Antichrist

Antichrist (Lars von Trier)

As the title suggest, Antichrist is an interpretation on Nietzsche. 'Antichrist', as a book, denounces Christianity as both a belief and practice, AND as a ethical-moral value system. As base humans we have an instinctive nature of survival, but Christianity subverts these instincts and forces us to adopt one of meekness, humility, and pity. Nietzsche saw this moral framework of Christianity as oppressive and called for a ‘transvaluation of values’. To Nietzsche, this transvaluation of values is possible when resentment of the lower classes to the superior becomes so great that they find compensation only in imagining or creating a different moral code.

Stop reading if you don’t want to know what the movie is about, Significant Spoilers Ahead

The film plays out this trajectory through the wife. Responding to the death of their son whose falling is intercut with the wife’s organism. Later we find out that she witnessed the event, taking ‘masculine’ pleasure rather than ‘acting like a mother’. Although, yes, these events do take place you can’t think of them as specifics, but as a system of logic operating on images rather than plot to work through psychological issues. Lars von Trier states he usually identifies with his female leads, the abuse and suffering is representative of his perspective on the oppressed, the subsequent action resulting as a response to enforced helplessness inflicted upon from patriarchal society. The husband ‘treats’ her from a clinical distance, as a problem to be solved not as his wife who would need love and understanding. From von Trier’s perspective this distancing causes her to take on these patriarchal myths about women (murderous, irrational, close to Satan, and one with nature) as the only escape route in which she can retain power. This is something see finally ‘understands’ from her research being able to see the representations of Gynocide (get it) in a new light.
In thinking of his past films this is a common theme for von Trier. These vicious creatures that his female protagonists become are not a conformation of dominant Western ideology, but a response and reaction against oppressive patriarchal society. The film is not to be taken literally (the animals, the acorns, a cabin named Eden, I mean, come on) but as an externalizing of psychological turmoil. In that respect, the husband’s final admission that the three sisters (cosmic deities) are not real can be taken as a realization that his own system of beliefs in psychoanalysis were based on false understanding. That he was not curing but creating a condition that lead to insanity. He kills his wife, thereby destroying any incompatibility in his way of thinking. What’s truly scary is that he (the larger He) survives and, as the final shot tells us, the cycle continues. Now, does that mean the film ends up being misogynistic or is von Trier fucking with us? That is the controversy surrounding this film, so check it out and come to your own conclusions.