Post on 23-Feb-2023
Lar von Triers Antichrist (2009) is a film which calls for
critical feminist analysis as several significant
feminist theories regarding the depiction of women in
film can be applied to the character of She, the unnamed
protagonist of the film. Antichrist portrays the emotional
struggles of a couple, She (Charlotte Gainsbourg) and He
(Willem Dafoe) as they struggle to come to terms with the
death of their young son. They retreat into the forest, a
landscape rendered horrific. Nature is depicted as a
hellish, evil force which exists beyond the grasp of the
rational and is irrevocably tied to femininity. In the
first part of my essay I will analyse scenes from Antichrist
in detail to demonstrate how von Trier has adopted the
archaic notion of the female body being controlled by
nature and how this dark depiction of the natural world
reflects the nature of women. What is most interesting in
Antichrist is that She has come to believe that women are in
fact evil, and her self loathing, more specifically her
loathing of her own sexual desire, is deemed an abjection
which must be destroyed. Therefore, an in depth
discussion of Julia Kristeva’s “Approaching Abjection,”
1
is necessary to fully comprehend the abjections present
in Antichrist, and to emphasize the notion that it is Her
internalized misogyny which shapes her view of herself as
an abjection which must be eradicated. He, the unnamed
male protagonist, is a therapist who takes it upon
himself to treat his grieving wife, yet he struggles to
fully understand the depth of his wife’s grief and self
hatred; Mary Ann Doane’s seminal essay “Clinical Eyes:
The Medical Discourse” can be directly applied to
Antichrist, as the two protagonists are reminiscent of the
archetypal characters of the medical discourse: the
irrational female hysteric and the rational, controlling
male doctor. By taking into consideration three integral
aspects of feminist film theory-woman and nature,
abjection, and the medical discourse- along with an in
depth analysis of scenes from Antichrist, a clear thesis can
be drawn regarding the character of She: internalized
misogyny, structured by patriarchal society, results in
masochistic submission to male investigation. However,
patriarchal reasoning and control fails to repress and
cure women of their disease: feminine sexual desire.
2
Therefore, excessive feminine desire is rendered abject
and cannot be contained within the bounds of the symbolic
order.
In Antichrist, nature is depicted as an evil,
destructive force beyond the comprehension of
rationality, and the female body is closely associated
with this malevolent representation of nature. In
“Woman’s Stake: Filming the Female Body” Doane states
“ideas about a ‘natural’ female body or the female body
and ‘nature’ are the linchpins of patriarchal ideology”
(93). What is imperative in Antichrist is that She, the
unnamed protagonist who is a symbol of the ‘every woman,’
has come to believe that her body, ruled by nature and
inextricable from nature, is evil, though her
internalized misogyny does not come to light until fairly
late in the narrative, when He, the “every man,” husband
and therapist, discovers that her greatest fear is
herself. Though this revelation does not occur until
later in the film’s narrative, the ‘evil nature’ of
nature is emphasized throughout the film in various ways.
3
For example, in the hospital, before the couple even
ventures out into the woods they call Eden1, He is trying
to convince Her that he should be her therapist, as no
one knows her as well as he does. von Trier uses a close
up shot of Her, which then pans to the left, focusing on
a vase of flowers by the bed. The camera then slowly
zooms in on the vase, a shot accompanied by ominous, low
noises, until in extreme close up we see the mould and
bacteria growing on the stems of the flowers, a shot
which emphasizes the rot and decay of nature, and
foreshadows proceeding scenes in Eden. When the couple
does arrive in the woods, it is He who experiences the
chaotic, unexplainable aspects of nature in the form of 3
animals acting in ways which highlight the brutality of
nature. For example, while She takes a short nap as the
couple travel towards their cabin, He walks away from
her, and a strong gust of wind seems to violently pass
over him. He then turns to sees a deer in a well lit
clearing; the light is soft, the quiet noises of birds
1 Though I acknowledge that there are several obvious references to Christianity within Antichrist, I feel that it is not pertinent to myfeminist anlysis of Antichrist to discuss Christian ideology in depth.
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can be heard and the deer peacefully stares back at him.
This image of the deer is reminiscent of a sublime
depiction of nature, yet as He slowly walks towards it,
von Trier cuts to a close up of the deer in profile which
reveals a dead fawn hanging from the mother’s womb, and
in slow motion the fawn’s neck gruesomely swings from the
deer’s body as she runs away. This shot is accompanied by
a shrill, grating noise and reaction shots of Him looking
horrified; von Trier then fades to black and follows with
the title card for the second chapter of the film: Pain
(Chaos Reigns.) The second instance in which von Trier
depicts an animal committing a shocking act occurs after
a therapy session in which He helps Her walk across the
garden. As the couple embrace they quickly look up, and
von Trier uses a fast tilt upwards to show a baby bird
falling from a tree. An extreme close up of the helpless,
featherless baby writhing on the forest floor as ants
crawl over its body is accompanied by low, ominous noises
and then the shrill cry of a hawk as it descends on the
baby bird and takes it back up into the trees; though,
not to save it, as von Trier then uses a close up to show
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the hawk ripping the infant apart and devouring it. The
third encounter with an animal takes place just after She
has felt that she has been cured, and delights in walking
through the woods which terrified her before, however He
seems suspicious of Her belief that she is cured, and She
storms off. He goes to follow her, and von Trier uses a
long establishing shot as she walks out of frame and he
pauses, surrounded by a sea of ferns. Von Trier inserts a
close up of one of the ferns shaking and then reverts to
the establishing shot to show the fern shaking again. He
decides to investigate, and as he walks cautiously in to
the ferns, another strong gust of wind passes over him,
foreshadowing the horror he will uncover. As He pulls the
ferns aside a fox is revealed and as he reaches out to
touch it the fox leaps up aggressively. Here, von Trier
again inserts a slow motion reaction shot of Him lurching
back in fright and follows this with a close up of the
fox tearing off its own flesh with its teeth. The same
shrill noises from the encounter with the deer are
repeated, along with the loud noises of teeth tearing
flesh. von Trier then uses a close up of the fox as it
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declares in a low voice, “chaos reigns.” I believe these
3 horrific encounters with nature not only emphasize the
dark unsavory aspects of the natural world, but signify
the three key events in Her life: The deer represents
maternity and Her giving birth to her son, the hawk
represents infanticide and the child abuse She has
inflicted on Nic, and the fox foreshadows her destruction
of herself at the climax of the film. But it is not only
the animals of the forest who are rendered horrific, as
the forest itself is depicted as an insidious force that
the couple are at the mercy of.
For example, on their first night in the cabin, He
who has been sleeping with his arm out the window awakens
to find several swollen ticks stuck to his arm;
disgusted, he hastily picks them all off, then shuts the
window. This scene emphasizes the idea that nature cannot
be escaped as even inside the cabin the couple are not
safe from the dark forces of nature- in fact, She is
inside the cabin and it will later be revealed that she
is a dangerous, chaotic force of nature in the film. In
the scene preceding this, while the couple sleeps, He
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awakens to hear loud, incessant knocking on the roof of
the cabin. She explains, “its just the stupid acorns” yet
he seems slightly disturbed, and von Trier follows this
with a shot of the roof as the acorns continue to fall,
emphasizing the over-fertility of nature. The symbol of
the acorn is one that is closely associated with
femininity in Antichrist. Later in the film, as the couple
sit in the cabin listening to the acorns fall on the roof
again, she tells a story which not only highlights Her
view of nature as being evil, but links the oak tree to
her own body. She tells him:
“Oak trees grow to be hundreds of years old. They
only have to produce one single tree every hundred
years in order to propagate. May sound banal to you
but it was a big thing for me to realize that when I
was up here with Nic. The acorns fell on the roof
then too. Kept falling and falling and dying and
dying. And I understood that everything that used to
be beautiful about Eden was perhaps hideous. Now I
could hear what I couldn’t hear before: the cry of
all the things that are to die.”
8
Here, the oak tree can be compared with the female
reproductive system: though the oak tree and a mother
only need to produce one offspring to continue the life
cycle, the acorns continue to fall and die, just as the
unfertilized egg is cast out of the female body monthly
in the form of menstruation. To this story, he reacts
condescendingly, telling her that she knows very well
that acorns do not cry and that this is only a product of
her own fear, to which she replies “nature is Satan’s
church.” This statement, along with her Oak Tree analogy,
begins to reveal the true extent of her internalized
misogyny, as she believes that her body, part of nature,
is evil. This is fully cemented when he discovers her
obsession with Gynocide, an obsession which leads to her
believing that her gender, and specifically female
sexuality, is an abjection that must be destroyed.
In her essay “Approaching Abjection,” Julia Kristeva
explains that the core of abjection, which cannot be
totally defined, is that which exists in opposition to
the self and constantly threatens the borders of the
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self; she states “the abject only has one quality of the
object- that of being opposed to I” (1). Abjection lies
very close to the self yet cannot fully be assimilated.
She explains that what is abject, “the jettisoned object,
is radically excluded and draws me toward the place where
meaning collapses” (Kristeva 1-2). Kristeva identifies
the corpse as the ultimate site of abjection; bodily
wastes such as tears, sweat, blood and excrement are
abjections that can be expelled from the self when a body
is living, yet “the corpse, the most sickening of wastes,
is a border that has encroached upon everything. It is no
longer I who expel, “I” is expelled”(Kristeva 3). She
emphasizes that it is not a lack of cleanliness that
inspires abjection, but “what disturbs identity, system,
order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules.
The inbetween, the ambiguous, the composite” (3). The
abject, then, can be understood as existing before the
borders of the self have been defined and before the
formation of the ego, as “abjection preserves what
existed in the archaism of pre-objectal relationship, in
the immemorial violence with which a body becomes
10
separated from another body in order to be”(Kristeva 6).
She then explains that the abject is the “object” of
primal repression, which she defines as “the ability of
the speaking being, always already haunted by the Other,
to divide, reject, repeat”(8). She then states that
perhaps what is the cause of this primal repression is
“maternal anguish, unable to be satiated within the
encompassing symbolic”(8). Kristeva explains that what
Freud called primal repression, that which cannot fully
be repressed, “borrows its strength and authority from
what is apparently very secondary: language”(9). The
learning of language marks the child’s entry into the
symbolic order as he/she breaks away from the semiotic,
pre-lingual relationship with the mother who is
subsequently rendered abject and must be excluded so that
the child may form its own identity. However after the
child has entered the symbolic and extricated her/himself
from the maternal-semiotic, the subject constantly yearns
for this lost relationship that can never properly be
revisited. This explains the fascination with the abject,
a desire to regress back to a time where the body was
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inextricable from the mother’s. Therefore, in regards to
primal repression, Kristeva states “let us not speak of
primacy but of the instability of the symbolic function
in its most significant aspect- the prohibition placed on
the maternal body”(9). In her article “Woman as Possessed
Monster” Barbara Creed explains that the abject “is
placed on the side of the feminine: it exists in
opposition to the paternal symbolic, which is governed by
rules and laws”(37). Femininity exists as Other in
patriarchal society, and “the feminine body, the maternal
body, in its most un-signifiable, un-symbolized aspect,
shores up, in the individual, the fantasy of the loss in
which he is engulfed or becomes inebriated, for want of
the ability to name an object of desire” (Kristeva 12-
13).
I have explained how female sexuality has be deemed
abject by patriarchal society, as it is an abjection
which displays the collapse of paternal laws and
regulations; it is imperative in my discussion of Antichrist
to note that Kristeva describes “the abjection of self”
in her essay. She exclaims: “if it be true that the
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abject simultaneously beseeches and pulverizes the
subject,” when attempting to identify with something on
the outside, the subject “finds the impossible within”
(3). Kristeva explains that one who sees himself as
abject “divides, excludes, and without, properly
speaking, wishing to know his abjections is not at all
unaware of them. Often, moreover, he includes himself
among them, thus casting within himself the scalpel that
carries out his separations” (5). This definition of the
subject who believes themself to be abject can be readily
applied to the character of She in Antichrist, as she not
only accepts the laws of the symbolic which render her
own body and gender as Other, but sees her sexuality as
an abjection which she must radically exclude from
herself.
In Antichrist, throughout the narrative it is revealed
that She has internalized the misogyny of patriarchal
society and consequently deems her sexuality as an
abjection that must be destroyed. Her internalized
misogyny comes to light when He discovers her notes and
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research for her thesis, which she had been writing in
Eden last summer with Nic. This scene occurs shortly
after von Trier introduces the third chapter of the film
titled “Despair: Gynocide.” A violent downpour arrives,
and water, which is associated with femininity, begins to
leak in through the roof. He goes up to the attic to fix
the leak, symbolizing his compulsion to block out the
undesirable aspects of nature, and in turn the
patriarchal urge to eradicate female sexuality. In the
attic he lights a lantern, and von Trier uses several
close ups of the pictures She had stuck to the wall which
are medieval illustrations of women being tortured and
killed by men. He then finds a book titled Gynocide,
which in her article “Antichrist: the visual theology of
Lars von Trier,” Tine Beattie explains was “a term coined
by feminists to refer to the persecution and killing of
women, particularly in the Christian tradition.” As He
flicks through Her notes, von Trier uses a close up of
the book to show Her writing deteriorating into
nonsensical scribbles, a shot which is paired with the
high grating noise which has been associated with His
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horrific discoveries throughout the film. After this
scene, He decides to try a role playing exercise with her
in which He pretends to be nature and She rational
thinking. When She states that nature cannot hurt her
because it is only the greenery outside, he replies, “I’m
outside but also within. The nature of all human beings.”
This statement relates to the abject, as human nature,
which she believes to be evil, exists within herself; it
disturbs the boundaries of self, and exists within her
yet cannot be completely expelled. As the couple
continues to talk, she admits “that kind of human nature”
interested her last summer when she was working on her
thesis and tells him, “I discovered something else in my
material than I expected. If human nature is evil then
that goes as well for the nature of…” He finished her
sentence with “of the women. Female nature.” She replies
“Women do not control their own bodies- nature does.” In
disbelief and frustration He says that the literature she
was researching was about horrible crimes committed
against women yet she read it as proof of the evil nature
of women. This scene emphasizes her self loathing which
15
is a product of the misogyny she has internalized through
researching Gynocide. Gynocide was an act committed by
men who deemed women as Other, as threatening abjections
who must been exterminated and cast out of society. Von
Trier follows this scene directly with a scene in which
the couple are engaging in intercourse and She asks Him
to hit her, stating that if he will not do it then he
does not love her, highlighting her masochism. However,
the scene in which her rage and self hatred violently
manifests occurs when he has discovered that her biggest
fear is herself, and her loathing of her own sexuality
erupts, signaling the return of the repressed.
In this scene, She attacks him in an act of
gruesome sexual violence by dropping a large brick onto
his genitals and while he is unconscious she masturbates
him until he ejaculates blood. This incident intertwines
abjection with the uncanny. Menstruation in patriarchal
society is a function of the female body which is
repressed and abject; for men, blood spilling from the
genitals would signal pain and injury, whereas in women
it is a sign of health and fertility, yet there is an
16
impulse within the symbolic to view the vagina as a
bleeding wound. Therefore, when blood spills from His
genitalia it signifies emasculation and horrific
abjection. After this scene, he attempts to escape into
the woods but she finds him and after this fit of rage,
appears to be upset and apologetic and takes him back
inside the cabin. In this scene she cries, kisses him and
then states, “a crying woman is a scheming woman.” As he
lays injured on the floor, she finds a pair of scissors,
lies next to him and places his hand on her genitals.
Here, von Trier inserts a flashback to the first scene of
the film, the scene which depicts Nic’s death as the
couple fornicate, yet in this version of the flashback,
von Trier uses a close up of Her face, followed by a shot
of Nic on the table, to reveal that she did in fact see
Nic climbing towards the window and to his death. This
flashback fully reveals the reason why she has come to
believe that her sexuality is evil and abject: she
prioritized her sexual pleasure over saving the life of
her son. Directly after this short flashback, She begins
to cry, and in the most graphic shot of the film, von
17
Trier uses an extreme close up of her vagina as she cuts
off her own clitoris. This self castration fully
demonstrates Kristeva’s theories regarding the “abjection
of self.” As previously mentioned, Kristeva states that
one who deems himself abject casts “within himself the
scalpel that carries out his separations”(5). Though
Kristeva may have been speaking in metaphorical terms,
She in Antichrist literally takes a scalpel to the parts of
herself which she regards as abject: her clitoris, the
source of her sexual pleasure which she believes is evil,
is violently separated from her body, and the blood that
flows from her genitals no longer signifies fertility but
destruction and horror. Creed states that “the central
ideological project of the popular horror film is
purification of the abject” (n.p.) Antichrist, which can
certainly be regarded as a horror film, demonstrates
Creed’s statement. Not only does She attempt to purify
herself of her own abjection, her sexuality, but He
strangles and kills her, then burns her remains in the
forest. Her fate in Antichrist is strangely ironic; though
he tried to convince her that she had misinterpreted the
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literature on Gynocide, she meets the same fate as the
women she was researching: killed and burned by a man,
thereby perpetuating the violence towards women which she
believed was deserved. These final scenes of the film
highlight his arrogance and inability to understand the
depths of her self loathing, and the two characters, He
and She, represent the relationship between the
hysterical female and the rational male outlined in Mary
Ann Doane’s “Clinical Eyes: The Medical Discourse.”
In her essay “Clinical Eyes: The Medical Discourse”
Mary Ann Doane explains how films which employ the
medical discourse focus on the gendered binaries of the
clinical gaze of the rational male who attempts to
diagnose, regulate and control the irrational female
body. She states that within the patriarchy, femininity
is associated with the pathological as “disease and the
woman have something in common- they are both socially
devalued or undesirable, marginalized elements which
constantly threaten to infiltrate and contaminate that
which is more central, health or masculinity”(38). For
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women, the border between physical and mental illness is
ambiguous and of “little consequence in the
medicalization of femininity,” and Doane draws on
Freudian psychoanalysis to demonstrate this fact (39).
She explains, “the patient whose discourse is read and
interpreted as the origin of psychoanalysis, as the text
of the unconscious, is the female hysteric”(38). Hysteria
was a disease that was closely associated with
femininity- the word hysteria derives from the Greek word
for uterus- and though there certainly were male
hysterics, most psychoanalytic theory has been written
about women. Doane explains that the female hysteric’s
body is seen to be symptomatic of her mental ailments, as
her illness is not localized but affects her entire
being. Freud believed that conversion was characteristic
of hysteria, conversion being “the translation of purely
psychical excitation into physical terms” (Doane 51).
Doane explains that Freud and Breuer outline “the types
of symptoms which require that the body acts as the
expression of the illness;” for example tics, muteness,
disturbance of vision and hysterical attacks (40). It is
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clear that in terms of Freudian psychoanalysis, the
female’s body is totally implicated by her mental
illness, her body is symptomatic of mental disturbances,
and her only hope for a cure depends on the interjection
of the male doctor, the figure of rationality and
patriarchal order. In classical Hollywood cinema, in
which women are represented as erotic spectacle and the
object of the male gaze, the signification of the woman
is “spread out over a surface- a surface which refers
only to itself and does not simultaneously conceal and
reveal an interior”(Doane 39). However, in the films of
the medical discourse, the female is often
despecularized, as her body is “not spectacular but
symptomatic” (Doane 39). She is attributed a depth for
which a doctor is called for to decipher her mental
illness in order to “cure” her symptoms. In many
classical Hollywood films of the medical discourse, the
female patient’s mental disturbance is represented by her
lack of beauty and a pleasurable physical appearance. For
example, in Irving Rapper’s Now Voyager (1942), Charlotte
(Bette Davis), whose neuroses stems from her mother’s
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repression of her sexuality, is portrayed as frumpy and
overweight, with glasses and unkempt hair and eyebrows. A
doctor prescribes Charlotte with a trip on a cruise, and
there she is cured by a love affair, and later in the
film is portrayed as fashionable and glamorous; therefore
“the doctor’s work is the transformation of the woman
into a specular object” (Doane 41). Doane explains that
though the medical discourse produces a detour in the
male character’s relation to the female, the process of
coming to know the female patient in eroticized and it is
quite common of these films of the 1940s for a romantic
relationship between the female patient and her doctor to
arise. Doane explains that the figure of the doctor “is
not merely the practitioner of an objective science- he
acts as the condensation of the figures of Father, Judge,
Family and Law” (63). The doctor, quite often a
psychoanalyst, is represented as the “pivotal figure
linking the visible and the invisible in the construction
of knowledge (about the woman)”(Doane 48). The doctor in
these films is an interpreter of the female body, and the
“site of knowledge which dominates and controls female
22
subjectivity” (Doane 43). Films of the medical discourse
represent unstable female subjectivity as symptomatic of
hysteria, and subsequently, the woman becomes an object
and her “lapses or difficulties in subjectivity are
organized for purposes of medical observation and study;”
the female subject becomes a readable text, and her body
an object which can be investigated and deciphered (Doane
44). Doane states that in many of the films of the 1940s,
“what is diagnosed in the women patients is generally
some form of sexual dysfunction or resistance to their
own femininity,” and love is the ultimate cure (46).
However, Doane states that Cat People (Jacques Tourneur
1942) demonstrates the limits of psychoanalysis when it
comes to femininity. “Forcing an equation whereby the
unconscious=female sexuality=the irrational the film can
claim that the impotence of psychoanalysis stems from the
unfathomable nature of its object of study- the woman and
her sexuality”(49). Excessive female desire and sexuality
cannot be explained by the rationale of the medical
discourse, as “it is that which inhabits the realm of the
unknowable”(52). The medical discourse activated in von
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Trier’s Antichrist demonstrates this inability of the
institution of medicine, psychoanalysis, and the symbolic
order in general, to understand and control excessive
feminine sexuality.
The characters He and She in Antichrist represent the
archetypal figures of the medical discourse: doctor and
hysterical female patient. The film begins with the death
of the couple’s son, Nic, who falls from an open window
while his parents are having sex. At his funeral, He can
be seen sobbing, while She collapses with grief. The next
scene occurs in the hospital, where She has been for over
a month. He, a therapist, disapproves of how much
medication the doctor is giving her, and convinces her
that he is more capable of treating her himself. His
insistence that the doctor at the hospital is wrong to be
medicating her body demonstrates Doane’s description of
the psychoanalyst in the medical discourse films; He
believes that her illness is mental, not physical.
Therefore He creates a therapeutic regime concentrated on
Her accepting the irrationality of her feelings, which he
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believes will result in her return to a reasonable state
of mind. The first part of the film is separated into
three chapters, grief, pain and despair, and focuses on
her stages of grieving. She displays all of the bodily
symptoms associated with the female hysteric, and, as
explained by Doane, there is little difference between
her physical and mental experiences, as her body becomes
a vehicle for hysteria. For example, in one scene where
she is experiencing an anxiety attack, von Trier uses
black and white extreme close ups of her fingers shaking,
her lips as she struggles to breathe, and the pulse in
her wrist visibly pulsing. The soundtrack consists of the
sound of an accelerated heartbeat, discordant ominous
sounds and Her gasping for air. During this attack, He
enters the room, and what first appears to be an
affectionate hug, becomes an act of holding her down
while He forces Her into a breathing exercise, commanding
her to inhale and exhale when he tells her to. In this
scene, the doctor figure attempts to exert complete
control over Her body, and then remarks “you’ve entered a
new phase;” this demonstrates the doctor’s tendency to
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read her illness as a text of medical discourse as he
tries to rationalize her feelings into categories of
medical stages of grieving. She remarks that this new
stage, anxiety, is physical and dangerous, emphasizing
the mechanism of conversion characteristic of hysteria;
her grief has begun to take over her body, and she cannot
control it. In a scene shortly following, She is trying
to pour herself a glass of water yet is shaking
uncontrollably, and ends up keeled over on the bathroom
floor before purposely hitting her head against the rim
of the toilet, until he hears the noise from the next
room and forcefully restrains her. This not only
reinforces his rational authority over her irrational,
hysterical body, but also introduces her urges of self
destruction which violently manifest later in the film.
Doane describes the eroticization of the doctor/patient
relationship in the films of the 1940s, yet this is
complicated in Antichrist because He and She are already
married, and the event of her trauma, the death of her
son, involved sexual intercourse with her husband. As
mentioned above, Doane explained that some form of sexual
26
dysfunction or repression is usually what is diagnosed in
the female patients in films of the medical discourse; in
this first chapter of Antichrist, She forces herself onto Him
and though he protests, “you should never screw your
therapist,” he is complicit and fornicates with her,
unaware yet that the core of her fear, what she is
repressing, is excessive female desire and sexuality. In
one of their sexual encounters, She accidentally bites
Him, and this seemingly innocent mistake foreshadows the
sexual violence which erupts at the film’s climax. After
Her anxiety attack, He constructs a therapeutic exercise
in which he tries to decipher what she is most afraid of
by drawing a triangle and asking her to name what fear is
at the top of the diagram. She states that Eden is near
the top, but does not know what lies at the peak of the
triangle. Consequently, He decides that exposure is the
only way to destroy her fears surrounding Eden, much like
how the “talking cure” was used on female hysterics, as
when they could articulate what they were repressing, it
cured their physical symptoms. So the couple ventures
into the woods. During their stay at the cabin, He
27
continues to try to figure out what Her main fear is;
firstly he writes down “nature” but then crosses it out,
later he writes down “satan” yet quickly erases this as
well- it is clear that the figure of the rational
therapist is struggling to conceive of what could
possibly be her worst fear as “the impotence of
psychoanalysis stems from the unfathomable nature of its
object of study- the woman and her sexuality” Doane 49).
He receives Nic’s autopsy report which shows
disfigurement of the bones in his feet, and earlier He
had found a photograph of Nic with his shoes on the wrong
feet. When He confronts Her about it, she says “a slip of
the mind that day,” yet when he goes alone to the shed,
von Trier uses extreme close ups of Him looking through
several photographs and the camera lingers on Nic’s
shoes. In every picture Nic’s shoes are on the wrong
feet; this is intercut with a flashback, or perhaps His
subjective imagining, of Her putting the shoes on Nic
while he cries in pain. He then takes out the triangle
diagram and writes “ME” at the top of the pyramid and
almost instantaneously she attacks him from behind,
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knocking him to the floor. At the precise moment that the
doctor figure realizes that what she is afraid of is her
own sexuality which cannot be repressed, it returns and
erupts in the form of sexual violence; Doane states: “not
only does female sexuality escape the objectification of
the medical discourse, but by means of psychoanalysis’
own formulation-conversion hysteria-this femininity
returns to kill the representative of psychoanalytic
authority” (52). Clearly, Antichrist demonstrates these
notions of the medical discourse, as her sexuality cannot
be contained by the figure of the symbolic order and she
attempts to kill him; however, it is she who dies, as
“unrepressed female sexuality leads to death” (Doane 65).
Antichrist is a film with addresses and explores
complex issues surrounding the depiction of female
sexuality in the cinema. A detailed analysis of the way
von Trier depicts nature, as evil and chaotic, reveals
that though He experiences the horrors of nature, it is
She who has internalized this conception of nature as
evil, as an inescapable part of her own existence as a
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woman. An in depth exploration of Kristeva’s theories
regarding abjection emphasizes how women have been
regarded as abjections within patriarchal society for
hundreds of years; therefore, through Her obsession with
Gynocide and her overwhelming self loathing, it is
unsurprising that She has internalized this misogyny and
subsequently deemed her own sexuality as abject, and her
self castration marks her all consuming drive to
eradicate her natural sexual desire from her own body.
The relationship between He and She is also an element of
Antichrist which supports and illustrates the theories of
Mary Ann Doane, as though the male doctor may try to
control and cure the woman, female sexuality is beyond
the bounds of the symbolic order; excessive female
sexuality is regarded as a threatening element of
femininity that must be repressed in order to maintain
the authority of the symbolic order. Though it would be
easy to write off Antichrist as a film that merely
perpetuates negative stereotypes regarding women in film,
I believe that Antichrist is a complex, provocative film
that lends itself to critical feminist analysis.
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Works Cited:
Beattie, Tina. "Antichrist: The Visual Anthonlogy of Lars von Trier." Open Democracy. N.p., n.d. Web. 11 June 2014. <http://www.opendemocracy.net/article/antichrist-the-visual-theology-of-lars-von-trier>.
Creed, Barbara. “Woman as Possessed Monster.” The Monstrous Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis. New York: Routledge, 1993. N. pag. Print
Doane, Mary Ann. “Clinical Eyes: The Medical Discourse.” USA: n.p., 1987. 38-69. Print.
Doane, Mary Ann. "Woman's Stake: Filming the Female Body." Feminism and Film. Ed. E. Ann Kaplan. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. N. pag. Print.
Kristeva, Julia. “Approaching Abjection”. Powers of Horror. New York: Colombia University Press, 1982. 1-19. Print.
Rapper, Irving, dir. Now, Voyager. Warner Bros, 1942. CD-ROM. von Trier, Lars, dir. Anitchrist. Nordisk Film Distribution, 2009. CD-ROM.
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