When He and She are having sex against the washing machine, the camera changes focus to show a baby monitor in the foreground, a “mute” symbol on its display. Strangely, Nic is initially lured from his crib by a teddy bear tied to a helium balloon, floating lazily in the air. The prologue immediately stands out due to the intensity of the photography, the beauty of the music, and the unnerving juxtaposition of sex and death.Ī close reading of this sequence reveals important elements that will inform the film that follows.
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As He and She have sex, we see their young son Nic (Storm Acheche Sahlstrøm) free himself from his crib, open his baby gate, witness his parents having sex, climb up to the window that has blown open, and fall to his death, all while He and She remain obliviously occupied in their sex.
During this sequence, we observe a man and a woman, named in the credits only as He (Willem Dafoe) and She (Charlotte Gainsbourg) having sex in a variety of locations, beginning in the shower and then proceeding to the floor next to the washing machine, and finally the bed.
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As a soprano sings the beautiful, plaintive aria on the soundtrack, we see a series of images shot in hyper-stylized, high contrast black and white proceeding in extreme slow motion.
In such a world, the film seems to say, there is no room for goodness, for beauty, for love, for security, or for feminine subjectivity the pernicious cultural tyranny of heteropatriarchy is omnipresent, insidious, and, if cultural conditions remain unchanged, ineluctable.Īntichrist begins with a wordless, lyrical prologue set to the aria “Lascia ch’io pianga” from Handel’s opera Rinaldo. Shocking in its violence, cryptic and surreal in its imagery, and vital in its message, Antichrist exposes the evil of heteropatriarchal paradigms of cultural hegemony and asks its viewer to bear witness to that evil. Through its examination of this woman’s depression and her husband’s arrogant and clinical attempts to pathologize her feelings, von Trier explores the dark depths of melancholia, the struggle for feminine erotic agency within a heteropatriarchal symbolic order, and the apocalyptic stakes of emotional repression. Von Trier enters into a consideration of the politics of gender and of the oppressive symbolic violence enacted upon women by the hegemonic cultural forces of heteropatriarchy through an examination of the film’s lead female character’s depression that follows the death of her child. Featuring scenes of graphic genital mutilation and with an explicit focus on the psychological instability and moral depravity of women, the film received a special “anti-prize” from the ecumenical jury at Cannes for its supposed “misogyny.” Despite the vocal protests of critics who decried Antichrist as misogynistic, however, I believe the film has important and polemical arguments to make about gender, the silencing and oppression of women’s erotic agency, and the toxicity of hegemonic patriarchal culture. In 2009, Danish film director Lars von Trier scandalized the Cannes Film Festival and shocked audiences with his film Antichrist, a hallucinatory art-horror film depicting the psychological breakdown and descent into madness of a couple ensconced in a remote cabin in the woods. “Nature Is Satan’s Church”: Depression and the Politics of Gender in Lars von Trier’s Antichristīy Nolan Boyd Volume 20, Issue 8 / August 2016 40 minutes (9963 words)
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