Believable psychological portraits, or lack thereof

I have to think that one of the most challenging things to depict on screen is a person with some brand of abnormal psychology. The term "abnormal" is problematic here, especially considering the kid gloves we use to describe mental health issues these days. But you know what I'm going for. 

Generally, I'm speaking of people whose view of the world is in some way skewed by factors that do not totally reflect their reality. Like, many people have real reasons to be depressed: their mother's dead, their father's in jail, they bounce between homes and they don't get enough food. But I'm talking here about people whose reality is pretty okay and yet their wiring is still screwy.

Like the protagonist of Michael Haneke's The Piano Teacher, played by Isabelle Huppert. 

I have always heard The Piano Teacher discussed in hushed tones, like it was this really confrontational, difficult-to-watch film. I think that's probably accurate, but I also thought that meant it was acclaimed. And perhaps it is. But to quote Leslie Nielsen, "that's not important right now." (But while we're on the topic: It won the Grand Prix at Cannes in 2001, and the two leads won best actor and best actress.)

The reason it's supposed to be difficult to watch is that Huppert's character, an exacting virtuoso pianist and piano teacher by day, is into sleazy sex shops by night, and wants to be dominated sexually as well as watch other people have sex. 

This isn't the part I have trouble with. Sex addiction is an addiction like any other addiction, if it is appropriate to describe the predilections of Huppert's Erika Kohut as sex addiction.

No, it's how she behaves independently of the sex addiction that I found irreconcilably odd. I won't go into all the details of her moment-to-moment interactions with the others in her life, but I do want to give one example that I think might stand in for the whole broken psychology. 

Erika lives with her mother, and in a symbol of her stunted emotional state, they sleep in the same bedroom in twin beds that are next to one another. In case it's not obvious how strange this is, Huppert was either 47 or 48 when she filmed The Piano Teacher, so obviously that's about the age the character is. 

At one point in the film's final third, at a moment of particularly damaged affect, she rolls over onto her mother's bed, mounts her, and frantically kisses her on the mouth, saying over and over again "I love you! I love you! I love you!" It is basically a sexual assault of her own mother.

Sorry, I just can't relate to this.

I don't mean I can't relate because I've never sexually assaulted my mother, though to be clear, I have not. I mean because it just doesn't make sense as a psychological portrait, even if she were a lesbian, which she isn't. But that still would only go a very small, superficial and irresponsibly reductive way toward explaining such an act. 

Untangling the influences of a toxic parent is also a tricky exercise on screen, though I guess we could say that being damaged during your upbringing could explain almost anything that sprouts in your psychological profile later in life. But not this, right? 

Plus, although the mother is clearly a nag and disapproves of what she knows, or at least suspects, her daughter is doing after hours, she isn't portrayed as specifically toxic in a way that goes beyond the ordinary concerns of a parent who might also be aging into dementia. 

What I'm getting at is, this feels like a provocation by Haneke, one without the justification of having a basis in psychological reality.

And it would not be the first time Haneke had made a provocation just for the sake of it. That's what I feel about his movie Funny Games, though I've only seen the English language remake, not the original. I like to be discomfited in movies, quite a bit in fact, but Funny Games discomfited me in the wrong way, enough that I have no interest in going back to watch the original. And that's a bit how I feel about The Piano Teacher, though just to a lesser degree. (And the fact that Haneke remade Funny Games means that not only did he find it a concept worth exploring, he doubled down on it by exploring it twice.)

For a moment I considered writing about this film via a blog post I would have called "Kissing cousins," because I think Haneke is kissing cousins with Lars von Trier. They both show a sadism about women that I sometimes feel exists only to be confrontational. To be clear, both are capable of excellent work -- I love Haneke's Amour, and I love several von Trier films, including Dancer in the Dark and Melancholia -- but both have baser instincts they indulge more often than is warranted, which verge on the misogynistic. (I didn't write that post because I thought it required me to list other examples of kissing cousins directors, and honestly, I felt too lazy to undertake that, even though it's a good project.)

But I do think you have an unenviable task when you are trying to make a movie about someone who's fucked up. Surely the writer, in this case Haneke, has someone in their own life in mind when they write such a character, and is not just making up these details on the fly. 

But I think of it a bit like a sports movie, which sounds like a strange comparison, but hear me out. The reason I don't love most sports movies is that I feel like I don't believe some screenwriter's crazy idea of a crazy finish to a game. I believe crazy things that happen in real sports because they actually happened. If a screenwriter just made it up, it doesn't wow me the way they obviously want it to because it just feels like a complete and utter fiction. 

If I had seen a 48-year-old woman, in real life, pin down her mother and furiously kiss on her on the mouth, maybe I would believe it.

As something a screenwriter appears to have just made up, not so much. 

Lars von Trier's 20-year descent from humanism to misanthropy

I guess the past few days have been about picking off movies that have been sitting on my Kanopy queue for a while. Thursday night it was The Girl Next Door, and then Saturday night, Dancer in the Dark.

Now of course, this was not my first viewing of Dancer. I saw it in the theater just about exactly 20 years ago. I was living in New York at the time, and I saw it with an ex-girlfriend while she was visiting me in the city. I'd hoped we might get back together, but that wasn't her intention with the visit. So Dancer had the function of feeling additionally sad to me. 

IMDB says the movie was released on October 6th of that year, but I'm pretty sure my ex's visit was not until November. I wasn't so fixated on seeing movies immediately after their release back then, so it's perfectly plausible we were only just catching up with it a month after its release, which would make this pretty much the 20th anniversary of my first and only viewing of the movie.

Although I loved Dancer in the Dark -- it was my #6 movie of 2000 -- I have since come to see it as a "one-timer." In other words, a movie so hard to watch that you can't bring yourself to endure it again. At least, I thought that explained why I had never sat down for that second viewing.

Really, though, the notion of the "one-timer" is something that makes a lot more sense for other people, not me. I've watched movies like Irreversible and Requiem for a Dream multiple times, so apparently the experience of marinating in human misery is not something I really object to recreating.

As I was watching the movie, though, it occurred to me that part of my feelings of despair about its world are retroactive, and a function of how I have come to see the movie's director, Lars von Trier, in the ensuing years. I was surprised to realize that this was not, in a lot of ways, the von Trier I have come to know and steadily detest. 

The stories of how hard von Trier is on his female actors, in an effort to get the kind of gut-wrenching performance that Bjork gives here, are legendary. Misogyny has come to seem like a feature of von Trier's films, not a bug, as he subjects his female characters to all sorts of brutality and sacrifice. It's a bit complicated as he wouldn't make women the main characters in his movies if he didn't also have some kind of empathy for them or intuitive sense of their interiority. It certainly warrants an in-depth discussion, but not here or now. 

In my memory, Dancer in the Dark was a story of how a good woman is destroyed by a terrible world. I was surprised to find that this is anything but the truth.

Spoilers for Dancer in the Dark to follow. 

Bjork's Selma is a self-described day dreamer, drifting away into flights of fancy in her head that von Trier depicts as glorious musical numbers. The settings of these musical numbers -- a factory, a prison cell block -- make them very von Trierian, but they also reflect Selma's real world. Selma is also going blind, so working in a factory with heavy machinery is precisely the wrong place for a person with her already distractible nature.

That Selma is headed for a crash is inevitable, but it's not for lack of others trying to ward it off. I was amazed at having to jump to a second hand when counting the people who try to help Selma, well beyond what is required of them. 

First there is her friend and fellow factory worker, Kathy (Catherine Deneuve), who knows Selma needs the job as she is saving money for her son to have a surgery that will prevent the same degenerative eye disorder from which Selma suffers. So Kathy helps Selma continue to work in the factory, both assisting with a doctor's appointment where she has to pass an eye test, and working a night shift (without getting paid) to make sure Selma does not hurt herself or destroy the equipment. (Alas, Selma does destroy the equipment.) Kathy also helps during Selma's rehearsal of the local production of The Sound of Music, making an "accidental" entrance on stage in order to determine how many steps Selma must take to reach her mark. It's not the only time in the movie Kathy takes the blame for something so Selma can continue upholding her charade. Kathy gets frustrated with Selma sometimes, but she never gives up on her, even after Selma is imprisoned for murder. In fact, I found Kathy's emotional journey -- which is all a selfless act of helping a woman live her life on her own terms -- to be the thing that moved me most on this viewing.

Then there is Jeff (Peter Stormare), a lonely misfit who lives in town and always shows up at the factory at the end of Selma's shift to offer her a ride home. He knows Selma has vision problems and that riding her bike home is no longer really a viable option for her. But Selma is proud and she does not want to lead Jeff on, so she tells him she doesn't want a boyfriend right now. This does not deter Jeff, but not because he wants to break down her hesitancy. He's in love with her, and has a bottomless well of kindness to offer her, even with no hope of the reciprocity he wants. In fact, having no hope only seems to make him kinder toward her.

When Selma is in prison, she is doted on by Brenda (Siobhan Fallon), a kindly prison guard who may also (sort of) be in love with her, but more than anything is just under the spell of Selma's core goodness. Interestingly, von Trier does not show us the seeds of Brenda's endearment toward Selma. The first time we meet her, she is already fully besotted, eager to do anything within her means to make Selma's stay on death row slightly less horrible.

Even two characters who ultimately do Selma wrong have an empathy toward her at their core. Her foreman at the factory fires her only with an extremely heavy heart, after a number of warnings and after a whole day of productivity at the factory is lost when Selma breaks the equipment. Before that we see him being kind and jovial with Selma, even though he knows she is a "problem worker" and he's in a results-driven business. And then her director on The Sound of Music, who ultimately calls the police to let them know where she is after the film's central act of violence, shows excessive deference to her as well. When she makes the difficult decision of telling him she can no longer play Maria -- again, not referencing her eyesight -- he understands what's happening with her and finds a different, less-demanding role for her in the show. He tells her she will always be his Maria.

Okay, so I didn't get to that second hand. But no fewer than five characters in this film do all they can to help a woman whom life has dealt a harsh hand. And they do it gladly.

Even the film's two real sources of evil -- Selma's landlord Bill (David Morse), a policeman, and his wife Linda (Cara Seymour) -- only do what they do because of their human frailty. Bill believes his wife will leave him if he does not have enough money to support her expensive shopping habits, and he's really desperately afraid of this outcome. So he makes the unforgivable decision to steal Selma's life savings, saved for her son's operation. When he's caught later on, he's so miserable that he asks Selma to kill him. We only get third-hand accounts of Linda, and never know for sure whether she really would leave Bill, or if this is just his paranoia. But she is actually kind to Selma before beginning to suspect her husband is having an affair with their tenant, and her own actions start to spiral from there. She chooses to believe her husband's version of his interactions with Selma, and she also sees Selma apparently having shot Bill in cold blood upon trying to steal his money.

Instead of the exercise in misanthropy I thought I remembered this film as being, it is, paradoxically, one of the more humanistic films I have ever seen.

Suffice it to say that von Trier has never made a film like this again.

This November also marks 20 years of Lars von Trier in my life, as I believe I did not see his earlier breakout Breaking the Waves until after this. Although I have liked other films von Trier has made -- Dogville and Melancholia chief among them -- no film he has made since then has had anything like Dancer in the Dark's optimism about the capacity for good of human beings.

What happened, Lars?

Dogville, the film with the minimalist set design and Nicole Kidman as the tortured heroine, is kind of like the misanthropic version of Dancer in the Dark, where a town collectively destroys a woman instead of mostly trying to save her. Antichrist is about the horrors a husband and wife visit upon each other as they grieve the loss of their infant child. Melancholia represents a slight uptick toward humanism, as the behaviors of these characters are largely a function of trying to cope with depression, but there is at least one character (the one played by Charlotte Rampling) who is a source of concentrated malevolence. And then both of the Nymphomaniac films are basically four hours of something like malignant narcissism, and everyone is pretty much awful to each other. 

Von Trier completed his descent into total abject faithlessness in humanity with The House That Jack Built, in which Matt Dillon plays a sociopath who kills for sport. This film has victims, but if I remember correctly, it doesn't really have any characters who are good. I may not remember correctly, though, because I have mostly blocked it out.

No wonder I had not scheduled another viewing of Dancer in the Dark before now.

But I'm so glad I did. It reminds me of everything of which von Trier was capable when he was at his best. And since I myself am an optimist, I believe he can get there again. We're still within ten years of a von Trier movie I really loved (Melancholia). 

Unfortunately, I think it's much more likely that he will remain in the dark. 

I'm not going to give Lars von Trier the satisfaction

Around the end of the ranking year, you tend to get locked into your idea of which films make up your top ten and which make up your bottom five. And by "you" I mean "me" because you, the actual person reading this, probably don't bother yourself with any of this type of obsessiveness.

Watching Lars von Trier's The House That Jack Built on Friday night, I wondered if I might need to rethink some of that.

Not my top ten. My bottom five.

In fact, for a time, I thought this was lining up to be my worst movie of the year.

Which gave me pause. Considerable pause.

You see, that's just what von Trier wants me to do.

The bastard.

Cinema has a number of enfant terribles who make movies that push our buttons in similar ways, but von Trier is definitely the terrible-est of them. Ever since he got kicked out of Cannes for saying nice things about Hitler, it's become clear that all that talent masks a guy who just wants to figure out new ways of pissing us off. If he's not pissing us off he's not really alive, he thinks.

Not that there's no value to making art that provokes and pisses off. But von Trier's approach to it seems to be particularly juvenile. He calculates every filmmaking decision and every comment to assess what will make proper society faint. It's not only predicable, but it's actually boring.

And "boring" was easily the first word that came to mind to describe the over-long serial killer flick The House That Jack Built, which clocks in at 150 minutes for no reason other than the fact that von Trier has always felt it necessary to indulge every little whim he may have. Okay, not always -- this was not what the man was doing when he made terrific films like Breaking the Waves and Dancer in the Dark. In fact, even as recently as Melancholia I don't think he was anywhere near this creatively wasteful. Now, though, he elongates scenes and goes on tangents like he's being paid by the minute of celluloid he produces.

Never mind that this film actually includes a self-aggrandazing montage of clips from his own previous films. The ego of it all.

Watching a film that seemed both boring and misogynistic -- and no, Lars, you can't undercut the accusations of misogyny just because you address them directly in your dialogue -- I was inclined to think that this is the type of movie it's worth taking a stand about in naming your worst of the year. It's dramatically lethargic and it puts bad things into the world.

Then I thought, "Shit, that's just feeding into von Trier's narrative."

If I hate his film I give him even more power than if I love it. He's like Trump. Whether you love him or hate him, you are inflating him either way.

Fortunately, particularly in the second half, von Trier does some things that interested me enough to avoid any real consideration of this as my worst of the year. In the end, I did not even give it only one star. One-point-five stars was where I landed. When the film goes from mostly realistic to obviously absurd and fantastical, it helps recontextualize some of what he's doing, trending it toward noble failure territory rather than just the ghettos of misanthropy. The grotesque imagery itself had some really chilling moments, such as the taxidermy scene, which I have to credit in some form.

Really, though, no matter what I say about von Trier, it's not going to cut him. Of course part of that is because he will never read this. But even if he did, it wouldn't shame him. Like Trump, he's already heard every variation on every insult anyone could deliver toward him. It just fuels him to make another unmistakably von Trierian film.

And as much as I'm tired of this guy's shtick, he does make valuable movies from time to time. I don't mind telling you that I'm actually considering Melancholia for the "best of the 2010s" list I release a year from now, honoring my favorite 25 films of the decade. That I watched it just a few months ago and haven't ruled it out for this list tells you something about whether I really want this guy to go away or not.

More than anything I just want him to figure out something that's genuinely useful to say, and not just useful for making decent people hyperventilate.

Anti-theater

There are countless reasons a person could/would write a post about Lars von Trier's highly controversial Antichrist.

The one I'm choosing is pretty low on that list.

Antichrist, which I watched on Friday night, was another Vancetastic milestone, the kind that only an obsessive like me would even know had passed: It was the 2,000th film I've seen on video.

I suppose I should define my terminology here. A movie seen on "video" is any movie that I saw for the first time somewhere other than a movie theater. VHS and DVD are the two most obvious subcategories, but "video" also includes the similar subcategories of On Demand, pay-per-view, cable movie stations (such as HBO and Showtime) and even commercial TV -- though that's rare because I try to avoid seeing edited versions of movies. Of course, I will see edited versions of movies on an airplane (the whole "captive audience" thing), which is another subcategory of video, as is movies seen on a bus, of which I saw maybe a dozen on the Boston-New York route I regularly rode while visiting a girlfriend in 1999 and 2000. I've never actually watched a movie on an ipod, but if I had, that would count too. The last, hardest to define category of "video" are those movies presented on a large screen, but not in a conventional theatrical setting -- such as the movies they showed for free (or a very minimal charge) in lecture halls on campus back in college, or movies we've seen broadcast on the side of a building at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery. (You sit in the grass on a blanket and bring a picnic dinner. It's a lot of fun.)

It might seem simplest to say that "video" means any film not seen in its initial theatrical run, but that's a bit too restricting, because it doesn't include films you saw in the theater on a re-release. When I went to see Buster Keaton's The General in college, in a theater that specialized in pairing silent films with a live organist, I could hardly call that "video," could I? The real difficult one was when my wife and I went to see Lawrence of Arabia a couple years ago at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and yes, it was my first time seeing this classic. The "theater" where they screened it was not exclusively used to screen movies, but because it was set up like a conventional theater and had quite a large capacity, I labeled that experience a theatrical viewing. They charged us around $10 for the tickets, so that made the designation a little easier.

So "video" is defined more by what it isn't than what it is. In that way, video is the "anti-theater," making Antichrist an appropriate film for this milestone.

I started keeping track of this theater-video distinction as a "what the hell?" once I had my movie list loaded into Excel, and could easily keep track of additional stats about each movie (such as whether I liked or didn't like them, as I described here). I figured it would be easy enough to remember whether I'd seen a movie for the first time in the theater or on "video," so I went back through the list and marked each film with one designation or the other, and have been doing so ever sense. At the bottom of that column I've kept a running total of how many are in each category, and have been ticking that number upward by one with each new film I see.

When I hit 2,000 videos on Friday night, my theatrical total stood at 913.

Let's consider that for a moment. I've seen more than twice as many movies on video than I have in the theater -- for some time now, in fact. And the number gets even larger when you consider the total number of distinct video viewings -- movies seen for the second, third and sixteenth times on video, regardless of where they were originally seen. (I've also seen some movies more than once in the theater, but that list is less than 20).

This shouldn't be surprising, when you think about it. It's obviously far easier and less expensive to watch movies on video than in the theater. But only 25-30 years ago, it wasn't even possible. Can you believe there was a time in our lifetime -- depending on how old you are -- when the only way to see a movie was to wait for it to get re-released in the theater? I distinctly remember waiting for Star Wars to come back to the theater so I could see it again. And for some reason, I also distinctly remember that Ghostbusters, released in 1985, was one of the last films that made a second theatrical run before video stores, VHS and (back then) laser disc made that practice null and void. The cable movie channels, of course, also played a significant role in limiting the need for theatrical re-releases.

Before video and cable, you did have the one video subcategory of commercial TV available, but you had to be prepared to watch it exactly when it aired (there weren't yet VCRs), and only a limited selection of classics that usually didn't have to be edited for content were widely available that way. As for the movies of lesser quality and sketchier content, once they were gone from the theater, it's like they entirely ceased to exist in any practical way.

Then again, I'm definitely a kid of the video generation, as I probably saw 50 movies at most in the theater before I saw one on video. Strangely, I think I remember what that first one was. My friend Jed's family had the first Betamax player I'd ever seen, and I still remember watching a mostly animated, partially live action children's movie called Water Babies at his house. Water Babies was in theaters in 1979, so this might have been 1980 or 1981 -- but certainly not much later, because Jed and his family moved to Colorado soon after that. We might have seen The Black Hole before Water Babies, but I saw The Black Hole in the theater, so it wasn't my first movie seen for the first time on video. Congratulations, Water Babies, that honor goes to you. Since I was born in 1973, and I'm pretty sure the first movie I saw in the theater was Star Wars in 1977, it might have been far fewer than 50 before Water Babies -- it might have been fewer than 25. It might have been fewer than ten.

Now, 30 years after Water Babies, I've seen my 2,000th. Which brings us back to Antichrist. Which, for the record, was a movie I splurged on, paying $5.99 through On Demand (I guess On Demand and pay-per-view are the same thing these days) in order to get it on my 2009 list.

You know the director of Antichrist, Lars von Trier, for his films Breaking the Waves, Dancer in the Dark and Dogville, if you know him at all. (You may know him from other films. I'm just listing the ones I've seen.) The famous thing about Lars von Trier is that his female characters get used, abused and spat out, which have led to charges that he may actually hate women. It's an interesting line he walks -- as his main characters are most often women, you could actually say the opposite, that he sympathizes them, or that if he does subject them to constant dehumanization and degradation, it's to demonstrate how they get treated in a misogynistic world. But there's nearly a sickness to the way these women get treated in his films, which is why you have to wonder. You also have to wonder if he's just trying to push buttons, which is distinctly possible. The man is known for having an inflated sense of his own greatness, and accusations that he tries to discomfit people just for kicks are easily understood once you've watched a couple of his films.

Antichrist is no different. Following in the footsteps of actresses like Emily Watson, Bjork and Nicole Kidman, Charlotte Gainsbourg takes her turn acting out von Trier's awful fantasies of female destruction. Which is why I could have written a post about how violent is too violent, or how pornographic is too pornographic, to show in a mainstream movie. There are really two moments of mutilation/grotesqueness in the movie that have caused it to gain the notoriety it has gained, and I probably could have spent a whole post just talking about whether it is artistically justifiable to show them. Though, for the record, knowing they were supposed to shock me ended up making them a little less shocking when I finally did see them. That's the opposite of the Suspiria effect, where I spent the first ten minutes watching that movie in white-knuckle terror because I knew something f**ked up was going to happen. And so I could have also written a post called "The anticipation," about how anticipating something you know is going to be horrible is an exquisite experience in itself -- for people who aren't squeamish, that is. (And since I didn't know I wouldn't be as shocked as I thought I might be, the film did have that impact on me.) Lastly I could have written a post about the discrepancy between the beautiful and ugly in a film, as there are many shots and sequences in Antichrist that are delicate and gorgeous.

I like the fact that I spent the majority of this post not talking about those things. Just a little FU to von Trier, the self-stylized enfant terrible, a director who likes having people talk about him for deathly serious reasons rather than utterly trivial ones.