Almost as soon as I’d posted, the feed from Ebert’s blog brought news of a second, more in-depth post on Antichrist. He starts by noting that the film ‘will not leave me alone’ and goes on to say, ‘I rarely find a serious film by a major director to be this disturbing. Its images are a fork in the eye. Its cruelty is unrelenting. Its despair is profound.’ He quotes one of the comments on his blog, which asks, ‘If it is in fact the most despairing film you’ve ever seen, shouldn’t it be considered a monumental achievement? Despair is such a significant aspect of the human condition (particularly in the modern western world) so how can this not be a staggeringly important film, given your statement?’ Ebert acknowledges that there is some truth in this, and remarks

In the first place, it’s important to note that “Antichrist” is not a bad film. It is a powerfully-made film that contains material many audiences will find repulsive or unbearable. The performances by Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg are heroic and fearless. Von Trier’s visual command is striking. The use of music is evocative; no score, but operatic and liturgical arias. And if you can think beyond what he shows to what he implies, its depth are frightening.

I cannot dismiss this film. It is a real film. It will remain in my mind. Von Trier has reached me and shaken me. It is up to me to decide what that means.

With its very explicit theological connections, and since von Trier is extremely interesting on spiritual issues, I’m very interested in what the film has to say. The trouble is, it sounds so shocking that I have absolutely no desire to watch it. Ebert says he thinks it’s an ‘exercise in alternative theology’, a reflection on the beginning of Genesis (Ebert says Exodus) where humanity is driven from Eden after rebelling against God. He writes:

The Prologue, a masterful sequence lovely b&w slow motion, shows a couple, He and She, making love while their innocent baby becomes fascinated by the sight of snow falling outside an open window, climbs up on the sill, and falls to his death. This is Man’s Fall from Grace. Consequently, She (Charlotte Gainsbourg) falls into guilt and depression so deep she is hospitalized. That is one half of Original Sin. The character named He (Willem Dafoe) insists she cut off her medication. He will cure her himself. That is the other half. Her sin is Despair. His is Pride. These are the two greatest sins against God.

These are not quite the greatest sins against God, though pride is very close to it. The greatest sin, the fundamental act of rebellion against God, is to put something other than God at the centre: idolatry. This is why the first of the ten commandments is ‘You must not have any other god but me’ (Exodus 20:3). Pride is close to this because it puts us at the centre; it makes us our own gods. All other sins follow from this basic act of defiance.

He and She go to Eden, where He psychologically tortures She, and She phsyically tortures He. Ebert explanation of this gruesome-sounding film is:

The title Antichrist is the key. This is a mirror world. It is a sin to lose Knowledge rather than to eat of its fruit and gain it. She and He are behaving with such cruelty toward each other not as actual people, but as creatures inhabiting a moral mirror world. As much as they might comfort and love each other in our world after losing a child, so to the same degree in the mirror world they inflame each other’s pain and act out hatred. This would be the world created by Satan.

If I am right, then von Trier has proceeded with perfect logic. Just as a good world could not contain too much beauty and charity, an evil world could not have too much cruelty and hatred. He is making a moral statement. I’m not sure if he’s telling us how things are, or warning us of what could come.

All of which leaves me asking ‘Why?’ On the evidence of this, von Trier would seem to be very conflicted, even disturbed, character. According to Wikipedia, he was brought up in an atheist family by Communist parents who were also nudists. Several childhood holidays were spent in nudist camps, which may explain why his films have featured very explicit sexual content. He describes his upbringing as ‘unbelievably lax’, to which he attributes his well-known neurotic nature. He has been interested by religion, perhaps as a result of religion being banned in his childhood home.

I’m not yet sure what he’s trying to say in Antichrist, whether he is now attacking Christian faith with a parodic inversion of the account of the Fall. Ebert’s phrase, ‘It is a sin to lose Knowledge rather than to eat of its fruit and gain it,’ might be the key. He misunderstands the Fall again at this point. It is not knowledge itself which is the problem in Genesis 3, but that human beings wanted the ‘knowledge of good and evil’ for themselves so that they could be like God. It is an expression of idolatry again, wanting themselves at the centre, not God. The issue was that they declared themselves to be the ultimate moral authorities in their lives and grasp at a kind of knowledge from which human beings should be free (since our knowledge of evil is from the inside, as evildoers, not the objective, external knowledge of a God who is absolutely untainted by evil). But He and She are not losing this knowledge, they are embracing it more wholeheartedly – leading to the despair Ebert referred to. What they do lose is the knowledge of Good because they turned away from their responsibility to protect it, to protect innocence. In which case, it sounds like von Trier has expressed with conviction the madness and despair that ultimately results from turning away from God.

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Roger Ebert, film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times is at the Cannes Film Festival, where he’s just endured the latest film from the Danish director/screenwriter Lars von Trier. It sounds dreadful:

There’s electricity in the air. Every seat is filled, even the little fold-down seats at the end of every row. It is the first screening of Lars von Trier’s “Antichrist,” and we are ready for anything. We’d better be. Von Trier’s film goes beyond malevolence into the monstrous. Never before have a man and woman inflicted more pain upon each other in a movie. We looked in disbelief. There were piteous groans. Sometimes a voice would cry out, “No!” At certain moments there was nervous laughter. When it was all over, we staggered up the aisles. Manohla Dargis, the merry film critic of The New York Times, confided that she left softly singing “That’s Entertainment!”

Whether this is a bad, good or great film is entirely beside the point. It is an audacious spit in the eye of society. It says we harbor an undreamed-of capacity for evil. It transforms a psychological treatment into torture undreamed of in the dungeons of history. Torturers might have been capable of such actions, but they would have lacked the imagination. Von Trier is not so much making a film about violence as making a film to inflict violence upon us, perhaps as a salutary experience. It’s been reported that he suffered from depression during and after the film. You can tell. This is the most despairing film I’ve ever have seen.

Read more on Roger Ebert’s blog.

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Roger Ebert is the film critic for the Chicago Sun-Times and one of the most respected critics in the world. He has often commented on spiritual issues in a way which suggests he has a real interest in them, but no convictions about there being any spiritual reality. He’s not alone in this, of course. He has recently posted on his blog an explanation of where he’s come from, in a religious sense, and where he is now. He had a Catholic upbringing which he views very positively, in terms of the morality it instilled in him, but which didn’t apparently help him to develop any confidence in the existence of God himself:

Catholicism made me a humanist before I knew the word. When people rail against “secular humanism,” I want to ask them if humanism itself would be okay with them. Over the high school years, my belief in the likelihood of a God continued to lessen. I kept this to myself. I never discussed it with my parents. My father in any event was a non-practicing Lutheran, until a death bed conversion which rather disappointed me. I’m sure he agreed to it for my mother’s sake.

Did I start calling myself an agnostic or an atheist? No, and I still don’t. I avoid that because I don’t want to provide a category for people to apply to me. I would not want my convictions reduced to a word. Chaz, who has a firm faith, leaves me to my beliefs. “But you know you’re one or the other,” she says. “I have never told you that,” I say. “Maybe not in so many words, but you are,” she says.

But I persist in believing I am not. During in all the endless discussions on several threads of this blog about evolution, intelligent design, God and the afterworld, now numbering altogether around 3,500 comments, I have never said, although readers have freely informed me I am an atheist, an agnostic, or at the very least a secular humanist – which I am. If I were to say I don’t believe God exists, that wouldn’t mean I believe God doesn’t exist. Nor does it mean I don’t know, which implies that I could know.

I understand why Roger Ebert wants to avoid being labelled as an atheist, but I’m not sure he can avoid the agnostic label quite so easily. It just means he doesn’t know, but it doesn’t, as he suggests, carry the connotation that he could or even should know, but cannot or will not. But it is just a label, and we all too easily use labels to pigeon hole people and even attack them without actually listening and understanding them. Later in his post, Ebert says:

If there was a First Cause, was there a First Causer? Or did Big Bangs just happen to happen? Can we name the First Causer “God?” We can name it anything we want. I can name it after myself. It is utterly insignificant what it is called, because we would be giving a name to something that falls outside all categories of thought and must be unknowable and irrelevant to knowledge. So it is a futile enterprise.

Ebert raises important questions. Why do Big Bangs happen? Why is there something rather than nothing? As Stephen Hawking once remarked,

. . . Even if there is only one unique set of possible laws, it is only a set of equations. What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to govern? Is the ultimate unified theory so compelling that it brings about its own existence? Although science may solve the problem of how the universe began, it cannot answer the question: Why does the universe bother to exist? I don’t know the answer to that. (Black Holes and Baby Universes, (London, Bantam Press, 1993) p. 99)

Given that everything we know about the universe and everything we experience points to the existence of causes for effects, there must be a first cause for the universe. Yes we can name that First Cause anything at one level, but it is only insignificant what we choose to call it if that first cause is impersonal. But what if the Christian understanding that the first cause is a personal God is right? Then it matters enoromously. Roger Ebert would not think it utterly insignificant if I decided to call him whatever I liked. The difference between the two, he would say, is that Ebert is knowable and falls well within various categories of thought, while ‘God’ or ‘First Cause’ ‘falls outside all categories of thought and must be unknowable and irrelevant to knowledge.’ This is an extraordinary claim. At a stroke he dismisses all of theology, all Christian experience and all Christian history. It is true that any God is intrinsically beyond my ability to understand completely, because God is infinite and I am decidely finite. But that does not mean I cannot know some things about God. Why must any God be unknowable? Inaccessible to scientific exploration, yes, because God is a spiritual being and science is only able to deal with the physical dimensions. It is reasonable to assume that God is unknowable if it all starts with, and depends on us. But what if God chooses to communicate? What if he chooses to reveal himself to human beings down through history, particularly through divinely inspired writings? What if he chooses to take on properties of the physical creation and step into it as a human being, revealing in his words and actions God himself? What if he did this in order to rescue us from our rebellion, or our ignoring him, in order to develop a relationship with us? What if he even wants to live in us, transforming us more into his likeness? The simple answer is that it would change everything. No longer would God be remote, inaccessible, unknowable, unfathomable. No longer would God be irrelevant. The Christian claim is that all my ‘What ifs’ are answered in the affirmative: this is precisely what the Bible claims has happened. If it’s true, it makes the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ the central event of history. It is not only a question of what the Bible says, either. Jesus’s life and death, even his resurrection, are events for which there is very strong historical evidence. And the testimony of millions of Christians down through history is that have personally experienced the inward transformation which a relationship with God brings. Isn’t Roger Ebert missing something vital here by defining God as unknowable and irrelevant? As Francis Schaeffer said of God many years ago, ‘He is there and he is not silent.’

Related posts:

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