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Is Antichrist Anti Mother?
Lars von Trier’s gothic horror film Antichrist sounds, to put it put it mildly, like a miserable story—a couple trying, and utterly failing, to get over the accidental death of their young son descend into mutilating each other and themselves. And that’s the delicate description.
But how to interpret that story has got some critics in a debate over motherhood, sex, guilt, and misogyny.
At Cannes, along with its lead actress capturing the Best Actress prize, the film also was given an “anti-prize” for misogyny, with the idea that the mother is portrayed as liking sex better than her kid and somehow responsible for his death.
But critic and mother Deborah Orr makes a startlingly opposite argument, saying that it’s not misogyny to explore those dark fears that mothers have about somehow being the agent of their children’s death through the smallest of accidents, not to mention the complex experience of having erogenous zones suddenly do double duty as birth passages and sources of nurturance. Von Trier may be a misogynist, says Orr, but at least he’s “interested in the experiences of women under stress.”
Her arguments intrigue me, but I have to admit, not enough to make me want to see the film. I never was one for horror, but as a parent, I get flustered by a gratuitous two-second shot of a crying toddler in the town-sacking scene in Pirates of the Caribbean. I am, however, glad that it gave Orr the excuse to write about such taboo subjects.
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2 Comments
Laure68 commented on Jun 25 09 at 5:38 pmAll I can say is that I hate Lars von Trier. His movies are depressing to an unbelievable degree. And I am one who normally likes movies with realistic, non-Hollywood endings, but he goes way too far. The women in his movies are often helpless and get tortured (mentally and/or physically). I would not take anything he does as representative of anything close to reality.
Shana commented on Jun 26 09 at 11:58 amYou should check out his miniseries The Kingdom (which Stephen King ripped off years later). But yeah, his stuff really sucks for the most part otherwise. I do not think that he is necessarily a mysoginist as more someone that sees women as always suffering for others.
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