Images and Antichrist

A recent viewing of Robert Altman's heady 1972 thriller Images brought to mind last year's more shocking, more self-conscious, and more juvenile horror provocation: Antichrist. The comparison, however, almost entirely favors Altman's film. Whereas Lars von Trier's Antichrist amounts to little more than grimy self-indulgence, Images is, though cold and difficult, almost endlessly fascinating. The former takes root with brutality; infamy is its claim to fame. The latter stems from character; its horror and violence emanate from a troublingly real place.

Images is an odd duck in Altman's filmography. One of his few films that could unquestionably be called a horror movie, it concerns a husband and wife's weekend retreat to a foggy vacation home buried deep within Ireland's atmospheric hillsides. While there, the wife, Cathryn (characters actually have names here, unlike in von Trier's film, in which we can only identify the protagonists with the emblematic labels “She” and “He”), plummets into a hallucinatory nightmare of sexual guilt. In addition to her husband, Hugh, a schoolboy-ish joker oblivious to his wife's torment, two other men show up: a neighbor, Rene, boorish and impetuous, who paws at Cathryn every chance he gets and who believes her sexual reticence can be cured by persistent harassment; and Marcel, one of Cathryn's ex-lovers, a Frenchman who died in a plane crash three years ago. Although the possibility is raised that Marcel never took the flight and is still very much alive—or, on the other hand, that his ghost continues to haunt Cathryn, as an apparition and not a hallucination—it seems clear that Cathryn's aggressive and self-annihilating imagination is tearing her apart from the inside. We can never really trust what she sees, unsure if the force that is terrorizing her is the synecdochic phantom of male sexuality (the “male gaze” turned murderous) or Cathryn's own guilt. She becomes convinced that the only way to rid herself of these apparitions is to kill them, leaving a trail of corpses in her wake—some real, some imaginary. We experience the latter when Cathryn heeds Marcel's advice to kill him—again—by shooting him with a shotgun, only to realize that she has shot and destroyed her husband's expensive camera instead. The symbolism is too blatant, too coldly pedantic, but it remains interesting; we may be turned off by some of Altman's film-schoolish allusions, but we are simultaneously aroused by them, in every sense of the word.

With Images, we are in the realm of Ingmar Bergman's Persona (1966) or Roman Polanski's Repulsion (1965), two films that Altman has cited as influences. All three films (and Antichrist as well) take place in a nightmarish realm where the metaphorical guises of male and female sexuality torment female characters to varying degrees, shattering identity and disturbingly fusing together women's corporeal and psychological states. All four of them are misogynistic to varying degrees, with Bergman's film by far the most sensitive to individual female characters as distinct people with relatable crises, and with art film techniques that amplify the characters' plight instead of overshadowing them. Though I like the Polanski and Altman films, Repulsion, Images, and Antichrist are all too schematic in attributing certain stereotypical tropes to male or female sexuality—brute force, an arrogant sense of entitlement, and cool, emotionless rationale for the males; ceaseless paranoia and self-criticism, emotional hysteria, and vengeful penetration for the females. Phallic images and viscous fluids reappear often. These three movies are the epitome of the “art horror” subgenre, a corpus of films that is by turns fascinating and infuriating.

Images comes closer to fascination than frustration. While Altman does give in to overly simplistic stereotypes regarding female sexuality and hysteria, the overall portrait of Cathryn in Images is actually identifiable to viewers of either sex. This may primarily be attributed to Susannah York as Cathryn, who won the award at Cannes for Best Actress and who never allows her character to lapse into a symbol or a jigsaw puzzle (and whose own writing, included in Images as a sporadic voiceover narration, contributes immensely to a complex understanding of Cathryn's troubled psyche). Her jealousy over her husband's possible infidelity, her simultaneous attraction and revulsion to the wolfish character of Rene, her unexpected tenderness towards a surrogate daughter character—these emotions take on real weight thanks to York's performance, and they turn Images into more than a psychoanalytic cryptogram to be deciphered by the audience. A jigsaw puzzle is, in fact, a recurring motif in Images, but the movie itself becomes more complex and disturbing as each successive fragment is put into place (unlike in hollow puzzle exercises like Memento or Antichrist, which become simpler, cruder, and phonier as the puzzle becomes clearer).

The crucial emotional centerpiece of Images may be a dreamlike montage sequence in which Cathryn's sexual flings with Hugh, Rene, and Marcel are edited together into simultaneity (when in fact their temporality is almost impossible to determine). Much of Images marks a striking departure from Altman's aesthetic, but this sequence, at least in sound, editing, and cinematography, hews closer to something we may see in McCabe & Mrs. Miller or Nashville. A zoom lens is adeptly employed in order to uncover unexpected visual facets of each location and performance; dialogue overlaps and marks a connecting bridge (and thematic glue) between segments; temporal consistency is made secondary to an often troubling simultaneity of events. More than an aesthetic enterprise, though, Cathryn's patchwork of memories is the most emotionally affecting sequence in the film, and perhaps the key by which we may unlock her character. By blending together each tryst into one moment, Cathryn's sexual attraction to each male character is made simultaneously more real, more sensorial, and more unsettling. Love and compassion are rarely the driving motivations for these sexual encounters; the emotional distress that nudges her into the arms of men who (it seems) don't really care about her is suggested, but Altman and York wisely realize that Cathryn's emotional complexity is more believable when exhibited but not exposited. Cathryn feels like she has been unfaithful to each of the men in her life, when in fact her infidelity is never clearly established; the lustful power of each sexual relationship remains unabated throughout the film, a disorienting feeling that can in fact be related to by any viewer who has undergone a difficult relationship, sexual or otherwise. Thus, the paranoia that Cathryn feels throughout the film can be interpreted not as a mathematical and absurd representation of female hysteria (unlike that von Trier movie I'll be getting to in a moment) but as a result of the painful memories, guilt, loneliness, and desperation that may seem familiar to many members of the audience, both male and female (albeit in less hallucinatory or hyperbolic fashion).

While it is abnormally successful, for a cryptic arthouse psychodrama of its ilk, at fleshing out its characters' sexual relationships, Images still leans in favor of its heady or formalistic aspects. Its allusions to cinema are especially unavoidable. In addition to Cathryn's aforementioned shooting of her husband's beloved camera (which is only the most explicit metacinematic ruse in the movie), camera lenses can be seen smuggled into the mise en scene throughout much of the film. During an early sequence in which Hugh's camera is affixed to a tripod in the background, careful viewers may detect that the onscreen camera in fact changes position and perspective depending on where Cathryn is throughout the scene. And the intimate complexities of cinematic acting (especially in a film as sexually suggestive—though never explicit—as Images) are referred to by the fact that each character in the film is named after an actor or actress playing somebody else in the movie (Susannah York as Cathryn; Cathryn Harrison as Susannah; Rene Auberjonois as Hugh; Hugh Millais as Marcel; Marcel Bozzuffi as Rene). Obviously not a coincidence, this sly bit of self-referentiality points towards the enigma of any cinematic character as well as of any flesh-and-blood performer inhabiting a cinematic guise. Where does the actor end and the character begin? Is there a difference? For that matter, do we differentiate between previous sexual partners, or do some people envision their entire sexual history as a synchronous montage, as Cathryn does in the movie? Mediation and sexuality are thus seen as inseparable, not unlike the unbreakable bond between Cathryn's sexual corporeality and her complex psyche.

Images is not a perfect movie. Although it manages to convey its sexual relationships with remarkable power and conciseness, it still leans a bit too heavily towards the cold and calculated, in my opinion. The muddy, cool aesthetic, indebted to Vilmos Zsigmond's brown-and-gray-dominated camerawork, makes it almost inevitable that no signs of brightness or levity will find their way into the film. And though the movie is more sensitive towards female characters than either Repulsion or Antichrist, we are nonetheless left with a metaphorical horror film in which a psychologically fragile woman kills several men because of her sexual paranoia—a depiction that is at least conceptually troublesome, even if its execution is more sympathetic than we may have expected.

But Images' intelligence, complexity, and emotional impact are made immediately evident when compared to Lars von Trier's Antichrist. Like Altman's movie, Antichrist concerns a husband and wife who retreat to a foreboding vacation home, although unlike Images, Antichrist's She and He are impelled to solitude by the tragic death of their infant son. Both movies, though, originate with debilitating sexual guilt and self-loathing (mostly on the part of the wives), a destructive hysteria that avalanches as the movies progress. In Images, it is Cathryn's seemingly delusional conviction that she has been unfaithful to her husband, and likewise that he has been unfaithful to her, that begins to torment her and drives them to seclusion. In Antichrist, however, that sexual guilt springs from the fact that their son died by falling out a window during a frenetic bout of lovemaking, in a sexually explicit prologue that treats us to black-and-white shots of vaginal penetration. Von Trier's opening scene is simultaneously crude and pretentious; though there are interesting ideas beneath the fashion-magazine-esque surface, the primary aim is undoubtedly provocation.

In each movie, that violent sexual passion skyrockets once the couples maroon themselves in their hideaways of choice. The difference is that, in Images, it is strongly suggested that Cathryn's hysteria is the result of male sexual aggression that surrounds her. Whether through her husband's sense of entitlement and treatment of her as a physical object to be owned and enjoyed; Rene's repeated molestations of her, accompanied by his taunting claims that, deep down, she really likes it rough; or Marcel's cold analyses of her ever-changing sexual desires, it seems likely that Cathryn's delusions and violent retribution are the results of the persistent and virulent male sexual aggression that surrounds her. This is not necessarily to laud the movie's overly pragmatic encapsulation of male and female sexuality—merely to recognize that its investigation is more shaded and complex than Antichrist's. For, in von Trier's film, we truly are meant to believe that Willem Dafoe's He personifies male sexuality—cool, detached, logical, controlling—and that Charlotte Gainsbourg's She does the same for womanhood—she's hysterical, passionate, acts spontaneously. The fact that there are no other characters in Antichrist (unless we count the poor little boy who falls to his death while his parents are vigorously screwing, or that infamous snarling fox) intensifies the movie's focus, but not in a good way: we are left only with von Trier's deluded notions of how Men and Women behave, specifically in reacting to intense tragedy and despair. There is no one to blame for the horrific acts that She commits in Antichrist except for the woman herself.

This, despite the fact that Antichrist is partially about misogyny itself. Gainsbourg's character is in fact a former graduate student who abandoned her dissertation on the history of misogyny and violence against women halfway into its completion. Part of the film, then, makes note of eons of cruelty against women, the burning of purported witches especially. Perhaps von Trier thought the direct inclusion of this subject matter, the tackling of misogyny in a blatant discursive manner, would alleviate charges of misogyny against his own film. In any case, the movie's interest in the history of misogyny only intensifies von Trier's apparent hatred towards women (something that he has often been accused of, given that much of his prior filmography—great though some of it may be—constitutes the brutal torment of actresses such as Emily Watson, Björk, Nicole Kidman, etc.). The conclusion that Antichrist seems to reach is that women are indeed destined, in cosmic fashion, to fulfill the role of tormentor against the male sex. In the midst of her research, She succumbs to a lengthy documentation of the supposed crimes committed against women and ultimately inhabits a position of gruesome mercilessness, even outright evil. The first incarnation of this occurs when She forces their infant son to wear the wrong shoes on each of his feet, thus inflicting great pain on the child. Each successive demonstration of Her sadistic violence in the film further “proves” von Trier's case. I'll avoid spoilers, but suffice it to say that two brutally explicit instances of genital mutilation—one self-inflicted, the other inflicted upon her husband—are, in addition to being unwatchable, totally unwarranted. Von Trier knows how to viciously grasp his audience's attention, which is not in itself a negative feature for a filmmaker; his flaw is that he does not know how to satisfy their intense involvement, dangling sex and violence in front of them but not providing any emotional or thematic payoff. Nowhere has this ever been more apparent than in Antichrist. What could have been—and what, in fact, starts as—a hypothesis on what drives both male and female sexual paranoia eventually becomes an ugly testament to the evil of which women are capable. The greatest flaw that may be attributed to “He” in the movie is that he responds to all of this with detached resolve; never is he implicated in the insanity that torments his wife, thus completely belying the movie's half-proposed suggestion that misogyny is itself to blame for sexual violence.

Antichrist is willfully ambiguous; admittedly, some of these interpretations may not be what von Trier intended. But, on the other hand, some of his images are unmistakable in their implications. The clearest example of this is the movie's epilogue (and yes, the movie is distinctly separated into a number of parts that each receive their own onscreen title). At the end of the film, in which Willem Dafoe's character gruelingly drags himself across the forest floor while afflicted by intense bodily trauma, He (and we) see an army of women trudging up the forest path. Their destination seems to be the secluded cabin in which She first was tormented by immersing herself in a complete history of misogyny. The implication may be that their fate is the same as Charlotte Gainsbourg's character's: that all of these women truly are destined for sexual hysteria and violence. Even if this interpretation is more excessive than von Trier intended, however, it's undeniable that von Trier closes Antichrist with a depiction of the entire female sex unanimously embroiled in the same history of cruelty and misogyny as the vicious female character featured in the movie, able to respond to it in a way that is predicated only upon their womanhood, not upon their individual and distinct psychologies.

In this way, Images and Antichrist also serve as an unexpected delineation of the benefits and pitfalls of psychoanalytic theory. A mode of analysis that I find primarily misleading and only fleetingly revealing, psychoanalysis is, at root, a worthwhile attempt to parse out the purely psychological drives and neuroses common to all humanity that strongly influence our physical behavior and personal relationships. The ways in which these linkages are usually elucidated in psychoanalytic practice, however, is to claim that all males function the same way on a basic foundational level, all women similarly function the same way within their sex, and that individuals are usually unaware of the psychological processes that influence their reasoning and behavior. Psychoanalytic film theory is a noxious manifestation of this trend: it suggests that males and females, respectively, respond to cinema in a broad and homogeneous fashion, that (typically male) directors promulgate traditional fetishistic modes of looking (at the female sex in particular), and that further distinctions like race, sexual orientation, ethnicity, etc., mean little in influencing individual viewers' responses and interpretations. Maybe this overview is unfairly broad, but it does seem like this is the general foundation of psychoanalytic film theory—one which may seem ludicrous to anyone who's had a profoundly personal or intimate relationship to a specific film, or whose opinion regarding specific movies has been in the minority.

Images recognizes the universal and significant fact that people behave and respond to others in a manner that is markedly influenced by psychological processes that cannot be clearly demarcated. It also, however, realizes that these psychological processes are profoundly influenced by individual experience, by the unknowable and minute patterns of development that our psyches undergo. This is why dreams, memories, and figurative visuals comprise a great deal of Images' running time, yet why a believable portrayal of the character of Cathryn is integral to comprehending what the movie is trying to say. We must realize that there is an infinity of experiences, thoughts, and emotions that Cathryn has felt that have accumulated within what has become a turbulent psyche; but we must never believe that this psyche is meant to stand in for the female sex as a whole, for this reading would be to negate our own ability to identify with the movie, and would therefore not allow us to reflect upon the combustible psychological states by which we operate. The power of Images is that we sense that the movie is a hyperbolic nightmare of each viewer's own unique neuroses and passions.

Antichrist, meanwhile, posits that man is man, and woman is woman, and we are imprisoned by the psyches that constitute each sex from birth. Never mind the fact that the (supposedly) innate differences between man and woman are manifested in such gruesome fashion, with self-congratulatory shock value; the psychological premise that underlies the movie is virulent to begin with. And while the movie is somewhat valuable on a bombastic, you-gotta-see-it-to-believe-it level, its sordid appeal vanishes instantaneously when the movie is over, and you begin to fathom what the movie is actually trying to do. Images, despite its flaws and its problematic depiction of a besieged female character, genuinely attempts to fathom human relationships and the dark lengths to which they may lead. Antichrist deals in the shocking imagery of cruel sexuality, but only to arrive at conclusions that are as nasty and deluded as anything that happens in the movie itself.