Mysterium Horrendum: A Symbology of Lars von Trier's Antichrist
“At the very climax of joy, there sounds a cry of horror or yearning lamentation of irretrievable loss.”
— Frederich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy
“But as in ethics, evil is a consequence of good, so, in fact, out of joy is sorrow born.”
— Edgar Allan Poe, “Berenice”
I. Joy and Sorrow
So begins Lars von Trier's Antichrist, in which a man and woman engage in the act of creation by copulating, while a melancholy piece by Handel plays, their son emerging from his crib to fall to his death out a window— while his falling motions of death match the heaving ecstasy of his parents' bodies. Birth and death, creation and destruction are eternally intermingled with one another in every branch of the humanities, and von Trier's film is but another examination, expressing this sheer fact in imagery rather than dialogue. He and She, Willem Defoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg, respectively, exist as an Adam and Eve in Eden. This much is obvious. The return to Eden after having left it, leaves man in a position in which he is confronted with that which he has been separated, what Lutheran theologian Rudolf Otto called the "peace that passeth understanding." In von Trier's world, man comes back to Eden after living in the civilization that he has made his own. Nature had been visited before by the couple, as a place for vacation, a place for peace, but the peace that passeth understanding takes them over as soon as she begins to work on her thesis. This gesture is perhaps eating from the tree of knowledge, but gives her some notions about women in relation to the world which may or may not be true. In examining the symbols inherent in this mode of expression, it is also necessary to examine the means by which they are expressed, such as similar titles found in literature.
II. Symbols
Nature has an ambiguous legacy in the humanities. There a tradition in the literary arts, especially within English Literature, showing nature as abominable yet also part of man's need for celebratory rites. Edmund Spenser's “Epithanon”— for example— is the most telling, in which man rejoices at nature's beauty at day, and is warned of its evils at night, as an allegory for the respective powers of love and sexuality. As darkness— sex— falls, he wills a separation from nature out of horror, as the joys of Bacchus and Hymen give way to Ravens and satyrs, hobgoblins and other assorted children of the night. Nature also begins the terror of the Dark Wood of Dante's Inferno. A She-Wolf, a Lion and another beast guard the door of hell, as part of a natural order that must exist, as should the levels of hell themselves. The process that occurs afterward is man's repression of such evils.
Implicit in this process is the revelation that man should embrace the better angels of his nature and scorn the devils, that is accept all that is rational, availed to him by the almighty and repress the chthonic beings that exist infinitely underneath him. Such an idea is prevalent within western society, and has expressed itself not only in poetry— but in practice— through such books as the Malleus Malifercarium, the Catholic Church's official policy on witches throughout Europe, in which any divination contrary to the dogma of the church was automatically a delusion or the work of Satan. All of this is simply made explicit in von Trier's film, including Her direct reference to the aforementioned text as she is making love to Him in front of a tree that seems to be containing dead souls:
“The sisters of Rothsbam could cause a hailstorm.”
Eventually, through her spiral of self destruction, Gainsbourg's Her begins to echo these misogynistic sentiments more frequently. She again appeals to English literature, by quoting a poem by Robert Herrick:
“False in legs, and false in thighs; / False in breast, teeth, hair, and eyes.”
In this way, the falseness, and power of women is explored and eventually lends itself to a self-fulfilling prophecy of women controlled by unholy nature, or as unholy nature itself. Woman controls the weather, against God’s— or the gods’— law. But in Antichrist, this is somehow also part of the natural order, as it is expected that the feminine, the darkness, the ethereal will subsume the individual rational being. More concrete examples are the images in the attic and the shed where She conducts her studies into gynocide. One is a strange deer woman. This sketch alone appears to create a unity of woman and nature, and through its composition, an evil nature. The images alone are enough to evoke truth— It is the thoughts of demons and demonic nature forming and laying waste to reality, rather than actually existing in reality. Therefore they are eternally chthonic— unable to be proven— yet still present.
This strange pattern occurs with other symbols not necessarily dealing with femininity. When we learn of the strangeness of the incident that spurred the film, the death of the couple's child, we are shown a notice of an autopsy that indicates a slight deformity in the child's feet. Immediately, when confronted with the notion that Nic's feet are misshapen, we think of cloven hooves, perhaps because of the title of the film, perhaps because there is much to be seen. Of course, it is not the case that the child actually has cloven hooves, but it is in this way that the film enacts its symbolism, evoking thoughts by images that are familiar yet sinister, or to use a Freudian term, “uncanny.”
Nature itself presents a slew of images like these, including the burning ground that is only revealed in one instance, a burn on Her foot that is never explained. It is not a mere question if such a burn is only in Her mind, but rather why should she imagine the ground is burning when it shouldn't. The image seems to speak for itself. Similarly, there are other insidious signs, such as the ticks that attack His hand while He is asleep, his hand out the window for nature to enter his flesh.
Of course, Willem Defoe's psychologist doesn't allow himself to think that these manifestations means anything, and remains a rationalist. For Him, it is a scientific fact that “obsessions never materialize,” despite his constant interaction with them. The obsessions necessarily materialize in the world around him, but since he is so reliant on the dogma of his own psychological expertise, reality eludes him. The experience of these manifestations comes into being with or without the rational mind's consent.
III. The Three Beggars
The Three Beggars— Pain, Grief, and Despair, are at the core of this phenomenon. They are revealed as agents that continually bring Him and Her back to the hell He and She experience and are fated to experience. These beggars are very much like the three fates of antiquity— but also represented in folklore as harbingers who change man's fate by bringing man and woman together. Of course in another sense, as in a Yeats poem, the “Three Beggars” are nothing but agents of utter chaos, who compete for a goal, but only end up biting, scratching and tearing one another apart.
The animals, as von Trier has stated, are “creatures he encountered on shamanic voyages,” but it would be just as well if he had said they were common forest creatures that have been prevalent in myth: The raven is a creature derided multiple times in the Bible, but presented as the eyes and ears of Odin in Norse mythology, a bird representing intelligence in Aesop's fable, “The Fox and the Crow,” so here it is very telling that we have a bird so despised in Christianity, but also in the Western canon— o one may substitute raven for crow— at any rate, the same genus, the same creature, black bird with a black beak— Corvus. In Antichrist, the crow or raven merely returns once it has been killed, intimating that this intelligence declared as evil forever exists.
The fox is a creature no doubt associated with conniving and trickery, but here it is associated with pain. Its first appearance is that of being disemboweled, and literally speaks as an embodiment of chaos. It exists chthonically as a deathless being, perpetually biting its own flesh to eviscerate its own body. Chaos was the first being in many countries' mythologies.
The deer is perpetually miscarrying its child in its womb, an animal associated with peace and docility, forever losing its child. It is not tragic, for the grotesquery of the miscarriage is too severe, but the baby is never born, nor is stillborn as it is still in the process of being born. The baby is dead and alive simultaneously, just as the fox lives only to kill itself.
Eventually, these three figures form a constellation, and are shown to be the three trophies Nic topples over when he falls to his death at the beginning of the film. At one point, Willem Dafoe's He looks to the sky, after She has impaled Him. He sees the fox, the raven, and the deer, for a moment places a familiar map over the sky, and in one of the most oft-quoted statements in the film, declares “There's no such constellation.” The scene elicits laughter, precisely because of the extreme absurdity of applying the map to the sky when there are far more pressing matters to attend to. By trying to apply human concepts to the sky, he attempts to reconcile it visually in his mind. The map that results becomes itself a symbol.
Since these Three Beggars must be the figures that exist before, during, and after the events in the film, and presumably have no end, due to their inability to be killed, it is fair to extend this symbolism to the films epilogue in which He leaves Eden.
IV. The Epilogue
The faceless denizens of the forest that appear to visit Him as he makes his way through the forest after He has burned Her on a pyre. The irony is that ascension appears to come after She has been burned, taking on all the sins of the woman, murdered by man in a dispassionate manner, but in a method— strangulation— that women have been so murdered as retribution for cheating on their lovers. The women that rise up out of the trees and bound up the hill in a symbolic arch toward ascension are faceless after death perhaps as they have become more ineffable. They become more satyrs and furies than spirits of women. The corpses of women have been earthed, chthonic, and in the Hieronymus Bosch-worthy style that they are shown to be encased in the earth they remain forever active, just as the Three Beggars, who are seen standing side by side as the spirits of those women make their ascension.
The epilogue makes full use of the nearly too obvious Eden allegory, with He and She re-enacting Adam and Eve. As is revealed in the research of Her academic thesis on gynocide, the origins of male hatred toward women round out this allegory. The “antichrist” thus formed is the institution of female guilt and self hatred at procreating Satan, and then the subsequent destruction of her by the man who instituted that guilt perhaps unknowingly. But stepping from this stone to another, it is necessary to examine why this is the ultimate final conclusion to the interaction between men and women, civilization and nature. In some sense, it is the casting of man against the power of the “wholly other.”
V. The Noumen
The wholly other— or noumen— is always separate from man in theology, and something against man's understanding, but it reflects itself in gross form of symbols, those symbols may not necessarily represent concrete things, but they do reflect the fear in an archetypal sense. All of the symbols mentioned heretofore are simply the mysterious in gross form, and formally, Antichrist makes grand use of this concept.
Perhaps von Trier has taken a cue from the polymath Goethe, in which he would “renounce speech altogether, and communicate instead in sketches.” This is just as well, as every instance of rationalism, modern psychology, and otherwise logical application of thought is thoroughly rebuked in favor of things-in-themselves.
Horror, in its exploration of these things-in-themselves, probes into the deeper nature of man, which is inexplicable, and devious. The nature of woman is all the more problematic, especially as reflected in von Trier's film. But the inquiry of this deeper nature need not be clinical, as expressed formally by Antichrist. It adheres to a sentence from one of Edgar Allan Poe's deranged narrators:
“The realities of the world affected me as visions, and as visions only, while the wild ideas of the land of dreams became, in turn,— not the material of my every day existence — but in very deed that existence utterly and solely in itself.”
The images that so pervade Her in Antichrist, and eventually what come to being in His mind as well materialize as themselves, and they are only themselves, which is precisely why they are not able to be explained rationally. Dreams in the mind become the landscape and evoke the underlying reality of existence— which resists materialistic definition.
To evoke the story through these symbols accurately, the film could not have ended in another way other than to have man slay woman, He slay She, and have Furies return to haunt him, as He walks out of the forest, hobbled and castrated— a theme echoed in Greek tragedy as well. While these symbols do not add up to a unifying system of one religion, they at least evince a mood or a sense of the religious, the other, the uncanny, or the otherwise unknown “thing in itself,” or noumena. And von Trier consciously pokes at this.
To return to the scene where He mutters “There is no such constellation,” there is clearly a commentary on the need to create symbols to make our fears known to give them form, as man has done with the garden of Eden. Man makes known what cannot be known to give himself a compass, but that compass is his own invention. This dogmatic symbolism as imposed upon the world by Him is looked upon as an incredibly inept anthropocentric lens. Perhaps this is why, in some sense, Antichrist is a statement about the use of symbols in film itself.
VI. Tarkovsky
It is therefore no coincidence that this film has been dedicated to Andrei Tarkovsky, who in his book Sculpting in Time had warned against the dogmatization of symbol as absolute meaning, but rather that a focus on environment or mood, or the openness of shot should invoke meaning through its composition and placement. As the great Russian director observed of the cinema of his national ascendants— the Soviet montage of Sergei Eisenstein et al— their symbolism was too in line with one particular agenda to take full advantage of the mystic opportunity inherent in the film medium. The case could be made that von Trier has taken full advantage of that mystic element, but inverted the ideology imposed by such an approach from Christian mysticism, to Satanic nihilism.
That is not to say that von Trier is totally cognizant of his own theological landscape. Perhaps this is why the film is successful almost by accident, tapping into very visceral emotions while reflecting accurate and interesting mythological symbols, coming into being unconsciously, and therefore the symbols present themselves in a way that reflects psychology and religion.
VII. On Provocation / Intent— The Antichrist
Of course, the very title of von Trier's film is provocative, but one needs only look at a major work of philosophy similarly titled to see that content such that has been outlined in this article may be gleaned from a work seemingly made to exorcise demons or ruffle feathers. Frederich Nietzsche's The Antichrist was a book of philosophy titled so as to invite controversy and provoke thought. The mere designation of an anti-savior or anti-everything-Western-culture-has come-to-stand-for-or-thinks-it-stands-for in and of itself provokes without any examination of its content. That being said, it seems as though some people have looked at that book, a polemic that does not reflect the totality of the intellect of its author, and the film similarly titled by a gadfly Danish filmmaker as something without content, that exists just to titillate and exist as provocation.
While it cannot be denied that both Nietzsche and von Trier in titling their works intended to provoke, a thorough examination of their content reveals there is something more. With Nietzsche, all one has to do is read the short book— really a minor tract in the pantheon of Nietzsche— and one will find that it is packed with careful observations with a firm and sincere belief in their truth in the interactions of peoples that comprise mankind. Similarly, if one looks at von Trier's film, we see that contrary to the director's insistence that it was merely a cathartic expression of hatred, and a method of working through his depression— and some accusations that his vision has nothing to do with religion, courtesy of Armond White— that it is packed with religious symbols, and important ones that reflect philosophical discourse with regard to man and nature.
Although Nietzsche's book has nothing to do with the content of von Trier's film on the whole, there is a compelling quote from the philosopher that exemplifies the spirit of the film:
“Mankind has just as much need for an evil god as for a good god […]
What would be the value of a god who knew nothing of anger, revenge, envy, scorn, cunning, violence?
Who had perhaps never experienced the rapturous ardeurs of victory and of destruction? No one would understand such a god: why should any one want him?”
This is not to suggest that von Trier is so naive as to posit an evil God at the heart of all existence, but rather, that humankind reflects in himself only that which is the worst of his nature, and that it rules him, for good or ill, regardless of whether or not there is a wholly other being. That being said, it is also the examination of the wholly other as something repugnant at the same time, embodying evil. The idea is not positing the reality of such a God— that would be too simple. It is positing the idea that man needs such a God that reflects his own ideas, in his own image, to paraphrase an idea of Freud's. In this way, Antichrist sustains a very interesting symbology, which is determined through ideas, things in themselves that evoke a mood without having to retain a formulaic mythological symbolism.
And so, like Nietzsche's similarly titled, unrelated polemic— while the title is meant to provoke— the degree of aesthetic craftsmanship and serious exploration of the content of its subject make Antichrist a wealth of interesting conflicts between that which can be discerned and that which is wholly outside of human discernment, taking the form of symbols expressed through myth, ultimately expressing futility of even that myth.
For further reading, one should examine an article by Tina Beattie, professor of Catholic Studies at Roehanption England, written shortly after seeing the film at Cannes. She speaks with assuredly more authority on the subject matter than even the very good essay by Ian Christie in the Criterion Collection's edition of the film.
Full text of the article can be found here.
