Antichrist Reimagined: Von Trier, Violent Misogyny, and Authoritarian Pathology

Introduction

Lars von Trier has built a reputation as a cinematic provocateur, but beneath the shock value of his films lies a deeper ideological and psychological pathology. Over a decades-long career, von Trier’s work has launched what one critic calls “the most sustained and unrelenting assault on the female body… that the film industry has ever seen” (Sometimes a Misogynist is Just a Misogynist: Don't Excuse Lars Von Trier - Tablet Magazine). Such extremity is not mere edginess or abstract allegory; it is symptomatic of a worldview steeped in misogyny and a kind of malignant narcissism that compels him to orchestrate suffering for artistic validation. His controversial statements off-screen – from ill-judged Nazi jokes to self-aggrandizing claims – further underscore an ego-driven persona that finds outlet through the domination and torment of his female characters. Rather than treat his provocations as isolated stunts, we should approach them as expressions of a pathological ideology: a fusion of gendered contempt, authoritarian impulse, and self-indulgent cruelty presented as “art.” In this sense, von Trier’s cinema becomes a case study in how personal pathology can intertwine with cultural narratives, normalizing disturbing ideas under the guise of aesthetic daring.

To illuminate this dynamic, consider a provocative thought experiment: What if a feminist woman filmmaker made Antichrist, but with the gender roles reversed? Imagine a film in which a grief-stricken husband (rather than wife) descends into madness, mutilates himself and his spouse, and posits that men are inherently evil – all crafted by a female auteur with the same graphic intensity von Trier brings. The very premise feels jarring, precisely because we are unaccustomed to seeing male pain and vileness aestheticized in the way von Trier aestheticizes female suffering. This reversal throws into relief the double standards at play in both filmmaking and reception. We are conditioned to accept extreme violence against women on screen as art or entertainment, while violence against men – especially if framed as a systemic indictment – would likely be met with outrage or dismissal. The casual ubiquity of gendered violence in pop culture attests to this imbalance: as one feminist critic wryly noted, classic rock songs like Jimi Hendrix’s “Hey Joe” (which casually narrates a man shooting his unfaithful wife) play as “the background music of our lives,” contributing to a culture in which “male violence against women is so normalized” (Feminism/Popular Culture: "Hey Joe"). Yet if the tables turn – say, a woman artist sings about killing an abusive husband – the backlash is swift and shocked (Ibid.). By introducing a gender-swapped Antichrist, we set the stage for a critical examination of von Trier’s oeuvre: how it normalizes the spectacle of female pain and what that reveals about authoritarian and narcissistic undercurrents in both the artist and the society that praises him.

In the following analysis, we will probe von Trier’s aestheticization of female suffering, connect his artistic choices to frameworks of authoritarianism and narcissism, and explore the implications of reversing the gendered gaze. The goal is not merely to condemn von Trier, but to unpack how his work exemplifies a malignant cultural script – one that thrives on the subjugation of women and aligns disturbingly well with authoritarian ideologies. Through comparisons to other filmmakers and theoretical perspectives from feminist film criticism and authoritarian psychology, we can better understand why Antichrist and its brethren are more than just “outrageous” art-house provocations. Instead, they emerge as artifacts of a pathological narrative tradition: what some feminist theory calls phallogocentric master narratives, stories centered on male power and female guilt, propped up by aesthetic techniques that compel the audience to participate in the spectacle of women’s suffering. By imagining an alternate Antichrist, we hold up a mirror to these narratives, asking what they truly reflect – and whose purposes they serve.

Von Trier and the Aestheticization of Female Suffering

Few directors have so consistently turned female pain into spectacle as Lars von Trier. From his early European arthouse successes to his later controversial hits, von Trier’s films construct narratives of female suffering with an almost fetishistic devotion to detail and intensity. In Breaking the Waves (1996), a devout young wife endures sexual degradation and ostracism, ultimately sacrificing herself for her husband’s spiritual and physical recovery. In Dancer in the Dark (2000), an innocent single mother is falsely accused of murder and executed by hanging – a protracted martyrdom orchestrated to the strains of a Björk musical elegy. Dogville (2003) places a trusting heroine at the mercy of an entire town that beats, rapes, and enslaves her. Each of these works earned von Trier critical plaudits, in part due to the undeniable power of the performances (Emily Watson, Björk, and Nicole Kidman all won awards or acclaim for these roles (Is Antichrist anti-women? | The Independent). Yet the through-line is unmistakable: in his films, "women are beaten, raped, depressed, falsely accused, murdered, and commonly said to side with the devil” (Lars von Trier: Misogynist? | Cinema Scandinavia). Female characters are put through hellish ordeals, portrayed with an operatic mix of realism and stylization that invites the audience to linger on their pain. Von Trier doesn’t just tell stories of women’s suffering – he aestheticizes that suffering, turning it into grand tragedy, religious allegory, or horror spectacle, depending on the film.

Antichrist (2009) represents the most extreme iteration of this tendency. Billed as an “art-horror” film, Antichrist scandalized Cannes with its graphic depictions of sexual violence and self-mutilation – including an infamous scene of female genital mutilation enacted by Charlotte Gainsbourg’s character upon herself. The film’s premise is steeped in misogynistic lore: a mother (identified only as “She”) descends into guilt-ridden madness after the accidental death of her son, comes to embrace the idea that women are inherently evil, and ritualistically tortures herself and her husband amid visions of a satanic Nature. Von Trier literalized his theme by crediting an actual “misogyny researcher” on the film – an academic consultant tasked with providing historical ammo for the notion that “women are evil” (Lars von Trier: Misogynist? | Cinema Scandinavia). As The Independent noted in its review, Antichrist “even has an official ‘misogyny researcher’ listed in the closing credits” and was duly “crowned at [Cannes] with an ‘anti-prize’ for being ‘the most misogynist movie from the self-proclaimed biggest director in the world’” (Is Antichrist anti-women? | The Independent). In other words, von Trier baked a centuries-old phallocentric myth – woman as the root of sin – into the very DNA of the film, then doubled down by visualizing one of the most vicious punishments imaginable for his female protagonist. The result, as critic Antonia Quirke put it, was “one of the most vicious movies ever made” (Ibid.) and a work that prompted Cannes jurors to accuse von Trier of suggesting “woman should be burnt at the stake so that man can finally stand up” ((Ibid.).

Despite – or rather, because of – its grotesque extremes, Antichrist crystallizes von Trier’s aesthetic project: female pain transformed into art, presented with both technical virtuosity and confrontational brutality. Even detractors had to acknowledge the film’s craftsmanship. Danish critics praised its “peerless imagery” and the daring blend of raw handheld camerawork with “wonderful stylized tableaux” that give the film an almost operatic visual texture (Antichrist (film) - Wikipedia). Roger Ebert, while disturbed, noted that von Trier “is driven to confront and shake his audience” with whatever tools necessary – “sex, pain, boredom, theology and bizarre stylistic experiments” – and that Antichrist is undeniably a film made with uncompromised vision (Ibid.). Such comments underscore how suffering itself becomes spectacle under von Trier’s direction. The opening sequence of Antichrist is telling: shot in sumptuous black-and-white slow motion and set to a Handel aria, it intercuts a child’s fatal accident with unsimulated penetrative sex between the parents. The scene is hauntingly beautiful and deeply disturbing all at once, collapsing Eros and Thanatos (love and death) into a single aestheticized tableau. In Breaking the Waves, the climactic image of heavenly church bells ringing to honor the deceased Bess is both visually striking and deeply unsettling—a moment of transcendence rendered with lyrical beauty, yet also verging on the absurdly sentimental, if not outright sophomoric. Time and again, von Trier aestheticizes female agony, drawing the audience into a voyeuristic engagement with suffering. Whether through intimate close-ups that magnify pain or stylized sequences that teeter between profound empathy and gratuitous exploitation, his films repeatedly invite us to gaze at the eroticized spectacle of female martyrdom, leaving us to question whether we are witnessing a critique of oppression or merely another iteration of it.

Feminist film theorists have long warned of the dangers in such representations. Laura Mulvey’s classic critique of cinema’s male gaze notes how mainstream narratives often derive a “sadistic, voyeuristic pleasure in the spectacle of the punishment of women, the bearers of guilt (who, being ‘castrated’, must have done something to deserve it)” (Laura Mulvey: Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema | Speaker to Animals). Von Trier’s filmography could serve as a textbook illustration of Mulvey’s point. His heroines are invariably treated as bearers of guilt: Bess believes she’s to blame for her husband’s paralysis and thus must sexually martyr herself; Selma in Dancer in the Dark is punished by society for a crime she didn’t commit, as if her goodness itself must be crucified; and in Antichrist, She literally internalizes misogynistic doctrine and concludes that her very nature as a woman is sinful evil that warrants torture. Von Trier’s direction compels the audience to become uneasy witnesses to these acts of punishment, trapping them within the spectacle of suffering. The filmmaker assumes the role of a sadistic masculine overlord, orchestrating torment with meticulous, almost clinical precision—daring viewers not only to confront their unavoidable complicity but also to reckon with any unsettling pleasure they might derive from being immersed in his brutality and authoritarian aesthetic.

We are made complicit in watching the spectacle of female suffering, lured by the compelling performances and cinematic flair even as we recoil at the content. This aestheticization reaches its apex in Antichrist, where horror and beauty collapse into one another, forcing us to ask: is the film exposing the misogynistic myth of women’s inherent guilt, or is it perversely reveling in it? The question, however, is an illusion—it is always the latter, because that is what the dictator-director has decreed, ensuring that no other interpretation can truly take hold. By making female suffering both the narrative engine and the aesthetic centerpiece of his films, von Trier does not straddle a fine line between exposing misogynistic violence and perpetuating it—he simply perpetuates it, draping brutality in the guise of artistic provocation. Indeed, as one commentator bluntly put it, “Misogyny has come to seem like a feature of von Trier’s films, not a bug, as he subjects his female characters to all sorts of brutality and sacrifice” (The Audient: Lars von Trier's 20-year descent from humanism to misanthropy). In von Trier’s cinematic universe, the aesthetic of suffering reigns – and it is almost always women who bleed for the sake of the “art.”

Authoritarianism, Narcissism, and Gendered Violence

What drives Lars von Trier to repeatedly script and film such ordeals for his female protagonists? One answer lies in the intersection of personal psychology and broader authoritarian ideology. Critics and colleagues have frequently remarked on von Trier’s mercurial, tormenting directorial style – he is notorious for pushing actors (especially actresses) to their breaking point to capture raw emotion. The stories of “how hard von Trier is on his female actors… are legendary” (Ibid.). Björk, who delivered a harrowingly authentic performance in Dancer in the Dark, later described her collaboration with von Trier as a form of abuse, alleging that he sexually harassed her and created a hostile environment until she, in desperation, “ate [her] own cardigan” on set (Lars von Trier: Misogynist? | Cinema Scandinavia). Nicole Kidman likewise found filming Dogville a “gruelling experience” (Is Antichrist anti-women? | The Independent). Such accounts paint a picture of a director as authoritarian figure, exerting power and control in ways that mirror the domination depicted on screen. It is as if von Trier’s authoritarian pathology operates both within the fiction (where female characters are subjugated under cruel moral orders) and in reality (where the director’s will to power tests the boundaries of professional ethics and human decency).

Psychologically, von Trier’s behavior and artistic obsessions align with what Erich Fromm and later clinicians term “malignant narcissism.” This syndrome combines an grandiose self-importance with aggression, paranoia, and sadistic tendencies (Malingnant Narcissism: From Fairy Tales to Harsh Reality). In a malignant narcissist’s worldview, other people exist chiefly to serve as extensions of the self – or to be punished if they do not. We can see reflections of this in von Trier’s filmmaking. He often identifies closely with his protagonists, using them as avatars to work through his own emotions, yet he also sacrifices them for dramatic impact. Tellingly, von Trier has admitted that he uses female characters to channel his personal struggles because if he used male characters, the result would simply appear “brutality and cruelty.” As he once explained, “Women are better at embodying and expressing that part of me… if I expressed the same thing through a man, you would only see the brutality and cruelty” (A Critique of Judgment: Movies and Morality — photogénie). This stunning comment reveals the narcissism at play: the female characters are extensions of von Trier’s self, vessels for his depression, fears, and anger. By his own account, he makes them endure horrific trials as a way of externalizing his inner darkness, cloaking it in the perceived vulnerability or “otherness” of a woman. The filmmaker’s psyche essentially uses the female form as both mirror and punching bag. It’s a dynamic of ego-driven manipulation that resonates with the sadistic streak in malignant narcissism – a pleasure or compulsion in inflicting pain, rationalized as necessary or even noble. Von Trier’s protagonists—whether the devoutly suffering Bess or the feral and tormented "She"—are subjected to relentless punishment while both the director and his male characters look on, wavering between pity and sadistic control. These women serve as vessels for his obsessions, absorbing the weight of his cinematic self-flagellation as he transforms their suffering into spectacle. In doing so, he blurs the line between martyrdom and exploitation, crafting a vision where female agony is not just narratively essential but aestheticized, fetishized, and inescapable.

This conflation of self and other, artist and victim, hints at an even broader framework: the authoritarian aesthetic underlying von Trier’s narratives. Authoritarianism in art can be understood as a mode that glorifies domination, demands absolute submission to an overarching will or idea, and often aestheticizes violence as a means of enforcement. Von Trier’s films, whether because of their arthouse pedigree or in spite of it, display many of these traits with a self-conscious intensity that dares the viewer to question their own response.

The worlds he builds are ruthlessly deterministic: a cruel logic governs events, whether it’s religious fundamentalism in Breaking the Waves or the brutal social contract of Dogville. Dissent or non-conformity by the heroine (expressing sexuality, showing kindness, seeking justice) is met with overwhelming punitive force. This mirrors the structure of authoritarian societies, wherein transgressions (especially by those low in the hierarchy, such as women) must be crushed to preserve the power structure. Indeed, one could argue that von Trier’s films ultimately reinforce a conservative moral order, even as they masquerade as subversive—an illusion that only the most naïve audience might accept at face value.

In Breaking the Waves, Bess’s community – the patriarchal church elders – banish and vilify her, and in the end they are vindicated by the narrative: Bess dies, but heavenly bells ring to affirm her sanctity only once she’s a silent martyr. The authority of the (male-defined) spiritual law is oddly upheld. In Antichrist, despite all the apparitions of satanic Nature, the climactic moment is disturbingly aligned with an ancient authoritarian impulse: the husband, representing rational patriarchy, strangles his “witchy” wife to death, recalling countless witch trials where hysterical women were killed to “finally allow man to stand up,” as the Cannes anti-prize jury observed (Is Antichrist anti-women? | The Independent). Even Dogville, which ends with the female protagonist turning the tables and obliterating her oppressors, does so by invoking her father’s mafia-style firepower – essentially calling on a greater patriarchal violence to annihilate a lesser one. In these narratives, ultimate authority (be it God, patriarchy, or brute force) is never truly questioned; rather, the female figure is the site upon which authority is asserted, through suffering or destruction.

Many feminist scholars would describe these kinds of stories as phallogocentric master narratives—storytelling structures that put men and male authority at the center while pushing women to the sidelines, often as tools to advance the male protagonist’s story or to reinforce male dominance. Von Trier might appear to give women center stage, but as director Catherine Breillat (herself no stranger to exploring violent sexuality on film) astutely observes, he often “adapt[s] a female perspective to disguise his misogyny” (A Critique of Judgment: Movies and Morality — photogénie). In other words, the camera may be on the woman, but the perspective calling the shots is still the patriarchal master’s. Breillat’s critique highlights that von Trier’s female-centric tragedies can function as Trojan horses for old misogynistic tropes: the “fallen woman,” the “hysterical mother,” the “selfless martyr.” These are sexist archetypes deeply embedded in Western culture’s master narratives. By resurrecting them with art-house sophistication, von Trier’s films lend a new credence to antiquated, sexist ideologies – all while the director coyly insists he’s just exploring or provoking. It is a move reminiscent of authoritarian propaganda in its subtlety: the core message (women as cause or locus of evil and chaos) is smuggled in under cover of avant-garde provocation and personal confession. Critics have sometimes given von Trier the benefit of the doubt, proposing that he is critiquing misogyny by depicting it so grotesquely. But as Batya Ungar-Sargon argues, this charitable view often amounts to making excuses for an artist’s “disgust with all things female” (Sometimes a Misogynist is Just a Misogynist: Don't Excuse Lars Von Trier - Tablet Magazine). Instead of reflexively lauding von Trier’s audacity or craft, perhaps we should interpret his oeuvre as a sustained symptom of a diseased cultural unconscious: a place where malignant narcissism and authoritarian gender norms meet. In that light, von Trier’s violent misogyny is not subverting the status quo – it is the status quo, distilled and amplified, then sold back to us as high art.

Reversing the Gaze: If a Woman Made Antichrist

To fully appreciate the double standards at work in both von Trier’s filmmaking and its reception, it is illuminating to reverse the gaze. What if Antichrist were made by a feminist woman director and presented the male gender as the source of cosmic evil? Envision a film in which a grieving father goes insane, concludes that “man is inherently corrupt,” and graphically mutilates his genitals and tortures his wife. Would such a film be hailed as a profound exploration of grief and psyche? Or would it be dismissed as misandrist exploitation, the deranged polemic of a “man-hating” director? It’s not hard to guess the likely reaction. In a culture where male-on-female violence is normalized to the point of invisibility, even a hint of female-on-male retributive violence often triggers disproportionate criticism (Feminism/Popular Culture: "Hey Joe"). We tolerate the everyday misogyny of slasher films, revenge thrillers, and yes, arthouse dramas, but we have far less appetite for seeing men placed vulnerably in those positions – especially under the creative control of women.

Popular music offers a telling analogue: songs about men killing unfaithful or “difficult” women abound across genres and eras, barely raising an eyebrow, whereas songs about women killing men (even abusive men) are met with controversy. A commenter on one feminist blog noted the pattern incisively: “songs where women murder their abusers are so heavily criticized while songs where men murder women (and there are SO MANY) play without comment. We are so desensitized to it.” (Feminism/Popular Culture: "Hey Joe"). This double standard is rooted in societal expectations about whose pain is acknowledged and whose violence is justified. (See my "'Hey Josephine': Addressing the Virulent Misogyny of A Great American Rock Song.")

Translated to cinema, it means that von Trier can show Charlotte Gainsbourg brutalizing herself and Willem Dafoe with scissors and grindstones and have it debated as art, whereas if a woman filmmaker staged analogous scenes of a man being castrated or overpowered, many would likely cry foul. It would be seen as a political statement (feminist “propaganda”) rather than a psychological horror, its director accused of harboring a vendetta rather than plumbing the human condition. Such is the lens of bias: male-authored violence is art; female-authored violence is agenda.

History bears this out. When women directors do center female vengeance or male victimhood, the response is often uneasy. Consider Meir Zarchi’s grindhouse shocker I Spit on Your Grave (1978), a rape-revenge film so unsparing in depicting a woman’s retaliation against her rapists that it was reviled and censored – even though its male-directed peers in the “rape-revenge” genre also reveled in brutality (usually aimed at women) with far less moral scrutiny. Or take Coralie Fargeat’s Revenge (2017), a stylish French thriller where a raped woman turns the tables on three men; it garnered critical praise in festivals but only limited release, and some reviews fixated on its extreme gore as if this were something abnormal for an exploitation premise (it was not). The discomfort largely stemmed from who was inflicting violence on whom.

Another example: in Patty Jenkins’ Monster (2003), based on real-life serial killer Aileen Wuornos, the film took pains to contextualize a woman killing predatory men – yet Charlize Theron’s Oscar-winning transformation was often discussed as an acting feat or true-crime study, sidestepping the film’s indictment of male exploitation of vulnerable women. It seems that when female perspectives threaten to make men as a group look bad or vulnerable, critics hasten to neutralize the threat, reframing it or isolating it as an exception.

Even iconic male directors have faced pushback when subverting gendered expectations, albeit to a lesser degree. Brian De Palma, for instance, often invoked and twisted the male gaze and gender roles in his thrillers. In Carrie (1976), he presented a bullied teenage girl whose eruption of telekinetic violence at the prom inverted the usual horror formula by making the female victim the avenging monster – a twist that left audiences both sympathetic to Carrie and horrified by her. The film was successful, but it’s notable that Carrie’s violence is couched in supernatural tragedy rather than a targeted sociopolitical fury. When De Palma crafted Dressed to Kill (1980), a Hitchcockian thriller featuring a deeply transphobic depiction of a "gender-bending" killer, and Body Double (1984), a film that satirizes voyeurism and objectification while indulging in both, he faced widespread criticism for misogyny—even as he insisted his work was a critique.

Dressed to Kill, in particular, leaned into harmful stereotypes by portraying its villain as a murderous trans woman—a trope that has historically fueled real-world violence and discrimination against transgender people. Rather than subverting the slasher genre’s fixation on gendered violence, De Palma’s film reinforced the idea that gender nonconformity is pathological and inherently dangerous. At the same time, it deflected male culpability by placing the figure of monstrosity onto a feminized body, much like the narrative twist in Hey Joe, where the woman is ultimately revealed as the killer. This sleight of hand allows the film to indulge in its violence while obscuring the deeper structures of male dominance that drive it.

Meanwhile, Body Double presents itself as a critique of Hollywood’s objectification of women, inviting audiences to interrogate voyeurism and power dynamics in cinema. Yet, in doing so, it collapses the boundary between satire and complicity, luxuriating in the same exploitative imagery it claims to expose. The film’s self-awareness does not neutralize its indulgence; if anything, it only deepens the ambiguity of its intent. This unresolved tension mirrors the (unfortunately) ongoing debate surrounding von Trier—whether he is dismantling cinematic misogyny (an interpretation that is far too generous, if not outright naive) or simply repackaging it in an arthouse aesthetic, masking brutality beneath a veneer of intellectualism.

Brian De Palma’s female-centered noir Femme Fatale (2002) and the corporate psychodrama Passion (2012) play sly games with power dynamics and agency, yet were met with critical ambivalence. If a seasoned male auteur like De Palma struggled to convince audiences of his so-called “gender subversions,” imagine a woman filmmaker directly deconstructing male authority with the same sledgehammer that Lars von Trier takes to female psyches. It is likely she would face far harsher judgment. The industry might not even finance such a project outside of niche circles, fearing it would alienate the predominantly male critical establishment and audience base—one that still reflexively treats male suffering as a deviation from the norm while remaining largely unfazed by the ritualized destruction of women on screen.

The hypothetical “gender-swapped Antichrist” illuminates just how conditioned our gaze has become. Von Trier’s film, with its Grand Guignol portrayal of a “witch” figure, taps into a long tradition of storytelling that vilifies women under the pretext of exorcising evil. Audiences and critics, even those uneasy with the film, could situate it in familiar territory – from the Bible’s Eve to horror cinema’s parade of female demons – and debate its meaning. But a film that overtly treated men as the locus of evil, drawing perhaps on patriarchal atrocities or the concept of toxic masculinity incarnate, would be entering relatively uncharted narrative waters. And where it has been attempted, the response tends to prove the point about double standards.

For example, Jennifer Kent’s The Nightingale (2018) features a young woman exacting revenge on male colonial officers for rape and murder; while widely acclaimed, it also prompted walkouts due to its unflinching violence, and some viewers decried it as too harsh – as if the depiction of what historical men actually did was an affront. In contrast, male-directed films that put women through equal or worse violence (from Irreversible to The Passion of the Christ) are often taken in stride as necessary “realism” or artistic exploration. The imbalance suggests that cultural gatekeepers are far more comfortable with violence flowing in one direction. As the feminist blog commenters observed about music, when Rihanna released “Man Down” – a song about a woman shooting a man who abused her – “everyone lost their shit because she’s a woman,” whereas male artists routinely sing of hurting or killing women with little outcry (Feminism/Popular Culture: "Hey Joe"). The same principle extends to film: a woman meting out violence, or a woman filmmaker metaphorically attacking the male collective, is perceived as transgressive on a level that von Trier’s female-directed violence is not.

By comparing von Trier’s work to this mirror image scenario, we underscore how authorial identity and gendered bias shape the interpretation of violent content. Von Trier benefits from what we might call auteur exceptionalism – he is a male genius figure, given leeway to be offensive and “go too far” because it’s assumed to be in service of art or deeper truth. A female director is rarely afforded such indulgence; she is expected to uphold a moral or social responsibility even as an artist, lest she be labeled irresponsible or misandrist. This double standard not only affects how films are received, but it also influences which films get made in the first place. It’s no coincidence that Antichrist, with all its graphic outrage, came from a male mind steeped in depression and contrarian showmanship – and that it still secured distribution, festival slots, and serious critical discourse. A Feminist Antichrist might languish in screenplay form, deemed too alienating for viewers, or be relegated to the margins as a curiosity. The thought experiment thus reveals the contours of our collective tolerance: extreme misogynistic imagery can masquerade as “didactic” or “philosophical” cinema (indeed, some defenders claimed Antichrist was a commentary on grieving and misogyny, not an endorsement), whereas equivalent misandrist imagery would likely be read literally and condemned.

In sum, reversing the gaze highlights how von Trier’s work operates within a permissive zone of patriarchy – a space where the brutalization of women can be intellectualized and aestheticized without upending the social order. The very fact that Antichrist’s grotesqueries did not ostracize von Trier from the film community (on the contrary, he followed it with more ambitious projects and maintained his auteur status) speaks volumes. It suggests that however extreme his films are, they ultimately don’t threaten the underlying gender hierarchy. A true threat – a film that made viewers viscerally experience the systematic horror of male violence as a structural issue, or that imagined women violently overturning that structure – remains largely hypothetical, or at least marginal. By contemplating a female-made Antichrist, we are really asking: Why is von Trier’s vision acceptable? The answer lies in unexamined bias. As long as violence on screen reinforces traditional power dynamics (men active, women passive; men as punishers, women as punished), it can be subsumed into “art” relatively easily. Flip that script, and the reaction tells us how deeply those power dynamics are ingrained in our expectations of storytelling.

Conclusion

Lars von Trier’s cinema forces us to confront an uncomfortable reality: sometimes art that claims to critique darkness is, in practice, an embodiment of that darkness. After examining Antichrist and von Trier’s broader filmography through the lenses of misogyny, narcissism, and authoritarianism, we arrive at a verdict that is both damning and necessary. Rather than a rebel challenging the establishment, von Trier often operates as a bard of the status quo’s worst impulses – packaging age-old patriarchal violence and despair in auteurist wrapping. His work functions as an extension of his narcissism and misogyny, projected onto the screen with technical bravura. The women in his films suffer and die ostensibly to show us something about injustice or human nature, but more often they serve to validate a worldview obsessed with their subjugation. As one critic quipped, “Sometimes a misogynist is just a misogynist” (Sometimes a Misogynist is Just a Misogynist: Don't Excuse Lars Von Trier - Tablet Magazine), and no amount of cinephilic praise for provocation should blind us to the patterns at play. The supposed profundity of von Trier’s portrayals of female agony collapses when we recognize how eagerly those portrayals feed into the very narratives that have long oppressed women. His films ask us to feel for broken women, but rarely to empower them; they present patriarchal brutality so unflinchingly that it risks seeming inevitable. Instead of challenging the viewer to change a cruel world, the viewer is often left overwhelmed, perhaps titillated by the audacity, and ultimately accepting that cruelty as a given. This is, in its own way, a hallmark of authoritarian art: to assault the senses and conscience so relentlessly that one submits to the film’s terms rather than resisting the ideas it presents.

In closing, it is crucial to acknowledge how cultural products like von Trier’s films do not exist in a vacuum. They reflect and potentially reinforce the logics that run through our real social and political structures. Authoritarian regimes and movements have always thrived on gendered violence – from witch hunts to state-sanctioned misogyny – as a means of asserting control and instilling fear. The pathology we observe in von Trier’s work – a fascination with dominating the feminine, an equation of suffering with profundity, a narcissistic need to orchestrate life and death – has analogues in the psyche of authoritarian leaders and systems. Political psychologist Erich Fromm noted that the authoritarian character is drawn to mechanisms of control, sadism, and submission, often rooted in an ego that cannot tolerate opposition. In von Trier, we see a microcosm of this: a director who plays god with his characters, who manipulates audiences into uneasy submission, and who reacts petulantly (even abusively) when challenged. If we treat his films as merely personal exorcisms, we miss this bigger picture. They are also cultural signals, barometers of what violence society will countenance and under what guises.

Contemporary events show that misogyny and authoritarianism remain deeply intertwined. Wherever authoritarian politics are on the rise, attacks on women’s autonomy – from reproductive rights rollbacks to normalized hate speech – are not far behind. The narratives that von Trier indulges, wherein a woman’s pain is either her own fault or her ultimate virtue, dovetail with the narratives by which authoritarian structures justify real harm (e.g. “she asked for it,” or “suffering purifies”). To be clear, von Trier is not responsible for global misogyny; but his cinema exemplifies how art can mirror and even massage the conscience of oppression. By consuming such art critically, recognizing its biases and implications, we take a step toward breaking the spell that aestheticization can cast. We can choose to demand more from our art and from our society – as Ungar-Sargon implored, not to keep “forgiving von Trier yet again for his disgust with all things female,” but to “demand more from our art” (Sometimes a Misogynist is Just a Misogynist: Don't Excuse Lars Von Trier - Tablet Magazine) and, by extension, from our world.

In imagining an alternate Antichrist where the script is flipped, we implicitly issue a call for alternative narratives: ones that do not simply invert oppression, but that illuminate it and seek to dismantle it. Such narratives may not come from provocateurs who revel in pathology; they might come from voices historically sidelined, offering new paradigms of empathy and power. As for von Trier’s Antichrist and its ilk, they will remain part of the discourse – cautionary tales of how easily transgression can slide into complicity. Ultimately, the film Antichrist ends with a haunting image of faceless women emerging from the woods, a hint of the countless victims of historical misogyny rising up. It’s an image pregnant with meaning von Trier perhaps did not intend: a specter of reckoning. If there is to be any redemption from the tales of authoritarian cruelty and narcissistic abuse – in art or reality – it will come when those ghosts are given voice, when the cycle of spectacle and suffering is broken. Until then, we must continue to critically reimagine and challenge works like Antichrist, refusing to let their pathology normalize our own. In doing so, we deny authoritarian pathology the cultural blank check it so desperately seeks, insisting instead on an art and society where empathy triumphs over ego, and equality over cruelty.

Sources:

Batya Ungar-Sargon, “Sometimes a Misogynist is Just a Misogynist: Don’t Excuse Lars von Trier” – Tablet Magazine (2014) (Sometimes a Misogynist is Just a Misogynist: Don't Excuse Lars Von Trier - Tablet Magazine) (Sometimes a Misogynist is Just a Misogynist: Don't Excuse Lars Von Trier - Tablet Magazine).
Cinema Scandinavia (Issue 1) – “Lars von Trier: Misogynist?” (Lars von Trier: Misogynist? | Cinema Scandinavia has moved to www.cinemascandinavia.com) (Lars von Trier: Misogynist? | Cinema Scandinavia has moved to www.cinemascandinavia.com).
Sheila Johnston, “Is Antichrist anti-women?” – The Independent (2009) (Is Antichrist anti-women? | The Independent | The Independent) (Is Antichrist anti-women? | The Independent | The Independent).
Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” – Screen (1975) (Laura Mulvey: Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema | Speaker to Animals).
Hey Joe analysis – A Feminist Response to Pop Culture blog (2014) (Feminism/Popular Culture: "Hey Joe") (Feminism/Popular Culture: "Hey Joe").
Catherine Breillat interview excerpt – via Photogénie, “A Critique of Judgment: Movies and Morality” (2014) (A Critique of Judgment: Movies and Morality — photogénie).
Roger Ebert, Review of Antichrist – Chicago Sun-Times (2009) (Antichrist (film) - Wikipedia).
“Malignant Narcissism” definition – Psychiatria Danubina (2019) ([PDF] MALIGNANT NARCISSISM: FROM FAIRY TALES TO HARSH ...).
The Cannes Film Festival Jury Citation (2009) – as reported by The Independent (Is Antichrist anti-women? | The Independent | The Independent).
The feminist blog comment by “Cortney” on gendered violence in music (2014) (Feminism/Popular Culture: "Hey Joe").

Coda: The Pathology of Projection – Von Trier’s Castration Anxiety on Display

Projection, Castration Anxiety, and Sadistic Fantasies: Lars von Trier’s cinema can be read as a sustained act of acting out – the external staging of internal conflicts that he cannot symbolically resolve. In psychoanalytic terms, von Trier appears caught in a loop of projection and disavowal fueled by profound castration anxiety. Lacan reminds us that symbolic castration – the acceptance of one’s lack and separation from the (m)Other – is a prerequisite for relating to others as truly Other (Lars Von Trier’s Antichrist: Executioner at the Alter of the Other, Part 2 – Offscreen). Only through undergoing castration does the subject move beyond solipsistic fantasy and ask, “What does the Other want of me?” (Lars Von Trier’s Antichrist: Executioner at the Alter of the Other, Part 2 – Offscreen). Von Trier’s films, however, betray a refusal of this fundamental psychic step. Rather than countenancing any limit on his phallic omnipotence, his narratives enact a furious denial of lack, as if to ward off an intolerable vulnerability. In Antichrist, for example, the male protagonist’s rejection of castration anxiety manifests in literal violence: the film pointedly references the historical trauma of witch-burnings as a kind of male panic at threatened manhood (Lars Von Trier’s Antichrist: Executioner at the Alter of the Other, Part 2 – Offscreen). By symbolically “burning” or mutilating the female other, von Trier’s stand-in is attempting to annihilate the reminder of his own castratable state. In Kleinian terms, this is classic paranoid-schizoid defense: the aggressive impulse is expelled (projected into a female figure construed as evil or crazy) and then destroyed in effigy (Melanie Klein and Repression Mechanism). The sadistic torture we witness on screen thus becomes a perverse purge ritual – von Trier’s pathogenic fantasies are hurled outward at his characters (and by extension the audience) in an attempt to exorcise his inner terror. Jean Laplanche’s insight into the “enigmatic signifier” of the Other is also relevant here: von Trier’s psyche was seeded with an unspoken traumatic enigma – a message of betrayal and confusion – which he now compulsively restages. Indeed, he has repeatedly cited a shocking real-life disclosure as a key to his psyche: in 1989, his dying mother confessed that the man who raised him was not his biological father but merely a convenient husband – she had conceived Lars with another man “to give [her son] ‘artistic genes’” (Lars von Trier - Wikipedia) (Lars von Trier - Wikipedia). This belated revelation devastated von Trier, precipitating what he called his “first real breakdown” (On the Experience of a Melancholic Gaze). Here was castration in its most personal form: the mother’s secret undermined his very identity and filiation, demonstrating her godlike power to manipulate his reality. The fury and betrayal that he could not resolve are palpable in the sadistic scenarios of his work. (Tellingly, von Trier later admitted that Melancholia was created as a giant “Fuck you!” to his mother (On the Experience of a Melancholic Gaze) – a belated, symbolic parricide of the maternal figure.) In light of this, the obscene violence in his films reads as an acting-out of unprocessed trauma. Rather than working through castration anxiety by accepting limits, von Trier disavows it, projecting his fear into female characters who are then made to suffer or die. Julia Kristeva’s theory of abjection is illuminating here: the abject is that which the subject expels to erect a fragile border of self (‘What Did Your Mother Do To You?’ The Grotesque, Abjection and Motherhood in The Others (2001), Mama (2013) and The Conjuring (2013) - MAI: Feminism & Visual Culture) (‘What Did Your Mother Do To You?’ The Grotesque, Abjection and Motherhood in The Others (2001), Mama (2013) and The Conjuring (2013) - MAI: Feminism & Visual Culture). Von Trier’s grisly tableaux of mutilated women represent an attempt to cast out the “impure” source of his anxiety – the (m)Other who haunts him – in order to preserve an illusion of invulnerable selfhood. In short, his art transforms personal nightmare into external horror, forcing the audience to bear witness to – and in a sense contain – psychic contents von Trier himself refuses to contain or metabolize.

Violence as a Defense Against Care: The extreme violence visited upon women in von Trier’s films can be understood as a defensive formation – a psychic fortress erected against the very notion of being cared for. Underneath the grand guignol cruelty lies an incapacity (and unwillingness) to receive care, one so profound that it is warded off with theatrical sadism. From a developmental perspective, one might speculate that von Trier never internalized a reliable holding environment in the Winnicottian sense. His upbringing was, by his own account, emotionally barren – his parents were atheists who “did not allow much room in their household for feelings, religion, or enjoyment” (Lars von Trier - Wikipedia), and his mother’s ultimate betrayal shattered whatever basic trust might have existed. In this context, accepting care or empathy from an other would require a vulnerability that von Trier’s psyche experiences as dangerous – a potential repetition of betrayal or castration. Thus, instead of engaging with themes of healing or genuine intimacy, his films compulsively stage scenarios that invert the caregiving relation into sadomasochistic domination. The caregiver – often figured as a woman who offers or symbolizes nurture – is brutally punished on screen as if to declare sovereignty against any dependency. We witness this across his oeuvre: the selfless heroines of his “Golden Heart trilogy” (e.g. Bess in Breaking the Waves or Selma in Dancer in the Dark) suffer grotesque martyrdom for their loving kindness, as if their purity itself must be annihilated; in Antichrist, the character identified only as She, a grieving mother, is first “treated” by her husband’s arrogant therapy and then ultimately murdered, her attempt to embody maternal care turned into literal witchery that “deserves” execution. This is care turned upside-down – a nightmare mirror of the dependency that von Trier cannot tolerate. Melanie Klein would recognize in these scenarios the operation of projective identification fueled by terror of the maternal object. The feminine caregiver is split into an all-bad persecutor (the “castrating” mother imago) and attacked without mercy. Von Trier’s He (often a stand-in for the director’s ego) remains “innocent” by casting all sin and weakness into Her, then obliterating Her. As Klein noted in her analysis of early sadistic fantasies, the child who cannot tolerate its neediness or rage will defensively project aggression and then attempt to destroy the object that now embodies its own hated impulses (Melanie Klein and Repression Mechanism). So too does von Trier’s camera enact a fantasy of sadistic omnipotence – striking down women who dare to care. From a clinical standpoint, this dynamic exposes profound cowardice. To call von Trier “cowardly” in this context is not mere insult but a diagnostic observation: he is too afraid to be helped. He lacks the basic trust to place himself in a position of vulnerability vis-à-vis another. Instead, he concocts elaborate trials to prove (to himself) that he has no need for tenderness – that any figure offering love or solace is false and will be duly punished. In psychoanalytic therapy, patients often resist care too, but through the slow development of the therapeutic alliance they may come to accept the analyst’s help and move toward growth. Von Trier refuses any such surrender. His violent misogyny is a pre-emptive strike against the humiliating prospect of needing anything from anyone. It is as if he announces: “I will destroy the one who cares for me before she can disappoint or dominate me.” In doing so, he traps himself in a cyclical revenge against a phantom mother, rather than ever risking the vulnerability required for real psychic change.

Authoritarian Masquerade and the Caricature of Masculine Strength: Compounding these defenses is von Trier’s authoritarian aesthetic – a self-conscious performance of dominance that barely conceals the fragility it is meant to obscure. As a director and public figure, von Trier cultivates an image of the auteur as tyrant-provocateur. Even his adopted name, the aristocratic “von” Trier, was a deliberate affectation chosen in film school “because it seemed the most provocative thing” he could do (Authority Issues: Questioning Authorial Control in the Films of Lars von Trier » PopMatters). This persona is itself a construct – what the PopMatters critics called “the confrontational construct” of von Trier (Authority Issues: Questioning Authorial Control in the Films of Lars von Trier » PopMatters) – assembled to project an aura of control. His reputation “rests on his ability to create and shape narratives of control,” and indeed he “often works within narratives of control” in his films (Authority Issues: Questioning Authorial Control in the Films of Lars von Trier » PopMatters). Yet this obsession with control is frequently a hollow performance, a feint. Critics have observed that von Trier will toy with appearing to cede power or to undermine his own authority, all the while surreptitiously pulling the strings (Authority Issues: Questioning Authorial Control in the Films of Lars von Trier » PopMatters). In other words, his oeuvre exhibits a fetishization of mastery – an almost compulsive need to assert, through style and story, a position of unquestioned authorial power – even as true confidence eludes him. The result is a flimsy caricature of masculine strength. One might say that von Trier’s “strength” is all staging and no substance. He caricatures dominance through hyperbolic cruelty and technical control, but this only highlights an incapacity to embody genuine strength – which would require comfort with uncertainty, empathy, and mutual recognition (qualities anathema to his cinematic universe). We can view his authoritarian flourishes as a kind of false self (to borrow Winnicott’s term) – a defensive shell developed to cope with early environmental failures. Having lacked a nurturing framework in which to develop an authentic sense of self, von Trier seems to rely on grandiose posturing as a substitute. It is no accident that many of his films subject their protagonists to authoritarian regimes or sadistic “games” (the rigid moral community in Dogville, the forced humiliation of The Idiots, the psychosexual ordeal of Nymphomaniac). These scenarios re-enact a world of harsh, one-way power – as if strength could be proven by dominating or degrading others. But this is performative masculinity at best. It convinces only within its own closed circuit. Outside the perverse logic of his films, such exaggerated displays read as insecure, even adolescent provocations. True resilience or bravery – the capacity to acknowledge weakness, to embrace care, to respect the other’s subjectivity – is nowhere to be found. In Lacanian terms, one could say von Trier is stuck in the Imaginary register of phallic narcissism, unable to traverse the Symbolic castration that would actually anchor his identity. His authoritarian aesthetic, then, is less a mark of mastery than a symptom of its absence. It is flimsy precisely because it has to constantly announce itself. Like a tyrant who knows his throne is built on quicksand, he must shout ever louder and punish ever more severely to maintain the illusion of control.

Sadistic Cinema vs. Therapeutic Encounter: Von Trier’s relationship to his audience further underscores the pathological nature of his project. In a therapeutic framework, no matter how hostile or resistant a patient might appear, there is an underlying (often unconscious) hope for relief and understanding – a wish to be helped. The therapeutic setting establishes a hierarchy of care: the patient suffers but also trusts (or learns to trust) that the analyst will hold their pain without retaliation, and will return it in metabolized, bearable form. Wilfred Bion described this function as containment – the therapist absorbs the patient’s projected fears and aggressions (the beta elements) and digests them, feeding back insight (alpha function) rather than violence. Crucially, the patient-analyst dyad is founded on an ethical agreement: the patient consents to the process and the analyst commits to doing no harm. Von Trier’s cinematic practice inverts every aspect of this healing model. His films constitute a unilateral assault on the audience’s sensibilities – a kind of forced feeding of his undigested psychic material, without the audience’s negotiated consent or any intent to heal. If we consider the movie theater as an analogous “frame,” von Trier essentially abuses that frame for sadistic transference enactments. He projects his most violent fantasies into the viewer’s mind’s eye, not to work through anything in a shared space, but to make the audience feel as overwhelmed and anguished as he does. Thomas Ogden, expanding on Bion, noted that projective identification can function not only as a fantasy but as a real interpersonal manipulation, a coercive maneuver to provoke feeling in the other (On the Experience of a Melancholic Gaze). Von Trier’s films operate precisely in this register: they manipulate the audience into absorbing his distress, terror, and rage. But unlike an analysis – where the analyst would remain steady, process the projection, and help the patient reintegrate – here there is no such ameliorative structure. The audience is left holding the projections, assaulted by them. In effect, von Trier conscripts the viewer as a container for his own pain, without providing any containment for them in return. This is sadistic in the clinical sense of foreclosing reciprocity. The director gets catharsis (of a primitive sort) by evacuating his aggression; the audience gets traumatized, left to fend for themselves with the unprocessed emotional fallout. The hierarchy of care is stood on its head – instead of the one in pain seeking help, the one in pain punishes those who have come to witness. Furthermore, any intimation of a helping figure within the films is swiftly corrupted or destroyed. For instance, in Antichrist, the therapeutic stance of the husband (Willem Dafoe’s character) devolves into patriarchal domination and is ultimately revealed as hollow; “He” is more interested in proving his invulnerability than actually helping “She,” and so even the film’s diegetic attempt at therapy becomes another exercise in control and cruelty. In Nymphomaniac, the listener who feigns a therapeutic ear ends up exploiting the patient’s story for his own perverse ends. Over and over, von Trier stages a perversion of the helping relationship, reinforcing his cynical view that seeking or offering help is futile at best, and more likely dangerous. The fundamental element that therapy requires – a patient’s willingness to be helped, however ambivalent – is utterly absent in von Trier’s engagement with his audience. He does not invite viewers to understand or heal him; he forces them to endure him. This is the diametrical opposite of a collaborative analytic encounter. As a result, there is no transformation, no working-through – only a repetition compulsion in the form of art. Von Trier’s sadistic projection onto his viewers thus stands as a kind of anti-therapy, an enactment that offers no mutual growth, only the temporary discharge of tension for the “patient”/director at the cost of traumatizing the witness.

Abjection of the Maternal – Punishing the ‘Castrating’ Caregiver: Underlying the patterns above is a specific target of von Trier’s aggression: the maternal or caregiving feminine figure. His films repeatedly turn women who love, nurture, or sacrifice into scapegoats for his rage. Symbolically, these women function as stand-ins for the “castrating mother” – the figure who, in the classical Freudian scenario, is imagined to wield the terrifying power to render the son impotent (by revealing his lack or demanding his submission to social law). Julia Kristeva’s work on the abject clarifies how the maternal comes to be seen as both coveted and loathed in the male psyche. The child’s first experience of abjection, says Kristeva, occurs in separation from the mother’s body – an ambivalent process of breaking away from what was once total unity (‘What Did Your Mother Do To You?’ The Grotesque, Abjection and Motherhood in The Others (2001), Mama (2013) and The Conjuring (2013) - MAI: Feminism & Visual Culture). If this separation-individuation is fraught or incomplete, the maternal object remains as an internal phantom, alternately alluring and threatening, that the subject feels compelled to expel. Barbara Creed, building on Kristeva, famously argued that the horror genre encodes male fears of the maternal in the figure of the monstrous-feminine (‘What Did Your Mother Do To You?’ The Grotesque, Abjection and Motherhood in The Others (2001), Mama (2013) and The Conjuring (2013) - MAI: Feminism & Visual Culture) (‘What Did Your Mother Do To You?’ The Grotesque, Abjection and Motherhood in The Others (2001), Mama (2013) and The Conjuring (2013) - MAI: Feminism & Visual Culture). In horror, the mother (or mother-surrogate) often appears as a grotesque, uncanny force that must be destroyed to re-establish the patriarchal order (‘What Did Your Mother Do To You?’ The Grotesque, Abjection and Motherhood in The Others (2001), Mama (2013) and The Conjuring (2013) - MAI: Feminism & Visual Culture). Von Trier’s cinema unabashedly participates in this tradition, albeit in a more psychological register. He takes women who embody care – mothers, wives, good Samaritans – and renders them monstrous or abject through suffering. Sometimes the woman herself goes mad or violent (as in Antichrist, where She mutilates her own genitals and attacks her husband – a literalization of the castrating woman stereotype), and sometimes she remains ostensibly innocent but is subjected to monstrous torments (as in Breaking the Waves or Dancer in the Dark). In both cases, the message is that female care is dangerous and must be extirpated. It is crucial to note that von Trier’s wrath against the maternal is overdetermined by his personal history. The mother who gave him life also deceived him profoundly; in psychoanalytic terms, she is the originary object who turned bad. His attempt to cope has been to split “Mother” into extremes – the idealized fantasy of artistic pedigree she bequeathed, and the hateful betrayer who lied – and then unconsciously to replay that split on screen. The women in his films oscillate between saintly and devilish, often collapsing from one into the other. This is the splitting characteristic of what Klein called the paranoid-schizoid position, where the psyche cannot integrate good and bad aspects of the other into a whole. In Antichrist, the wife is at first a grief-stricken, sympathetic figure (the loving mother broken by loss) but gradually she is revealed – through the husband’s accusatory lens – to be aligned with chaos, evil, and even witchcraft. She literally becomes a “wicked witch” in the narrative, complete with mutilation and murder, thus justifying her brutal elimination by the husband. This narrative arc reads like a dramatization of what Betterton observed in horror films: the threat of the abject maternal is “displaced onto the monstrous or the alien, which must be expelled in order for…psychic resolution [to be] achieved” (‘What Did Your Mother Do To You?’ The Grotesque, Abjection and Motherhood in The Others (2001), Mama (2013) and The Conjuring (2013) - MAI: Feminism & Visual Culture). By the film’s end, He (and implicitly the male viewer) achieves a ghastly “resolution” by burning the wife’s body, eradicating the maternal presence. The final shot, however, is telling: a horde of women (the murdered witches of history, perhaps) ascends the forest hill – an uncanny suggestion that the repressed maternal-abject cannot be so easily purged. Yet von Trier seems unable to take that suggestion in. Each new film repeats the punishment of a caring woman as if for the first time. One could say that von Trier’s entire body of work is a elaborate ritual of violent recusal of the feminine. He cannot accept the care of the (m)Other – be it literal mother, wife, or even a metaphorical stand-in for Mother Nature – so he must continuously enact its rejection. The caregiver is tortured and banished so that he, the authorial subject, can avoid confronting his dependence on her. It is a tragic irony that in doing so, he also sacrifices the very aspects of humanity associated with growth and creativity: openness, trust, and the fusion of Eros (love) with art. His sadism kills love on screen in order to protect a terrified, regressed ego. The authoritarian pathology at the heart of von Trier’s vision thus comes into sharp focus: what masquerades as fearless filmmaking is, in fact, a fear-driven reflex – the unending attempt of a wounded child to strike back at a mother he experienced as annihilating.

In sum, Lars von Trier’s films function less as works of artistic catharsis than as symptoms on display. Through a psychoanalytic lens, we see a man caught in a compulsive repetition of his earliest traumas and terrors, unable (or unwilling) to symbolically work them through. His cinematic universe is one where projection eclipses insight, where acting out supplants dialogue, and where the possibility of care is perverted into cruelty. One is left with the impression of an auteur who, for all his technical brilliance, remains imprisoned in the dungeon of his own psyche – a dungeon he eagerly invites us into, only to assail us once we’re captive. It is a cinema of spectacular defenses: projection abounds, castration anxiety undergirds every shock, and sadism becomes the law of the land. But behind those defenses looms the specter of psychic collapse. Von Trier’s violent misogyny, his authoritarian posturing, his assaults on audience and characters alike – all bespeak a fragile self, “too cowardly” (in the apt words of this critique) to face the pain of needing love. In rejecting and punishing the (m)Other, he attempts to prove his invincibility, yet only succeeds in broadcasting his woundedness. As clinicians know, what is not transformed will be transmitted – often in destructive ways. Von Trier transmits his untransformed pain to his viewers, enacting a kind of contagion of trauma rather than a healing. The therapeutic alternative, by contrast, would demand humility and courage: the courage to relinquish omnipotence, to let oneself be held in another’s mind, and perhaps to forgive the original injury. That is a journey von Trier has not yet taken. His films, this coda argues, stand as extravagant monuments to a defensive refusal – brilliant, infuriating, and ultimately stunted monuments to a psyche in revolt against its own salvation.