Anti-Christ: A Movie Review

by John David Ebert

Though this film was released in Denmark in May of 2009 and is therefore not technically recent, I just watched it for the first time on Netflix streaming video on demand and must say that it requires discourse. In an age of Hollywood formulas and computer generated celluloid video games, watching this film actually surprised me by reminding me that film, in the hands of a real artist, actually is a real art form. I had forgotten that. The film is made with the same sensibilities which attend European avant-garde art: the paintings of Gottfried Helnwein, let’s say, or the blackboard drawings of Rudolf Steiner; the photography of Gerhard Richter or the installations of Joseph Beuys. If the world of Euro-avant-garde art repels you, you might as well forget about the movie and also skip this review. This film wasn’t made for the little old lady in Dubuque. Its imagery is frank, and often brutal, and sometimes gives us scenes that thus far we are only accustomed to seeing in porn. Charlotte Gainsbourg, for instance, is shown, in one scene, masturbating: not pretending to, like Natalie Portman in Black Swan, but actually doing so on camera. And Willem Defoe’s penis is a sight you may as well get accustomed to here.

It is, you might say, though, the type of film that Bergman wished he could have made: it tells the story of a married couple who lose their child, who falls out the window one night while the two are making love. The woman, played by Charlotte Gainsbourg, is locked into a grieving mode and the husband, using psychotherapy, attempts to bring her out of it by conditioning her to go through several therapeutic processes. He attempts, in other words, to reform what he perceives to be a broken, but not unfixable psyche. The two retreat to a cabin in a wooded area known as “Eden,” where the mother had spent some time years before alone with her son.

The man, played by Willem Defoe, spends hours revolving around his wife, putting her through one psychological ordeal after the next. One day, however, he comes across a photograph of their child taken from the years when his wife and the child had been alone at the cabin and finds that in the photograph both of the child’s shoes are on backward. Then when he scans all the other photographs from the period, he notices that the mother put the child’s shoes on backward in every single one of them. An autopsy report conducted upon their child has revealed a slight anomalous foot deformity in the child’s feet, and now the husband knows why: the child fell to its death as the result of its inability to stand properly on its deformed feet, as a direct result of the mother’s bizarre practice.

At this point, his wife rushes in and assaults him, insisting that he not leave her. She knocks him out, then smashes his genitals with a log, and while he is out cold, masturbates him to a bloody orgasm. Then she drives a lathe through his leg, pinning it to the floor while she castrates him. He wakes up and a struggle ensues. I won’t reveal the ending here, but let’s just say that it makes perfect sense.

So in other words, the wife does to him what he had been doing to her psychologically: whereas he had been revolving around her and torturing her psyche in the belief that it could be restored to normality, she now has him pinned to the floor while she revolves around him torturing him physically.

The mistaken assumption made by the husband is that his wife was suffering from a broken psyche that could be “fixed” with the right therapy. However, what he realizes is that the wife’s psyche was not broken at all, since it was never “right” to begin with. You can’t fix what isn’t broke. The wife suffers from a badly misaligned psyche that was designed from the start with production errors built into it. It can’t be fixed.

And neither can we, I think von Trier is saying here. The film is a stark refutation of all systems of psychotherapy. The human pscyhe, von Trier says, can’t be fixed because it isn’t broken: it’s deformed. It suffers from a design flaw that is inherent to the entire species. And that design flaw is its propensity toward evil: to inflict it upon others and to suffer its infliction willingly upon ourselves because of our belief that we deserve such cruelty. Christianity had it right: sin can’t be washed away. It’s coded into the genes.

In this respect, von Trier’s philosophy is a secular version of Christianity. Original sin stains human nature so thoroughly that it can’t be washed away by any mere system of psychotherapy. It can only be forgiven for its sins, or not. Depending.

The misalignment that is inherent to the human psyche as a design flaw, moreover, is part of the cosmic order. Chaos is an error built into Nature to prevent it from petrifying and hardening into rigid forms. Chaos keeps systems open so that they can keep destroying and recreating themselves. Evil, then, isn’t a moral issue: it’s a cosmic one. It is simply the reflection in the design of the human soul as microcosm of the cosmic order. Satan is the personification of error, asymmetry, misalignment and chaotic vortices. In the human psyche, these vortices upon up little windows of personal hell and misery that spiral into life-destroying cataclysms because that is the way the human psyche is designed. It can’t be fixed, remodeled or salvaged. We are all doomed, sooner or later, to personal self-destruction.

Human beings build habitations to wall out chaos and disorder only to find themselves taken by surprise when such disorder erupts, stillborn, from the vaginal caverns of their own psyches. They forget that the brain is a natural striation of biology, just the way rocks and minerals are formed out of such processes of sedimentation and striation. There is no escaping chaos. It’s built into the system.

Hence, the imagery of tangled bodies littered along the landscape of the forest in von Trier’s film is a confession that he doesn’t see any partitions separating human nature from natural nature. The human being is merely a striation himself, a tiny microbial flaw in the fabric woven by the dense textile of the forest’s emerald green trees.

Christianity, von Trier is saying, had it right: we are unredeemable.

There is, however, a lot more going on in the film than what I am discussing here. This review explores only one of its many thematic striations that occurred to me on an initial viewing. I’m sure there are more. Great works of art are great because they outlast so many different semiotic systems that come and go over the centuries, each one trying to capture and “fix” the work for all time. Those that can’t be captured are what we call “classics,” those that can are merely “fashionable.”

I have a feeling this film will be written and rewritten about in film classrooms for a long time to come. Von Trier has created a permanent addition to the celluloid canon.