If one of the most authoritative voices of British film criticism is in the (superficial) position to say that all Von Trier’s films are rubbish and that his latest Antichrist is a mere “cine-prank” realized by a man of “giggling insincerity” willing to stir some “pointless controversy” then yes, chaos does reign for real! I understand that the normative and prescriptive tendency of film criticism is the only alternative to pandering admiration, but the fact that observations of such stupid mediocrity find space on ‘The Newspaper of the Year’ is a rather worrying coincidence…
Let us start by saying that the violent biodiversity of this film averts any accommodating univocal reading whilst simultaneously liberating numerous fields of enquiry, which are not necessarily pleasant to explore.
Those who detect misogyny are self-evidently limiting their perfunctory looks on the epidermal appearance of Von Trier’s film, or, even more impairing, refusing to explore the complex gaze of the Danish director on the feminine universe. As always in Von Trier we have the unreconciled dichotomy executioner/victim hence, author/spectator.
More than ever, the director’s irreverent empathy is dramatically siding with the female character, with Bess and Grace the process of victimization subtended a stubborn opposition towards the (cinematographic) world besieging their femininity, with Charlotte Gainsbourg sexuality is not intended as guilt anymore, it is guiltiness itself that is experienced as a castrating form of sexuality. Chaos reigns these days, sexual repression grows furious. If cinema for Von Trier has been a psychic flux of energies flowing in the firing channel of melodrama, with Antichrist he hijacks his poetics on the murky paths of horror where the victim transcends into headsman, salvation into guilt, good into evil. Only pain is left untouched. Everything (else) is inverted. The deer symbolizes fertility and is giving death from its sex; the fox embodies lucidity and instead announces chaos; the crow is the symbol of the regenerating power of death through decomposition but in the Antichrist refuses to die, even when buried…The therapist feels the chaos (through the fox), the witch halts it.
Willem Dafoe’s arrogation to lead his wife through the road of mental healing, his psychoanalytic academic exercises and mournful sexuality are the clear traits of a moral inquisitor whose adamance ends up triggering the liberation of primordial pulses. If this is a film about the woman as antichrist then it configures itself as the protracted and provocative representation of a male vision of society. Why do people accuse Von Trier of being sexist and absolve our rotten society? The sweet and caring rationality that this obtuse and considerate husband opposes to the irrational fear(s) and carnal pain of his wife embodies the patriarchal will of purification that uses ‘love’, instead of fire, as a torture tool. Von Trier offers a cognitive map of pain where the equation woman/nature and evil (re)lies on the biological origin of suffering. Pain, is represented in its unbearable absoluteness by a mother watching her child dying. Unfathomable pain, unimaginable grief. The affliction comes from the maternal womb and the severing of a biological bond, under this logic pain is conceived as “natural”, that is why nature is Satan’s church.
In any Saw or Hostel the spectator witnesses countless mutilations but never invoke the scandal, why? Because that is cinema. Fiction. Von Trier is almost snuff: the soul is tested, there is no catharsis, the psychosis is explicated. And we refuse to watch, to believe, to face the squalor of our miserable lives. We zealously affirm that Von Trier likes to exaggerate and that there is no need to be so cruel and so, illusory, forth. The world, after all, is not that bad…
The same malign magnitude with which the wood roars its ancestral spirit to the outlandish bodies violating its gate, in one of the most profoundly evocative scenes of the film, shall echo in our deaf consciences and unhinge our blind bigotry.
Amen.