'Antichrist': Lars von Trier Bores Me

Antichrist hasn’t even come out in the United States and I’m already bored.

If you haven’t heard about Antichrist yet, you will. It’s the latest movie from Danish art film director Lars von Trier, who has made a name for himself with critically-hailed movies that push the limits his audiences’ tolerance for bizarre sex, bloody violence and artistic pretension. One of his recent movies focused on an American town where slavery never ended, while another had pretty much an entire American village raping Nicole Kidman. A third film ends with the American authorities hanging Icelandic rock waif Bjork. Sensing some themes? By all accounts, Antichrist is a similarly delightful romp.

Naturally, the critics adore him, and combined with the fact that von Trier despises Americans, you would expect that he would get cut some slack by the French audience at Cannes last weekend when the festival screened Antichrist. Not so – the few cheers were apparently drowned out by a tsunami of boos when the lights went up. What happened?

Maybe, just maybe, people are starting to catch on to the fact that shocking art has become anything but. The problem for Mr. von Trier and those like him who specialize in transgressive art is that there’s really very little in the way of conventional morality left to transgress.

You can’t shock audiences who have seen everything. An artist paints a picture of the Virgin Mary in elephant dung? Whatever. A rapper busts a rhyme about shooting cops? Just keeping it real. A network crime show channels grisly autopsies right into our living rooms? Ho hum, pass the Pringles and dip.

Even mainstream movies are losing the power to shock. Ron Howard can’t even manage to pick a high profile fight with the Catholic Church by accusing it of mass murder in Angels & Demons. The Holy See shrugged its collective vestments and only a little more than half the audience of The Da Vinci Code confessed enough interest to show up opening week.

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Antichrist apparently tries really hard to be shocking. There’s the title – that should kidney-punch those bourgeois audiences’ sensitivities, right? Uh, not really. Then how about some truly shocking content? According to the reports, there’s a graphic sex scene intercut with the death of the couple’s child. Sex and violence mixed together – there’s something we’ve never seen. Then the couple goes to a cabin in the woods to recover from their loss and begin to psychologically and physically torment one another. Sounds like “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf” meets “The Evil Dead.” Gotta do better than that, Lars.

Well, Willem Dafoe runs around naked then gets castrated. Yeah, that’s horrifying. Not the castration – in recent years, extreme vasectomy scenes have become the go-to shock effect for the truly transgressive auteur. Yawn. But the idea of the cadaverous Dafoe nude – that image will haunt your nightmares.

Now, there is a talking fox that whispers, “Chaos reigns.” I don’t know what the hell that’s supposed to mean, but seems to be the only thing about this movie we haven’t seen a hundred times before. With reason, to be sure, but at least it’s fresh.

Poor Mr. von Trier. He and many of his ilk have made careers of trying to shock the rest of us out of our collective aesthetic stupor. And it worked. We’ve now seen it all. And we’re tired of it. What else you got, Lars?

I know – how about the further adventures of that talking fox? Maybe he can partner with a by-the-book cop and solve crimes. We haven’t seen that before.