[Warning: contains spoilers. Erm, pretty much all of them.]

Much has been made of von Trier’s recent deep unhappiness; even if you were unaware of this biographical detail, Antichrist is very obviously the product of a serious and prolonged depression of frankly theological proportions. Everything is wrong or We are already in hell: Nature has revealed itself as the relentlessly cruel, profoundly disgusting indifferent monster it always was; human nature is even worse, and women are as disturbed and disturbing as anything a malevolent deity could create in its worst dreams. If Antichrist IS a misogynist film – with the symbol for woman in the title, the ‘researcher on misogyny’ in the credits and Gainsbourg’s demented thesis on ‘gynocide’, her own self-hatred and the final utterly strange scene where blank-faced women swarm up a hill as Dafoe’s character looks on in bewilderment – it is so transcendentally misogynist that it fails to be applicable to any empirical woman that could ever exist, even Gainsbourg’s own character, with her already infamous self-mutilation, hyper-dependency and childlike cruelty. Indeed, it is hard not to sympathise in some small way with her character at points, as tangentially complicit as she is in the death of her own child as well as her own madness.



If depression is the feeling that somehow everything is askew, even with itself, that things are out of joint, and perhaps have always been so, then one’s own nature quickly becomes an internal faultline by which to measure this sense of abyssal disconnection. If nature is indeed ‘Satan’s church’ as Gainsbourg’s character (‘She’) claims at one point, then between the rational man (Dafoe’s distant, condescending therapist) and nature red in tooth and claw (the talking autophagic fox, the deer unconcerned that it has a stillborn fawn dangling from its womb, the runt egret covered with ants and eaten by its mother, the crow that Dafoe has to kill interminably whilst hiding in a burrow from his by-now completely deranged wife), lies woman, a confused and confusing mixture of the pathologically normal and the biologically disconcerting. If you think this is itself a problematically misogynist claim, overcoded with the self-hatred we are supposed to internalise from women’s magazines and the false expectations of a hyper-sexualised culture, I would suggest that we begin instead with the very real problems in self-conception generated by these contradictions: otherwise compassionate men are traumatised by the graphic nature of childbirth, finding it hard to reconcile the comforting warmth of the vagina they used to know with the monstrous visceral apparatus it becomes, however sanitised the hospital surroundings might be. Or the ambiguity of menstruation in a modern world, trying to square the regular heavy flow of blood, welcome only as an indication that one is not pregnant, with the world of plastic bags, air fresheners and pre-cooked meat (if this makes absolutely no sense, it’s because it’s a form of nausea almost impossible to explain because so mundane and so disturbing at once). It’s not hard to feel disgusted with this nature whether it’s because, as Charlotte Roche (interestingly a dead-ringer for Gainsbourg) said in that interview I did with her a while back, this womanly, female nature is experienced in a bizarrely, almost entirely individualised way:

We’re all completely isolated, it’s not a group of women that menstruate, we’re on our own. But where does it come from? Mothers still don’t think it’s a good thing to be a woman.

I don’t know about blaming mothers as such, but there’s no disputing the fact that biology in its raw and visceral state has receded back into the realm of the private and the professionally managed. Pregnancy is the last thing that gets discussed collectively: it’s the decision of the individual and/or the couple and no one else (minus the odd surrogate here and there). Menstruation, as banal and common as it is for half the world, is still a thing to be discussed in slightly hushed tones, the middle-class man biting his tongue as he says he doesn’t mind doing it through the blood, the teenage son slightly afraid and dismissive of his ‘moody’ mother or sister, the odd mysterious ties to tides and moon-cycles half-joked about, half-indulged, even as we’re no longer sure what is ‘natural’ and what isn’t.



Antichrist takes the bourgeois couple, well used to taming nature, as its start and end point. The moppet that dies in an almost comical opening scene manages to combine the trauma of the primal scene with the premature suicide of a little Oedipus in a matter of moments; the film is not about his death in any meaningful way, and the very creepy abuse – creepy because so utterly minimal – that we discover his mother has inflicted on him (routinely putting his shoes on the wrong feet leading to a mild distortion of the bones noted in the autopsy report but not deemed a significant factor in his death) says far more about Gainsbourg’s disturbed mind than it does about the child. When the couple are later kept awake by acorns falling on the roof of the cabin, Gainsbourg’s character tells her husband that it takes a hundred years for an oak to reproduce itself just once: the tragedy of the only child dying is truly the fear of the modern age. Less than a century ago in ‘developed’ countries and less than a second ago in others, over-investment in any given child would potentially be a massive waste of time – far better to churn them out and hope that some survive, as brutally pragmatic as this sounds [note: I am of course not condoning this fact, more noting it. The grief of a parent for a child is unimaginable to me, and I do not think it gets any easier the more you have or however rich or poor you are].



The sex of the opening scene is bleak in the way that adverts for cars and expensive washing machines are, a kind of anti-Don’t Look Now fumble for the contemporary couple who spend its weekends at Muji and Habitat, studiously avoiding any conversation that might point to anything beyond domesticity and credit card bills. It is not until they get to ‘Eden’ that Nature, the true character of Antichrist hoves into view. Where Herzog oscillates between a fascination for the brutality of nature (‘nature is violent…I wouldn’t see anything erotical here, I would see fornication and asphyxiation and choking and fighting for survival’ here) and the eventual eradication of humanity from the planet (as in later Herzog films such as the Wild Blue Yonder), for von Trier, it is immediately and personally hostile, both the nature within and the nature without; that is to say the viscera of humanity (and don’t think that von Trier merely plays up the physicality of his female character; Dafoe too suffers in a particularly nasty cum-become-blood incident and a viscous wound that Gainsbourg shoves first her finger into then a make-shift contraption to prevent movement) as well as that motley collection of grasses, animals and weather that alternate between appealing and disturbing (the headache-inducing pressure of the English summer is a case in point, like being trapped in a geodesic dome on the wrong setting).



But nature, being so far both from the domesticated-but-traumatised couple, as well as the contemporary cinematic audience, is hard to capture. It always was – the German Romantics caught a glimpse of its might just as it was disappearing, jabbing the sublime back into some warped combination of man’s moral capacity and a recognition of his utter weakness. Feuerbach goes at this clutching at religious reverence more boldly half a century on:

I have sketched ... the historical solution of Christianity, and have shown that Christianity has in fact vanished, not only from the reason but from the life of mankind, that it is nothing more than a idée fixe, in flagrant contradiction with our fire and life assurance companies, our railroads and steam-carriages, our picture and sculpture galleries, our military and industrial schools, our theatres and scientific museums. - Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, 1841.



Feuerbach is, of course, correct, but fails to predict the religio-natural-revanchism that would follow in the twentieth century – when Heidegger simultaneously attacks technology and humanism it is the instrumentality of both, the lack of breathing space they leave open for a deeper understanding of man and nature, that appals; for von Trier it is the truth of nature as revealed in depression, which is as deep as anything Heidegger might have wanted, though not nearly so noble. Nature is passé, either the human kind or the other one, something to watch on film as you slip away (the footage of deer in the death chamber of Soylent Green), or to animate (from Disney’s Bambi to Ice Age). Indeed, it is not for no reason that the initial shots of von Trier’s ‘Eden’ (filmed on location in Germany), pre-imagined by Gainsbourg’s character on the train, are closer to computer game images than any ecological celebration, as nature just doesn’t seem, well, natural, any more. (I wonder if in the midst of his misery, von Trier didn’t sit in bed and play The Path and The Endless Forest on his laptop, as many of the shots of the forest, the animals and Gainsbourg’s character resemble almost perfectly the gothic sensibility of these games.)



The jolting camerawork, the horror-film close-ups and the sudden switches of scene where characters and animals suddenly come to occupy the spot they were just looking at all make this a highly mediated nature (when was it ever not?) and it’s perversely not until the Misery-esque ankle-crippling and auto-clitoredectomy that the Dogme-asceticism creeps back in a bit. By attempting to immobilise her son with the wrong shoes and her husband with a hybrid lathe-screw machine, the most consistent feature of Gainsbourg’s character is her inability to let men walk away from her, which is what the faceless women of the final scene do en masse, as the now-restored fox, deer and crow gaze indifferently at Dafoe’s murderous visage.



Like Houellebecq’s intense loathing for the irresponsibility of his hippy mother, von Trier has repeatedly spoken about his resentment towards his nudist communist parents. The hippy celebration of nature’s innate goodness, and the Christian benevolent God giving man dominion and naming-rights over the animals both seem to be the target of Antichrist, and both are ultimately misguided, kitsch attempts to harness and tame the malevolent and unnameable (what precisely do you call the fox that eats itself or the two-in-one assemblage of the mother-deer and dead half-born fawn?). Antichrist is not, however, straightforwardly an anti-Christian film, which would be too simple by half. It is though, a heretical film in the Gnostic non-tradition. Whatever God, or Devil, created this kind of nature, he or she got it wrong, but there is no hope, no salvation, no righting of order: even the stars don’t line up properly, their mythos means nothing (the ‘Three Beggars’ of Despair, Grief and Pain, statues of the initial sex-death scene, form part of a constellation that Gainsbourg’s character is somehow in thrall to, but as Dafoe’s character points out, doesn’t even exist. Gainsbourg’s character admits too that ‘there is nothing to be done’). The simian faces of Dafoe and Gainsbourg are fortuitous here, reminding us of the maladaptive, neotenous anatural status of the human (a long way from Leth’s ‘The Perfect Human’, von Trier’s obsession in The Five Obstructions).



Whilst Dafoe’s character has given up on Freud, the anxiety generated by his smug therapy would indicate that he’d do well to start there and work backwards to larger questions of a metaphysical and theological nature; similarly, the disturbing nature of Gainsbourg’s character’s research (which ends up in the attic of the rural cabin as a singularly mad scrapbook, a teen diary gone spectacularly wrong, complete with increasingly crazy hand-writing and pictures of burning witches which is what Dafoe, for all his cosmopolitan rationalism, ends up doing to the body of his strangled wife) would suggest that it is all too easy to get absolutely, devastatingly fucked-up by nature, human or otherwise, male or female, and that the closer you get to it the more uncanny it starts to look. Antichrist is disturbing because ultimately there is no separating the natural from the unnatural, right from wrong. There is trauma because there is life and then death, and none of it means anything.