It's Always Lightest Just Before the Dark: Michael Winterbottom's The Killer Inside Me

"How dare you?" shouted the woman at Sundance to a doubtless characteristically bemused Michael Winterbottom, thus setting the pattern for a string of festival screenings marked by boos, jeers, and walk outs. Now, it's coming out in the UK and the critics are lining up to accuse it - not of being too violent, of course not, that might suggest a certain weak-heartedness on the part of the critic. I'm no lily livered white bread Disney fan, they seem to be saying, but this film is Misogynist! There they said it. As Nina Power pointed out in her book One Dimensional Woman, the language of feminism is called forth to some peculiar causes these days - from the selling of shoes and chocolate to the hounding of Muslims. Since at least last year's Antichrist, 'feminists' are being rallied to a new cause - to express outrage at any film which deals with violence against women. Curious that a movement, part of whose historical mission has been to highlight and bring to attention the violence perpetrated by men towards women, the symbolic and the very real violence perpetrated by history, by society, by the law, by capitalism, against women, should now be called upon to sweep under the carpet any motion picture which deals with precisely this subject. No, we don't express our horror at cinematic violence anymore, we're not The Daily Mail screaming about video nasties corrupting our children, we're not Mary Whitehouse. The problem is that this violence is directed against women - and you just shouldn't hit girls, because girls are fair and weak and made of fairy dust.

Of course, the real problem with The Killer Inside Me, really so close to being a great film, is that it is simply not brutal enough. One way or another Jim Thompson's ferocious prose has been neutered time and again by the film industry. Kubrick gave writing credits to himself and his pals for scripts Thompson wrote alone; Peckinpah gave The Getaway a happy ending and changed its protagonist, Doc (played by Steve McQueen), from a vicious killer to a pensive pacifist who only kills once and in self-defence; Frears neutered The Grifters with a layer of ironic reflexivity that stops you getting suckered by its seductive con games.

The Killer Inside Me is an enormously strange book - a first person crime story narrated by a man who is clearly completely insane - but what is perhaps most disturbing about the book is just how nice, how charming this man, Lou Ford, is. Always ready with a quick line and an easy cliche, he's the nicest guy in town and everybody likes him. He's the good cop - the only one in the precinct who doesn't use violence to beat a confession out of his suspects. So when the bodies start piling up, no matter how much evidence there may be against him, no matter how implausible his story is, no-one would believe that Lou would do such a thing. Not good old Lou Ford. Everybody loves Lou - and so do you, the reader. And so you become complicit in his horrific acts of violence. You're right there with him, and pretty soon you're starting to feel pretty sick with yourself.

It's clear from interviews and press sheets that Michael Winterbottom regards Thompon as an essentially apolitical writer, a sort of tough guy nihilist like Dashiell Hammett. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth. In a way, Thompson was a kind of anti-Hammett, a member of the American Communist Party (the only political party at that time to support and fight for the rights of women and black people) who launched a tirade of abuse against the union-busting activities of Hammett's former employers, the Pinkerton Detective Agency (under the not so subtle codename of the Talkington Agency), in Pop. 1280. Likewise, The Killer Inside Me is not your standard psycho-on-the-loose story. Lou Ford is a high-ranking police detective, a pillar of the community - he practically is the community, a community that greets violence towards women and ethnic minorities with a broad smile. The cruelties and the contradictions of this small town - one much like the town Thompson himself grew up in - are writ large on every page.

So, the real problem with Winterbottom's film is precisely the one thing that all the haters have singled out for praise: Casey Affleck. From the very beginning of the movie, Affleck's Ford is clearly a nutcase with the cold dead eyes of a killer, merrily living up to every cinematic psycho cliche - he even listens to opera (Donizetti's L'Elisir d'Amore, no less). As a result, the various twists and turn of the plot cannot help but seem wildly implausible. We are never seduced by Ford, we never catch a glimpse of how seductive he is, and so cannot fathom how anyone else would be. Likewise the violence remains just standard movie violence because it's what we expect of him from the very start. So it never feels like having your own face pummeled into hamburger meat by your best friend, it never feels like an anarchic scream against everything that is supposedly moral and upstanding in society, it just feels like another nasty movie in which boys get pleasure from watching girls get beaten up.

Cinematic violence can - and indeed must - be political and understood politically, not just as a thrill ride. For the Right this has always been understood, and the banning of violent films has always been used as a political weapon of normalisation and the protection of conservative values (the first film banned by the BBFC was of a boxing match - banned because it showed a black boxer triumphing over a white boxer). Now, increasingly, voices on the Left are stealing their thunder, trying to out-conservative the conservatives and neuter themselves in advance. In France, the last decade or so has seen the emergance of a hitherto unseen wave of bloody violence on cinema screens - but this wave has been accompanised by the emergence of a new filmic subject, the banlieues and their disenfranchised immigrant populations. In many recent French films, such as A L'Interieur, Trouble Every Day, or Frontier(s), the swathes of fake blood on screen are explcitly related to the upsurge in political violence from the banlieues over the same period. If we are to have a problem with Winterbottom's violence it should be precisely with its coyness, its insufficiency. Anything else is to hold your hands over your eyes in disavowal not just in the darkened cinema, but in our increasingly darkened world.

Leave me to weep - the music of Antichrist

The presence, amongst Antichrist's end credits of "Research on Music" (amongst, similarly, "Research on Misogyny", "Research on Anxiety", "Research on Horror", none of which are mentioned on IMDB), a phrase so different in its implications from the usual, "Soundtrack Coordinator," might give us pause. Especially when we consider that there is only one credited piece of music in the entire film, Handel's aria, "Lascia Ch'io Panga" sung by Almirena in Handel's opera, Rinaldo. This piece of music, we can fairly safely assume, has been chosen with some care. The most obvious connection is on the level of narrative. This particular aria, whose lyrics translate as 'Leave me to weep over my cruel fate, and that I yearn for [or sigh for] freedom,' is sung by a character trapped by a sorceress in an enchanted garden (c.f 'Eden'), begging to be left alone to her self-pity than be rescued by the king of Jerusalem. That most of the male parts, in the original performance of Rinaldo, were taken by castrati, and that this particular aria is most famous to movie-goers from featuring in a film, Farinelli, about a castrato, may have also appealed to Lars von Trier's thematic interests for the film.
It is interesting to note von Trier's insistence, throughout the interview process for this film, that he has been making the same film over and over again throughout his career. For if there were one tune that followed Handel throughout his career, it is this one. Starting life as an instrumental sarabande, a 'dance asiatique', in Handel's first opera, Almira, premiered in 1705 (and is it not the case that Handel's relationship with Asia is not unlike von Trier's with America - a vast exoticised other, known only through traveller's tales and the artifacts of its culture, wrenched from their original context?). In 1707, a lyric version was included in his first oratorio, Il trionfo del Tempo et del Disinganno ('The Triumph of Time and Disillusion'). Sometimes known as La Bellezza ravveduta nel trionfo del Tempo e Disinganno (‘Beauty reformed in the triumph of Time and Enlightenment’), this extended dramatic cantata concerns a four part dialogue, written by cardinal Benedetto Pamphili, between 'Beauty', 'Pleasure', 'Time' and 'Disillusion'. The lyrics to our tune, here Pleasure's lament to the forces of reason and temperance,

"Lascia la spina,
cogli la rosa.
Tu vai cercando
il tuo dolor."

translate as "Leave the thorn, pluck the rose, you go seeking your own pain." This piece was then revised twice: first, in 1937, as Il Trionfo del Tempo e della Verita, and then, in an English translation, The Triumph of Time and Truth, becoming his final work in 1757. Though significant changes were made to the score and its arrangement at each juncture, the sarabande remained. One thing about each of these renditions of this tune, except for that in Rinaldo (i.e. as 'Lascia Ch'io Panga'), is that is always preceded by a faster variation of itself ("Dangerously precarious and slightly frantic," according to Wilfred Mellors) in order to emphasize the very slowness of the sarabande. As though such were necessary! The first thing you notice about this piece of music is its extraordinary, unnatural slowness, like wading through oil - the perfect complement to the super slow-motion of Antichrist's opening scene. 

Of course, whether Almira is in fact the true ur-text of our tune is something of a moot point. Much as von Trier has been pulled up over Antichrist's various borrowings from classic horror films - the isolated log cabin from Evil Dead and Twin Peaks, Willem Dafoe as Final Girl, etc. - so concerns over Handel's 'borrowings' have given sleepless nights to a few Handel scholars, worried that their idol may turn out to be "a wholly unoriginal composer". 'He takes other men's pebbles and polishes them into diamonds' said William Boyce, and so Lars von Trier has taken his thematic tropes from the video nasties and made of them something that is not itself quite a horror film - much as we might argue that Handel's oratorios were not quite oratorios but rather a means of pursuing his true love, opera, via other means once it had fallen out of favour.

Chaos Reigns: Lars von Trier - Antichrist

Twenty-five years after the video nasties act, Lars von Trier's latest film, Antichrist, has shown conclusively that, now at least, the British Board of Film Classification (responsible for drawing up the notorious 1983 list of over 70 banned horror films) is now a more liberal and enlightened judge than the entire critical and juridical establishment of the Cannes film festival. While the BBFC sees Antichrist's more explicit images as "exceptionally justified, in this context, by the manner in which they illustrate the film's themes and the nature of the couple's relationship," the critics and jurors at Cannes found themselves frothing at the mouth in the style of the hapless victims of Lamberto Bava's Demoni, "The film must be stopped!" It may be instructive, in this context, to compare the film to another film by a Danish director from eighty-five years earlier, Benjamin Christensen's Häxan (occasionally subtitled "Witchcraft Through the Ages"). Häxan traverses very similar territory, comparing the treatment of women during the witch trials of early modern Europe to the modern day treatment of women in the psychiatric clinic, and asking, have we really come so far? Like von Trier's film, Häxan is split into chapters and a prologue and freely mixes fantasy and 'reality' (even calling itself a "documentary") without clearly distinguishing between the two. Perhaps von Trier's most astonishing acheivement with Antichrist is to have effectively replayed a scene from Häxan, in which a convent of nuns are seen in the grip of a wild collective hysteria, not in the film itself, but at the Cannes festival, swapping impressionable young nuns for supposedly mature and respectable elder statesmen of the film industry. More recently, I have seen reports on the web of critics who, having booed and jeered with the pack at Cannes, have now seen the film again, and found themselves forced to admit that it really is quite a brilliant film, and wondering quite what came over them at that initial screening. Also, like Häxan, in which the part of the devil is played by Christensen himself, one should be in no doubt as to who the 'antichrist' of the title is - as the sequence of credits makes almost comically clear it is von Trier (perhaps we could even compare the now notorious interview in which von Trier repeatedly attempts to insert the words "is the greatest director in the world" into Willem Dafoe's answers, to a scene in Häxan in which young witches are seen kissing the devil's backside).

Since seeing the film in Paris a few weeks ago, I have become strangely obsessed with reading critical reports on the film, if only because so many of them seem to thoroughly misguided. Christopher Hart's Daily Mail piece, in which he repeatedly calls for the films censorship despite admitting he hasn't seen it, is almost too true to form for the Mail, scarcely even a newspaper, more a comic for Nazis. Even stranger in some ways, was Sean O'Hagan's assertion in The Guardian that the film contains a "critique of psychoanalysis." presumably because at one point Gainsbourg's character says, "Modern psychology has no place for dreams. Freud is dead, right?" Can such an experienced journalist really be so stupid to confuse a line spoken by one of a film's characters with the controlling idea of the film? Especially when everything we see directly contradicts the line? The assertion that "Freud is dead," in a film so full of resurrections and disinterments, is clearly meant to be ironic, and if "modern psychology has no place for dreams" then that is, no doubt, modern psychology's problem, for this film is totally suffused with dream images, and Dafoe's character's complaint of bad dreams is an omen the couple ignore most foolishly. In fact, this film is an attack on the phallogocentrism of 'modern' cognitive behavioural therapy (such is the occupation of Dafoe's character) and psychoanalytic theory is its chief weapon in this attack.

There seems to be a real desire to strike out at von Trier, the arch-provocateur, in a fashion somewhat akin to the tendency of the thick kid in the class to beating up their most openly verbose and intellectually precocious classmates. The insistence on the part of Ads Without Products that the film represents an idealised, Europeanised vision of America because 'real' Americans don't have log cabins in the woods, far from the road, is particularly odd. For if this log cabin reminds us of anything it is nothing in European culture but, of course, Jacques Renault's log cabin (also in the woods of the Pacific Northwest) in Twin Peaks (I also seem to remember that a certain Henry David Thoreau had a little log cabin, far from the road, out by Walden Pond, and James M. Cain inserts just such a cabin into the middle third of Mildred Pierce - but no doubt Cain, Thoreau and Lynch aren't really real Americans either). This is far from the only Lynchian touch in Antichrist (the precise use of close-ups to render familiar objects and body parts strange and uncanny being the most obvious) and no doubt the reference is not accidental. And then there is the gallimaufry of accusations of misogyny, almost entirely from male critics (the one exception - at least as far as I'm aware - being Julie Bindel, who curses the film for the apparent absence of rationale and logos, the very object of the film's critique). Calling this intense and patiently researched analysis of anti-feminism (what other film have you ever heard of feature a credit for "research on misogyny") a misogynist film is of a kind to the recent accusation that comic Richard Herring's current show about racism (entitled "Hitler Moustache") is in fact racist. Is it racist for a white comic to to tackle racism in his show? No, I don't think so. Victims, as Alain Badiou says in his book on St. Paul, have no privileged access to the truth. As Rifa Bhunoo points out, dismissing Herring's show as racist is a means of sidestepping debate, acting as though the issue is no longer relevant or unworthy of serious attention. There is a kind of Boris Johnson logic at work here - cancelling an anti-racism free festival in London on the grounds that London does not have a racism problem and therefore to have such a festival is only inciting racial tension. The horror of these male critics at Antichrist is the horror of castration - the very fear that, according to psychoanalysis, animates man's fear of women. It is for this reason, I believe, that the BBFC had no issues with the film's more graphic moments. The British censor understood that the theme of the film, its subject (but certainly not its intent) was misogyny, and an intensive and in depth exploration of a long history of violence towards women, like Häxan, from the witch trials to the therapautic clinic, and as such to skip or gloss over the fear of castration and the reality of cliterodectomy (emphasized by their structural mirror image: the healthy, thrusting organs of the opening scene) would be almost more offensive than their inclusion.