Lars von Trier’s Antichrist

Last night I watched Lars von Trier’s film Antichrist (2009). I understand that it was controversial for a mainstream film upon its release, although I did not then pay attention to the relevant discussions. I should first mention that the film intends to incite the uneasiness in the audience that I experienced, especially as it coordinates several key moments of genital mutilation with non-simulated sexual acts performed by its only two actors (apart from the child who is seen briefly at the beginning of the film, and towards the end in flashbacks), Charlotte Gainsbourg (“She,” who won Best Actress for this role at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival) and Willem Dafoe (“He”).

“Antichrist,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary, is “[t]he title of a great personal opponent of Christ and His kingdom, expected by the early church to appear before the end of the world.” This opponent, in Christian eschatology, will deceptively resemble Him (i.e. Christ) and appear to mankind as a figure attempting to carry out His mission on earth. Yet he will do so while leading humanity away from any possibility of salvation.

In the Biblical tradition, Adam acknowledges all living creatures in the Garden of Eden by giving them a space in language; that is, by naming them, he indicates his control over the world as allowed by God. Yet it is Eve who encourages Adam to ingest the material world of this Garden, to eat of the apple and internalize its existence, joining it with his own. If we consider this tradition, especially Original Sin and the Garden of Eden, Eve’s mediation of Adam’s relationship with the natural world, and her corruption of his relationship with God, von Trier’s positioning of “She” as the antichrist figure in the film is, at the very least, intellectually intriguing.

In Antichrist, the young child is the only character of the three who has been named (“Nic”). While his mother climaxes during intercourse with his father, “Nic” climbs through an open window, falling alongside the heavenly snow to his death far below. Since “He” and “She” are now alone (as the only remaining characters on this stage) after the death of their son, the absence of names, and thus of order in the world, indicates that power now rests in a world that exists apart from reason. This is first related to the audience in the unanswerable questions asked during the grieving process.

In the uncertain world presented – which questions man’s (already inexplicable) rational capacity, and undermines faith in individual significance, categorization, determination, and the concepts of good and evil – man’s power no longer rests in his act of recognition. Without names, he cannot discern the particular from the general, and therefore the concept of recognition is without bearing. Understanding cannot be attained easily in this world in which the unknown, and a tendency towards chaos, cannot be kept at bay by man’s rational capacity, by his perception of the world, or by his belief in God or any other ordering force. (As the 18th c. philosopher Berkeley conceded, such a force is necessary to sustain any conception of an ordered world alongside the namelessness of subjective perception alone. If the universe only exists to the extent that each mind perceives it, recognition is useless without consensus by which a name can communicate its reference to an object of thought between subjects).

Where does power reside in this vision of the world, then? Recall that, when God produced the first human ‘other’ from a rib of Adam, “The man said, ‘This is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called ‘woman,’ for she was taken out of man.’” (Genesis 2:23). While man can force woman into physical submission, since she is generated from a portion of his own bone and flesh, von Trier’s film suggests the concept that woman has the ability to force man into submission from within, since she understands a part of him that is missing. She can use his own methods against him, distorting the application of logic and rendering powerless his ability to recognize and thus control nature through reason. Woman, in the film, has a sacred connection to both nature and man. She has an intimate relationship with the world that takes into account the interstitial space, that which is unaccounted for by any conception (including the Christian God’s) of ordered relations. In the film we see that, after the loss of her son, “She” experiences a subjective crisis during which she cannot function. In response to her visible and communicated symptoms (he cannot perceive more), “He” attempts to reconcile her condition with his practical knowledge, using psychological methods of examination and therapy as treatment as he documents the internal afflictions he perceives in an organized diagram.

But as they approach and enter the cabin in the woods – the supposed site of She’s anxiety – existence strays further from the realm of certainty, exhibited in worldly manifestations that increasingly counter He’s sense of reason. Talking animals (the self-wounding fox, which tells “He” that “chaos reigns”), invented constellations (the “three beggars,” represented in the forest by the appearance of the fox, crow, and deer), and the needless and gratuitous procreation of  oak trees over their cabin each serve to underscore that nature does not exist in accordance with the terms of man’s rational capacity. The sounds made by acorns falling onto the cabin roof is incessant during quiet moments, and “She” ruminates one night that, while each tree only requires one replacement every few hundred years, nature induces it to send countless potential offspring to their deaths below. While, in Western pagan traditions, the oak tree and eternity are often correlated (providing an alternative structure to the Christian view of regeneration), this also reveals that the cabin is a feeble protection from this bombardment. Each acorn contains the potential to grow into a great oak and, in contrast to the silence with which Nic falls into the snow-covered ground, the echoes of nature’s bold indifference to futility resounds against the structures of humanity. The female aspects of the oak are careless and unselective in their allocation of this power to bestow life; there is no rational plan for the potential of each seed, and its existence is a matter of utter indifference to its creator.

As the film progresses, “She” plots to increase her power through destructive, non-generative means. Man’s desire to overcome and destroy her, through the sexual act, becomes the location of her strength in both their relational dynamic and in their connection to the arational coherence of the natural world. The audience learns that She not only sensed, or saw, but watched as her son climbed out the window. Rather than submit to the generative logic that requires a mother to save her son, to salvage his potential, she indulged her desire to attain the pleasures of orgasm as he fell – innocent, without knowledge – to his death. As the oak, She is indifferent to her offspring, and shows no emotion during this moment in the film’s flashback – which also appears to be vacant of any consideration or decision. Without thought or sentiment, her humanity is absent, replaced by the pursuit of bodily pleasures provided by the unknown forces of nature. Sex has lost its procreative aspirations, and exists without the generative impulse; consequently, humanity is reduced to the realm of the natural world.

This indifference to human life in the attainment of pleasure – a pleasure that forsakes the interests of its host; a parasitic pleasure – draws the audience’s attention to the urge by which She acted to generate Nic’s life in the first place. Yet in the moments before his death, in a beautiful sequence in the film, the audience observes Nic’s curiosity in the world beyond his window, the joy as he senses freedom on the ledge, and the pleasure he feels in the sensation of his falling body. He descends gently with the snow, slowly, weightlessly, as the possibilities of the universe expand before him for the first and last time. Nic’s innocence reveals that his desire for freedom rests on his insufficient rational capacity and comprehension of the world. But, unlike his mother’s desire for freedom, for a release through the inexplicable source of her pleasure, the child’s pleasure depends on no other person. Furthermore, it is complete because he does not understand the consequence of death, or conceive this possibility, and thus his pleasure is unhindered by an anxiety or fear of the unknown.

In von Trier’s vision nature contains the source of Freud’s death drive. It has escaped the confines of psychoanalysis (it is poetic; it is not a science, and thus cannot explain the world according to the laws of reason) and is no longer unique to humanity. Overpowering the generative impulse, nature is absorbed in the frenzied pursuit of pleasure at the cost of its destruction. Indeed, “She” mocks her husband for his faith in the contemporary position that Freud is useless to psychology, and cannot increase our practical understanding of others; she thus derides the method of her therapy, and their ostensible purpose for visiting the cabin.  She manipulates “He” (a psychotherapist by profession), and appeals to the male assumption of inherent weakness (emotion, hysteria, irrational behavior, etc.) in the female sex. His attempts to free her from the indeterminate source of her fears and anxieties (using exposure therapy, a method by which the psychotherapist encourages encounters with the source of a phobia in order to reduce its influence) enable her to lead him to their cabin, a place that is immersed in the natural world and near the summit of a mountain that, in a Freudian reading, represents the locus of her egocentrism.

Throughout Antichrist, nature shows no fear of man. The cabin is fragile and dilapidated, nearly falling in on itself, barely withstanding the external forces of the natural world. Here they are vulnerable, unsupported by the protection of humanity larger than themselves. It is here that, the previous summer, “He” had left her alone with their son Nic as she worked on her academic thesis, the focus of which was gynocide, specifically man’s historical exertion of power and physical violence against women. A twisted tree trunk nearby, with gnarled roots containing a cavernous hole deceptively suggesting shelter, is perhaps the weathered remains of a dead oak that – acting in a position against the proverbial tree of life – serves as a focal point of her destructive libido. This tree of death represents a natural force – perhaps an erotic force – that exceeds the reach of life in its desire for eternity. She flees to this tree, resting between its bared roots, when He refuses her pleas to hit her during intercourse. It is here that He first submits to She’s masochistic wishes, however, expressing his preference to join her in the pursuit of an internal source of pleasure rather than watch her alone, absorbed in this search within the embrace of twisted roots. During her climax during this scene, a lascivious mass of limbs, sprawled out beneath the tree’s roots, depicts She’s unity with countless other female bodies, others who have also been enthralled by this masochistic drive to control the source of nature’s secrets within.

The film counters this impression of the female orgasm with the male climax, depicted as superficial and easily obtained. When She grows frustrated with His inability to meet her desires, she lashes out at him, crushing his testicles with a log that was gathered from the nearby forest and placed besides the fireplace. He passes out from the pain, but She is nonetheless able to stimulate him manually to climax. In a physically uncomfortable moment for the audience, She revels in her power as she forces him to ejaculate blood onto her chest.

His organ, vulnerable and easily sated, has urges that are more rational, even mechanical, when compared with those that motivate her. In perhaps the most uncomfortable moment in the film, She curls up besides his injured body, passed out on the floor from her relentless abuse. She forces his hand into her as she pleasures herself and, since She has placed a sharp pair of scissors nearby, we expect that she will castrate him once he has been sufficiently aroused through his forced servility. Yet, instead, she waits for the moment at which her arousal presents her organ in its most vulnerable state, and – the audience is forced to watch – she circumcises herself while emitting an otherworldly shriek of pain and satisfaction.

Without a physical location of her desires, the false illusion that She has encouraged – the notion that He can subdue her through his control of her search for pleasure – is no longer sustainable. She has severed her physical connection from He, and She now exists only as a threat to his future exertion of reason. His perception unhindered by desire to control the unknown, He perceives the limits of his power clearly and is suddenly capable of overpowering and destroying her physically. He strangles her, and She does not struggle to escape, understanding that this is the moment in which she will attain the simultaneous fulfillment and extinction of her self-destructive urge. He places She’s body on a pile of tree branches that serves as her funeral pyre, and creates a fire – man’s first control over nature – that consumes her.

In the film’s epilogue, multitudes representing womankind pass He during his descent from the mountaintop cabin. They forge through the forest brush easily, without discrimination in their paths, compelled in the direction of She’s funeral pyre. They are nameless, as indicated by their blurred faces, and are thus outside of Adam’s originary influence; they are unrecognizable to He, and cannot be determined within the limits of his capacity for language or reason.

The death of She has led them on this pilgrimage, just as Christ’s intimates came to visit him at the moments of his sacrifice. But these masses of womankind retain their possession of the truth contained in nature, and can together withhold their understanding forever, temptingly outside of the reach of men. Unlike the Biblical depiction of Christ’s sacrifice, the understanding for which She is sacrificed, and by which she redeems womankind, requires no miraculous explanation. While the body of Christ disappeared from his tomb, and was then transferred into the sustenance of mankind through transubstantiation, the body of She will have no tomb to separate her from nature. In the ashes, She will return to her origins in the basic element of life, and these will be combined with those of the oak branches which fuel the process of regeneration, and from which they will be indistinguishable.

Antichrist is, ultimately, a film that presents a world in which Eve has internalized the apple from which Adam was persuaded to take a bite. She maintains her power – a power not accorded by God – through the ability to manipulate his desire to violate her, to destroy her, for the secrets she contains. The film, while shocking for its graphic visual content at first glance, is primarily offensive to contemporary audiences not for its sexual depictions or religious commentary but for its exploration of misogyny. In the worldview presented by Antichrist, women maintain power over humanity through their rejection of both God and the basis of their relationship with men. Women seek only the pleasure they can obtain through the source of their power, and they willingly encounter the limits of self-destruction – by inciting the lustful wrath of men – in their attempt to satiate their eternal desire. In the film, She does this by reflecting the source of He’s frustration, revealing the futility of his reason in the face of nature, and the ease with which He is deceived by his belief in its illusion of control. (Alongside the metaphor of the oak, one is perhaps reminded of Kant’s statement, “Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made.”)

In Kaja Silverman’s Flesh of My Flesh (2009), the contemporary philosopher asserts that the question presented by Genesis 2:23 is not ‘What is woman?’ but rather “What is mobilized in the encounter between Adam and Eve that is not there when he meets the animals and the birds? What is the basis of human relationality?” (40). Silverman finds that this basis rests in analogy, since “[t]o be fully human…one needs to be in relation to others who correspond to oneself. [Eve is thus Adam's h]elper not in a relationship of subordination but mutuality and interdependence” (40). However Antichrist provocatively upends this possibility by eliminating the potential for mutuality and interdependence. While Adam has the power to name, to determine the organization of the world in the terms rendered by his rational capacity, Eve has kept the most profound truths to herself. In a subversion of reason, Adam’s only source of control, Eve – his only potential source of intimate connection – refuses to provide him with this understanding unless he embraces the position from which she perceives to the world: an acceptance of chaos and indifference to death.  These terms are impossible for him to accept, however, since they require his disavowal of reason and companionship; and these are all that Adam was provided before being cast out of Eden as punishment for his desire to understand and control that which he was told he could not.

Thus, in the vision depicted in Antichrist, the appearance of any mutual relationship between men and women is contingent upon tension and deceit. Embodying the complicit and unrelenting opposition between encounters of the forces of nature and reason, the relationship between man and woman does not provide humanity with any trajectory other than one riddled with senselessness and self-destruction. She, presented as the ultimate antichrist figure, maintains power over both the world that is known and unknown to He. In this view of humanity, Woman’s origin marks man’s first potential for mutual relations (recall that God confined Adam’s understanding to the realm of knowledge, and that the animals of Eden could not reciprocate Adam’s recognition of their existence by calling his name in return). Woman then conceives of, realizes the existence of, and influences all aspects of humanity from within herself – a source not understood by Man. Even though Woman was produced from Man, and by God, both Man and God needed Woman to conceive God’s earthly son, an occasion that provided her with control over the source of the salvation of humanity.

In von Trier’s film, She also intially appears concerned with the needs of humanity. But, whether at first conscious or unconscious, this is only a deceit, one which enables her to manipulate He. She takes her pleasure in the loss of control the He provides her during orgasm, a masochism that relies on her understanding that the source of her pleasure will always be outside of his grasp. In her final moments of ecstacy, She engages in the chaotic confluence of pain and pleasure obtained through willful self-destruction. Her sacrifice, in order to destroy He’s world through the elimination of reason, is enacted in the excision of the earthly source of her power with his helpless and degraded assistance. Her ultimate act of masochism is an acceptance of her finitude, her physical death, in order to maintain eternal control over her source of power. She revels in the understanding of that which He cannot, and will never, attain; and She submits to his destructive powers with the certainty that the salvation for which he searches – the potential for which she has been instrumental in constructing – is, without her, nothing but an illusion.