A few years ago I attended a John Lydon concert inside a Somerset covered market. The music was good and the mood was cheerful, with the crowd liberally studded with infirm, ageing punks. There were punks clutching walking frames and punks in wheelchairs. There was even a dead punk in an urn who had requested that the ex-Pistol scatter his ashes on stage. Lydon obliged and pretended to gag. He said, “No offence, mate, but you taste like Gauloises.”
Forget the tired adage about policemen getting young. It’s punks getting old that’s the real measure of age, at least for those of us who were raised in the afterglow of new wave music and grindhouse cinema. It’s seeing the upstarts and berserkers who once electrified the Eighties and Nighties being quietly steered into retirement homes or laid to rest and memorialised. In life these people embodied something wild, dark and delicious. In death they are reduced to a set of smiling memes and inspirational quotes. I’m not sure which is more alarming.
Anyone reading the recent tributes to David Lynch, for instance, would be forgiven for thinking of him as America’s eccentric, benign uncle, beaming out on his flock with a mug of warm coffee and his daily meditation advice. That was certainly one aspect of the man, although it rather risks glossing over the actual work he produced. Lynch’s art wasn’t sweet. The Straight Story aside, it was chaotic and savage – meant to chill us to the bone. “There goes the Willy Wonka of filmmaking,” gushed Lara Flynn Boyle the day after his death, as though he’d just exited stage-left after singing “Pure Imagination” to a group of starstruck children.
One dreads to imagine how Lars von Trier will be described when his number is up. The Just William of filmmaking? Arthouse’s Horrid Henry? For the time being, thank goodness, the man is still clinging on – impish and awkward and presumably still raising hell in his immediate circle. But in 2022, Von Trier announced that he had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. Last month his production company confirmed that he is now being treated at a care centre in Denmark. “Lars is doing well under the circumstances,” said producer Louise Vesth. You could read a whole book into those final three words.
“A film should be like a stone in your shoe,” Von Trier used to say, by which he meant that it should be troublesome and annoying and occasionally downright painful. That’s not for all tastes – probably it’s not for most tastes – but the Dane’s best stones were finely cut works of art, like little diamonds, and I can’t think of another director from the past 30 years who has been so reliably exciting and enraging. Von Trier’s films don’t care whether we like them or not. They’re provocative and discombobulating. They practically invite our revulsion and rage. Perversely, that’s what made them all the more beautiful. For years the most violent audience response I’d ever witnessed came at the Cannes press screening of Antichrist (2009). It was only topped by the Cannes press screening of The House That Jack Built (2018).
Fans will no doubt take a crumb of comfort from Vesth’s assertion that Von Trier is doing well “under the circumstances”. But one might argue that this is what he’s always done: made lemons into tart lemonade; turned those pebbles into diamonds. He’s shot all of his films in the teeth of alcoholism and depression. If there were no impediments to be had, he’d quite likely devise them himself, as he famously did with his infamous Dogme 95 Manifesto. Here, the rules state that the camera be hand-held, that genre movies were unacceptable, and that all shooting had to be achieved on location using natural sound and light. Granted, Dogme 95 was a joke but it made some valid points. A challenge is a privilege. The difficulty is the point.
Lars von Trier’s films don’t care whether we like them or not. They’re provocative and discombobulating. They practically invite our revulsion and rage
Von Trier is due to direct again this summer – assuming he’s not incapacitated; assuming the difficulty can be met. His next film is called After and is reputedly about death. “After has always been designed to be made based on Lars’s physical condition,” explained his friend, producer Peter Aalbaek Jensen. “He has always used limitations for something creative.”
In 2020 the filmmaker Gaspar Noé, the rambunctious creator of Enter the Void, Irreversible and Climax, suffered a near-fatal brain haemorrhage. He emerged from the hospital in a more sombre, reflective mood to shoot the magnificent Vortex (2021), which trailed a dying old couple around a cramped Paris flat. Quiet and stealthy where Noé’s pictures had been loud, brash and stroboscopic, Vortex points the direction that Von Trier might choose to go himself assuming he is able to get After off the ground. It shows that it is possible to survive, slip death and make a different kind of film. It may not be as lively as Von Trier's trademark provocations, but it's better than the alternative.
I wonder, though, if this might be the endgame for a certain strain of uncompromising left-field cinema. Lynch has already left the building. Von Trier and Noé are ailing. Almodovar and Ferrara have aged. In the meantime Yorgos Lanthimos and Pablo Larraín, their natural successors, appear to have mellowed prematurely.
Perhaps disturbing, dark cinema is a luxury we feel we can no longer afford. Not when the US president is sharing his “Trump Gaza” movie to the fanbase, or Elon Musk is cosplaying The Texas Chainsaw Massacre on stage. But the films of Lynch and Von Trier aren’t debasing or poisonous. They’re thrilling, galvanising and sometimes maddening, too; the equivalent of those abstracts by Kandinsky, Picasso and Klee that the Nazis chose to label “degenerate art”. Films can be your best friend, your entertainer, sometimes even your comfort blanket. But we also need those directors who make a different kind of picture: who rattle the cage and break the mould and scatter stones in all our shoes.
