Antichrist

I just finished watching the Criterion Collection Bluray of Lars VonTrier's Antichrist. I read the Ian Christie essay and watched most of the supplementary features contained within the sterling set to round out my understanding and appreciation of this work of art. For over a year now, I've been hearing tall tales of what an endurance test the film was and how unrelenting its concerted effort to shock and punish whatever audience was brave or self-flagellating enough to watch it. I've heard a great deal about its misogyny and misdirected hatefulness. Let me say, as someone with a strong stomach and consistently well fed appetite for disturbing cinema, all these hushed warnings and hyperbolic accusations are nothing more than reactionary balderdash.

Antichrist is a complicated film that challenges everyone who views it in a fashion unique to that particular individual based on their gender, relationship history, religious beliefs and ability to confront their own prejudices and pre-conceived notions. This is PRECISELY the function of art and the fact that VonTrier exorcised his own demons of anxiety and depression while crafting such an exquisitely beautiful and fascinating film makes his achievement all the more impressive and worthy. That it's reduced in reviews to "the movie with the genital mutilation scene" is indicative of the prurient streak in highbrow film criticism and the salacious nonsense of online blowhards (of whose ranks I suppose I must admit membership).

I detest plot recapping and infer those bothering to read this have seen it, so I'll just get to it. I find it hilarious that anyone can call a film this thoughtful misogynous with the glut of regressive romantic comedies and teen male wish fulfillment crowding screens both big and small. Women in America are ceaselessly objectified, degraded and dismissed on sitcoms, commercials, music videos and print ads without given the benefit of having a voice. Antichrist explores the roots of such ingrained disgust and conflicted lust. It shows how such a pervasive atmosphere of animosity can infect a woman's mind and reprogram it to hate and destroy.

The film turns the generally accepted parable of mother as the anthropomorphic representation of natures bounty into an inverse Edenic holocaust with Satan as the lord of the earth and progenitor of feminine fury. It's a terrifying and discomforting proposition to the men of the audience and Gainsbourg does indeed become an unstoppable villain by the end of the film. Her assault on his power totem with a wood block and subsequent proxy rape and binding of his leg are deep seated male fears, fully realized in a fashion both urgently potent and deceptively subtle. She strips him of his power in a bloody sexual assault and shackles him to prevent escape, something most men attempt when threatened by the ferocity of a woman's emotion. I, as I'm sure most men watching, felt genuine fear for the unpredictability of Dafoe's predicament and sensed a very real, very palpable threat from his jilted, mercurial counterpart.

This is testing the men in the audience to confront their castration fears, which are at the root of all male fear. It's the fear of loss of potency, the fear of imprisonment, the fear of imposed stagnation: it's the fear of death, plain and simple. It also forces us to confront our belief that women are overly emotional and preternaturally sensitive beings that we can somehow control and "put into a place". Dafoe's confident psychologist thinks he has all the answers and will set his injured birds wing so that she may fly again. But the damage is beyond his ken, as its roots are in the millenia of mistreatment and misdiagnosis at the hands of men such as him.

The women who see this film will no doubt have an entirely different take on it than I, so I won't even pretend to interpret it from their perspective. Perhaps I can encourage my wife to give it a viewing and glean from her her thoughts and impressions. There's so many possibilities and permutations, I feel this film will be dissected for years to come and my thoughts will grow and evolve with the passage of time and repeated viewings. One thing will never change though: This film is beauty of the highest order. There are sequences of unsettling violence to be sure, but there is also painterly use of slow motion photography so stunning and arresting I will never get the images out of my head. In time, I will have more to say, but for now, this brief missive must suffice. I needed to get the initial thoughts out of my head in an effort to begin processing the film and making room for more interpretations. So yeah, don't believe the hype, but in a good way.