December 23, 2009
Prologue: Whilst a husband and wife have sex at home, their toddler climbs out a window and falls to his death. In the film, the husband is a therapist and is known simply as He. Similarly, the wife is a researcher into the history of witchcraft and is known simply as She. Note: ...( read more)He is played by Willem Dafoe, who famously portrayed Jesus Christ in Martin Scorsese's "The Last Temptation of Christ".
Chapter one (Grief): She collapses at her child's funeral and is hospitalised. He takes over her treatment, believing that He can cure her with the miracles of Science. His theory is that she must re-live her deepest fears. She says she associates fear with Eden, a cabin in the woods where she spent the previous summer trying to finish her dissertation on "Gynocide" (the killing of women). They travel to Eden (the Biblical cradle of mankind) and start hiking through the woods. He sees a deer whose stillborn fawn is still partly contained in its womb. At this stage, Mother and Child, Nature and Birth, are still intertwined in an uneasy harmony.
Chapter two (Pain): He directs her in therapeutic exercises. "I understood that everything that used to be beautiful about Eden was perhaps hideous," she says. "Now I could hear what I couldn't hear before, the cry of all things that are going to die." Out walking, He sees a wounded fox which speaks: "chaos reigns."
Chapter three (Despair): He confronts her with an autopsy report and explains that their son's feet were deformed because she forced the kid to wear his shoes on the wrong feet. Why was she trying to harm the kid? She knocks her husband unconscious, batters his genitals, masturbates him, and bolts a lathe wheel onto his leg. He manages to crawl into a foxhole where he finds an injured bird. It is unable to fly, he is unable to walk, both creatures bound to the land. Hands reach out from the Earth, man and nature re-embrace.
Chapter four (The Three Beggars): It is revealed that she was watching their son as he climbed up to the window. She let the kid die. She mutilates her own genitals with scissors. Her scream alerts the deer, fox, and bird, which come to the cabin. Seeing Him about to extract the wheel, she stabs him. He fights back, strangles her, and burns her corpse on a pyre. A modern man of science becomes a medieval witch hunter.
Epilogue: He limps away from Eden. Human bodies litter the landscape. He watches a host of women, their faces smudged, climb up a wooded hillside. The film ends.
So what we have here is the product of director Lars Von Trier's serious and prolonged depression. The film is his rejection of all religion, a sort of post-depression admittance of both atheism and hopelessness and also a nightmarish desire on Lars Von Trier's part to penalise himself for all the "wrongs" and "persecutions" of Catholicism. The film calls itself anti-Christ because it is completely against Christ, Willem Dafoe becoming a collapsed version of pseudo-science and Christianity who is symbolically castrated and turned over to a now hostile world, the director fetishizing his newfound awareness of the hungry ugliness of nature, vagina, birth, death- the spiralling ugliness and baseness of life - God symbolically sodomizing the holy child back out of Mary whilst faceless women are resurrected from the very bowels of the Earth.
Everything is now wrong and we are already in hell. Nature has revealed itself as the relentlessly cruel, profoundly disgusting and indifferent monster it always was. Human nature is even worse, and women are as disturbed and disturbing as anything because they are nature embodied, able to create, bound to the cosmic cycles of menstruation, pregnancy and birth. Discovering this leads the wife to self hatred, self-mutilation and infanticide. Destroy the penis and the vagina and end the spread of Satan's church.
The film is graphic, but more so for the paradoxes it raises. Men find it hard to reconcile the comforting warmth of the vagina with the monstrosity it becomes at birth within sanitised hospital surroundings. Menstration is itself now ambiguous, the regular heavy flow of blood stymied by a world of plastic bags, air fresheners and pre-cooked meat. Female nature, like all modern nature, is experienced in a bizarre, almost entirely individualised way. Biology, sex, defecation, in their raw and visceral states, have receded back into the realm of the private and the professionally managed. Eyes are shut. Doors are closed.
When the couple are later kept awake by acorns falling on the roof of the cabin, She tells Him that it takes a hundred years for an oak to reproduce itself just once. The tragedy of the only child dying is the fear of the modern age. Less than a century ago, over-investment in any given child would potentially be a massive waste of time - far better to churn them out and hope that some survive. Nature: brutally pragmatic.
Antichrist is not, however, straightforwardly an anti-Christian film. It is a heretical film in the Gnostic non-tradition. There is no hope, no salvation, no righting of order, a fact which brought about a profound state Antonioni-like depression in Lars Von Trier. But Despair, Grief and Pain (the 3 encountered animals), as Dafoe's character points out, don't even exist. There is no separating the natural from the unnatural, right from wrong, life from death.
An X-rated Woody Allen film, director Lars Von Trier failing to produce a new mythography of despair. He serves up "Blair Witch Project" with a sprinkling of Herzog, Antonioni and Dreyer, but fails to film Nature in a way that makes it seem truly bleak and oppressive. Of course the scenes of mutilation and have a visceral power, but this is cheaply achieved.
Worth two viewings.
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