Karina on SpoutBlog

A friend pointed me to this inane editorial in the Guardian, in which Christopher Hart rails against the British ratings board for giving Lars Von Trier’s Antichrist an 18+ certificate rather than banning the film outright. Comparing the film unfavorably to the eye gouging scene in King Lear, Hart writes,

The world of Antichrist, by contrast, is blatantly amoral, without any sense of justice or retribution whatever. Its mingling of sex and violence, the cheapest and nastiest trick in the book, is usually one which the BBFC pounces on in a straight horror film. But here they are blinded by their own cultural snobbery, swallowing the lie that Antichrist is Art.

Harsh words … which might actually merit serious argument from me if not for this preceding admission:

You do not need to see Lars von Trier’s Antichrist (which is released later this week) to know how revolting it is. I haven’t seen it myself, nor shall I - and I speak as a broad-minded arts critic, strongly libertarian in tendency. But merely reading about Antichrist is stomach-turning, and enough to form a judgment.

Being that the universally accepted threshold of obscenity is that the viewer knows it when they see it, perhaps Hart’s just playing a Von Trierian game in pretending to suggest that the seeing part be taken out of the equation. But I’ll take him at his word and argue that, actually, you do need to see Antichrist to understand how the elements which Hart complains upset his stomach are much more complicated in practice. You do need to see a film before you declare that “the world” it depicts is “blatantly amoral” or that it’s a “lie” to call that film “art.” Even most of the film’s detractors — I mean, the ones who have actually seen it — would probably argue that once you do see Antichrist those “revolting” descriptions lose much of their power to shock. I argued something similar myself. Meanwhile, you really shouldn’t need to see a film in order to synopsize it correctly, but Hart manages to simplify the plot of Antichrist into inaccuracy.

Hart invokes no less an authority than Ernest Hemingway to excuse the act of publishing hundreds of words on a topic which he admittedly does not know via first hand experience: “You don’t need to eat a whole bowl of scabs to know they’re scabs.” Maybe not, but one would think you should at least take a look at the bowl.