Back at Eden in Lars Von Trier’s “Antichrist” she explained an incident that happened the past summer. She heard her son Nic crying. She searched everywhere for him. When she found him, he was playing contentedly, but the crying persisted for a time in the air in Eden.
“What you’re experiencing is panic, nothing more,” he said. “The screaming wasn’t real.”
She took that in as he walked away. Then she jumped him and started hitting him. He wrestled her to the ground.
“You’re just so damn arrogant,” she said.
Later she shared her own conclusion about hearing Nic cry: “Now I could hear what I couldn’t hear before,” she said, “the cry of all things that are to die.”
“That’s all very touching,” he said, “if it was a children’s book….That’s what fear is. Your thoughts distort reality, not the other way around.” But he had already experienced some of the “reality” distortion of Eden, and his words had begun to ring hollow.
“Satan’s church,” she said later.
“Satan!? Jesus!” the rationalist psychologist, who believed in neither, exclaimed.
“Nature is Satan’s church,” she asserted.
The earth was ruined in the sight of God, the book of Genesis reads, the earth was filled with violence. God saw the earth, and indeed it was ruined, for all living creatures on the earth were sinful.[1] We accept the violence of animals (and even that of human beings sometimes) as “natural,” because fallen nature is natural to us. But the Creator did not: God said to Noah, “I have decided that all living creatures must die, for the earth is filled with violence because of them. Now I am about to destroy them and the earth.”[2]
In “Antichrist” her husband couldn’t tolerate her conclusion about fallen nature being Satan’s church. He began to talk to her about nature.
“The kind of nature that causes people to do evil things against women?” she asked. He agreed.
If you continue to follow my teaching, Jesus said to those who had believed him, you are really my disciples and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.[3]
We are descendants of Abraham, they protested, and have never been anyone’s slaves![4]
I tell you the solemn truth, Jesus answered, everyone who practices sin is a slave of sin.[5] I know that you are Abraham’s descendants.[6] But now you are trying to kill me, a man who has told you the truth I heard from God. Abraham did not do this! You people are doing the deeds of your father.[7]
We were not born as a result of immorality (πορνείας, a form of πορνεία)! They protested again. We have only one Father, God himself.[8]
If God were your Father, you would love me, for I have come from God and am now here.[9] You people are from your father the devil, Jesus continued, and you want to do what your father desires. He was a murderer from the beginning, and does not uphold the truth, because there is no truth in him. Whenever he lies, he speaks according to his own nature, because he is a liar and the father of lies.[10] The one who belongs to God listens and responds to God’s words. You don’t listen and respond, because you don’t belong to God.[11]
“That kind of nature interested me a lot when I was up here,” she continued. “That kind of nature was the subject of my thesis. But you shouldn’t underestimate Eden….I discovered something else in my material than I expected. If human nature is evil then that goes as well for the nature of…”
“…of the women,” he finished her thought, “female nature.”
“The nature of all the sisters,” she agreed. “Women do not control their own bodies. Nature does. I have it in writing in my books.”
“The literature that you used in your research was about evil things committed against women,” he clarified for her. “But you read it as proof of the evil of women? You were supposed to be critical of those texts. That was your thesis. Instead you’re embracing it. Do you know what you’re saying?”
“Forget it,” she said. “I don’t know why I said it.”
Later he attempted to drive his point home. But by that moment in the film it seemed like he was trying to persuade himself, more than her, that the strange visions and dreams he was having in Eden weren’t real.
“Good and evil have nothing to do with therapy,” he assured her. “Do you know how many innocent women were killed in the 16th century alone just for being women? I’m sure you do—many—and not because they were evil.”
“I know. It’s just sometimes I forget,” she said without conviction.
“The evil you talk about is an obsession. Obsessions never materialize. It’s a scientific fact.”
She caught up with him in the shed later and attacked him. She feared that he would leave her. As he wrestled with her and fended off her blows he protested that he loved her. Just as it seemed that their fighting would become fucking, she hit him in the groin with a heavy object (a toolbox, I think, by the sound of it; I winced both times I saw it). Though he lost consciousness from the pain, he still had an erection. She massaged it to a bloody ejaculation. Nature, it seems, also controlled his body.
I, too, have nothing but a woman’s word for the way my body responded when I was unconscious from driving all night to get home to her. I awoke refreshed and whole. In “Antichrist” he awoke to find a whole drilled through his calf and a heavy grinding stone bolted to his leg. While she was outside disposing of the wrench under the shed, he attempted to escape, dragging his hobbled leg.
She found him hiding in a fox’s lair and dug him out. She dragged him back to the shed. She grabbed scissors and hid them from him as she began to masturbate with his hand. I expected that he was about to be emasculated. But she exposed and put her own clitoris in between the scissor’s blades instead.
I remember the Sunday afternoon during my first divorce when I considered cutting off my penis according to Jesus’ command. He said, “You would need to cut off your head.” It was the way He knew my thoughts from afar that persuaded me He was speaking. I had gotten well beyond the act to its aftermath in my mind. There was no way I would call for help and have to explain why I cut off my own penis. I had considered cauterizing the wound because stitching seemed out of the question. I wasn’t sure if I could stop the blood flow or not.
“That will kill me for sure,” I said.
His answer was “precisely” or “exactly,” something to that effect. I had been studying Romans. At that moment I began to take Jesus’ command to cut off my penis (literally, a hand or a foot)[12] more figuratively, and Paul’s insight—we have been buried with [Christ] through baptism into death, in order that just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, so we too may live a new life[13]—more literally.
“Antichrist” is a horror movie. She was not studying Paul’s letter to the Romans. No still small voice intervened to enlighten her. She snipped off her clitoris with the scissors. As she writhed in pain, he recovered the wrench and freed himself from the grinding stone. And though he didn’t believe in Satan’s church, he joined her in worship. He choked her to death with his bare hands, after he silenced her voice by crushing her larynx.
As he limped away, the last man standing, he had a vision. He was surrounded by women, the victims of gynocide, I think. When asked at Cannes to account for “Antichrist,” Lars Von Trier resisted. But if the featurette on the DVD was edited honestly, eventually he said something to the effect that it was the hand of God.
Though Trier claimed not to know, the closing scene of “Antichrist” reminded me of a scene Jesus described: The people of Nineveh will stand up at the judgment with this generation and condemn it, because they repented when Jonah preached to them – and now, something greater than Jonah is here! The queen of the South will rise up at the judgment with this generation and condemn it, because she came from the ends of the earth to hear the wisdom of Solomon – and now, something greater than Solomon is here![14] The people of Ninevah and the queen of the South were portrayed by the victims of gynocide, while he, the rationalist psychologist, was this generation.
[12] Matthew 5:30, 18:8; Mark 9:43-46 (NET)