“I am the best film director in the world,” Lars Von Trier told reporters at the Cannes Film Festival, “all the others are overrated” (Hernandez). The Danish director, long infamous in international cinema for his bravado and courtship of controversy, provided these remarks in defense against the critical firestorm launched over the premier of his latest film, Antichrist (2009). Despite its title, the film has drawn unique ire not for blasphemous content (at least in a Christian sense), but for several instances of shocking violence and perceived undertones of misogyny. The Cannes jury awarded Von Trier a special prize for his work, an “Anti-award” for misogyny, and against such charges the director says simply “I can’t justify myself,” neither confirming nor denying the claims while clarifying his intention to do no such thing (Hernandez). Many artists have claimed that explaining the meaning of their work detracts from the art, but Von Trier’s film is one of few works to stir an audience so much as to demand in rage an explanation. Does the violent response to Antichrist indicate a meanness or evilness inherent in the film, or is it simply indicative of the work’s rare cinematic power? While Antichrist contains elements that can be construed as misogynistic, the film does not condone such beliefs and should be respected as an individual’s artistic expression.
Antichrist tells the story of a married couple suffering in the wake of their young son’s death. While this scenario may resemble the basic outline of many of cinema’s most boring and depressing adult dramas, Von Trier establishes his unique intentions by opening the film with an explicit black and white love scene between the two parents (Willem Defoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg) as their child wanders slowly towards and open window. The director juxtaposes shots of sexual ecstasy with the child’s slow motion descent through the air to the snow covered ground below. The first critical accusations of misogyny against the film come in response to this opening sequence, with claims that, “the creepy implication is that somehow she and her child are being punished for her taking pleasure in sex” (Tookey). This response to the sequence seems not only entirely subjective and personal, but also selective in its use of the text to support the specific reading. Yes, Von Trier does show the child’s mother enraptured in pleasure as her son dies, but he also shows the father in shots depicting a similar state during the sequence. “This is the first hint of misogyny,” the critic Tookey writes, but the scene is only misogynistic when analyzed through his selective memory. Perhaps Tookey is right that the mother (known as She) is receiving punishment for her pleasure, but this can only be read as misogynistic when one ignores the equal punishment inflicted on the father (He), who took part in the same sexual act and who has an equally dead son. Tookey’s reading itself seems more misogynistic than the sequence it critiques, singling out the female’s enjoyment of sex as somehow more wrong or notable than her husband’s in the exact same scene. It seems here that Von Trier attempts not to associate female sexuality with evil, but the act of sex in general with images of death, a thematic linking that the film returns to repeatedly.
Following this opening chapter, She, an academic, enters a debilitating depression that He, a therapist by trade, seeks to draw her out of through the technique of recognition and exposure to her deepest fears. Her greatest fear turns out to be Eden, the provocatively named cabin in the woods where she had previously retreated with her son in attempt to complete her thesis work. The subject of her research comes to light when She and He return to Eden in attempt to confront her fear of the place, and that very subject becomes the next lightning rod for critical cries of misogyny. She’s research delves into the history of witchcraft and the accompanying “gynocide” of countless innocent women during the middle-ages up to modernity. While the expected conclusion of such research (and that which that audience likely draws) is the overwhelming proof of centuries of violent male oppression towards women, She concludes that perhaps all women are agents of Evil, deserving the violent fates they have historically met. Another critic, Dana Stevens, selectively misreads this subplot, suggesting that “He and She convince themselves and each other that women are at fault for all this,” implying that (were this what actually happens in the film), the characters’ general acceptance of this thesis indicates a validated and shared belief by the director. Firstly, the plot as Stevens describes it does not even happen in the film, as He in fact tries to convince his wife that the self loathing feelings of which she has convinced herself stem from her overwhelming grief and depression, not from any truth to the theories. Secondly, even if the characters in the film really do come to believe in the idea that all women are inherently evil (which they don’t), this does not make the film or its director misogynistic.
“A line of dialogue is not a manifesto,” writes Jessica Winter in the film’s defense, pointing out an all too common problem in the reading of Antichrist and its creator. A film about racism is not (necessarily) a racist film, and neither is a film dealing directly and uniquely with misogynistic notions necessarily misogynistic. And finally, even if one somehow reads this passage of Antichrist as a whole-hearted endorsement of truth in natural feminine evil, one would be foolish and naïve to pin this belief on the director’s lapel. Von Trier himself says, “one of my techniques is to defend an idea or view that is not mine,” a claim exemplified by his interest in making a film about “the human side of Hitler” (O’Hagan). As this statement came during Von Trier’s press promotion for Antichrist, one could interpret it as a backtracking from his vow not to defend the merits of the film against its critics. However, coming from the man who proclaimed himself the world’s best director in the Holy Land of international cinema (Cannes), the filmmaker’s statement rings louder as truth than an attempt to save face. Even if the discourse on screen is 100 percent thoroughbred misogyny (which it is not), that cannot responsibly be used to conclusively condemn the film or its director.
While the above examples from the film have drawn high levels of criticism, the greatest controversy surrounding Antichrist circles around a graphic and now notorious scene of sexual mutilation in which the enraged She smashes He’s penis and testicles before clipping off her own clitoris with a pair of scissors. Charges of excess, tastelessness, and sadism towards the audience are impossible to refute, as those lay squarely in the domain of personal preference. The sequence is undeniably extreme, likely to ignite a firestorm of controversy regardless of which film is was attached to. As a part of Antichrist, however, it inspires increasingly redundant cries of misogyny.
Certainly, female “circumcision” through removal of the clitoris has long been decried in the global community as an act of chauvinistic barbarism with little purpose but cruelty and sexual oppression of women at the hands of a ruling class of males. Critics must realize, though, that no matter how real the act appears through special effects, Von Trier did not actually ask Charlotte Gainsbourg (courageous as her performance is) to mutilate her own genitals. Once again, the presence of the image is not a ringing endorsement from Von Trier for the procedure as an effective treatment for the inherent evil of women, but instead an intentional catalyst for the contemplation and discussion of a challenging issue. Additionally, the critics either forget the fact that He endures a similar act of debilitating violence or choose to focus on the role of a woman as the perpetrator. To suggest that the acts shown in the film criticize women suggests that these are the unspeakable actions of an average everyday woman. She is a mentally unstable and grief stricken individual, goaded on by her husband’s invasive “therapy” and forced through traumatic experiences to associate sex with death. Von Trier does not suggest that she acts violently because of her sex (despite the complicating element of her thesis research), but instead because of her grief and emotional abuse at the hands of her self-interested husband.
If the labeling of the film’s elements as misogynistic can be so simply discredited or the elements themselves explained as intentionally provocative ambiguity, it might seem strange that the cries have come so loudly and maintained ever since the film first screened in May 2009. Perhaps, more so than declaring Antichrist a misogynist work, the critics seek to certify the film’s director as a consummate woman hater. One would think, given the director’s pedigree for serious and quality filmmaking (he took home Cannes’ top prize for 2000’s Dancer in the Dark), that the usually progressive international film critics would seek to give such a prominent figure the benefit of the doubt. However, when Antichrist stands next to its maker’s other works, it seems to continue a pattern in the director’s treatment of women. In Dancer in the Dark, a benevolent blind woman is framed for robbery, forced into murder, and ultimately executed by hanging. Like Antichrist, the film on its own seems to illicit sympathy for the female lead and her apparent martyrdom. However, its predecessor, Breaking the Waves (1996), features another sympathetic female lead forced into prostitution before being gang raped to death. The emerging pattern seems obvious.
Von Trier admits that he repeats the same film over and again, a “melodrama in which a passive, vulnerable, often mentally unstable woman is gradually driven crazy, and sometimes killed, by the gaslighting of a sadistic man,” an apt summary of Antichrist (Stevens). For critical viewers, then, the question must be, “which one of these characters is Von Trier himself?” Bjork, star of Dancer in the Dark, had an infamous on-set bust up with her director and later denigrated him as an “emotional pornographer” (Winter). Von Trier’s Dogville (2003) star Nicole Kidman allegedly shared similar sentiments with Bjork, asking the director, “Why are you so evil to women?” and refusing to reprise her roll in the sequel (ibid). These women, both of whom worked closely with the director over a period of months, seem to have felt on set like the characters they were playing, goaded to extremes by this “sadistic man” behind the camera. In the unlikely case that either Bjork or Kidman watched Antichrist, one might easily guess which camp they would come down in. Von Trier’s reputation for misogyny, as supported by these two actresses, seems to have precipitated the response to Antichrist, whose critics see the director himself on screen behind the guise of the callous He.
However, Von Trier’s latest leading lady, Charlotte Gainsbourg, paints a very different portrait of the filmmaker. “I find it unjust when people say he hates women,” she says in an interview, “I really have the impression that I was playing him, that he was the woman, that he was going through that misery” (O’Hagan). Indeed, Von Trier’s depression when creating the film has been well documented, himself calling the process “a kind of therapy… filmed without much enthusiasm, made as it was using about half my physical and intellectual capacity” (Hernandez). In those words, the filmmaking experience sounds very much like She’s journey’s to Eden, unable to finish her thesis and diminished to self-loathing under the crushing pressure of her grief. Perhaps, then, She’s violent outbursts act not as a criticism of the woman or women in general, but as a kind of visceral release for the director on film. Like Von Trier’s previous heroines, She’s journey concludes in death at the hands of man, but unlike the others she gives the man a dose of his own debilitating medicine on the way. Why then, if She represents Von Trier, does he write the roll as a woman rather than a man? “My main characters are built on my own person,” Von Trier says, “I think women are better, more understanding” (Winter). Despite these words coming from a known woman-hater, they somehow imply a profound respect and identification with femininity and the female gender. If he does hate women then maybe, like She, it results from his own self-loathing.
All too frequently, the critical community breaks controversy down into oversimplifying binaries. A piece of art must, more often than not, fit into one category or another. Good or bad, right or wrong, true or false, the systemized grouping essential to the critic’s job frequently hinders any thoughtful discussion of a work. In the case of Lars Von Trier’s Antichrist, the film must be misogynist or not, bad or good respectively, and pornographic or artistic as respective to the judged quality. The truth, as it usually prefers, lies in none of these simplified labels. Perhaps Antichrist contains elements critical of or hateful towards women, but in likelihood Von Trier seeks rather to exorcise his own demons and prod the minds of his viewers than to provide audiences with a didactic treatise on his own views of gender politics. An assessment of the man’s oeuvre certainly indicates some possible issues with women, but maybe they result more from personal issues of self-identification and corresponding depression than any true prejudice. “I am an American woman,” the male Danish director once said (Winter). Clearly we deal here with a complicated man who produces complicated art, deserving of discussion not over what ill fitting critical umbrella it can be stuffed under, hateful or not, but over what unique box its creator has made for it himself and where exactly its bizarre boundaries could have come from.
