HOWZAT

The odd thing about online violence is that its sheer availability has prompted a new wave of censor­ship. The respectable players don’t want to be associated with the more grisly inhabitants of the internet swamp. So YouTube censors violent material, including the death of poor Neda only because of its docu­mentary importance. And Apple, the supreme Silicon Valley player in the consumer market, has been censoring what is available via applications for its iPhone. It even, at one point, banned an e-book reader called Eucalyptus because it gave access to the Kama Sutra. Commercially driven censorship seems to be the strictest of all.

Yet beyond YouTube and iPhone “apps” lies a whole landscape of easily available graphic violence. If watching this stuff does people harm, then harm is surely being done on a mass scale. But it remains a tedious truism that academic opinion on this is divided. Some studies show damage, others don’t. Follow your prejudice. Mine is that one film — even one as nasty as Antichrist — probably won’t do much damage, but a prolonged diet of such material almost certainly will, because it will dangerously blur the boundary between hurt on screen and in the world. Unless a crime is committed, or some clear mental illness appears, the damage of that blurring may not be apparent, other than in the form of decayed and empty personalities. In other words, the harm will be terrible but indefinable.

This leaves the BBFC in a tricky position. Is it holding the line against social decay or upholding the freedom of mature adults to see what they want? The board has never worked this out, and usually ends up relying on a series of vague and unconfessed prejudices of its own. Last month, for example, it reclassified an episode of Friends on DVD because it contained the phrase “laundry spaz” to describe Jennifer Aniston’s Rachel — she couldn’t load a washing machine. Its rating was raised from a PG to a 12. It’s perhaps just as well they didn’t ask poor Rachel to do an auto-clitoridectomy.

In this context, Antichrist may be seen as just another movie shocker, concern about which will be seen, in time, as quaint. But I don’t think so. Its sheer badness and the undergraduate cynicism of its director raise this to a different level. Why did Trier shoot those scenes the way he did? Not in the name of art, but to compete, to do something, anything, to stir the jaded sensibilities of an age stunned by screen violence. And the suckers in the art-house crowd fell for it.

I said I would tell you about the final obscenity in that last shot. It was just a dedication of the film to the late Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky. Tarkovsky is the Shakespeare or Titian of cinema, an artist of the highest order. Trier, at his best, is the Jeffrey Archer. My rage was uncontrollable. But, just in time, I thought, “He’s not worth it,” and the Oddbins window survived another day.

Antichrist opens on July 24

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