION, Baumbach's MARGOT AT THE WEDDING, have already been there. But unlike those affairs, LVT's is a picture of a cold planet bathed in warmth but unable to feel warm, and if you can survive the whiplash handheld camera nausea in these scenes, you can move on to the next course. The bride, however, won't be there as she's upstairs, nearly catatonic with ennui.

After some portions of the reception are over, Justine ducks into the library and  changes the open art books on display from abstract geometrical shapes (put there no doubt by John as they reflect his dull patriarchal-modernist tastes) to archaic pictures of female suffering and/or death and peasant post-wedding debauchery.  There's: "Land of Cockaine" and "Hunters in the Snow" by Bruegel; "Ophelia" by J.W. Waterhouse; and "After the Hunt" by Bogarde. As in DOGVILLE and ANTICHRIST, this book swap seems a full rejection of the flat, dull left-brained scientific rationalism championed by an insufferable materialist know-it-all in favor of a return to the mythic unconscious where every day is your last so you better get connected back to your Jungian roots, and hammered, before the whole tree of life goes up in flames.

John rejects such Dionysian nonsense outright, but his own left-brained thinking falls apart at every turn. Unable to to deal with the loss of his empirical toe-hold, deluding and denuding-- as DaFoe did in ANTICHRIST--via smug dismissal of Gainsbourg's intellectually eroticized 'feminine hysteria,' and the neglect of their co-owned horses. Dunst's depression is never fully explained so we naturally look for clues and there are plenty if you hate the fact that all that rich razzle dazzle, the 'very expensive' fairy tale wedding is the closest the dead patriarch of order and logic dares come in the direction of ritual, of 'myth' (outside of forbidden Masonic rites, etc). In going for high class in a materialist bourgeois competitive manner, this stuffy wedding becomes a control freak's dream and an awake aesthete's overload nightmare, where the more money spent the less fun it's possible to have. It's Bruegel land of plenty fairy tale overrun with linear edicts.

Pieter Bruegel the Elder's "Luilekkerland" ("The Land of Cockaigne"), 1567. Oil on panel.

Cockaigne is a medieval mythical land of plenty, an imaginary place of extreme luxury and ease where physical comforts and pleasures are always immediately at hand and where the harshness of medieval peasant life does not exist. Specifically, in poems like The Land of Cockaigne, Cockaigne is a land of contraries, where all the restrictions of society are defied (abbots beaten by their monks), sexual liberty is open (nuns flipped over to show their bottoms), and food is plentiful... Writing about Cockaigne was a commonplace of Goliard verse. It represented both wish fulfillment and resentment at the strictures of asceticism and dearth (Wiki)

Justine prefers dearth

In Lars' film, a ceremony that should be mythically enriched with archetypal energy (a wedding) is stifled by the trivialities which the wedding planner (a marvelous Udo Kier) and the host couple (i.e. John) cling to, insisting on guesses from guests as to how many pebbles are in the foyer vase, for example, and not taking "I don't wanna guess" for an answer. John's outrage over Justine not coming down to cut the cake relates to her boss's slimy demands for a tag line (his weird head games resonate meta as the producers of MELANCHOLIA were no doubt hoping a tag line to this film would occur to Lars, as the image the boss shows her/us, the image that needs the tag, is like a Vogue cover premonition of mythic poses Justine herself will assume later in the film).

While we struggle to not get nauseous from whiplash shaky-cam, the heavy breathing Dogme sound keeps the wedding unbearably intimate: we hear every cut of the meat and every clang of cutlery on the china plates; every breath and wheeze from the gathered throng is amplified like we're tripping our faces off and boiling over in claustrophobic anxiety; trapped in this crowded dining room with all these acting actors talking over each other all at once like real people do in groups, it's as if the secret joy of the movies--avoiding having to talk to people and act civil--is corrupted, the meat and small talk tumbling out of the screen like the guts out of a rotten pumpkin.

At first we don't know why Justine is losing her grip, but we feel it's something to do with the oppressive worry of her sister ("Don't ruin this!") her brother-in-law John ("this cost a fortune") and the insane ravings of her mom. The wedding is a public de-pantsing of artistic success, wherein the best riches and opulence can be is thrown up as buffer against the onslaught of Lars'/Justine's depression, and it all crumbles like fairy dust.

It is only in Justine's subsequent sad melt-down and later ecstasy over the approaching doomsday that she blossoms. The planet is her true groom and its destruction her true union.

Seeing how each person in their group prepares for the end, I was reminded of my own strange exaltation on the day of 9/11, the acrid smell of the burning buildings in my nose as I went racing up deserted 2nd Avenue at midnight, brain thrilling that it might the world might end any moment. Any building might blow up at any time! I was alive for the first time in years, I was FREE of all my conceptions of self and the world around me. New York City was a ghost town at that hour. Not a car or soul on the street but me. Yet, I managed to grab the only train running, a single C-train that suddenly arrived at Brooklyn Heights as I went racing down the stairs, and to find one cab when I got off at 78th street (?) and me and the the cab driver were like the post-apocalypse, like ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK, map of the bridge! Hey! Hey! HEY!

I knew my exaltation was not 'proper' but also, later, learned I was not alone in feeling it, especially at the uptown AA meetings I attended in the weeks that followed. We had a lot of firemen and cops up there at those meetings and we felt their pain and grief at losing--roughly--half their number in a single day, but we, the non-responder/survivors, were strangely calm, more serene than we'd been in some time. We went to the movies never sure if the city would be there when we got out, thus comedies took on special import (ROCK STAR, ZOOLANDER, coming to mind).

In this apocalyptic moment, we AA people were at peace. Our constant existential dread, so useless in normal life, was suddenly the norm. Now that the world was blind, our impoverished vision made us royalty.

What’s madness but nobility of soul
At odds with circumstance? The day’s on fire!
I know the purity of pure despair,
My shadow pinned against a sweating wall.
That place among the rocks—is it a cave,
Or winding path? The edge is what I have.

                 –Theodore Roethke, “In a Dark Time”

 

John however, will have no such apocalyptic acceptance, and in the period after the wedding he belittles and dominates Claire in a vain effort to allay her anxiety about the approaching planet. In his bland pretense he resembles past Von Trier male characters of past films like Dogville and Antichrist, authority figure wannabes who do their best to dominate the women in the room but come off sad and impotent, wanting in the shadow of some dead patriarchal ideal that dominates both genders.

In TREE OF LIFE we saw the dawn of the earth, and the first vague gestures of compassion, leading up to some beach-side dream jazz heaven cast party. That's the kind of soiree Claire wants to have as the planet looms, a Cockaigne-style acceptance of the end through drink and song and togetherness. From her new husband's picture of an apple orchard he's bought for her, to 'rest' in, to the pebbles in the jar Udo Kier wants everyone to guess the number of--everything but the strange request to 'build caves' from the son, to return to Werner Herzog's CAVES OF FORGOTTEN DREAMS, perhaps, and to the mythic inner reality of Jungian archetypes of which we are the shadows on the Platonic walls-- is, in Justine's eyes, contemptible. 

Von Trier shows that all the money in the bourgeois world of wealth and rationalism won't allay or abet this impending cloud, only Justine's resolutely transcendental delusion is some kind of salvation. Hers is the peace of the twisted. She is a herald, one of the women and men who have writhed backwards through time due to years of enduring the stale, hollow pleasures of Cockaigne. Like Jack in the 1920s New Years eve picture at the end of THE SHINING, Justine moves backwards into the representations of the past until she's as indestructible as the planet Melancholia itself. I hope Lars doesn't mean to follow her quite yet, though at this point he's running out of language, image, and time. Every new film shows a little less sand in the hourglass and MELANCHOLIA shows the hourglass itself breaking into slow motion splinters. Soon he will have nothing left but sand, unless... 

May I suggest an Effexor + Wellbutrin + Neurontin cocktail, sir? It works wonders! Cockaigne is for suckers, as Bruegel and Lacan well knew. When life gives you only lemon orchards as far as the eye can see, no amount of lemonade-making can allay the soul-curling sourness. One must burn and run, even if there's nowhere to go but deeper into the ash crevasse.

POST-SCRIPT (12/7/12): As Justine gets out of the limo to head into the reception, she spots the incoming planet--still just a dot in the sky but she recognizes it--and five days after seeing the film it dawned on me that even so far away she recognizes it as our onrushing doom and her deliverance. So fuck it, she tells off her boss and dumps her groom. But isn't that what depression is all about? She doesn't bother to share her realization though, knowing perhaps that in the house of a coddling smugly bourgeois materialist like John it's useless to bring it up. Considering this, the film suddenly comes into sharper focus for me, so thought I'd add it! 

Special Thanks to Jennifer Boyer,

The Coolest of Couples #1: Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward

"Joanne is one of the last of the great broads." 

- Paul Newman 

               

The weirdness aspect here isn't age, but that Paul Newman is actually hotter than his own wife, and yet they were together and happy from the 1950s right through to Newman's recent sad passing. The actual physical beauty of Woodward is not insubstantial, but as Newman is still probably the closest thing cinema has had to a living Greco-Roman god one would think he'd need someone like Rita Hayworth or 1967-era Raquel Welch to be evenly matched. And yet! Newman seemed to have an altruistic gift--perhaps an old soul too cool to be shallow--in realizing excessive beauty can be a curse after few months into a sexual relationship, as anyone who's dated a painfully hot girl can tell you. A woman who is too beautiful becomes like a dagger, stabbing you in the heart with recrimination because no matter what you do, somehow, you can't live up to her, the ideal, the pedestal, which advertising and the media has helped raise to ludicrous heights in this country... so you end up fighting against becoming an insecure drunken wreck over all the skeevy attention she gets and she instinctively recoils and acts out against your spinelessness by playing it all up, like Marlene Dietrich in DEVIL IS A WOMAN. Conversely however, Newman is almost too hot to cheat, it's just too easy. Men cheat because they need validation; a guy as hot as Newman never needs validation. Also, if you're a girl with a guy like Newman in your hands, you know better than to bother getting jealous.

Woodward's suspected uninhibited sexuality, then, is a blessing that comes with the phenomenon known as "ugly-sexy," i.e. someone is enough themselves that even their conventionally unattractive features become incredibly sexy (perhaps defined ultimately by Serge and daughter Charlotte Gainsbourg). Woodward's healthy lust is something Newman was always quick--even wolfishly proud--to confirm in the press. He praised her as one of those rare and all-but forgotten creatures of the 1960s and 1970s, the broad. Women extroverted to the extent that their sacral chakras hum like spinning tops, theirs is actually the highest level of sensuality short of the tantra. It's a casual, open-hearted lust that prettier women sometimes never develop thanks to an excess of skeevy male attention at too early an age. Instead of learning to go after the boys they like, to parlay out into the field to claim a particular prey, the too-pretty women cultivate a defense against "men" as a whole, a facade of shallow bitchiness that repels close contact but rewards long-distance worship. While gorgeous women become obsessed with making themselves prettier, no matter how pretty they may be, the clock ticks and they recoil from each new wrinkle like Baby Jane in the mirror. The ugly-sexy girls don't worry so much and so wiggle free from narcissism's trap, staying eager for the flesh of their opposite rather than their own ego ideal. As a result, ugly-sexy women often get the hottest guys, while the hot girls wind up with rich short dudes, looking around their expensive lofts and wondering if their girlfriends' are bigger.

As for Newman, as goddesses would throw themselves off horses just to touch his garment, carousing around on a midnight creep carries no 'thrill of the chase,' so marrying Woodward and being faithful to her becomes a key to spiritual enlightenment, as Shakespeare intended, like Siddhartha chucking his kingdom for a spot on the river. If Newman spent most of his career free from the shallow insecure vanity that leads men astray, the cause lies perhaps in this sacrifice.

Newman and Woodward's relationship is built, in Newman's words, on "equal parts lust and respect." The "broad" comment atop may be lost on today's generation outside of MAD MEN fans, but I still remember flirting with drunken secretaries at my dad's bridge games as a swingin' eight-year-old in the 1970s. I value and remember those "broads," and if the juggernaut of feminism has them steamrolled, I hope they don't look back on their swinger days with any remorse. They shouldn't. Sex needn't always be a weapon or means to an end. If you give it a little effort you can wiggle free from guilt, shame and repression and just have a good time. It's clear Newman and Woodward did, and they probably helped usher in 1970s permissiveness as a result. Acidemic salutes them and all broads. Ladies, please come back.

But blue eyes and Greek god sculpted features, sex and slinkiness, aren't the true measure of Newman as a man, it's his unshowy altruism and wry, self-effacing humor. He's a veritable Otto Kruger from MAGNIFICENT OBSESSION, as is evidenced in the couple's preference for rural Connecticut over Hollywood, and in the many amazing food products-- popcorn, salsa, cookies, tomato sauce, you name it--all delicious, well-made, affordable--the profits from which go to charity. Yeah, man, not just "a portion" of the profits but all. ALL PROFITS!  And the company's been a huge success without having to hoist any TV commercials on the public, nothing with Newman in overalls, intoning gravely about the importance of natural ingredients. Just sunny pictures of Newman and sometimes Woodward clad as farmers on the labels.

Just look at those still-hot sweet elderly beaming faces! So much wisdom. They're in the documentary on LONG HOT SUMMER, looking great and radiating enough matrimonial calm assertiveness to fuel twenty Thin Man movies.

Now, to confess, LONG HOT SUMMER is the only movie of theirs I see over and over. PARIS BLUES (1961) and A NEW KIND OF LOVE (1963) were okay but dated in their winky attitude towards sex. I'd love to see FROM THE TERRACE (1960) but RALLY ROUND THE FLAG BOYS (1958) pissed me off no end, as I couldn't stand seeing Newman's character being cock-blocked at every step by bratty children and Woodward's community activism; I cried seeing him struggle to get a much-needed after-work drink: he can't even fit into the crowded bar car on the commuter train home from the city, and at home there's barely enough gin in the liquor cabinet to make even one gin and tonic, and--right as the lip of the glass is reaching his lips--one of his bratty boys knocks it out of his hand with a pillow thrown from across the room. And the kid is not punished! Rather the dad is supposed to be very tolerant that neither his sexual or alcoholic needs are  being met.

And then when Joan Collins--the only other awake, sexually frustrated human being in this gossipy white collar settlement--tries to get him into bed (all the way safely over in Paris, mind you), who should show up but the wife for a surprise visit. Woodward is great, of course, but what's the point of watching a match not burn?


I did stick around for Collins' Pocahontas dance at the Thanksgiving-cum-fertility festival. Whoop! Whoop! And since I'd read Robin Wood's essential but slightly bitter Sexual Politics in Narrative Film, I knew to see it as the "repressed erotic (barred from the home) returning in the exotic" (p. 170) Whoop! Whoop!

Ah, but THE LONG HOT SUMMER (1958), that never fails me. Their first co-starring vehicle, it does what so many films, including CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF, can only try and do and don't often get right: that whole American Gothic style whoop-whoop that was so hot in the television-competitive Cinemascope-crazy late 1950s. Colliding a couple of Faulkner stories and contrasting acting styles. Unlike some of their other vehicles, here the passion between Newman and Woodward is allowed to be super hot in its non-hotness, as Newman's hustle only strengthens her spinsterish desire.

Woodward is deliberately school-marmish here the way a modern hipster chick might be today, all she lacks is granny glasses--promoting an implied gender neutral celibacy via unsexy clothing and carting around devoted and coded momma's boy, Oscar Madison from SIX MILLION DOLLAR MAN. Gender, man, it's a weird thing when a girl tries to not be sexy. I don't know how to handle it! Neither does Newman. He can't steamroll over it, so he surrenders into a calm, submissive state for the first time in a tender final monologue.

 Masters of staying humble and in character, there's no more spark or heat than needed between these two, yet they still sizzle. Their bond has developed naturally through antagonism and begrudging respect-- though offscreen they were--according to the DVD extras---racing down to Florida to ball all night during their days off. Man, I know what it's like to be in love, don't you? If not, just learn from the masters: Newman and Woodward were a solid front, completely devoted, and it helped no doubt that they were in acting class together and probably got all inside each others' heads through hours of improv and exercise. So often stars dictates to what extent the supporting characters around them are allowed to flesh out and develop in any particular movie (they don't want anyone stealing their show). But no one in the family dynamic here feels the need to spell out their connections to one another in any showy or expository manner. It's all direct non/interaction, immediate, forceful! It cuts through the artifices of poetry and grabs right at the bull's balls, without seeming to grab a damn thing. Son, that's mythic!

Orson alone seems oblivious to such dynamics, and is thus superb. We see the way living with such a boisterous, animal breeding tyrant--no matter how benevolent and witty he may be--takes its toll on his children and shows in Fanciosa's and Woodwards' sense memory resignation. Welles' complete obliviousness to all but his own charm links him to Kane and Quinlan, and matches a current of self-loathing running below Newman's self-satisfied drifter--a mutual respect forms between them, one not sullied by confusing issues of trust.

But it's humility and vulnerability that win out. As they said in later years, their relationship was built on affection and tolerance, an understanding they didn't need to meddle in every aspect of each other's life. Noted Newman: "You can’t spend a lifetime breathing down each others' necks ... We are very, very different people and yet somehow we fed off those varied differences and instead of separating us, it has made the whole bond a lot stronger.”

Acid's Greatest Horror #1: ANTICHRIST (2009)

My original conception of a #1 one horror acid movie has hovered between THE HOLY MOUNTAIN, THE WICKER MAN and HOUR OF THE WOLF. How awesome then, that Lars Von Trier's ANTICHRIST should come along and perfectly encompass all three, and work almost as a remake of POSSESSION besides?

Anyone who ever wondered what ZABRISKIE POINT would be like if done by David Lynch, and if he was a bigger fan of David Cronenberg and D.W. Griffith, would be wise to brave it. Don't let the frightened critics spook you just because there's some genital mutilation and shocking sexuality. You can handle it. If you're like me and a lifelong victim of anxiety and depression, then you'll really handle it. In fact, you'll dig into it so deep you may just decide to lie in it like a deep root coffin, hoping for your own Charlotte Gainsbourg to come fill the hole above you with comforting black dirt, while you wait for the comforting kiss of the conqueror worm!

Though a toddler figures into it, and some talking forest animals (!) this is a two person piece, which is fine when the people are Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg and the man behind the scenes is the public depressive Von Trier (and even the illiterate can relax since it's in English!) The story is simplicity itself: a pair of screwed up marrieds head to a cabin in the woods after their child dies, there to "face her fears" mainly because he doesn't want to sleep with her. Charlotte goes insane from grief and her man's constant self-righteous attempts to "cure" her crippling anxiety (he's a behavioral therapist). Along the way, ye olde link between psychiatry and witch burning is exhumed, but mainly the landscape warps and weaves just like its wont to do when one is... warped. If you've ever been on major psychedelic drugs in the woods and gotten lost and wound up having a six hour conversation with a tree root about your impending death by starvation and exposure, only to find out you've been sitting in the petrified remains of a half-eaten fox and--oh wait, it's just some leaves--and anyway you've only been outside two minutes, and you're just a yard from the house where your friends are inside laughing hysterically while watching WAY DOWN EAST, then you'll know why this movie rocks so bad!

It's always amazing to see how many apparently normal people think Von Trier (like Neil LaBute) is a misogynist just because he makes films that address misogyny. In his films misogyny is a warping factor in archetypal cinema-psychology, not just an unconsciously endorsed lifestyle ala every "rom-com." If you want a list of real misogynists in cinema, just look at: Michael Bay, Cameron Crowe, or the geniuses behind PORKY'S, LAST AMERICAN VIRGIN and/or any stupid sex comedy or most of the slasher films to come along in the early 1980s.

Can I venture to say that the label "misogyny" is in this context only a detriment if its clearly unconscious on the part of the director and the film is marred by a subtextual contempt/hostility for the feminine? Von Trier's film may be partially about the "misogynistic response" but it in no way condones that response, and in fact rejects it. Yet the same critics who hate ANTICHRIST undoubtedly are rejecting the right of femininity to show its true warts-and-all self, its ambiguity over desire and fear, creation and destruction. For many supposedly enlightened critics, to see this thing is to automatically have to throw a rock at it, like a snake in the woods. And yet, it's Von Trier that they then accuse of hating snakes.


Compare ANTICHRIST to a Michael Bay movie such as TRANSFORMERS, wherein the fear of the feminine means every chick in the film (the few) have to be stunningly gorgeous, in form-fitting slutty clothes, walking in slow motion to an Aerosmith song and men in the audience are encouraged to leer from the safety of the dark and their pack of dudes, or basements. This snarkiness stems from a fear of the "other" that hinges on the sociopathic. Since there's not enough access to full understanding of female oppression vs. the barrage of sensationalistic media that assaults the average American every day, it's not surprising a pampered/sheltered American auteur sees so shallowly into the murky waters of the female psyche. The film adaptation of Margaret Atwood's HANDMAID'S TALE (1990), by contrast, shows misogyny as a widespread institution, yet what feminist would dare accuse Margaret Atwood of misogyny? And the genital mutilation shown in ANTICHRIST is forced upon many girls--even today--as they reach puberty, so who is more a misogynist, Lars, or those who just ignore/deny the barbaric practices of some of our extremely fundamentalist Muslim brethren? To me, that act itself means war! We should invade, and rescue these girls before it's too late!

May I venture to take a page from the book of Camille Paglia and suggest that if someone is afraid to look head on into the wild devouring Dionysian oceanic dissolution represented by pure unleashed feminine sexual drive then it is they who are the misogynists, not the artists who at least have the cajones to face such a deluge? Women get knocked around in the films of Von Trier, Peckinpah, Polanski, Hitchcock, but they don't fall down. In a lot of more conventional movies women never even get to stand up. Those directors who--rather than wade into the vaginal sea-- just scoop out a handful of muck from off the bank and then parade it around on a stick, or wrap it in tight spandex and shoot it out of a wet t-shirt canon, then wait to film it after the threat has been "subdued", i.e. objectified, crashed, burned at the stake, and/or mangled --they are the enemies! Is there a difference between silicone and sawdust when it comes to Norman's mommy's smothering breasts?

Ding-dong the witch is dead, but when the witch in OZ melts it's no more a permanent defeat than it would be for Medusa losing a single snake of her hair. Norman knows this all too well; he must kill and display his trophies over and over again. Their hair keeps growing long after their bodies have withered to bone and parchment skin. Death not ends it, only castration... old Teiresius with his dugs, wandering off into the Led Zeppelin wasteland night.

But enough of my deftly Eliot-alluding tirade, I've gone way off-path; let's wander back to the wild of the woods, where there's Charlotte Gainsbourg--raw and feral--as a castrating lunatic, digging deep into warrens to hunt her smug, covertly gynocidal therapist husband...

Gainsbourg, even as a child showed, she gave not a crap about social taboo, just by being sired by reprobate Serge (they sang "Lemon Incest" together on her teen pop debut) and here she is, acting it up in a string of solid Gallic hits (and albums) and now this performance, which is the gutsiest, rawest thing I've seen since Isablle Adjani in POSSESSION or Isabelle Huppert in THE PIANO TEACHER, and if the Oscars had any chutzpah she'd win next March, but there you go, more proof who really is the misogynist here - c'est Oscar!!

FURTHER VIEWINGS:

If ANTICHRIST confuses thee even after this sterling review, forget about the last 40 years of cinema, and compare it to 1960s and late 1950s Freudian Gothics like SUDDENLY LAST SUMMER, REFLECTIONS IN A GOLDEN EYE and WHO'S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF... You might also bring in Tarkovsky's SOLARIS and NOSTALGIA. Lastly, of course, you should compare it to IN THE REALM OF THE SENSES and every other good movie about castration. Aint nothing wrong with sparagmos and genital mutilation if it's done with clear-eyed awareness of the symbolic associations thereto, and by the mutilatee's own choice, not by some barbaric institutionalized misogyny. Second to lastly, dig up some moldy wet dirt-encrusted comparisons to the Japanese horror film, MATANGO and of course FEMALE CONVICT SCORPION: JAILHOUSE 41.
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In the end, just keep repeating "No sexual organs or appendages were harmed during the making of this movie." It's all a dream. All just stuff that transpires in that murky woods that exists between the unconscious symbolic and the ambiguity of the real, all just what the tree root says while you're outside, lost and tripping, a mere 20 feet from the front door. And if you're going / to San Fran / cisco / be sure to wear / some flowers in your hair... otherwise the loving people there will rip you to shreds and eat you alive, until all that's left is just a mouth, still screaming down the wind... for pusss-ay.

J'taime, Charlotte Gainsbourg: The good, the bad and the ugly-sexy

I love Charlotte Gainsbourg for her work in SCIENCE OF SLEEP, which I will insist once again is the CITIZEN KANE of the 21st century. Existing as an object of affection/alienation for the Confused Male Artist (CMA), she alternates adorable vulnerability, brokenhearted anguish, and swift vanishing into herself, oscillating from one to the other with a wondrous believability that you will perhaps only recognize if you've ever dated anyone who went off their bi-polar meds suddenly and without telling you. The daughter of perennially debauched and ugly-sexy Gallic musical genius Serge Gainsbourg and model Jane Birkin, Charlotte inherited enough of both their genes to be the supreme goddess of the ugly-sexy.

The sexy ugly is, by the way, that which all of us secretly prize more than the straight up or "ugly-less" sexy, which can be a bit bland after a bit (and tiresome, as you are always fending off other suitors). Gainsbourg has the face that alternately attracts and estranges. When there's the whole world in someone's eyes it can't all be pretty; you see a fractured, feral, fecund humanity that's more beautiful for its weakness than a thousand watt supermodel smile. That was the same strange allure her dearly beloved late father possessed in such ungainly abundance.

I mention this all to point out how much cooler the French are in areas of sex and attraction than we are in the states. They have the most beautiful girls in the world in Paris, but whom do they most desire? Charlotte Gainsbourg. (I'm listening to her album 5:55 right now, and right as I wrote that she whispers, "Nothing is taboo / here on the cutting edge of science.") I mention this because I see how in this country we flounder without tradition. We have to go looking to the movies and magazines to tell us what we deserve in aesthetically pleasing mates. Few in the USA's singles pool seem to realize the importance of finding beauty in those we hook up with, as opposed to those we don't. Though it exists worse here than anywhere, in America we stay blind to "attractiveness" class distinctions, this being a country built on equal ground. Thus do all poor ugly dudes think some hottie is theirs for the waiting, while the big ugly girl meant for them is shunned, and so both sleep forever alone. The French would never even consider such pointlessly self-inflicted abstinence. It would be unpatriotic! Do Americans really think anyone respects them one way or another for putting out or not putting out? Watch RULES OF THE GAME closely and note how all the classes co-exist and get it on without feelings of shame or regret or envy. Once you have a class system you function happily, because your naturally occurring anger and angst has something to rebel against, n'cest pas? In the states the only thing we have to hate is ourselves... and the people who are too stuck up to like us are considered true friends, while the geeks who love us are shunned like lepers.

I was lucky enough to be a kid in the 1970s, and to reap the benefits of a social fabric that was at the height of its permissiveness. Then the AIDS epidemic sprang through that party like a police dragnet. Now we can't imagine sex without guilt and anxiety, without labels and judgment, and bothersome condoms, can't imagine sex as just a natural outgrowth of love for all mankind, nothing to get hung about: strawberry fields forever not strawberry strawberry is the neighborhood ho. I know lots of people who were molested as kids, apparently in the 1980s, but I personally don't think victim mentality must--by some moral pejorative--be associated with casual sex. It wasn't in the 1970s or even 80s! Still, one person's repetition-compulsion disorder is another person's Don Juanism, as long as its consensual. What's the worst that can happen? Death? Welcome to the game, moron; you got to pay to play. Go complain to your mom if you don't want to die --she's the one who ensured you will. You got born to die and there's never been a better time / then right now. Moms aren't any closer to the universal truth than Manson or the Moonies. Let it all go, and realize your only error is the error of buying into the Stockholm syndrome-enforced notion you ever made an error in the first place.

What's ruining the fabric of American dating and sexuality? KNOCKED UP and SUPERBAD, that's what. No, wait.. wait, here me out. These sex comedies, man, wherein the dudes are all cast to look "normal," i.e. ugly, but the chicks they score are total foxes. How's a kid taking notes at these films going to deal when a girl comparable to him in looks sees fit to bust a move on him some day if he's lucky? When a beautiful face is made-up, lit and photographed by experts with endless bank, ain't no normal girl gonna compete.

This has all been written before, but it's interesting how the country with the biggest clout in fashion is also the one who can produce an irresistible chick like Charlotte Gainsbourg. What we are producing in this country is a generation of overweight illiterates conditioned through media saturation to have no tolerance for "beauty deficiency" in their women and so ignoring the girl next door in favor of the super airbrushed bimbos of Maxim. We can stare at the big ugly face of that fat kid in SUPERBAD on a giant screen no problem, but why can't he be paired up with a commensurately fat ugly girl who got lots of personality? When's these geniuses behind FREAKS AND GEEKS gonna learn to do right by their ungainly but goodhearted women? What the fuck, man...

In the Muslim society, the women keep their faces covered, so each man only knows the face of one woman, his wife (and family members). There is no one to compare them to on the street. You can't get envious that Hahmid has a hotter wife than you, because you don't know what Hahmid's wife looks like. Not that I condone the veil, but it's an interesting comparison to our culture where the guy can't look away from the computer screen even to say hello to his girlfriend. Of course if you're a 6+ on the 10 scale in the western way of doing things, you'll probably get by, but the below 5 crowd is stuck. They got the media keeping them from getting with each other, destroying their conception of themselves and others, so they genuinely believe, on some level, that Christie Brinkley is coming soon if they just hang on and keep the piano tuned. What they need to do is get together and watch Earnest Borgnine in MARTY. But they won't - they'll watch PROJECT RUNWAY and drift off into the wasteland of commodified desire. They'll sublimate and consume, after all, we need them to; they are the very MATRIX-ish batteries that power the wattage of big capitalism.

So in the meantime, grasp the enigmatic grace that is Charlotte Gainsbourg: she is the key to set us all free from the tyranny of conventional beauty.