Mutilated Emancipation: Lars von Trier’s Antichrist as a Critical Approach to the Representations of Women in History (original) (raw)

Transgressive Womanhood: Investigating Vamps, Witches, Whores, Serial Killers and Monsters

Abstract

Our aim is to offer a discordant interpretation of the film Antichrist (2009), by Lars von Trier. We depart from two elements which have not received enough attention from the critics – the first one is the fact that, despite the story being mostly placed in a mythical “Eden”, it is also set in Seattle, United States. The other element is our bet that Antichrist is structured around an ideological trap, linked to the choice of a determined point-of-view, which is materialized in the character played by Willem Dafoe. This choice unveils and problematizes not only the interests and needs of a singular individual, but those sustained by a whole group, which are closely related to ideologies such as patriarchy and sexism. Revealing, thus, through a non-reliable narrator, what seems to be “natural” as a historically and politically constructed discourse, the film shows the social and mostly unperceived roots of such issues as the demonization of women and the panic of the feminine.

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