Staffer's Note

In anticipation of the upcoming release of Melancholia, I feel compelled to revisit the debate surrounding Lars von Trier’s last film, Antichrist.

Antichrist, for those unfamiliar with it, is a film that follows a husband and wife to their mountain home following the loss of their child. More than that, though, it’s a film that purports to tell the story of Genesis in reverse, grounded in an Eden created not by God, but by Satan. And it’s a movie that certainly makes the most of, and ultimately outdoes, this disturbing premise.

But there’s a lot that goes along with something like that. Von Trier, who converted to Catholicism in the mid-1990s in an effort to erase the influence of the religion of his stepfather, gorges his film on Christian symbolism and immersing it in a complexity of references that makes it exceedingly difficult to parse out his intentions. It can be wholly and entirely unclear, at almost any point in the film, whether von Trier wants to undermine or pay homage, or both. Far from a criticism, as Roger Ebert points out, this is a strength of Antichrist, making it a conversational and mental centerpiece with considerable staying power. But it also raises some pretty difficult questions.

Take, for example, the fact that there are only two characters in the film, and that Charlotte Gainsbourg’s—known only as the “she” to Willem Dafoe’s “he”—eventually descends into stark-raving lunacy induced by her research on gynocide. Having taken on the topic in her doctoral thesis, her eventual subscription to an idea of women as the root of evil represents the abandonment of reason that would have to occur in any return to Eden, and so is sort of necessitated by the film’s premise. The readily apparent counterargument to this, of course, is that “she,” as the film’s only female character, must become a kind of stand-in for the gender in general, and so her impulses toward self-mutilation, self-hatred and the rejection of reason for mysticism extrapolate themselves to apply to women as a whole. At its least malicious, this is an unfortunate consequence of the way the film has to be structured. But, at its most, it can be summed up in a word with which von Trier knows well by now: misogyny.

This has been one of the greatest critiques of Antichrist: that von Trier’s treatment of the woman is brutal, and that he demonizes and vilifies her as a witch while at the same time deeming man a paragon of reason. This too, however, hastily misses the point, as would-be critics of Antichrist seem to overlook the negative portrayal of Dafoe’s psychotherapist in the first half of the film. In fact, man’s mistreatment of woman—albeit via reason rather than force—is equally disturbing in its depiction and scope, and Dafoe’s character is even less sympathetic than Gainsbourg’s. On top of that, Gainsbourg’s torment runs far deeper than Dafoe’s: we sympathize with man because we imagine ourselves in his physical pain, but we sympathize with woman because we believe she’s being wronged.

All that can really be said, in the end, is that it’s hard to say, but what’s clear is that an either/or approach won’t work with a film like Antichrist. And, frankly, I hope that Melancholia is the same way. Von Trier’s refusal to lean definitively one way or the other, and his subsequent obfuscation of endorsement and condemnation, results in a lasting and refreshing obsession for the viewer. If von Trier is not, as he says, the world’s greatest director, then he is at least one of the most fascinating.