Journal of Religion & Film Volume 16 Article 3 Issue 1April 2012 5-25-2012 There’s No Place Like Home: From Oz to Antichrist J. Sage Elwell Texas Christian University, Fort Worth, Texas, [email protected] Recommended Citation Elwell, J. Sage (2012) "There’s No Place Like Home: From Oz to Antichrist,"Journal of Religion & Film: Vol. 16 : Iss. 1 , Article 3. Available at: https://digitalcommons.unomaha.edu/jrf/vol16/iss1/3 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by DigitalCommons@UNO. It has been accepted for inclusion in Journal of Religion & Film by an authorized editor of DigitalCommons@UNO. For more information, please [email protected]. There’s No Place Like Home: From Oz to Antichrist Abstract This article explores the dialectic of the uncanny inThe Wizard of Oz(Victor Flemming, 1939) andAntichrist (Lars von Trier, 2009), treating the latter as a sequel to the former such that we encounter Dorothy first as a young girl and then as a grown woman. I observe that the uncanny entails a repressive and expressive moment that is cinematically rendered in these two films, and drawing on Freud and Žižek, I argue that in Dorothy’s evolution fromOztoAntichristwe see that the witches and wizards and gods and devils of our own minds are known to us most powerfully through the uncanny aesthetics of their repression and expression. Keywords The Wizard of Oz; Antichrist; Lars von Trier; uncanny; Freud; Žižek; witches; aesthetics of horror; aesthetics of pornography; repression Author Notes J. Sage Elwell is Assistant Professor of Religion, Art, and Visual Culture at Texas Christian University. He is author of Crisis of Transcendence: A Theology of Digital Art and Culture (Rowman and Littlefield, 2011) and also publishes and presents in the areas of suffering and embodiment, the aesthetics of atrocity, religion and film, and atheism and the arts. He also works as an artist in digital media, photography, and book art. Dr. Elwell holds a BA in Religious Studies, from William Jewell College, an MA in Philosophy of Religion from the University of Kansas, an M.Litt in Philosophical Theology from the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, and a PhD in Religion, Culture, and the Arts from the University of Iowa. This article is available in Journal of Religion & Film:https://digitalcommons.unomaha.edu/jrf/vol16/iss1/3 Elwell: There’s No Place Like Home: From Oz to Antichrist It is difficult to imagine two more dissimilar films than The Wizard of Oz (Victor Flemming, 1939) and Antichrist (Lars von Trier, 2009). The Wizard of Oz is an adaptation of L. Frank Baum’s children's book of the same title and tells the story of a girl who travels to the magical land of Oz where she encounters witches, wizards, and flying monkeys before clicking her heels together and waking up back in Kansas. Antichrist is the unholy offering of bad boy director and Danish provocateur Lars von Trier. Part porno, part horror flick, Antichrist tells the story of two unnamed characters, a husband and wife, who retreat to a cabin in a forest called Eden after the death of their son where they inflict upon one another brutal and unspeakable atrocities. However, the differences between these two films are more like inversions rather than a catalog of contrasts. And these inversions suggest an illuminating dialectic. The Wizard of Oz is about a young girl named Dorothy, Antichrist is about a grown woman known only as She. In The Wizard of Oz Dorothy defeats the witch, in Antichrist She becomes the witch. In The Wizard of Oz Dorothy travels through Oz to the Emerald City, in Antichrist She travels out of the city and into the darkness of a forest called Eden. And whereas Oz is a dream, Eden is real. On her journey, Dorothy’s three companions are in search of knowledge, love, and courage. In Antichrist She also has three companions, though they bring Published by DigitalCommons@UNO, 2012 1 Journal of Religion & Film, Vol. 16 [2012], Iss. 1, Art. 3 grief, pain, and despair. But most importantly, they each perform the unconscious. The Wizard of Oz presents Dorothy’s dream of Oz as an escape from the reality of her life in Kansas as she struggles to repress her impulse to flee her stultifying farm life. Antichrist similarly invites viewers into the unconscious of a woman rebelling against her reality. In Antichrist however, the repressed violently returns when She travels to Eden and embraces the dark impulses that Dorothy left in Oz. Side-by-side, these two films offer a cinematic window on to the suppression and expression of the unconscious. Thus, in this article I set these two very different, yet remarkably parallel, films along side one another in order to trace the arc that leaps between them. I propose to treat the latter, Antichrist, as a sequel to the former, The Wizard of Oz, such that Antichrist tells a story of Dorothy grown up. In the space between these films I suggest that we glimpse a cinematic dialectic of the uncanny, entailing as it does, repression and the return of the repressed. I conclude that in Dorothy’s evolution from Oz to Antichrist we see that the witches and wizards and gods and devils of our unconscious minds are known to us most powerfully through the uncanny aesthetics of their repression and expression. To make this argument I rely on Freud’s articulation of the uncanny from his famous 1919 essay of the same title and Slavoj Žižek’s notion of fantasy. I begin by first presenting the relevant ideas from each thinker before moving on to https://digitalcommons.unomaha.edu/jrf/vol16/iss1/3 2 Elwell: There’s No Place Like Home: From Oz to Antichrist the films themselves, where I turn to the application of these ideas. In this section, I map the surprising parallels between the films, in both content and shared mythic architecture, which, appealing first to Žižek and then to Freud, I argue figures a cinematic dialectic of the uncanny in the life of Dorothy, young and old. Returning to the beginning then, I conclude that these films, placed along side one another, disclose the uncanny aesthetics of repression and expression that animate the gods and devils, witches and wizards of the mind.1 Freud’s Uncanny and Žižek’s Fantasy Freud’s Uncanny In his essay on the uncanny Freud described the heimlich, the homey or familiar, as containing its own opposite – the unheimlich, or the uncanny. The unheimlich refers to the unfamiliar, the disturbing, the strange, and the weird. Freud explained that the heimlich contains its opposite in that it describes that which is intimate, known, and private. By virtue of this privacy and intimacy, the heimlich is at once familiar yet hidden and secretive. The hidden and secretive aspect of the heimlich that most interested Freud was expressed in the workings of Published by DigitalCommons@UNO, 2012 3 Journal of Religion & Film, Vol. 16 [2012], Iss. 1, Art. 3 the unconscious; that dimension of the psyche that is at once most active and powerful, yet also most intimate and hidden. The unheimlich – the uncanny – as Freud characterized it, refers to the emergence into consciousness of the repressed or surmounted drives of the unconscious id. Thus the common description of the uncanny as the “return of the repressed.” It is no coincidence that at the same time he was writing his essay on the uncanny, Freud was also completing Beyond the Pleasure Principle, wherein he replaced the libidinal and egoistic drives of his earlier work with the more potent and contestable pairing of eros and thanatos2 – life and death, pleasure and aggression. The uncanny is thus the conscious encounter with the otherwise repressed instinctual drives toward pleasure and aggression that seethe in the unconscious. As Freud writes, “this uncanny element is actually nothing new or strange, but something that was long familiar to the psyche and was estranged from it only through being repressed.”3 Freud begins his inquiry into the uncanny by observing that, “It is only rarely that a psychoanalyst feels impelled to investigate the subject of aesthetics…”4 For Freud, the uncanny falls to aesthetics because it pertains to “the qualities of feeling.”5 The feeling Freud has in mind is the return of the repressed. This return of the repressed is an aesthetic phenomenon inasmuch as it prompts “feelings of repulsion and distress.”6 https://digitalcommons.unomaha.edu/jrf/vol16/iss1/3 4 Elwell: There’s No Place Like Home: From Oz to Antichrist Although philosophical aesthetics has historically focused on “positive” qualities like beauty and the sublime, their opposite is no less an appropriate subject inasmuch as the perverse, the hideous, and the frightful are likewise “qualities of feeling.”7 If aesthetics is going to take the realm of sensuous experience as its subject as Baumgarten first intended, then it must embrace the whole panoply of feelings, including the most morbid. Thus for Freud the uncanny is the quintessential “negative” aesthetic. It represents the most archaic physic experiences realized in sensible form. Moreover, Freud recognized that these experiences are often themselves provoked through aesthetic means. For example, using shocking hues and dramatic composition or cinematic techniques and visual tropes the painter or filmmaker can prompt an uncanny experience in the viewer by reminding us that the desires and drives we thought were gone have been lurking in our unconscious all along. Thus, where in The Wizard of Oz we experience the aesthetics of repression, in Antichrist we witness the full return of the repressed in filmic form as the drive to sex and death explode in a grotesque coupling of the aesthetics of pornography and horror that incite feelings of repulsion and distress. Žižek’s Fantasy In a reinterpretation of Freudian thought, Žižek offers to the uncanny the Lacanian complement of fantasy. For Žižek fantasy is the answer to the enigma, Published by DigitalCommons@UNO, 2012 5 Journal of Religion & Film, Vol. 16 [2012], Iss. 1, Art. 3 “Che vuoi?”. What do you want? However, unlike Freud, for whom the instinctual drives of the id form the hard kernel of the unconscious, for Žižek there is a hollow void at the core of subjectivity. It is not the case however, as Foucault, Derrida, or Deleuze might suggest, that subjectivity is nothing more than a performative process or a construct of discourses. Rather, like Lacan, for Žižek there is a powerful extradiscursive force that constitutes “the truly traumatic core of the modern subject.”8 This force is the REAL and stands in contradistinction to commonplace reality in that it corresponds to the limits and limitations of language and the entire symbolic order that constitutes reality. Fantasy structures what we call reality by constructing the contours of desire as a veil pulled over the REAL. Fantasy is not escape from reality into desire, rather it is the transcendental framework that affords the very coordinates of our desire that are repressed and produced by the pacifying law of reality. Thus fantasy generates desire, not the other way around. That is, fantasy is not about what we desire, rather what we desire is the product of the fantasies into which specific desires fit. These desires in turn form the basis for an ideologically sanctioned version of reality. This is because our unconscious fantasies prompt conscious desires that reinforce dominate cultural values. This is why Žižek claims that fantasy, as an answer to the enigma, “What do you want?”, is in fact an answer to the question, “’What do others want from me? What do they see in me? What am I for others?’”9 By https://digitalcommons.unomaha.edu/jrf/vol16/iss1/3 6 Elwell: There’s No Place Like Home: From Oz to Antichrist providing the “transcendental schemata” for the desires that prompt our responses to these questions (and the sanctioned ideologies they convey), fantasy operates as the structuring agent of what we call reality. 10 Fantasy is the reality of the unconscious. Where Freud emphasized the unconscious as a reservoir for the wild and illicit drives, Žižek adds that inasmuch as these drives are repressed, the unconscious is also, if not above all, the traumatic site of primal castration by the Oedipal law of repression. Thus he writes that, “The Freudian point regarding fundamental fantasy would be that each subject, female or male, possesses such a ‘factor’ which regulates his or her desire…There is nothing uplifting about our awareness of this ‘factor’: such awareness can never be subjectivized; it is uncanny – even horrifying – since it somehow ‘depossesses’ the subject…”11 The “factor” that Žižek mentions here is the repressed impulse that triggers desire. Awareness of this “factor” is uncanny because it appears as something other than our own innermost psychic being when it is in fact the deep content of our unconscious and it compels behavior with a force that transcends the subject. If for Žižek the reality of the conscious subject is constituted by the repressive elements realized in the fantasy response to the question “What do others want from me?”, then the horror of the uncanny is the non-symbolizable, fundamentally aesthetic character (the quality of feeling) of both its repression and expression. Thus, on one hand, Žižek offers fantasy as the mechanism of Published by DigitalCommons@UNO, 2012 7 Journal of Religion & Film, Vol. 16 [2012], Iss. 1, Art. 3 repression that supports the symbolic world of language and law that is realized as normative ideology and transgressed in the return of the repressed. On the other hand, Freud offers the uncanny as the quintessential moment of the return of our repressed instinctual drives for pleasure and aggression. Turning to The Wizard of Oz and Antichrist, we see then the narrativizing aesthetics of Žižek’s repressive fantasy in Dorothy’s dream-work in Oz and the explosive return of the repressed in the aesthetics of sexualized violence played out by an adult Dorothy as the unnamed character She in Eden. The Yellow Brick Road Between Oz and Eden Taking a character from one film and interpreting her as the same, though matured, character of another, altogether different, film is unusual. There is admittedly no reason to suspect that Lars von Trier had any intention of casting his female lead as a grown up version of Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz. Neither is there any reason to believe that he set out to create something of a postmodern sequel to The Wizard of Oz. Rather, his own comments quite plainly set out that, in the wake of a serious and debilitating depression, his aim was to exorcise his own internal demons in a Strindbergian homage to Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky, and that the female protagonist was largely a projection of his own psyche.12 Thus von Trier made Antichrist as a type of therapy.13 https://digitalcommons.unomaha.edu/jrf/vol16/iss1/3 8