Antichrist

while I agree that the talking fox was too heavy metal cliche to be anything other than comic, and that this is a deeply problematic film, I am not sure that it is Misogynistic. It seems to be to be a detailed examination of internalised oppression, where a woman takes on the characteristics ascribed to her gender by some of the most vicious anti-female authors. I take it more as an attempt to grapple with the consequences of patriarchal savagery, to actually expose the undercurrent of female hatred that drives social conditioning.
In this sense, the film has a profoundly moral purpose. I am not quite sure that I'd push for it as a feminist work, but in a cinematic universe that sells both female terror and Fatal Attraction as entertainment, Anti Christ has something challenging in its apparent nihilism. I also think Defoe is the villain; manipulative and callous, he uses the word love as blackmail and drives his wife to madness just to satisfy his professional egotism.
You are quite right to note that his previous films have been notable for some anti-female sentiments and I agree that two stars is right for the film's relative status in the cinema. It is not there to be enjoyed. There is something disturbing in Trier's intention to make a film like this, and I am open to the criticism that my own aesthetic has been twisted by years of Live Art antics.

DM Editor: 'I say, Harty, what can we get angry about this week...I hear that Antichrist is rather profane.'

Christopher Hart: 'I haven't seen it myself, nor shall I.'

DM Editor: 'Well, why don't you write a 800 treatise on it anyway.'

CH: Sure. Can I slag off Johnny Foreigner while I'm at it?

I was also interested in the film's dedication to Tarkovsky. It did remind me, visually at least, of The Mirror, a parallel that I think Trier wanted to make explicit. Then there is the witches' march at the end, which was far from threatening but almost like the resurrection of the innocent dead. That reminded me of the sabbat in Andrei Rublev, which deals with paganism very positively for a pretty Christian movie.
This intertextuality does encourage me to think that Anti Christ wants us to think about how we associate femininity with nature- The Mirror uses the mother as a metaphor for Russia, and Anti Christ's 'nature is satan's church' stance does strikingly recall the more violent strands of misogynist rhetoric, where women is damned as a symbol of fallen nature.

*SPOILERS AHEAD*

That Daily Mail article is truly horrific. As I’m sure came through in my review I have a huge problem with the politics of Antichrist (aesthetically and formally I think there is a great deal of merit to it) but I’m equally against the sort of absurd censorship that the Daily Mail pedals.

I do think Antichrist is a misogynistic film, for several reasons. Firstly, as you say Gareth, Lars Von Trier’s previous films have been fraught with problems in terms of the way he treats his female characters, again and again he has presented audiences with films based on the torture and suffering of women. Given the extent to which his work is problematic I find it difficult to approach Antichrist thinking that he has some form of feminist agenda. In interviews, whilst he has disputed claims he is a misogynist he also has shown no sign that he intentionally wanted to tackle feminist issues (he has merely commented that he thought a story about witches was a great topic for a film). This raises the question of how important a director’s intention is in interpreting a film. For me it’s quite important and for a film as complex as this I think it needs to be considered.

Secondly, in narrative terms the film sets up and cements the female character as guilty of the tragedy that the film begins with. Towards the end of the film we see the flashback of her watching as her son falls from the window, choosing instead to continue enjoying sex with her husband rather than prevent the accident. With this ‘twist’ there is no way we can argue that she is innocent nor can we argue that she was made insane by her controlling husband. She is not only guilty of letting her son die but that guilt is placed firmly in her sexuality. Von Trier thus seems to be cementing the link between the nature of evil and femininity.

And finally, the tone of the film, something I touch upon in my review. At Cannes many scenes (the talking fox especially) were greeted with hysterical laughter and I’ve since met people who have interpreted the film as a black comedy. This confirms my thoughts that the tone of Antichrist is not only uneven but also misplaced – I have to say I came away from the film thinking it was in fact quite silly rather than horrifying, as I would imagine was the intention.

Sorry about the very long post, hopefully it shows where I was coming from for the review. It’s also great to see people engaging with the film rather than leaping to conclusions based on a couple of ‘shocking’ scenes (which seems to be quite a lot of the British press’s reaction). Keep it coming!

(P.S. If you’re after some trangressive cinema of a feminist nature I’d suggest a bit of Catherine Breillat as a possible antidote to Antichrist)

SPOLIERS AHEAD

Interesting point about Breillat Gail: Anatomy of Hell is a far more substantial take on the Adam and Eve story, but I’m not sure that’s what this film actually is at all.

I’d pay very little heed to what Lars von Trier has said in interviews: an artist he may be, but let’s face it, his speciality lies in the bullshit variety!

The misogyny accusations levelled at him in the past have clearly fuelled a heightened desire to explore misogyny as subject matter (hence his fascination with, among others, Strindberg). With Antichrist, he’s taken the idea to its logical conclusion, as if to say, “if you want misogyny, I’ll give you misogyny!” This is the same mentality with which Brian De Palma (post Dressed To Kill) made Body Double, a film whose hero is an underwear sniffing pervert who only needs to introduce himself to the lady he’s stalking for her to let him cop a feel, and whose obsession leads him to a lurid romp with a world famous porn actress after he fails to stop his former quarry from being graphically skewered with a phallic construction drill. Then there’s Paul Verhoeven, whose response to detractors of Reagan era proto-fascism and patriarchal female objectification in his work was Starship Troopers, an outrageous satire of the American military-industrial complex that shocked even Takashi Miike.

In this respect, Antichrist could be read as a Swiftian satire. I don’t think it’s meant to be taken either too literally or too seriously (as Gail has already pointed out). Cast your minds back to Polanski’s Rosemary Baby, a film intended as a dark exploration of Satanism and evil, but in the hands of a Jewish Holocaust survivor forced into Catholicism, one that became an ironic and Buñuelian mockery of New York’s bourgeoisie, the demonic elements treated with a William Castle-like ghost train ghoulishness.

Which leads to my next point. Like the Polanski film, Antichrist, for all its intellectual, aesthetic and formal posturing, is first and foremost a horror film, and should therefore be analysed and scrutinised within the genre. This is extremely important, not just because von Trier is evidently familiar with the conventions and archetypes of and theoretical approaches to horror, but also because the critical reaction has shown (and not just in the Daily Mail article) that there is still an attitude of snobbery and condescension towards the genre.

Whenever a respected director turns their attention to genre, the critical and even filmmaking establishment almost always spectacularly miss the point. The defenders of these films often do them a disservice: “it’s a horror movie, but it’s so much more than that!” Think of Danny Boyle and Alex Garland’s constant assertions that 28 Days Later isn’t a horror movie (despite pilfering from dozens of video nasties and late night sleepover favourites, most of which were better films); The Dark Knight’s appraisal as a “crime film” which “transcends” its comic book origins; or the Oscar success of The Silence of the Lambs being read as proof that it wasn’t just a glorified slasher movie (even Ridley Scott said this, which may explain the crapness of Hannibal).

This kind of reductive response can only do a film like Antichrist harm, for it’s the director's subversion of and adherence to the conventions of the possession story that makes it so powerful. Possession movies are always about the struggle between reason and faith, science and the supernatural, order and chaos (chaos reigns). Invariably, men represent logic and resistance (phallic, fear of penetration) while women are more open to the unknown (vaginal). You can see this in Rosemary’s Baby, The Exorcist, Don’t Look Now, Gothika and Drag Me To Hell, among others. In these films, women are more often than not the most intelligent and sympathetic characters, while the men stubbornly refuse to believe what they should and are punished for it. You can see this in Antichrist. As Gareth and even von Trier have said, Willem Dafoe’s character is the villain, who believes stupidly that he can control an uncontrollable situation. In the end, he is forced to burn the woman he loves and venture into a world of women he can never trust again. Naturally, you will now have gathered that the genital mutilation relates directly to these ideas.

Possession movies have always been about the battle of the sexes, but so have many of the recent torture porn movies Antichrist borrows so much from: Hostel meted out its violence to horrible young men who saw nothing wrong with the co modification of women (though its sexual politics were still pretty suspect); the Saw franchise has seen the male killer of the original possess (though not supernaturally) a woman to became heir to his moral-dilemma centred murder spree; while Miike’s Audition (the best of these films, and the one that inspired them all) saw a tormented young woman expected to be subservient to an arrogant widower’s wishes exact a particularly nasty brand of vengeance.

If womanhood is equated with evil in Antichrist (and within the confines of the story it is), it’s only because von Trier is exploring both the genre and the sexes anxieties about each other. Horror is often about these anxieties, from the possession movie to the slasher film, wherein men are often so disgusted with their maleness that they are willing to strike out at the people who inspire their sexual or desires (Psycho, Dressed To Kill, Cruising, The Silence of the Lambs or the gender-reversing Switchblade Romance). Can a film that dares to take female insecurities seriously be truly misogynistic? I mean, what’s the alternative? Sex and the City?

Finally, the idea that Charlotte Gainsbourg allowed her son’s death so that she could orgasm has been read by many, including Gail, as proof of the film’s misogyny. Yet I think it relates to something much larger. The first image we see is of water, generally used to denote baptism. As the film deals so explicitly with Eden and the notion of Original Sin, could it be that this rational, seemingly secular, academic couple have not had their child baptised nor their house blessed (do we even know for certain that they are married?), and have therefore left themselves open to attack from evil forces, regardless of gender? We can see this in the constellation hovering over the house that night, while the three animals have been interpreted as the antichrist’s equivalent of the Three Wise Men, although I would like to suggest they represent an Unholy Trinity. This is I know a very Catholic reading of the film, but it’s one I think holds some water (excuse the pun).

So there you have it, a few of my ideas, interpretations of the film. I’m not sticking to any of them like glue for the simple reason that I don’t trust Lars von Trier enough, but I think calling it misogynistic is reductive and just a little too obvious. It could just be the case that Antichrist is a remake of Sabrina: The Teenage Witch, with Gainsbourg in the title role, Dafoe as Aunt Selma and the talking fox a stand-in for Salem the cat. If that can’t convince you, nothing will.

"fully confirming our jihadist enemies' view of us as a society in the last stages of corruption and decay."
The Daily Mail really are becoming a parody of themselves, that article is awful.

I watched Antichrist at the weekend, where eleven people walked out of the screening before a single act of violence had even occurred on screen. This may have been because it is a slow paced film that doesn't move as quickly as other films within the horror genre. However, I think Antichrist has to be a slow burner in order to convey the grieving process of the couple in a realistic way.
Overall I enjoyed the film, to an extent. It looks wonderful and Charlotte Gainsbourg portrays a woman suffering from grief and guilt very well. However, Antichrist feels disjointed, with the talking fox part bringing everyone in the cinema into fits of laughter. It didn't sit well with the tone of the rest of the film, but when everyone is on the edge of their seat, not knowing when the dreaded and much publicised gore is about to begin, it was good to be share in a emotion with the rest of the audience that wasn't collective fear.
As for the final twenty minutes of the film, they are as every bit unsettling as I expected, if not more. The entire film shifts gear rather messily into something much darker and I can't say it benefited from it in my opinion.

Antichrist is a flawed film but a worthwhile addition to the horror genre in my opinion. The plot, centering on the accidental death of a child that the parents believe they could have prevented, plays on the fears of all parents. Whilst the long, drawn out wait for the infamous final scenes will have many viewers sweating throughout the film.

Pretentiousness Ahead

Some wonderful posts on here already: I think Gail makes an excellent argument for the film's anti-feminist in the context of Von Trier's work, while Michael reads the film through the filter of horror cinema, and Chris notes the uneven tone in precise detail.

To add my own particular preciousness to this debate, I am going to throw in some classical drama. When Medea was first performed, it was voted into last place in the Athenian tragedy competition and gave Euripides an unenviable reputation for misogyny (the line was "he loves women in bed but not on the stage"). Yet the speech made by the titular heroine has been taken up by feminists as an explicit statement of intent and the deconstruction of her husband's dishonesty and stupidity offers a fair justification of Medea's revenge- until she kills her children, natch.
What Medea and AntiChrist share, apart from being ultimately unresolvable into a single interpretation, is a representation of a woman in extreme circumstances who acts violently. It's not enough to say that the woman is simply a specific character and doesn't make any claims about feamle nature: the play and the film both want to say something more general and iconic. Whether the film is ultimately a vicious attack on women or an attempt to delineate the consequences of patriarchal oppression depends on the viewer's reading.
For me, I commend- if not enjoy- the representation of sexuality (male and female) as difficult and sinister: a far cry from the bland commercialism that, in order to sell through sex, defines sex as a casual laugh and completely ignores any emotion beyond "phwooar." Not that sex is always going to be nightmarish and brutal, but it is more difficult than the bright lights and coy poses on the front of Nuts magazine is willing to accept.
It also pokes at the subtext of other commonly accepted values. For Defoe's character, "I love you" is a justification for control, the therapist is as intolerant as any medieval priest with his rational explanations. Nature, usually our happy friend who is all innocence and needs protection, is recast as hostile and powerful: this plugs into a far older vision of nature, that has parallels with Paglia's vision and Aeschylus' fears of "chthonic" nature untamed by law. It was this fear that, possibly, drove humans to invent friendly gods to help us out and the scientific need for mastery over the environment.
In his editorial, Rupert points out that we are aware that, through our behaviour, we are in a position to destroy our planet and ourselves. AntiChrist harks back to a more primal fear, one that has shaken humanity since pre-historic times: that we live in a universe that could very easily snuff us out. Much has been made of Von Trier's Catholicism: what gives this film its impact, for me at least, is its evocation of a paganism that is far from the cheerful modern reconstructions.

*More pretentiousness*

I came across an article this weekend by Lisa Downing talking specifically about films which have come out over the last few years that portray sexual violence. She argues that often in these films (and I would suggest that Antichrist is one of them) the ideology of the image is particularly complex and we are presented with what she calls a “moral and ideological collage” rather than a clear, logical set of thoughts behind the image. She attributes this to a certain type of postmodern filmmaking which, as Gareth points out problematises the issue of sexuality and gives us plural points of views and perspectives. For me at least this goes some way to explaining why a film like Antichrist elicits such extreme reaction on the one hand and also such varied interpretations on the other. It is a film that calls to be challenged, unpicked and perhaps even defended.

Since we are being pretentious...

I happen to like PJ Harvey too. I think her songs often fit into this "moral and ideological collage": sometimes she does something like "Easy" ('I open once and you call me Devil's Gateway') which is a pretty sharp attack on misogyny, then tears into 'Rub It 'Til It Bleeds'- a number that celebrates women's ability to manipulate and torment. I wonder whether when we look at her music or Von Trier's films, we have to ignore, or at least hold back from, taking the actual artist's opinions as informative. If they are grappling with multiple points of view in their work, toying with stereotypes and trying to disrupt any straight-forward interpretation, it is unlikely their interviews can be used as a fixed reference point.
I do think, though, that all of the post here, regardless of their position, are pretty much ranged against the monolithic "must we fling such filth at our kids" line that even the intelligent papers seem to be following.

Chris is spot-on in his assessment of the film’s mechanics: it’s been a while since I’ve seen a film build suspense in such a way and have the strength to pay it off. That said, I did not, as many have, find the film's tone to be inconsistent. It's one of the few films I've seen recently that's gripped from start to finish.

Some very good points here too, Gareth. I particularly like “Nature… is recast as hostile and powerful: this plugs into a far older vision of nature… untamed by law”. As the director has spoken about his fear of nature and its inherent violence, is the film’s battle of the sexes simply another take on the black widow scenario and the breeding habits of creatures whose females devour their mates during or after intercourse?

I have to call you on a couple of things though. You say that Antichrist “is a representation of a woman in extreme circumstances who acts violently”. I think this misses the point Gail and many others have made. It’s not that the character is driven by extreme circumstances to commit extreme acts of violence: the film shows that she was already doing this before her son died, and may even have been complicit in his death. The evidence of her cruelty can be seen in the photographs her husband finds (photographs often used in cinema to signpost an objective viewpoint). My argument was that this element should be read in the context of a possession story.

Another point to be made about this is that, according to Willem Dafoe, the film is not about misogyny, and that the idea of the gynocide thesis was shorthand to express that the female character was a progressive, feminist, intellectual thinker. What could this mean? Well, one argument could be that (and remember it’s a genre film) as someone possessed by evil, her thesis was an attempt to understand and banish her own anxieties, fears and feelings of hatred for her son, blaming all of womankind for her own nature (Eden being the worst place she could have retreated to write the paper). The grief triggered by her son’s death was a manifestation of guilt about such feelings, and that grief finally caused her to surrender to the dark side (now it sounds like Star Wars), her revision of the thesis again an attempt to suppress this side of herself (this is why she opens about it to her husband). There are real life instances of such behaviour, one of the most well known examples being Philip K. Dick’s obsessive attempts to rationalise visions and messages he was receiving from Christian deities, or coincidences and psychic visions in his life (and no, contrary to popular belief, he did not indulge in copious amounts of drugs, only prescription amphetamines, effectively anti-depressants).

Yes, I know such an argument could easily be interpreted as misogynistic, but as I’ve already argued, it’s in a horror context, and still open to ironic elucidation. It’s very clear that supernatural forces are at work: it is not Gainsbourg but Dafoe who has the vision of the faceless women, the deer and the talking fox (which I actually didn’t find that funny, maybe because it only said “chaos reigns” in a creepy voice and not “so Willem, forget Speed 2 and Body of Evidence, why in God’s name did you make The Boondock Saints?”). I would argue that, for the most part, the film is from the male’s point of view, von Trier playing with the convention of the rational male to the point where, even in the face of Basil Brush’s evil twin, he still hopes to find logic where there is only chaos.

Furthermore, Gareth argues that “It's not enough to say that the woman is simply a specific character and doesn't make any claims about female nature: the play and the film both want to say something more general and iconic”. I agree wholeheartedly, but it got me thinking. This argument came up when David Lynch made Blue Velvet and he protested that the sado-masochistic Dorothy was just one woman and did not represent every woman. Personally, I’ve always found Lynch’s portrayal of women far more problematic than Lars von Trier’s. Dennis Hopper once said of Sam Peckinpah that he had a madonna-whore complex “like many creative men do”. This is a pretty depressing statement, but I actually think there’s a lot of truth to it. Blue Velvet alone contains several female characters representing standard archetypes like mothers, virgins and whores, and Lost Highway and Wild At Heart go even further. As these films have been filtered through male dream logic, their objectification of women has often been justified within the context of being under the “male gaze”. While I have tremendous respect and admiration for Lynch, I’ve always found his attitudes to sexuality and gender to be conservative at best, downright hypocritical and adolescent at worst.

Directors like Lynch, De Palma, Peckinpah, Verhoeven, Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick, Clint Eastwood, Woody Allen, Oliver Stone, Sergio Leone, Bernardo Bertolucci, Dario Argento, Takashi Miike, Craig Brewer, Jean-Claude Brisseau and James Toback have all been accused of misogyny with greater validation than von Trier. While von Trier’s women may be damaged, tormented and exploited within the contexts of the drama (and the stories are usually allegorical or satirical), their dilemmas are never exploitative or eroticised, as they are with the other filmmakers.

The majority of his films have a female character at their centre who is three dimensional and defined in often ambiguous but always thorough terms. I’ve never found any of these films to be problematic, even Breaking the Waves, which I disliked for several reasons, but not because I felt it was misogynistic. Any suggestions of misogyny on von Trier’s part have always related to his working methods, but I know that his male cast members have found him a nightmare to deal with as well, so he seems like an equal opportunities offender.

Compare depictions of women and sexual violence in his films to those in some of the stuff the aforementioned guys have made: generally, men are men and women represent either salvation or damnation. These are macho filmmakers who make films about men being men with women sidelined as victims, erotic spectacles or moderate diversions akin to good food or alcohol, while violence or abuse towards them is sensationalised, even sexualised, and on occasion even justified. In fact, many of them barely even touch upon issues of gender, taking male dominance or traditional sexual politics for granted. Does this sound like Lars von Trier? I’m not suggesting he’s a feminist, but I don’t think he’s put his women through the ringer any more than every actress and female cinephile’s favourite Pedro Almodovar has.

Almodovar comes across as a much more pleasant and endearing individual than von Trier, but bear in mind he is the director who has subjected the majority of his women to captivity, rape and incestuous abuse, often playing it all for laughs and asking us to sympathise for the male sex offenders he regards as a nuisance (please be aware, however, that I am not knocking Almodovar or any of the filmmakers I’ve mentioned, with the exceptions of Brisseau and Toback, whom I have tremendous admiration for and have made some tremendous films, many of which are suspect and demand the kind of attention Antichrist is currently receiving. It is simply that I find the sexual politics in their films often more problematic than von Trier’s, who I feel has been unfairly singled out in this regard, though I have other problems with him).

Finally, Gareth says that “I commend- if not enjoy- the representation of sexuality (male and female) as difficult and sinister: a far cry from the bland commercialism that, in order to sell through sex, defines sex as a casual laugh and completely ignores any emotion beyond "phwooar." Not that sex is always going to be nightmarish and brutal, but it is more difficult than the bright lights and coy poses on the front of Nuts magazine is willing to accept”.

This is a very good point, particularly in regard to the increasingly juvenile and patriarchal depictions of sex and nudity in Hollywood films, particularly horror. But this is only a Hollywood thing: Lars von Trier’s portrayals of sex have always been in a European art film tradition. With The Idiots, he of course took advantage of shifting cultural attitudes to pornographic or what is at least perceived to be pornographic imagery on film. This resulted in films such as Romance (and many others by Catherine Breillat), Intimacy, Baise-Moi and the like, evolving into Battle In Heaven, 9 Songs and Ken Park. I’m sure you know all this, but the point I’m making is that these films generally portray sex as “difficult and sinister”, or shot with an anthropological, clinical or decidedly unflattering eye. This is why John Cameron Mitchell made Shortbus, a romantic comedy which depicted plenty of unsimulated sex scenes (including S&M, gay, lesbian and group sex), but which tried to portray it not just as “a casual laugh” but also as something which is beautiful, loving and necessary for enriching people’s lives. Mitchell’s film was in fact a response to “difficult and sinister” representations of sex in the European films he was watching at festivals during the promotion of Hedwig and the Angry Inch, films that include those by von Trier. In this respect, I don’t think Antichrist’s vision of sexuality is particularly unusual.

The last two posts by Gail and Gareth have been interesting. Firstly, because both of you have suggested that there can be no definitive analysis of the film, but also because Gareth has commended these boards for avoiding the “monolithic "must we fling such filth at our kids" line that even the intelligent papers seem to be following”.
What interests me about this is that, if we can find no definitive interpretation and if the film is on the surface a misogynistic tract, and if indeed it is a “moral and ideological collage” then how do we know what impression it will make on the youngsters who, let’s face it, are going to see it regardless of the 18 certificate? As you’ve said Gail, “This raises the question of how important a director’s intention is in interpreting a film. For me it’s quite important and for a film as complex as this I think it needs to be considered”.