Posted by finn mccool on November 4, 2009, 17:43:12, in reply to "Re: Anti-Christ"
>>The 'poor black soul' of the woman was in evidence in her mistreatment of the child and I thought that the crying baby she never found might have been a manifestation of her own guilt, as might her protestations that nature is evil assuming she didn't feel she was in control when she did treat her son badly.>>
Thing is, it's difficult to know where the nightmare logic starts in the narrative, so in a sense the mistreatment of the child may have been the woman's mental illness already taking over reality for both of them, revising it so to speak, much like she at some point later on seems to remember that she actually saw her son get on that table while they were having sex, but in any case you're right to connect it all with her guilt.
Guilt and self-incriminations are also part of depressive states in general, and the way she embraced the misogyny in her research is just the way her self-hatred found a voice. There's some humor in how her liberal husband was more horrified by her confession that she believes all that stuff about the connections between nature, women, and Satan, women not being able to control their bodies, women being naturally in touch with dark forces, and so on, than he was of her distress before that. It's as if he wakes up to the seriousness of the situation only when his wife starts to sound politically incorrect. At least that was the moment when he finally turned away in disgust.
But you can't dismiss the supernatural aspects of the film. She didn't just lose her mind, it all really comes alive; the worst fears of someone inside a dark place manifest themselves, as if the universe reorganises itself to make these superstitious, hateful ideas real, or are discovered to have been real all along. Von Trier set out to make a horror film, and he follows the genre's conventions pretty cleanly on several levels. He researched Japanese horror films for it especially. The Onion AV Club review, which is the only one I've read, stresses that aspect of it, and I and a couple of others had a small conversation about that in the comments section, in the midst of loud, thin-skinned, defensive Americans.
http://www.avclub.com/articles/antichrist,34440/
One important thing to note is that you can't really get to her (or anyone's) guilt and distress, her horror, simply by showing her weeping on a bed and saying how unspeakably bad she feels. You have to find a language for it that does at least some justice to her state, that gets slightly beneath the surface. The surface being where her well-meaning therapist husband operates and where we as viewers along with her husband would have been left had the nightmare not become concrete reality in the film. One can use the horror aspects, the violence and the atavistic ideas, including grim humor, to drive that through to us, so that we might understand it a bit, be forced to face a little bit of it, and not simply sit there enjoying our feeble, pitying compassion for her. So she finally turns on the viewer as much as on her husband. No matter what we think of the character, we as viewers share the husband's position.
She can either beg for our compassion, trying to convince us of how much she hates herself, which no one would take seriously enough, or she can make us watch her cut off her clitoris with a pair of scissors.
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