Sacrilegious Cinema

Antichrist

Life of Brian

Blessings unto you, my perfect, pious reader. Happy early Easter and belated Passover, from one happy heretic to another. The only days in April that stand out to me, personally, are my half birthday (the 24th) and 4/20 (blaze it), but I guess Easter is one of the more important religious holidays to those whom observe Christian religious holidays. As a half-Jewish, all agnostic, atheist-curious person, I’d just assumed that Christmas reigned supreme in Christianity because of all of the fanfare and merch and songs and movies surrounding it. Easter is all about Jesus rising from the dead, and as spooky as that sounds, somehow this rebirth is symbolized with Easter egg hunts and chocolate bunnies. I find Passover to be slightly more interesting as a celebration, because it’s really just fun, participatory dinner theater when done correctly. But growing up half-and-half as I did (that’s Christmas AND Hanukkah, bitch), this humid holiday season was mostly marked by my mom’s nostalgic viewings of The Ten Commandments—a movie I always interpreted as a firmly Jewish epic, not a Christian one, though something tells me that the leading Christian, conservative man Charlton Heston would disagree with me. I’ve explored religion on this blog a bit, mostly with my Nunsploitation double‍ ‍features that I randomly love, and I am often intrigued by the way these holy concepts and characters are translated to the screen. I’ve always been fascinated by religion, for whatever reason—possibly due to my fascination with Greek mythology and fairytales, but also because of a curiosity that came from observing extremely religious peers growing up. I vividly remember making a joke in seventh grade that I was going to hell, only for a classmate of mine to say, with grave sincerity, “And you’re okay with that?” It shook me to my core, not because I believed in hell, but because I’d never interacted with someone who believed in it SO much. That type of fervent fellowship can inspire wild stories of biblical proportions—so let’s get blasphemous and begin with two scandalous and sacrilegious pieces of cinema.

Up first is a classic bummer from the king of bummer cinema (though it still wasn’t as upsetting as last week’s Drag Race elimination…) this is Lars von Trier’s 2009 film Antichrist. I have mixed feelings about the work of Lars von Trier, because while I randomly kinda appreciated his insanely salacious epic Nymphomaniac, and saw what he was going for with his insanely depressing Melancholia, this director is just not my favorite. Nymphomaniac, Melancholia, and Antichrist all belong to von Trier’s “Depression Trilogy”, so while I may be critical of this director, I am nothing if not a completionist. Antichrist was dreamed up and written by Lars von Trier when he was in the thick of a deep depression, and it absolutely shows. If you were worried that this film wouldn’t be in black and white, with artistic asides in slow-motion, and plenty of genitalia peppered in, fear not, this is a proper Lars von Trier affair and all of this is established within the first five minutes. Opera music booms as we witness the harmonious yet violent lovemaking of an unnamed married couple (played by Charlotte Gainsbourg and Willem Dafoe) who are so consumed by their passion, they do not notice that their son has escaped from his crib, and swiftly falls out of the window to his death. At the funeral, the father sobs uncontrollably, and the mother is stoic and quiet, until she faints. Her grief sends her into a coma, or presumably, prolonged bouts of unconsciousness, which her husband, also a therapist, tries his best to support her through. She is diagnosed with atypical grief, though the husband is suspicious of her doctor’s practices and takes it upon himself to implement psychotherapy. She flushes her medication down the toilet and asks her husband, “Will it just go on and on?” “No, it will change” he responds. “Will it get any worse?” she inquires, “Yes, it will” he answers, matter-of-factly. Being in their home causes the wife great distress, so the two decide to escape to their isolated cabin in the woods—which they’ve dubbed “Eden”—a peaceful place where she took her son the previous Summer while writing a thesis on femicide/gynocide. But this theoretically zen environment is not the restful reprieve this couple needs, as the wife is overwrought with grief and her husband is running out of mental exercises for her to try. Her mourning often manifests in the form of desire, her aching pain turning to aching lust which results in the couple having aggressive, but seemingly dissatisfying sex. All the while, the woods surrounding their cabin seems to rebelling and resisting against the presence of these two downtrodden people—acorns shower forcefully upon the roof every night, the man wakes up one morning with ticks all over his arm, and in general the wife is overcome with dread when she thinks of the nature all around her. Most disturbing of all, the husband finds evidence that the wife has been going mad for quite sometime. Her notes for her thesis devolve from academic and cogent to hateful and incoherent, he finds photos of their son where every single image shows his shoes were put on the wrong feet, and the husband is understandably troubled by these discoveries. Their discomfort with one another increases, and as the tension between the two grows, both the man and the woman descend into further despair and disrepair. Antichrist has everything: dead kids, people sobbing while having sex, Munchausen’s by Proxy, talking animal corpses, ominous fog, bleeding dicks, etc. What it doesn’t have is any clarity, true substance, or satisfying resolution. Betsy Sharkey of the Los Angeles Times wrote: “The story of Antichrist is a tangled mess of sex, evil and death, with von Trier making a stab at allegory and old-fashioned horror, but ultimately failing on both fronts...” I agree with this sentiment, and I’m extra miffed that this allegedly horrifying movie is not a horror movie at all, but rather a nudist meditation on grief. Most glaring of all, is the lack of any actual antichrist presence within Antichrist, causing me to wonder if this film even counts as “sacrilegious”, but then I learned just how much this film offended people—religious and otherwise. When it premiered at Cannes, several people walked out and at least four people fainted, and at the subsequent press conference when von Trier was asked by a journalist to justify why he made the film, the director responded that he found the question strange since he considered the audience as his guests, “not the other way around.” He then claimed to be the best director in the world. Two versions were available for buyers at the Cannes film market, nicknamed the “Catholic” and “Protestant” versions, where the former had some of the most explicit scenes removed while the latter was uncut, but the film was also banned in several countries. To me, it was all too overwrought, too dull, and semi-hateful toward women. I fail to see anything entertaining or interesting in this film, though John Waters hailed Antichrist as one of the ten best films of 2009 in Artforum, asserting, “If Ingmar Bergman had committed suicide, gone to hell, and come back to earth to direct an exploitation/art film for drive-ins, [this] is the movie he would have made.” Out of all of the films in Lars von Trier’s oeuvre, I appreciated Antichrist the least, but I am always intrigued by a film that causes such controversy and outrage.

You’d never guess that a silly little British comedy from the kings of silly British comedies would garner similar controversy and outrage, but that was entirely the case with tonight’s next film: Monty Python’s Life of Brian. My lack of a Christian education extends to pop culture references as well, because I wasn’t even aware of Terry Jones’ 1979 film Life of Brian until very recently, potentially because Monty Python and the Holy Grail is the most famous and beloved works by this iconic British comedy troupe. I can quote Holy Grail backwards and forwards, for some reason, but Life of Brian, which caused the biggest stir of them all, was a blind spot. Life of Brian opens on the three wise men arriving to Bethlehem in search of baby Jesus, but they happen to land next door, where baby Brian Cohen—not the son of god—has also just been born. Brian’s mother, Mandy (played by director Terry Jones in drag), asks, “What are you doing at this hour of the night? That doesn’t sound very wise to me!” but is more hospitable once they explain that they’ve brought gifts. “Don’t worry too much about the myrrh next time” Mandy says just as the wise men take all of their gifts back, and walk a few paces over to the actual messiah. Several years go by and Brian is now a teenager (more like an adult man, played by Graham Chapman), and as he joins a large crowd of people listening to Jesus’ “Sermon on the Mount”, next to him his mother yells, “Speak up!” Brian shushes his mother but she just rolls her eyes and says, “Let’s go to a stoning.” “We can go to a stoning anytime!” Brian pleads, and others close by grow annoyed as they cannot hear Jesus’ words, “I think he said, ‘blessed are the cheese makers’?” There’s all this excitement surrounding Jesus, but Brian is most intrigued by a young rebel named Judith Iscariot. His desire for her and his hatred of the Romans, further exacerbated by his mother revealing that Brian himself is half-Roman, inspire him to join the “People’s Front of Judea”—which often experiences more infighting than actual progress. The leader of People’s Front of Judea—don’t you dare confuse them with the Judean People’s Front—asks the question: what have the Romans ever even done for us? Only to be reminded by his fellow rebels that the Romans did give them sanitation, medicine, education, irrigation, roads, a fresh water system, public health, and wine. Even still, the PFJ plans to kidnap the wife of Roman governor Pontius Pilate, which results in only Brian being taken prisoner. Through trials and tribulations, Brian escapes by jumping out of a tower, where he then lands on top of a soap box, and begins repeating fragments of Jesus’ sermons to blend in with the crowd of proselytizers and listeners. This was only meant to disguise Brian as the Roman guards pass by, but many people in the crowd are curious to hear what he has to say next, begging to know what the meaning of life is, etc. “Fuck off!” he pleads with his followers, “How should we fuck off, my lord?” they respond. And while Life of Brian is full of heretical humor and blasphemously blue laughs and big-budget dick jokes, perhaps most scandalous of all is the existential lesson the reluctant messiah gives his loyal followers. “You don’t have to follow me, you don’t have to follow anyone! You’ve got to think for yourself! You’re all individuals!”, he asserts, to which they all chant, in unison, “Yes, we are.” I still think Holy Grail might be more quotable, but I really, really enjoyed Life of Brian, and I’m simply not Christian enough to know just how sacrilegious it was. I was astonished to learn that, just days before production began, EMI Films revoked their funding, and George Harrison (along with business partner Denis O’Brien) swooped in with a check to save the day. (He’s my favorite Beatle, so that tracks.) I was even more astonished, though, to learn just how sincerely appalled people were by this film, which is undeniably, by today’s standards at least, incredibly tame in its blasphemy. It was banned in a handful of countries, earning the film the tagline of, “So funny it was banned in Norway!” and in the UK, Mary Whitehouse, along with other traditionalist Christians, pamphleteered and picketed screening locations—a campaign that was felt to have boosted publicity. There is an ongoing joke in the film that crucifixion just really isn’t the worst form of punishment, which Christians took particular offense to, though director Terry Jones responded: “Any religion that makes a form of torture into an icon that they worship seems to me a pretty sick sort of religion quite honestly.” (The Pythons also pointed out that crucifixion was a standard form of execution in ancient times, and not just one especially reserved for Jesus…) All of the Monty Python players are present in this film (Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Eric Idle, Terry Jones, Michael Palin, and Terry Gilliam [who performed and did the set design]) and they all fiercely defended it—Cleese and Palin even partook in a debate on the BBC2 program Friday Night, Saturday Morning with Malcolm Muggeridge and Mervyn Stockwood, the Bishop of Southwark. (Perhaps the most British names ever?) Life of Brian isn’t just smart and funny, it was ahead of its time, and only gave in to one bit of censorship—removing the usage of the word “cunt.” (Awww :( ) All in all, my feathers were left unruffled, my pearls remain unclutched, and I really did not take offense to either film, though von Trier was clearly trying to provoke and the Pythons were only trying to have a bit of fun. Bless you, if you’ve read this far, and thank you for coming to my altar to worship the movies with me. Hopefully there will be more to praise next week—amen!