Trash Humpers and Antichrist

Is a movie a success if you’re still thinking about it days after viewing? This was the case with Harmony Korine’s Trash Humpers and Lars Von Trier’s Antichrist, two entries in the New York Film Festival that I very nearly walked out on, whose endings could not arrive soon enough, that made me question the credibility, if not sanity, of the selection committee. But the imagery in both was indelible. These are flawed, irritating provocations. And both are worthwhile.

Korine shot Trash Humpers on VHS and wanted the no-budget movie to resemble “found footage” salvaged from a dumpster (likely assaulted by one of the film’s demented participants). You can’t accuse the man of taking himself too seriously. In a Q&A after the movie, he said he wanted to make the “shittiest looking movie possible.” Fair enough, but you might ask why often snooty festival selection committees the world over consistently fall for his half-baked experiments.

Trash Humpers is not a complete wash. As cheap as it looks, the VHS film lends a bleached, fuzzy feel to the movie that often heightens its beauty. Twilight and nighttime scenes are especially affective. In one early sequence, the camera focuses away from its horny subjects doing God knows what in a big box parking lot to linger on a magnificent magenta sunset. In a complimentary shot, Korine takes a break from the manic cuts for a long, soft-focus gaze at a streetlamp against the darkness. There’s also the time the lens sticks on the female humper as she sits forlornly on the curb and watches her cohorts screw some bushes. (It’s one of the only times where a characters recognizes, or at least wonders, what the hell is going on and hangs her head in shamed confusion.)

Moments like these don’t just impress because they’re surrounded by, well, garbage. They stand on their own. If only Trash Humpers had more of them. Instead, Korine assaults us with more and more of the titular visual gag (it gets old about 30 seconds into the movie).

There is also the matter of sound: Trash Humpers is the most aurally unpleasant movie I have ever seen. Its characters rarely speak; they bray, howl and guffaw. Think of a cross between South Park’s Mr. Hanky and Jim Carry’s “Most Annoying Sound in the World” in Dumb and Dumber for an idea of the torture your ears are about to endure.

Trash Humper’s sonic endurance test is all the more unsettling for being unexpected. The first few minutes are nearly silent. When dialogue arrives, the content is either self-consciously base (lots of gay jokes) or comically pretentious. There are two coherent monologues: a frilly contemplation delivered by a poet and a colloquial digression on modern ennui as the gang drives through a barren suburb (“I can smell their sadness in the trees,” says the driver.) They struck a chord with me, but bomb with the characters (who actually kill the poet, for kicks, after his screed). Funny enough, but the dismissal robs the audience of any sustained reprieve from the gutter.

With Trash Humpers, Korine reaches for a combination of David Lynch’s ironic absurdity (a few moments explicitly recall Elephant Man) and Jon Waters’ anarchic, white trash bonhomie. But he lacks Lynch’s coal-black humor and formal control and Waters’ madcap glee. As Trash Humpers grinded on, the audience was less given to courtesy laughs and started to seem perplexed more than anything else. But maybe they weren’t confused at all. They could have just realized Korine’s joke was on them.

Antichrist, unlike Trash Humpers, takes itself very seriously. And if Korine’s audience feigned laughter, Von Trier’s must have repressed it, because Antichrist often feels like a parody of art house pretension. Trash Humpers hints at redemption through children as one character cradles her new, albeit kidnapped, baby. Antichrist wallows in misery as a couple torture each other after the death of theirs.

The movie begins with the gorgeous cinematography (by Anthony Dod Mantle) that sustains the rest of the film. A couple, unnamed beyond He (Willem Dafoe) and She (Charlotte Gainsbourg), ravage each other over every conceivable surface of their well-appointed home. (There’s a penetration shot thrown in, presumably to ruffle MPAA feathers.) While husband and wife are in heat, their baby boy escapes from his crib, catches a glimpse of the action and falls out an open window to his death. (He falls alongside a teddybear he clutches; the bear’s plunge is shown in extended slow-mo.)

He is a psychotherapist of some kind, and misguidedly dedicates himself to curing his wrecked wife with obtuse psychobabble. She takes to smashing her head repeatedly against a toilet bowl. In a sign of things to come (and few people watching Antichrist’s are unaware of what’s to come), she initiates sex, he demurs and she bites his nipple until the skin breaks.

What better time to go on a country retreat? And so they head up to their wood cabin, subtly called Eden, arriving only after She complains that the ground burns her feet and He spots a deer bloodily carrying a stillborn (or maybe half-born) fawn.

For all its heavy-handed foreboding and willfully dull shrink talk, the first two-thirds of Antichrist is intriguing to watch. Dafoe excels once again at playing an insufferable ass; if there’s one voice you don’t mind hearing in monotone, it’s his. And his off-kilter features are softened here—he actually looks classically handsome in certain scenes—which tempers the storm clouds Von Trier hangs over the rest of the film. Gainsbourg nails every conceivable shade of distress, treating viewers to something resembling the Kubler-Ross model on meth. As impressive as the two leads (in fact, the movie’s only two actors) are individually, they never betray much chemistry (actually, they don’t appear in the same frame that often). But I guess that’s the point.

Antichrist’s main asset is Mantle’s camerawork. From the pristine black and white of the prologue to the abstract flourishes (a beating pulse, a slow-motion silhouetted walk through the woods) to the slate-toned nature scenes, this is a great looking movie.

Unfortunately, Von Trier wants viewers to avert their eyes. After building to a slow burn (the woman in front of me was out cold after 15 minutes), Antichrist explodes first into a ludicrous jumble of mystical/psychological/astrological/paranormalsociological/feminist phooey. Then, I guess to relieve the actors’ and the audience’s confusion, She smashes a wood log into His balls. (This is when the lady in front of me woke up.)

What follows is a flat-out slasher movie, with some talking animals thrown in for good measure. (“Chaos Reigns,” as uttered by a disemboweled fox, has become the movie’s catchphrase, though I’m not sure how Von Trier would take the cackling that swept the audience following its delivery). The denouement of Antichrist sees a horde of faceless women climbing up a hill toward Him. It’s Von Trier’s last attempt to hammer home a thesis, but the bludgeoning on display throughout will leave most people searching for an exit rather than a resolution.

Arthouse films often pride themselves on the sort of subtlety that withholds graphic details, sexual and violent, from their supposedly evolved audiences. But surprisingly it is the cerebral, stylized Antichrist and not the subversively lowbrow Trash Humpers that threatens to become a cynical exploitation flick. Von Trier’s expensive therapy session—he couldn’t hold the camera during film because his “hands shook with depression”—shabbily deconstructs little more than a marriage. Risqué sex and violence aside, Antichrist sticks to genre conventions; Trash Humpers discards genre altogether.

Both directors sought visceral reactions with these incendiary movies. They’re masturbatory works. And despite their merits, it’s the audience that ultimately gets jerked around.