Tim Jones

5/8/15

ENGL 7960

Dr. Chris Rovee

Love’s Hurts: Keats, Lars Von Trier, and Romantic Depression

In 2009, Danish film director Lars Von Trier released

Antichrist, a film that contrasts gorgeous, painterly shot

composition with horrific physical and emotional violence

between its only two characters, named simply He (Willem

Dafoe) and She (Charlotte Gainsbourg). The film follows these

two after the accidental death of their child occurs while

they are having sex, as He, a clinical therapist, attempts to

help She through a grief affecting her much more strongly than

He expects. While the film clearly carries several hallmarks

of the Gothic in its explicit violence, un-simulated

depictions of sexuality (performed by porn actors standing in

for Dafoe and Gainsbourg), and presence of hallucinatory

supernatural events, Von Trier is fact a kind of negative

reflection of Romanticism that is similar to, but

distinguished from, the Gothic. “Despite the aura of

subversion that still surrounds the genre as a whole, nearly

all of the romances which actually called themselves ‘Gothic’

were unambiguously conservative,” writes James Watt:

[I]t is fair to say that the majority of critics in the

period found the content of specific novels and romances

to be far less important in itself than the ‘context’ of

their production and reception. Works that described

themselves as translations or imitations of German

fiction were seen to be increasingly suspect as the 1790s

progressed, since anything ‘German’ was guilty by

association with the deluded revolutionary idealism

attributed to the Illuminati, or to writers such as

Schiller and Kotzebue. (Watt 8)

Gothic texts include, according to Robert D. Hume, a “moral

norm, […] a standard which the reader recognizes as close to

his own everyday outlook” which, even as the text features the

standard succession of disturbing images and events,

ultimately bear out a conception of the world restored to its

moral balance through what is, at best, the Pyrrhic victory of

its anti-hero: Frankenstein and his monster finish the story

dead and vowing to kill himself respectively, Ahab dies

hunting Moby Dick having proved his worth only to himself, and

The Monk’s Ambrosio sells his soul to Satan in exchange for his

life and is promptly killed by him anyway. In these stories

the evil are punished and the world returns to its prior

state, as literally conservative a plot as possible. On the

other hand, Romantic works allow for the possibility of

transformative experience: the Ancient Mariner spends the rest

of his life advising the people he meets of the sanctity of

the lives of all creatures, the Wordsworth of The Prelude is

constructing himself into his own ideal poet. Despite being

Danish and working in the twenty-first century, Von Trier’s

work owes a great philosophical and aesthetic influence to

nineteenth-century British romanticism, specifically ideas

about feeling and form found in the works of John Keats. In

Antichrist, Von Trier uses these concepts to create a work which

is not Gothic but carries a sort of Keatsian depressive-

Romanticism which is fundamentally the same but with much a

darker starting point: the natural world is better than the

one of human construction that is “too much with us” in

Wordsworth’s parlance, but for Von Trier “better” only means

“slightly less horrific.”

When Antichrist was released, Von Trier made an effort to

shape the perception of the film as “a kind of therapy,”

having written it in a “three-month depression” in which he

“despaired of making another film” (Badley 140). As such, it

is very explicitly about the way we are expected to deal with

depression, as Linda Badley writes: “Antichrist demands

psychological interpretation to salvage meaning. It is also

about therapy’s limitations, a hellish case study in cognitive

exposure therapy in which patients confront and gain control

over their fears—the method Trier had undergone for the last

three years” (150). The film possesses a particularly keen

insight into the disconnect in affective understanding between

those with mood disorders and those without1, particularly

along the lines of the conflict that would separate

Romanticism and its successive stylistic movement Realism: the

1 For the purpose of authorial situation, I have been diagnosed bipolar.

irrational and the rational. For Von Trier and the British

Romantics this dichotomy works most actively along the lines

of the discursive separation between mind and body, not the

literal difference between the two but the sets of values for

which they stand. Susan Bordo explains that “the birth of

modern science represents a decisive historical moment […] in

which the more feminine, i.e., intuitive, empathic,

associational elements were rigorously exorcised from science

and philosophy. The result was a super-masculinized model of

knowledge in which detachment, clarity, and transcendence of

the body are all key requirements,” which has led to cultural

meaning of the two as symbols for “two distinct substances

which share no qualities, permit of interaction but no

merging, and are each defined precisely in opposition to each

other.” (Flight To Objectivity 8, 99).

The Romantic period was a time of great change in the

perception of the relationship of the two and, most

importantly for my purpose, the way in which mental and

physical suffering operated. Steven Bruhm writes:

[B]y trying to use the mind to control the pained body,

we reinforce the mind's estrangement from the body. And

in so doing, we invoke a complex series of confusions

about the way we think about the body. These confusions

become particularly acute for the late eighteenth

century, in which the pleasurable perception of others'

pain was colliding with the distressing perception of

one's own odious pain. (10)

This develops a seemingly counterintuitive associational axis

of “rationality/physical pain” against “irrationality/mental

pain,” but remember that mind’s supposed superiority to the

body, its “transcendence” in Bordo’s terms, is due to its

mastery over the physical world. Despite how it pains me to

commit the faux-pas of quoting myself, I once described the

way that the mind/body split operates as “frustratingly

mutable; like any effective cultural directive it is ductile

enough to pick and choose associations without adhering to a

consistent logic and still remain influential: mind/body is

masculine/feminine, but muscular body/soft body is

masculine/feminine” (Jones 6). The originator of the

mind/body split in Western philosophy, Plato, described it

thus in Phaedo:

Would not that man do this most perfectly who approaches

each thing, so far as possible, with the reason alone,

not introducing sight into his reasoning nor dragging in

any of the other senses along with his thinking, but who

employs pure, absolute reason in his attempt to search

out the pure, absolute essence of things, and who removes

himself, so far as possible, from eyes and ears, and, in

a word, from his whole body, because he feels that its

companionship disturbs the soul and hinders it from

attaining truth and wisdom? Is not this the man, Simmias,

if anyone, to attain to the knowledge of reality?” (Plato

and Lamb 66)

This, finally, is the major conflict of Antichrist and also its

strongest linkage to the work of Keats. In both cases,

depression intervenes to expose that the mind’s superiority

over the body is located not in its being the mind qua the mind

but in its association with the capacity for rationality and

clarity; when depression removes this quality, it seems to unify the

mind with the body in its supposed irrational, intuitive nature.

Keats’ poetry contains several examples of a uniquely

depressive aesthetic which it shares with Antichrist2. Disability

studies has been slow to assemble a theory of describing

mental illness, and understandably so considering the

endlessly variable experiences of the numerous conditions

categorized by the term, but in examining these works together

I hope to produce a set of common attributes which describe a

depressive aesthetic. Keats’ poetry is shot through with a

pervasive experiential aspect of depression: the desire for

escape from depression by means of abdicating perception,

which in Keats’ work travels from an early fascination with

the most final way of doing so, death, to a more complicated

relationship with his difficult moods. His early poem “Sleep

and Poetry” contains a kind of anxiety about mortality in

which he fears dying before he becomes known as a poet, but

nonetheless presents a kind of fatalistic glory in dying:

2 In fact, Von Trier refers to his 3 most recent films, Antichrist, Melancholia, and Nymphomaniac, as his “Depression Trilogy.”

O Poesy! for thee I grasp my pen

That am not yet a glorious denizen

Of thy wide heaven; yet, to my

ardent prayer,

               

Yield from thy sanctuary some clear

air,

Smoothed for intoxication by the

breath

Of flowering bays, that I may die a

death

Of luxury, and my young spirit

follow

The morning sun-beams to the great

Apollo (53-60)

Keats, who famously did indeed die young at the age of twenty-

five, seems to find death an attractive prospect early in his

career, but his late, more critically lauded poems take on a

more complex character in this regard. “Ode on a Grecian Urn”

is typically expressive of the sort of weltschmerz characterized

by this desire; the speaker repeatedly references the

superiority of the frozen imagined scenes on the urn over the

experienced real in lines like “Heard melodies are sweet, but

those unheard / Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play

on” and “Ah, happy, happy boughs! that cannot shed / Your

leaves, nor ever bid the Spring adieu,” as well as in its oft-

quoted final couplet “beauty is truth, truth beauty – that is

all / ye know on earth and all ye need to know.” Stephen A.

Reid writes that in “Urn” Keats “attempts, successfully, but

only temporarily, to escape the pain of his depression by

adopting a ‘Platonic’ solution of focusing on the fixed and

immutable which is beyond the anguish of decay,” turning to a

simple equivalence between truth and beauty which allows for a

comforting narrowing of perception. This is but one of many

strategies Keats uses to try to escape (Reid 406). In “Ode to

a Nightingale” he proposes removing his awareness through

alcohol “With beaded bubbles winking at the brim,/ And purple-

stained mouth; / That I might drink, and leave the world

unseen, / And with thee fade away into the forest dim.” Yet,

and this is what confirms this quality specifically as

depression-the-condition rather than simple sadness-the-

feeling, there is a relationship to that pain that Keats seems

to incorporate and appreciate. Consider the opening stanza of

“Ode On Melancholy:”

No, no, go not to Lethe, neither twist

       Wolf's-bane, tight-rooted, for its poisonous wine;

Nor suffer thy pale forehead to be kiss'd

       By nightshade, ruby grape of Proserpine;

               Make not your rosary of yew-berries,

       Nor let the beetle, nor the death-moth be

               Your mournful Psyche, nor the downy owl

A partner in your sorrow's mysteries;

       For shade to shade will come too drowsily,

               And drown the wakeful anguish of the soul.

(1-10)

Here Keats arrays animal symbols of death and several

poisonous plants as methods of suicide but closes the stanza

with an admonishment not to kill oneself in order to preserve

the “wakeful anguish of the soul.” That wakefulness is a quality

of anguish, that suffering contains a benefit, is a common

trope of artistic discourse about depression. This likely

finds its root in pre-Romantic philosopher Kant’s concept of

the sublime, which is “[A]t once a feeling of displeasure,

arising from the inadequacy of imagination in the aesthetic

estimation of magnitude to attain to its estimation by reason,

and a simultaneously awakened pleasure, arising from this very

judgment of the inadequacy of the greatest faculty of sense

being in accord with ideas of reason, so far as the effort to

attain to these is for us a law (Kant 58-59). For Kant, the

sublime, as the truest experience of beauty, was so strong as

to actually arise from discomfort. Bruhm writes that Shelley,

Byron, and Coleridge all wrote of the importance of suffering

to art in their time, but specifically “Keats sees ‘mortal

pains;' the ‘worldly elements’ that prey upon sensation, as

necessary to the soul's formulation. In his famous letter of

21 April 1819 to George and Georgiana Keats, the ’World of

pains’ is an essential teacher of consciousness; pain is

necessary to the Romantic construction of the identity” (3-4).

Keats’ poems evince a complex relationship to depression as

both a difficulty and a gift to artistic expression that would

come to be more strongly codified in the years between him and

Von Trier.

Supporting the incorporation of depression-the-condition

as an aspect of personal identity is the work done by

psychiatry to create a categorical definition of it; this has

functioned in much the same fashion as Foucault writes of

sexual identity: “Homosexuality appeared as one of the forms

of sexuality when it was transposed from the practice of

sodomy onto a kind of interior androgyny, a hermaphrodism of

the soul. The sodomite had been a temporary aberration; the

homosexual was now a species” (43). The model of

understanding that classifies depression as a “species” or a

condition, an empirically existing thing which can be

objectively communicated, rather than an “aberration” which is

a temporary state not created by a biological and thus not

“real” problem, creates a split in the conscious experience of

depression in which its affective disturbance is authentically

and sincerely felt to be emotionally real while maintaining a

consciousness of its unreality drawn from the awareness of

depression as being caused by a condition external to “true”

or “normal” emotional response. This is how depression comes

to so thoroughly wreak havoc on the traditional concept of the

mind/body split, by inverting and altering many of its

associations.

Antichrist is deeply concerned with this very phenomenon,

dramatizing it strongly by making its male lead a clinical

psychiatrist and its female lead suffer from depression

apparently brought on by the death of their child but revealed

to be something much deeper. In the third scene of the film,

He comes to visit She in an inpatient mental hospital where He

reveals she has been staying for over a month. As She begins

to blame herself for the death of the child, He remarks that

her doctor is giving her too much medication and tells her

“Grief. It’s not a disease, it’s a natural, healthy reaction.

You can’t just remove it, you mustn’t.” The previous line

makes feminine the desire for escape from depression shown by

Keats in his poems, essentially classifying medicating mental

illness as a weak compromise because it does not make visible

what, for him, must exist: a rational, knowable cause for

depression. Later in the film, He beseeches She to “make a

list of the things you’re afraid of” trying insistently to

find what it is that is “making” her depressed. She begins to

explain that Eden, presumably the name for the forest in which

the cabin they stay in is located, had been beautiful to hear

until she realized that “Oak trees live to be hundreds of

years old. They only have to produce one single tree every

hundred years in order to propagate. The acorns fell on the

roof then, too. Kept falling and falling, and dying and dying.

[…] And I could hear what I couldn’t hear before. The cry of

all things that are about to die.” To this, He responds

“Acorns don’t cry, you know that as well as I do. That’s what

fear is. Your thoughts distort reality, not the other way

around,” apparently so committed to rationalism that he

refuses even the common poetic device of personification.

Perhaps to make fun of this very belief about distortion

in He, Von Trier frequently uses digital effects to

unnaturally “bend” several shots in the film, making parts of

the frame look as though there is magnifying glass warping

them. This is a jab at a specific kind of rationality about

film, perhaps most strongly voiced by Soviet Realist filmmaker

Dziga Vertov in “We: A Variation on a Manifesto:” “The kino-

eye3 lives and moves in time and space; it gathers and records

impressions in a manner wholly different than that of the

human eye. The position of our bodies while observing or our

perception of a certain number of features of a visual

phenomenon in a given instant are by no means obligatory

limitations for the camera which, since it is perfected,

perceives more and better” (Vertov 9). Realism in many ways

sought to counteract the emotional position of Romanticism,

and specifically in Realist film there was a belief that the

camera could produce true images, like Vertov says, free from

the imperfections of human perception.

3 Vertov’s neologism for the movie camera, devised to distinguish the film camera from still cameras and to emphasize the sort of transcendent perceptionhe speaks of in this excerpt.

Prior to Antichrist, Von Trier seemed enthralled by this

position on the nature of art and film; his own prescriptive

Dogme 95 film movement barred the use of digital effects, non-

diegetic music, and black-and-white film, all of which appear

in this film and the two he has made since. Von Trier

previously seemed interested in Clement Greenberg’s concept of

artistic purity, which he explained thus: “It quickly emerged

that the unique and proper area of competence of each art

coincided with all that was unique in the nature of its

medium. The task of self-criticism became to eliminate from

the specific effects of each art any and every effect that

might conceivably be borrowed from or by the medium of any

other art.” (Greenberg and O’Brian 86). Through depression and

his experience with therapy, Von Trier seems to have something

greatly redemptive in Romanticism that was lost after Realism

and Modernism seemed to normalize the sort of masculine

rationality it opposed. Von Trier repudiates this and even to

state that in film and inside depression no objective

perception is possible, challenging the anxiety about the

indexical representation that would come to characterize

reactions to Romanticism.

This is by no means the only meaning of reproduction that

Antichrist challenges anxieties over. The film is full of

blatantly obvious Freudian imagery, the first scene is, after

all, a re-enactment of the classic Freudian trauma of the

child discovering his parents having sex. Sexual contact also

provides the mode of escape earlier modeled by Keats; He

refuses She’s intense advances repeatedly until She appears

happy one morning, which seems to convince him that her desire

for sex is no longer motivated by escape but by love for him.

They have sex several more times throughout the film, but

these encounters escalate in their inclusion of physical pain

each time. First She bites He hard enough for him to abort

the act altogether. Later, She asks him to hit her during

sex, but he refuses. She tells him “then you don’t love me,”

and runs out their cabin, still naked, into the forest. He

follows and eventually gives in and hits her. Finally, in

what is by far the most difficult-to-watch scene in the film,

She beats him unconscious with a wrench, strips him, and

masturbates him until he ejaculates blood; She appears

unsatisfied by this and promptly cuts off her clitoris with a

pair of scissors. The escape escalates until there is no

longer a difference between the pleasure it seeks and the pain

that spurred it; the sublime is indistinguishable from the

enjoyment of suffering. Bruhm writes of the Marquis de Sade

that “[He] asserts, ‘there is no more lively sensation than

that of pain.’ For Sade, pain is syllogistic: aesthetics

validates feeling; the greater the feeling, the more aesthetic

the experience; pain is the most intense of all feeling;

therefore, pain is the most aesthetic experience we can have,”

and while de Sade seems like an obvious choice for this sort

of idea, he is merely expressing more literally the confusing

relationship to emotional pain depression encompasses

described by Keats (.

He (the character) comes to personify an extreme

rationality and belief in the knowability and moral stability

of all things that is Gothic in its conservative certainty.

He resembles quite strongly the archetypal Gothic hero, Dr.

Frankenstein, especially in his concern over She’s total

rejection of the value of womanhood and motherhood when she

says “If human nature is evil, then that goes as well for the

nature of all the sisters. Women do not control their own

bodies. Nature does.” She declares that “nature is Satan’s

church,” which provides the key to the worldview of Antichrist:

it essentially posits a Manichean reversal in which the world

is created in the image of total malevolence, here called

Satan. This is a belief that He’s rationalism is unable to

address, because it does not allow for “good” and “evil” as

actually-existing forces beyond the grasp of human

understanding, as he says, “Good and evil have nothing to do

with therapy. You know how many innocent women were killed in

the sixteenth century alone, just for being women?” If all

life and nature are evil, then consequently, those who

perpetuate it participate in the continuance of evil, and the

end of life is good. The film communicates this outside of

dialogue by showing us a deer with the rotting leg of a

stillborn fawn hanging out of it, a fox eating itself that

says to He, in a human voice, “chaos reigns,” and finally a

dead bird that begins to struggle its way back to life while

He attempts to kill it. “The sisters” does not mean merely

human women, it means every female of every species. It is

important here to avoid the simple logical leap of assuming

that because women are more closely associated with

reproduction that the film is unequivocally saying that women

are evil in reality. Antichrist was met strongly with charges of

being misogynistic for explicitly saying that women are evil

in the fashion, but the film is really quite feminist in its

dogged assertion of the value of She’s feelings and experience

over He’s insistence on empirical answers rather than actually

trying to understand her. Badley writes that “Supported by

Gainsbourg’s several interviews, Trier claims that She

embodies his own psychological struggles, reminding Aftab that

‘I’ve always been the female character in all my films,’

adding that ‘the men tend to just be

stupid, to have theories about things and to destroy

everything,’” and in this case it also important to remember

that reproduction does not rely solely on the existence of

women (Badley 149).

As the film reaches its final act, it becomes clear that

He is no longer trying to help She but trying to destroy her;

though, taken as whole, the film would argue that this is what

he has been doing all along. Gayatri Spivak’s reading of

Frankenstein proposes an interpretation where Dr. Frankenstein

is not challenging God, but women:

Frankenstein's apparent antagonist is God himself as

Maker of Man, but his real competitor is also woman as

the maker of children. In Shelley's view, man's hubris as

soul maker both usurps the place of God and attempts --

vainly -- to sublate woman's physiological prerogative.

Indeed, indulging a Freudian fantasy here, I could urge

that, if to give and withhold to/from the mother a

phallus is the male fetish, then to give and withhold

to/from the man a womb might be the female fetish. The

icon of the sublimated womb in man is surely his

productive brain, the box in the head. (Spivak)

Thus the strongest connection is made between maleness, the

mind, and rationality, it is how He is able to create the

world. At the end of the film, He finally strangles She and

burns her body in a manner meant to recall the execution of

witches; an effects shot fades in several piles of dead female

bodies under her pyre. In the film’s inverted depressive

structure, this is not a Gothic ending: She is victorious and

has finally made the escape, but paradoxically He continues

the existence of suffering by killing her out of fear of

facing total irrationality. The epilogue of the film shows He

walking out of the forest as suddenly hundreds of women

dressed in sixteenth-century clothing walk up the hill,

presumably to see the body of She. Badley writes that “the

title supports the culminating vision of a pre-Christian,

pagan Eden as, in the film’s final moments, hordes of glowing,

faceless (but otherwise ordinary, sturdy European) women

surround and move past him and nature is restored to benignly

indifferent fecundity,” this is meant to be a reminder to him

of the deaths caused by the distrust of the feminine as it is

associated with the emotional and the irrational which he

symbolically opposes, and a repudiation of the strongly

Christian Gothic tradition that sees the universe “set right”

after the supernatural events of its narrative.

Coleridge wrote in a review of Matthew Lewis’ novel The

Monk that “Situations of torment, and images of naked horror,

are easily conceived; and a writer in whose works they abound

deserves our gratitude almost equally with him who should drag

us by way of sport through a military hospital,” and while

Antichrist is likely the most severe fashion in which Von Trier

could have stated this, he is doing it for a reason: for him,

depression does not have an answer in the rational sense,

constructed as it has been across history as an isolated

occurrence, a mental illness, and an identity category, and

rationality cannot hope to provide an answer to it in a world

that rationalism ultimately cannot understand. Antichrist thus

is indeed a Romantic text in rejecting Realism, and in its

embrace and exploration of Keatsian modes of affect.

Works Cited

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Gainsbourg. Keyfilms, 2009.

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Culture. Albany: State University of New York, 1987. Print.

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U of Pennsylvania, 1994. Print.

Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality. London: Penguin, 1992. Print.

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