Antichrist 2009 Revisited: chaos, increase!

We have two human beings isolated from any other human contact, surrounded by a vastness of nature. The conifers and ferns stretch endlessly. Animals cry. The trees angrily hurl acorns on the cottage roof  like stones. It rains as though it were a billion years ago.

It is a drama of confrontation and interaction distilled to the barest of essentials that the film tries to expose. There are three forces in apposition: He, She and It. The dead child is the burden of the past.

The civilised element dissolves rapidly in the distance from society and merges into the primeval cries of the forest. The jungle and its wild inhabitants are not passive elements but seem to be in a dynamic interaction with the human protagonists.

 It is appropriately named Eden-perhaps Antieden would be right- for it's human population is just the two of them and the whole garden is theirs in which to love and hate. They are the highly educated products of a modern society and in that sense already traded their original innocence for a forbidden fruit.The widerness, as if it were in response, sends back ferocious echoes in the form of hellish animal symbols: the aborting doe, the disembowelled fox,  the entombed crow.

The vestments of socialisation are quickly shorn. It is primitive man surrounded by a menacing jungle inhabited by fickle and blood thirsty dieties in animal form.

He has only intelligence to govern over his inner wilderness: the volcanoes, canyons and stormy seas of his soul. There is no law to follow, no faith to anchor on. There is no Christ. Hence it is the realm of pure nature, Antichrist.

Von Trier has probably made a very personal, autobiographical and very religious film. A mixture of genius, abnormal upbringing and the absense of anchors, religious or otherwise, himself a victim of depression, he has produced a difficult, powerful and layered statement about the depth of human need.  It is a very troubled cry, this great film.

Antichrist 2009

Hamlet:
"Sblood, do you think I am
easier to be played on than a pipe?"

Bowing to the inevitable I sat down to watch Antichrist 2009 today.

It's unfair to demean it as a horror movie, as some are calling it, or to interpret and seek "meanings" in a work of such brimming  elemental energy.

Others have called it an expression of great despair. To call it despairing also seems off the mark since it celebrates the vastness of the human being's innerscape caught in a particularly stormy mood. Vastness of that which goes by the name life itself rather than vastness of despair is the point, and life's characteristic of ricochetting, often instantaneously, from extreme to extreme, just as the child and its mannikin descend to death like  snow-flakes, triggering what ensues. Surely the image of the child as it embraces the void in falling snow in rapt wonder is one to treasure.

 One can take or leave the controversial sections of the film according to one's inclination. The eroticism is depicted with sensitivity  and has more of sculpture and form than sensuality.

The brutality is a true portrayal of our animal potential which all our learning and Ph.ds can scarcely scratch. It's no worse than the routinised and bureaucratised horrors which are the staple of our recent past and the medias bread and butter. At least the  scene of drilling His leg was less shocking than made out.

 A work of art is either authentic or fake, and this one is not fake. Like every authentic drama or film it holds a mirror unto us. He and She as well as the sombre wilderness with its animal cries and whispers is no other but Us, our very own unknown selves. We ourselves are Christ and Antichrist.

As a Buddhist scripture states, all the 84,000 volumes of sutras and teachings ( one could add the great movies and literature) are the diaries of one's own life.Otherwise what interest could they possibly hold?  This is what one may call the Copernican view of the inner cosmos which all human beings inherit in like measure. The large volumes and the open spaces in which the drama of the movie is played out correspond to such a conception of Man. Jung would agree.

For myself, I was held in rapt attention throughout. The prologue is heart rending, a cinematic lyric on procreation, nature, childhood and death. It is a highly memorable piece of cinema. Handels music used as a score is perfectly appropriate as a paeon to the awsomeness of existence as encapsulated in this brief sequence.


The violence and explicitness in the film nowhere descends to a level of cheapness or sensationalism. The director has tried to capture his vision of  a dimension of life, its repertoires of joy and pain stretching towards a no man's land. Like Hamlet's last four words: ".....the rest is silence."

Physicists in the late nineteenth century used to worry that their field of work had reached a point of saturation. Their fears proved groundless and present day reaearchers have no such worry. Our own lives also  have something of the infinite, and art of which cinema is the century's most potent incarnation waits with wonders never to end-- a mirror of societies, a chisel to sculpt the unborn future.

 It's  fractals all the way down.