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

13

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

14

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

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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

18

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

23

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

24

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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