Ruminations on ANTICHRIST (2009, dir. Lars Von Trier) and THE WITCH (2015, dir. Robert Eggers)
By Hannah Clarke
This creative critique aligns the story structures of the films ANTICHRIST (2009, dir. Lars Von Trier) and THE WITCH (2015, dir. Robert Eggers) to reveal how their significant plot overlap tangles and re/mis/negotiates their resounding themes. The two films are more circle than Venn diagram; they are principally concerned with familial gender dynamics violently imploding, a woodland home, and the devil. Here, the significant difference is in the configuration of the given cisheteronuclear space. The differences in set time period impact the stories surprisingly little—ANTICHRIST deliberately regressive in its harkening of witch trials and climactic period-ambiguous hoard of descending women, while THE WITCH is progressive, with a triumphant frame lent to the surviving satanic heroine. This critique seeks to examine the thematic differences between these films, or lack thereof, by playing out the stories concurrently.
The baby is dead and we’re in the woods. We, being you, the doctor (my husband) or the preacher (my father), and me. A given, but the baby is absent. It died when I wasn’t looking. The vivacity of babies the whole point of me. There are other points subsequential to this one, perhaps, but this is the one that primordially matters, and this is the one I failed. I am grieving.
It is a half-lie to say that we are in the woods. We are in our cabin with the woods abounding outside. While we are in the cabin, you, husband/father, are knowledgeable and steady. You know and understand me, you seek to cure me, to haggle and manage me, which is for my benefit. There is civilized life inside the cabin. Inside is control, and outside is chaos. It is domestic space both in the sense of our own homely concord and in the sense of domestication. Limbs of the woods must’ve been hewn from the earth, stripped and bound into a legible shape for us to live in. The tree cadavers that make our home have been housebroken, like its inhabitants, to accommodate and be nurturing. It is like my own womb in that way. This means it must be bad.
The first womb was in Genesis. Before the womb was Adam, who lived in a forest without a cabin. He, unenlightened, still managed to name all cohabitating animals. This act determined that he and they were separate things. He was the knowledgeable one, despite never having sinned, he understood that there is a natural hierarchy of himself versus other living things. He is at the crest of this hierarchy. Everything he names, and thereby knows, is beneath him. Later, after Eve was wrought from him, she was approached by one of these animals. It said unto her that enlightenment is possible if only she transgressed. After it spoke unto her, she tasted fruit and was enlightened. She liberated/destroyed her husband/father soon thereafter.
Understand that a woman who cavorts with a beast is a witch.
Animals live outside, in the woods. They are permitted inside, on cabin grounds, only if they have been domesticated. Domesticated animals serve a function. They shouldn’t speak. We have children’s rhymes about them speaking, but only children can speak to animals unscathed. Remember, our baby is dead. If an animal speaks to us, it is a guise of Satan, who seeks only to make feral good domestic things.
It is a shame that we don’t to speak to animals. It is a deep wood and having only you for company is sucking up the air. What is there for us to do now that the baby is dead? Sex is an option, but it also got us here. Eve was torn from Adam so that he might fuck things more enticing than those animals he’d named. The baby was born because I fucked you. As your daughter, I grate on you, so you contemplate imposing me in marriage to a man. For him I’d bare children who might live to hear me tell it stories about animals that talk, perhaps.
If the animals in Eden could speak, what would they have named Adam?
I grieve over my loss, over the failure of my sex. I have compressed anything else I am, things like gender and fascination, down into the raw brutality of bodies and taught association. I’ve failed my womb, within and outside of me. I am fixated on it. I want it gone. You try and help me through my grief, you understand so much, but I am uncivilizing every moment. I am unbecoming and the cabin is unbearable, the tension makes you nauseous, but you don’t leave. You’re a good man.
I grieve over my loss, over the failure of my sex. I have compressed anything else I am, things like gender and fascination, down into the raw brutality of bodies and taught association. I’ve failed my womb, within and outside of me. I am fixated on it. I want it gone. You try and help me through my grief, you understand so much, but I am uncivilizing every moment. I am unbecoming and the cabin is unbearable, the tension makes you nauseous, but you don’t leave. You’re a good man.
My baby is dead. If I nursed a crow with blood, would that make me a good mother?
We’ve talked about women and beasts.
Any number of brutalities can be performed upon a body to chastise it for its witchcraft, but you do not consider yourself a brutal man. You’re a smart and holy one. Your initial instincts are not violent. Even if Satan was clearly upon me, you wouldn’t lay a hand on me. If I ask (beg) you to harm me, you wouldn’t (except you would). If you foist me on a different man, do you think he would do it in your stead? This brings us to a crossroads.
To whom does Satan speak?
Let’s say it’s you. You are in the woods when it rips open its belly and says, CHAOS REIGNS. Later, when I am insane and try desperately to murder you, you manage to get your fists on my neck.
My turn. It’s not in the woods. It’s in domestic space, with a domestic animal. We domestic animals understand each other. Anyway, nothing is domestic now. Everything’s the woods. The animal recalls the delicious parts of Revelations and asks me if I’d like something, a sensation to which I’m accustomed. Understand that at this point it’s already gored you to death. I’m on my own. I say yes.
Deeper in the woods, away from the cabin, there is no ‘we’ anymore. I, or you, stand bloody under the foliage. The animals come with us. Satan always watches the end.
If it’s me, I am triumphant in its community of feral women. We have no cabin and we’ll have no children. We round the fire and rise through the air of this big forest beast church forever.
Or, say it’s you. You are no longer a husband, no longer a father. You’re limping. You’ve tasted the fruit, so perhaps you understand now. The witches are spilling out of the woods all around you, you couldn’t count them, you do not try. You watch as they envelop you.
It’s the enlightened thing to do.
Copyright 2019 Hannah Clarke